The Sixth Family (33 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

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Unperturbed by the massive Pizza indictments, the Sixth Family pressed on, after only a momentary reassessment. With Sciascia established in New York and LoPresti moving between Montreal and New York, the Canadian drug connection continued to move large loads of heroin to the American market. For the better part of a year after the Pizza arrests, LoPresti and Sciascia carried on their business.
With police tripping over themselves while watching the pair in New York and Montreal, with the added attention from Salvatore Ruggiero’s plane crash and the compromising wires on his brother, Angelo, how long could that luck be expected to last?
CHAPTER 22
MANHATTAN, JANUARY 1985
Joe LoPresti was well dressed in a starched white dress shirt and a long tan cashmere coat when federal agents came for him at a Manhattan hotel, at 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, January 17, 1985. The agents had arrived armed with an arrest warrant, issued when an indictment in the Eastern District of New York was filed against him and Gerlando Sciascia for bringing massive quantities of heroin into the country. At the time of his arrest, LoPresti was on one of his many business trips to New York on behalf of the Sixth Family. Such business allowed him to travel light. His only luggage was a black briefcase and a garment bag.
Despite his size and strength, LoPresti knew better than to resist when approached, and the FBI agents politely informed him of his arrest. LoPresti, in turn, politely acceded to their demands, turning over his briefcase, in which agents found various business cards, photographs, brochures, a car-rental agreement, an Eastern Air Lines plane ticket and a toiletry kit. In his garment bag was a suit, another change of clothing and shaving items. He had $2,143 in a large roll of bills and a pocketful of change totaling $5.05. He wore a gold wedding band and an expensive Cartier watch. LoPresti went with the officers to a waiting car and, during the 15-minute ride to the FBI’s office, expressed surprise at the charges.
“What makes you guys think I’m involved with drugs?” he asked. “If anyone’s to blame for the predicament you’re in, it’s yourself, Ruggiero and Sciascia,” an agent said, hinting at the bugs in Angelo “Quack Quack” Ruggiero’s house.
“What Angelo does is Angelo’s business,” LoPresti said. “I don’t know his business.”
“How long have you known Angelo Ruggiero?” the agent asked. LoPresti quickly changed his strategy.
“I don’t know Angelo Ruggiero, I never met him,” he said, perhaps too late. He did not deny knowing Sciascia, however, truthfully telling the agents that the two had been born in the same town in Italy and been close personal friends ever since. He did not, he told agents, have any idea where Sciascia might be. He had not seen him for more than a year, he said. The agents knew he was lying. They knew LoPresti and his wife had spent some of the summer visiting with Sciascia and his wife. They also knew of FBI and RCMP surveillance showing the two together on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
At the FBI office, while LoPresti was fingerprinted and photographed, he became deeply quiet; his mug shot shows him sullen, with his mouth in a frown and his eyes downcast.
Almost two years younger than Vito Rizzuto and 14 years younger than Sciascia, Giuseppe LoPresti was another of Agrigento’s favorite sons. Over six-foot-two with a strong build, bushy dark hair and a prominent nose, “Joe” or “Big Joe,” as he was often called, had known the two men all his life. LoPresti was essentially born into the Sixth Family, and then, as if to make certain, married into it as well.
LoPresti was born in Cattolica Eraclea, the son of Lorenzo LoPresti and his wife, Giuseppina Sottile, on January 24, 1948, he told FBI agents when he was arrested. (Some police charts, however, list his parents as Giuseppe LoPresti and Antonina Mongiovì; the Mongiovì clan is linked to both the old Agrigento Mafia of Giuseppe Settecasi and the Cuntrera clan.) In true Sixth Family style, he married a woman who was also from Cattolica Eraclea, Rosa Lumia, who was four years his junior. And, like Vito, LoPresti emigrated to Canada, becoming a naturalized citizen, living in Montreal and adding English and French to his language skills. The LoPrestis had two children, one who suffered from a form of bone cancer, he told the FBI. Among his family and friends were the highest-ranking members of the Canadian and Sicilian underworlds.
In Montreal, he owned or had interests in several legitimate businesses: among them, LoPresti Construction, of which he was the sole owner, and a board-game venture in which his involvement was so vague he could not even remember the company’s address or phone number when asked. The business connections, however, were sufficient to justify his comfortable lifestyle. LoPresti had made his way into police files in the 1970s as a conspirator in the murder of Paolo Violi, but was never arrested for it. After he was identified as one of the men posing with Vito Rizzuto and Giuseppe Bono in the 1980 wedding photos, the FBI started to take an interest in him as well. Although Sciascia was known in New York as “George from Canada,” it was really LoPresti who made most of the cross-border trips for the Sixth Family’s heroin pipeline. LoPresti was a well-traveled man. Police in Canada documented his routine appearance in Montreal at Vito’s side, while at the same time American law enforcement frequently tracked him on visits to New York, where he mingled easily with Bonanno, Gambino and DeCavalcante Family mobsters.
“LoPresti is a narcotics trafficker and serves as liaison … between the Montreal Sicilian Faction and the Sicilian Faction in the Bonanno LCN [Mafia] Family,” an FBI report from 1985 says. “LoPresti, despite his frequent role as diplomat, clearly owes his allegiance to Rizzuto and the Montreal Sicilian Faction,” the report adds. LoPresti managed to keep a low profile despite the growing police interest and, in fact, had no criminal convictions—which, of course, made him the perfect choice for such frequent cross-border travel.
The Eastern District indictments were aimed at both the Montreal and New York ends of the heroin scheme and revolved, in large measure, around the evidence gathered from the bugs in Ruggiero’s Long Island home. Along with Sciascia and LoPresti, Gambino soldiers Ruggiero, Eddie Lino, John Carneglia and Gene Gotti were also indicted. While the FBI managed to catch LoPresti during a trip to New York, Sciascia, ironically, was back in Montreal, ostensibly involved in his Canadian construction business, when the New York indictment came down. The U.S. government applied for Sciascia’s extradition from Canada and, in November 1986, he was arrested by the RCMP and jailed.
“He was clean,” said Yvon Thibault, who made the arrest as a sergeant with the RCMP’s Montreal office. “No weapons, no drugs, no fuss. He was a gentleman.” Sciascia then began a two-year fight in Canadian courts to prevent his return to the U.S.
Sciascia was concerned about facing trial with someone with the notoriety of the Gotti name, and someone with the mouth of Ruggiero. By October 1988, he saw a more favorable climate in New York: his codefendants had all received bail and the case had been broken into separate trials, effectively distancing him from both the tainted Gotti name and his talkative co-accused. On October 28, 1988, in a letter to Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin of the Eastern District of New York, Benjamin Brafman introduced himself as Sciascia’s lawyer and informed the court that his client was returning to face trial. Describing Sciascia as a 55-year-old father of two with a wife of 25 years and no criminal record, Brafman started his campaign to win Sciascia bail.
“At the time of his arrest, Gerlando Sciascia learned that he was one of many defendants named in the same indictment,” Brafman wrote to the judge. “Sciascia was advised [by both his Canadian and New York counsel] that it was not in his best interest, as a peripheral defendant, to proceed to trial in the same proceeding with all the other defendants, because of the prejudicial spillover that was certain to result.” Sciascia had spent two years in Canada—in detention—rather than risk an appearance before a jury with such bad elements.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not let the lawyer’s spin pass without comment. In his reply letter, prosecutor Andrew Maloney lampooned the idea that Sciascia had voluntarily surrendered. “After his arrest in November 1986, Gerlando Sciascia, in fact, sought to prevent his return to the United States by opposing our application for his extradition,” Maloney wrote. “For almost two years, Gerlando Sciascia had been unsuccessfully seeking to overturn the order of extradition.”
After returning to the United States to await his trial, Sciascia was allowed to return to Canada briefly—for just 28 hours—on the occasion of the January 14, 1989, marriage of his son, Joseph, to Laura Bruno, at the Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal. While in Canada, he was to stay with his nephew, Luciano Renda. A year later, Sciascia finally secured a little more freedom, although his bail restrictions did not allow him to travel outside Manhattan, the Bronx or Brooklyn nor anywhere near an airport. At his bail hearing, when the issue of organized crime involvement came up, Sciascia looked up at the judge and appeared confused.
“Who’s in organized crime?” he asked.
Notwithstanding, he was released on a $2.5-million bond, signed as a surety by Sciascia’s wife, son and Giuseppe Arcuri, a relative of both Domenico Arcuri in Montreal and Giacinto Arcuri in Toronto.
Putting Sciascia, LoPresti, Ruggiero and Eddie Lino on trial was, as was becoming the custom for large mob cases, fraught with difficulty. After a mistrial, prosecutors forged ahead a second time, this time without Ruggiero as a defendant. The talkative mobster had died of cancer.
At the trial against the remaining three men, Assistant United States Attorney Gordon Mehler highlighted the clannishness of the Sciascia- LoPresti axis. If the Bonanno hierarchy did not realize where Sciascia’s loyalties lay, then Mehler certainly did when he declared: “George and Joe, Joe and George; they are one and the same.” Brafman, Sciascia’s lawyer, appeared to be playing to the jury’s preconceptions about “the Mafia” and his client’s Italian ancestry when he used objectionable terms to counter Mehler’s contention. “In Agrigento, when they were little greaseballs, they knew each other, too,” Brafman said at one point.
Waiting until their cases could be severed from that of Gotti and Carneglia proved its value. Gotti and Carneglia were sentenced to 50 years in prison. On February 9, 1990, however, after a month-long trial, Sciascia, LoPresti and Eddie Lino were acquitted.
“Thank you very much,” LoPresti called out to the jury, after the foreman delivered the verdict. “God bless you.” At least one member of the jury should have been thanking LoPresti, instead.
Earlier, a captain in the Gambino Family told Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano that the daughter of a customer at his Brooklyn fish store was a member of the jury. The captain said the woman “would be talked to and that for an appropriate gift of $10,000 she would do the right thing,” Gravano claimed. Gravano checked first with John Gotti and then turned over the money.
MONTREAL, SPRING 1992
Both Sciascia and LoPresti knew they had dodged a bullet with their acquittals and that their operations would forever be under close scrutiny by American law enforcement. For LoPresti, that did not appear to be an untenable problem. He was Canadian, and he returned to Montreal where he immersed himself in the daily activities of the Sixth Family. It was not long before Canadian police would again hear LoPresti on wiretaps, this time in Canada. On March 21, 1991, at 12:58 a.m., as part of Operation Bedside, one of several RCMP drug probes targeting Vito Rizzuto, officers intercepted a telephone conversation between Vito and LoPresti. LoPresti was back in business.

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