The Sixth Family (16 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

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The first target of the commission was the Cotroni-Violi organization.
The prospect of a commission that would dig up dirt but not have the teeth to lay serious criminal charges was at first a source of ridicule and amusement among the Montreal mob. Shortly before Christmas in 1973, Violi was heard lampooning the commission: “Their balls are in an uproar because they don’t know anything.” What he did not know was how deeply his organization was about to be exposed. Nor did he know of the profane and embarrassing police recordings of him and his closest advisors and co-conspirators in his inner sanctum. One man who did seem to realize what was at stake was one of Violi’s closest confidants, Joe DiMaulo. On September 19, 1974, when DiMaulo was being questioned by police on another matter, he asked directly whether his trip to New York the year before to help install Philip Rastelli as the Bonanno Family boss was going to be entered as evidence at the commission hearings.
“DiMaulo thought that public disclosure of the election of a head of the American Mafia would be a disaster for him and for the family. For DiMaulo, this would be a serious breach of the rule of silence with respect to all family business,” says one of several reports issued by the commission.
The toll of the inquiry on Violi and his organization was profound. In 1974, the commission sought first to hear from Vic Cotroni. Responding to a subpoena, Cotroni put on a show of befuddlement, gently rebuffing question after question in what he hoped would come across as benign ignorance. The charade did not hold. After eating up more than a thousand pages of commission transcripts he had revealed nothing of importance, prompting one commentator to describe him as “impassive as the Sphinx.”
“I have no authority,” Cotroni said in a whisper to the three-judge panel. The commission was not pleased. Cotroni was sentenced to a year in jail for contempt of the proceedings. The sudden jailing of the boss sent Violi into action. Likely expecting a renewed challenge for leadership by the Rizzutos, he took the initiative of formalizing his position with New York. On January 9, 1975, he called Pietro Sciarra into his office and told him to go immediately to New York to ask what should be done.
“You’re gonna talk,” Violi told him, preparing him for an audience with Rastelli. “The best thing is to explain your case before. You’re gonna say to him: ‘Paolo sent me here, actually, and seeing as Vincent’s inside all that time … somebody’s got to take responsibility now.’”
Rastelli knew what Violi was really asking for and gave it to him: “When Vincent gets out, have him call me, and if a change has to be made then, I’ll talk to Vincent. But for the time being, you take over,” Rastelli told Violi. Just days later, Violi was heard bragging to Joe DiMaulo of his appointment by New York as the acting boss. His joy was short-lived.
After Cotroni testified, Violi was also ordered to appear before the inquiry. His appearance was a media spectacle. Dressed in a sharply tailored light gray suit and fashionably wide, striped tie, Violi appeared as a stern, brooding man who stood authoritatively and defiantly in the witness box. His dark hair, with a hint of gray at the temples, was neatly combed and glistened in the television lights. In contrast to Cotroni, who seemed to shrivel before the commission, Violi seemed to swell beyond his natural size. His testimony was as unhelpful for the commission as Cotroni’s had been but—as with everything else Violi did—he was less subtle than his mentor.
“I don’t refuse to testify,” he said on the stand. “I have a lot of respect for the court but I don’t have anything to say.” Those words—and his refusal to take the oath before testifying—prompted the inquiry chairman to slap Violi with a one-year jail sentence for contempt.
Although Violi had nothing to say at the inquiry, he had plenty to say in private, and the secret police recordings were replayed for the commission in all their color. The words were shocking, not only to the public, who were riveted by media coverage of the hearings, but to Violi’s associates and rivals, who were the most astute of listeners. The scandal started to erode his respect. As would happen years later to John Gotti, the New York boss of the Gambino Family, who also made incriminating pronouncements on tape, Violi’s own words amounted to an unintentional breach of
omertà
. It was something his rivals did not ignore. Rizzuto supporters quickly used Violi’s lapse in security to stir up discontent. Complaints about breaches in mob etiquette suddenly shifted into reverse—Violi was now on the receiving end of the whispers.
The FBI noted the increasing “dissension from within its ranks” of the “Montreal family” in its internal reports.
“Although Nick Rizzuto had been banished to Venzuela, there remained a number of Sicilian figures in the Montreal organization,” an FBI report said. “Other organized crime groups in the Montreal area began to take more control of organized crime.”
Violi, through his own words, had suddenly made himself vulnerable, with little help from the Rizzutos. It is said that a mafioso is most at risk of attack when he is either dangerous or isolated. Violi was both.
The conversations recorded on the bugs captured an important problem that was cropping up within key Mafia centers all over the world. The issue of Sicilian Men of Honor operating criminally in the territory of the American Mafia was one that would arise wherever the expatriate mafiosi encountered an established mob presence: in New York, Montreal, Philadelphia and Toronto, in particular. It would take years for the full ramifications of the Sicilian penetration to be felt in New York. Had the situation between Violi and the Rizzutos and their Sixth Family allies properly made its way into police files and been fully understood by intelligence analysts, it might have saved investigators in New York years of confusion.
If the New York mediators from the Bonanno Family dismissed the Rizzuto-Violi dispute as a mere annoyance, or as yet another petty gangland squabble, they were not looking carefully enough. Had they paid more attention and compared the situation in Montreal to the changes on their own streets they might have been more prepared for what was to come in New York.
There is nothing to suggest that they did.
CHAPTER 12
QUEENS, NOVEMBER 4, 1976
At 11:30 p.m. on a cool autumn night, 70-year-old Pietro “Peter” Licata swung his long 1974 Cadillac to the foot of the driveway of his New York home, one of many tidy, well-kept houses in Middle Village, Queens. He and his wife, Vita, had just returned from a late meal at a restaurant. Before Licata could swing open the gates of his home, however, the tranquility and quiet were broken by the reverberating boom of a shotgun blast. Seven hot metal pellets shredded Licata’s head and upper body as his wife watched in horror from the passenger’s seat. A deeply distressed Vita told police detectives that a man had stepped out of a yellow car, possibly a Cadillac, and approached her husband before calmly firing the shotgun, aiming for his head. The gunman had jumped back into the yellow car and was driven from the murder scene by an accomplice.
Speculation abounded about the motive for the murder. Licata, ostensibly a retired businessman from the knitwear industry, was an old-time American gangster—one of the few remaining “Mustache Petes,” a term for the older, more traditional Italian gangsters. Homicide detectives and organized crime investigators wondered what was at the root of Licata’s demise. Was it the death three weeks earlier, through natural causes, of Carlo Gambino, the head of the Gambino Family? Or the distinct rise in influence and avarice of the Bonanno’s Carmine Galante? Or perhaps it was tied to the murder, four years earlier, of a Licata relative who was involved in gambling?
Later events offered more substantial clues. Licata’s murder was rooted in far wider shifts in crime than a neighborhood gambling den or even the death of an important crime boss. There was a shake-up under way in Mafia centers around the world and two of the most important New World mob outposts—New York and Montreal—were facing the same dangerous demographic shift.
Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn is a long, cluttered street that runs through the Bushwick section of the borough, near the border with Queens. With Knickerbocker and its surrounding streets as his base, Pietro Licata had operated a crew of Bonanno soldiers and associates. He was the epitome of the Italian-American mob boss. The long-time turf of the Bonanno Family, Knickerbocker was Licata’s personal fiefdom, just as Montreal’s Saint-Léonard was Violi’s.
“Anything moving in there, even a tree, they got to say to him: I want to move the tree. Nobody moves nothing,” said Luigi Ronsisvalle, a former enforcer for Licata, who worked Brooklyn’s streets for years at the behest of the Bonanno organization. Ronsisvalle described Licata as an old-style street boss involved in low-key money-making ventures, loan sharking and gambling. He owned—legitimately or by hidden interest—several businesses in the area, including Italian cafés where organized card games were run, with Licata getting his “end”—a piece of each hand wagered. On a good night, a single café could make thousands of dollars in profit.
Licata stood out from other neighborhood residents because he always wore white. Legend had it that when his daughter was deathly ill, he went to church and prayed that if God spared her, he would from then on wear only white clothing as a sign of gratitude for the divine intervention. The child recovered, and thereafter Licata walked like a living ghost through Brooklyn.
Licata kept his crew busy, leaving them enough money to live on. All they had to do was to show traditional respect, obey him without question and keep away from drugs. Drugs, as many old-timers like Licata believed, were not only evil but would destroy the under-pinnings of the Mafia’s traditional breadwinners. Gambling, loan sharking and other activities were illegal, but accepted by large segments of society. No one, however, could put a good face on drug trafficking. Licata and Ronsisvalle both had a nostalgic—if delusional—view of the Mafia.
“Like an American kid falls in love with baseball, I fall in the love with Mafia,” Ronsisvalle said in halting and broken English. “A Man of Honor no go around stealing and killing for money. A Man of Honor, he kills for some reason; to help people.” He himself had murdered 13 people during his time in America, which he no doubt felt had contributed to some greater societal benefit. Ronsisvalle established himself in Brooklyn in time to see the last vestiges of his beloved Mafia evaporate—if it had ever existed. When he arrived in America in 1966, he headed straight to Knickerbocker Avenue, on the advice of a connected friend in Sicily. Ronsisvalle would join Licata on collection runs, helping to convince debtors to quickly turn their money over.
But the old routine, which had played itself out for generations, was becoming a little archaic. Licata and Ronsisvalle found their precious Mafia was undergoing slow but distinct changes. It started with Carmine Galante.
After the death in 1976 of Carlo Gambino, the powerful boss of the Gambino Family, Carmine Galante started to believe he might finally achieve his dream of being the head of a pan-national heroin enterprise, not to mention boss of bosses in the American Mafia. It is hard to tell which he wanted more, although he probably saw them as related propositions. Upon his release from prison in 1974, after serving 12 years for his heroin conspiracy with Montreal’s Pep Cotroni, Galante’s outsized dreams became dangerously well known. The Bonanno Family leadership seemed an open question. Galante, as a former
consigliere
and underboss, felt himself to be more qualified than anyone for the job. The police and the public braced for a new wave of violence as Galante moved to regain his place as the key man in the Sicily-Montreal-New York heroin axis.
Like most theories and legends, there were kernels of truth scattered among the hyperbole and speculation. Galante did seem to have insane designs on becoming a boss without peer in the American Mafia. But he was really yesterday’s man. Internationally, the underworld had realigned in his absence: the French Connection, along with Galante’s Corsican and French colleagues in Europe and Canada, was unraveling. The European traffickers had spread through Europe and South America and formed direct alliances with the Bonanno and Gambino families in New York City—if not the other families as well—without Galante. Elsewhere, heroin laboratories in Sicily were starting to churn out product at an alarming rate. It seemed that all of the Sicilian Mafia clans were involved in the drug trade and the expatriate Mafia in Venezuela and Brazil were forming their own alliances. In Montreal, the Sixth Family was conspiring to eliminate the blockage caused by Paolo Violi, putting Galante’s long-time Cotroni connections at risk.

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