Authors: Lee Lamothe
The Sixth Family (19 page)
For this final sit-down, Nick and Violi arrived separately. With the Reggio wiretaps now removed, such private moments were once again closely guarded secrets. As such, it is impossible to say how sincere either was in proffering peace. Violi brought no offer of abdication; Nick, no sign of submission. Neither apparently was conciliatory. Perhaps Nick wished to formally deliver to Violi—
faccia-a-faccia
—something of an ultimatum. For his part, Violi likely wanted to show he was unmoved, unafraid and unprepared to waver from his position that he was the rightful heir to the Montreal
decina
. Whatever was said between the two men that day did not erase their disagreement or ease its tensions. They had, in the parlance of the modern divorce court, irreconcilable differences.
faccia-a-faccia
—something of an ultimatum. For his part, Violi likely wanted to show he was unmoved, unafraid and unprepared to waver from his position that he was the rightful heir to the Montreal
decina
. Whatever was said between the two men that day did not erase their disagreement or ease its tensions. They had, in the parlance of the modern divorce court, irreconcilable differences.
“The meeting held in Montreal did nothing to stem violence,” an FBI briefing paper noted.
MONTREAL, LATE JANUARY 1978Police realized something was amiss when the tone and tenor of underworld talk about Paolo Violi slipped from derisive to malevolent. Within the inner circle of the Sicilian coterie, thoughts were shifting from merely wishing calamity upon him to actively plotting it. Police were hearing rumors from street sources and wiretaps that Violi’s position was precarious.
If the plot against Violi was obvious to investigators, Violi himself surely knew of it. In fact, police tried to discuss it with him, but he rebuffed them, just as he had refused the Quebec crime inquiry. Violi was not one to run, nor to seek the aid of the state, even if it was his best—or only—chance of survival. When word reached Montreal police that several Rizzuto men were plotting Violi’s murder, surveillance officers started keeping a close eye on the suspects. Much of their time was spent watching the comings and goings at Mike’s Submarines in Saint-Léonard. After weeks of police surveillance, often late into the night, nothing happened.
On Friday, January 20, 1978, the police surveillance teams were called off for the weekend, an officer involved in the surveillance said. It was about money. The overtime bills were getting too high and the officers had gotten nowhere in their search for information that might result in the laying of charges, he said. The anniversary of Francesco Violi’s murder was 19 days away. The second anniversary of Sciarra’s murder was six days after that. Thoughts of mortality must have been on Violi’s mind.
On Sunday evening, January 22, two days after police were told to suspend their watch of Mike’s Submarines, Violi was at his old headquarters, the Reggio Bar on Jean-Talon. He had received the invitation by telephone, after dinner with his family. Perhaps a dozen familiar faces milled about inside. A game of cards was under way and Violi, wearing a wide-lapeled leisure suit over a white shirt, a popular style at the time, sat in a plastic and steel-tube frame chair, pulled up to a wood and Formica table at the back of the wood-paneled bar.
Someone at the bar placed a phone call: “The pig is here.”
Shortly afterward, at 7:32 p.m., a masked man carrying an Italian-made shotgun called a
lupara
, a stubby, double-barreled weapon, crept toward Violi from behind. The masked man shoved the barrel into the back of Violi’s head and fired. His body slumped to the fake marble floor, where he lay sprawled, arms and legs outstretched, in a growing pool of blood.
lupara
, a stubby, double-barreled weapon, crept toward Violi from behind. The masked man shoved the barrel into the back of Violi’s head and fired. His body slumped to the fake marble floor, where he lay sprawled, arms and legs outstretched, in a growing pool of blood.
There followed a second phone call.
“The pig is dead.”
Although the hit was successful, it was by no means carried out without flaws. Police had more clues to work with than in most Mafia murders, which are notoriously hard to solve without cooperating witnesses. Circumstantial evidence gathered before the killing was compelling. Police issued arrest warrants for five suspects. Three men were quickly arrested in Montreal: Domenico Manno, Vito Rizzuto’s uncle on his mother’s side; Agostino Cuntrera, a proprietor of Mike’s Submarines who was a cousin of Alfonso Caruana; and Giovanni DiMora, a brother-in-law to both Agostino Cuntrera and Liborio Cuntrera, one of the patriarchs of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan. Another man arrested was Vincenzo Randisi, one of the new owners of the Reggio Bar and a friend of Nick Rizzuto’s, but he was quickly released and the charges against him dropped for lack of evidence. The remaining official suspect became a fugitive. Paolo Renda had left Montreal for Venezuela, where he remained out of reach of Canadian authorities.
The Sixth Family had struck.
On September 15, 1978, Domenico Manno, Agostino Cuntrera and Giovanni DiMora pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Violi. They were issued modest sentences, the judge having been convinced that their efforts to establish legitimate careers and firm community ties made them good candidates for rehabilitation. In the end, the killing of Violi was strictly a family affair. All of those convicted were related by blood or marriage, a key marker of Sixth Family success. Curiously, when Manno was arrested, he was quick to distance Nick and Vito Rizzuto from the crime, telling authorities they were not implicated in the plot.
“After his arrest, Dominico Manno signed a written declaration that notably mentioned that Nicolò Rizzuto is his brother-in-law and that Vito Rizzuto is his nephew,” a report by the Montreal police says. “He says that both of them have been in Venezuela for about two years. It is important to underline that [Vito] Rizzuto has maintained ties with people associated with the murder of Paolo Violi over the years.” Indeed, over the following years, the trio of conspirators remained close to each other and to Vito and Paolo Renda as well. When police raided the Club Social Consenza, the Sixth Family’s headquarters, a little before 10 p.m. on March 3, 1983, among the 22 people inside were Vito, Renda and Agostino Cuntrera. In December of that year, at a boxing match at the Montreal Forum, Vito was seen talking with all three men convicted in the death plot. They were seen together again on March 25, 1984, at a boxing match that pitted Dave Hilton, Jr., against Mario Caisson. Vito sat with Cuntrera and Renda, with DiMora seated nearby, at the end of their row. And Manno and Cuntrera were also invited to the June 3, 1995, wedding of Vito’s son, Nicolò, to Eleonora Ragusa, daughter of Emanuele Ragusa, another figure in the constellation of Sixth Family clans.
“[Nick] Rizzuto is suspected of authorizing the murder,” an FBI report says. “Other suspects were Paolo Renda, Rizzuto’s son-in-law, and Joseph LoPresti, another member of the Sicilian faction in Montreal.”
After the convictions, authorities seemed satisfied; the only outstanding arrest warrant in the case, the one against Paolo Renda, was canceled and he returned to Montreal a free man. LoPresti remained untouched, despite deep and enduring suspicion by police.
The end of Paolo Violi, however, was not entirely the end of things between the Sixth Family and the Violis.
It was two and a half years after the death of Paolo Violi when Rocco, the last of the Violi brothers (another brother, Giuseppe, who was Rocco’s twin, had died in 1970 in a car crash), realized that the mob was not yet finished with his family. Rocco was in the driver’s seat of his Oldsmobile, idling at a red light in Montreal, when a motorcycle pulled alongside him. A sawed-off shotgun was lowered and fired. The blast narrowly missed Rocco, who, despite the shock, jammed on his accelerator. The motorcyclist caught up to him and fired again, catching him in the head with a splatter of pellets. Almost miraculously, he survived, but then, like his brother, declined the assistance of the authorities.
Summer slipped into fall and Rocco perhaps thought he had been given a reprieve. He was not, after all, a major player in the mob, had no apparent designs on the leadership in Montreal and had not sought revenge over the death of his brothers.
On October 17, 1980, Rocco was seated with his family in the kitchen of their Saint-Léonard home when a single sniper’s bullet, from a high-powered rifle, punched through a window and killed him. No one can accuse mobsters of not being thorough when they put their minds to it. The Violi boys were all dead, buried together at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, on the imposing heights of Montreal’s Mount Royal, a generation destroyed.
If New York had finally turned its back on the Violis in their dispute with the Rizzutos, at least one old mafioso remembered the family’s hospitality. A wreath sent to Rocco Violi’s funeral bore the name of Joe Bonanno.
The FBI attributed Rocco’s slaying to the war with the Rizzutos: “Nick Rizzuto is believed to have ordered this killing as well. This murder is described by the RCMP as yet another act of revenge by Rizzuto for his expulsion to Venezuela,” an FBI report says.
Though the blame may lie with the Sixth Family, it was not about revenge. It was about the future, not the past.
With Violi and his brothers eliminated, the Sixth Family’s primary irritant and impediment was removed—just as Pietro Licata had been removed in New York. The ensuing transformation of organized crime in Canada was unequivocal.
Despite the seemingly interminable delays, the mob had secured Montreal in time to allow the Sicilian expatriate clans on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border to put the final pieces together in what would become the Pizza Connection. This drug-smuggling and distribution enterprise brought in high-quality heroin that had been processed in clandestine laboratories in Sicily. Much of it was channeled through Canada and sent on to New York, where it was distributed through storefront retailers, many of them pizzeria owners for whom the restaurants were legitimate fronts that hid their criminal activity. The billion-dollar Pizza Connection would go on to eclipse the famed heroin rings of the past, including the French Connection. And, like its antecedent, it was really a system of intersecting, meandering routes that at once competed and complemented each other.
The end of the Sixth Family-Violi feud brought two changes that Canadian police noted in internal reports. The first was the return to Montreal of Vito Rizzuto. Vito returned from Venezuela “to slowly take over,” RCMP documents said. The second was an increase in drug activity in the city.
“After the Paolo Violi murder,” says an internal Canadian police intelligence report from 1990, “the Sicilians took the dominant role in Montreal. The Sicilians quickly and quietly began a large drug importing operation. They transformed the port of Montreal into the gateway to North America for hashish shipments from Pakistan and Lebanon and large heroin shipments from Sicily and Thailand. They sold most of their heroin in New York and New Jersey.”
Nick and Vito, however, did not immediately seize control of the city’s rackets. The official boss of the Montreal
decina
was still Vic Cotroni, who had left the day-to-day business to Violi. Even if the Sixth Family had wished to kill him, it would have been frowned on. It was not necessary for the Sixth Family to remove Cotroni. The wise old don seemed to know better than to try to hem in the Rizzuto organization. As long as the Sixth Family could fulfill their obligations in the drug pipeline, their patience seemed endless. Although Cotroni kept his job as boss, the demise of Violi allowed a reordering of power that would continue to tip in favor of the Sicilians.
decina
was still Vic Cotroni, who had left the day-to-day business to Violi. Even if the Sixth Family had wished to kill him, it would have been frowned on. It was not necessary for the Sixth Family to remove Cotroni. The wise old don seemed to know better than to try to hem in the Rizzuto organization. As long as the Sixth Family could fulfill their obligations in the drug pipeline, their patience seemed endless. Although Cotroni kept his job as boss, the demise of Violi allowed a reordering of power that would continue to tip in favor of the Sicilians.
“The already tenuous alliance between Calabrian and Sicilian factions worsened. The ‘Sicilian faction’ began its take-over of Montreal,” a private RCMP briefing says.
If the changing of the guard was slow to manifest itself on the streets of Montreal, it was strikingly evident elsewhere. The Rizzutos were active with major Sicilian mafiosi, South American drug lords and leading New York gangsters in the years immediately after Violi’s murder. The Sixth Family seemed content to concentrate on building its international infrastructure, shoring up its networks and conducting private business until Montreal was formally cleared for them. They knew the wait would not be long, as Cotroni was dying of cancer. Nick and his family had their official mob status restored in Montreal, although Nick still spent much, if not most, of his time in Venezuela and Europe in the years after Violi’s death. Vito was the family’s face in the city and he prepared for a future where the Sixth Family would be soundly and securely in control. Cotroni was often said to be in semi-retirement when Violi was running things on his behalf; with the Rizzutos running free, there was little that was “semi” about it. His title remained and little else.
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