The Sixth Family (34 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

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Something, however, turned sour.
On the last day of April 1992, Montreal police were called to a set of railway tracks that ran through an industrial plot on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard East. There, wrapped in a large gray dropcloth, the kind used by painters, and tied up with the type of cord commonly used at construction sites, was the body of a tall, dark-haired man carrying a large roll of cash but no identification. He had been shot in the head at close range with a small-caliber bullet. The next day, the body was identified as that of Joe LoPresti. Police later found his red Porsche abandoned at a nearby restaurant. He was 44.
“Joe was involved a lot more in the background and was very discreet in Montreal. Unfortunately, he was not discreet enough in New York,” a long-time Montreal drug investigator said. The murder investigation was not helped by LoPresti’s grieving family. A lawyer for the family wrote a letter to the Montreal police asking detectives investigating the murder to stop contacting them.
“His point was clear: Lay off. He said for us to stop harassing the family, cease and desist. It effectively shut down the investigation,” said André Bouchard, who retired in 2004 as head of the Montreal police’s Major Crime Unit. It went unsolved and is periodically reviewed by detectives. “We took a look at it again in the last year I was there,” Bouchard said. “Still nothing.” Perhaps some members of the family knew more about the murder than the police. Although the murder was never solved in Montreal, LoPresti’s killer had revealed himself in New York.
LoPresti was well known to most of the New York gangsters. He spent enough time in the city for the Bonanno captains to know him by name and by sight. LoPresti was officially recognized by the Bonanno administration as Sciascia’s acting
capo-regime
, or acting captain, meaning he was second-in-command to Sciascia in New York and was a suitable stand-in for Sciascia, should Sciascia not be available. The New Yorkers had been looking at things only from their perspective and, by their standards, LoPresti was the number-two man in Montreal, behind only Sciascia. They failed to realize that both men were underlings of the Rizzutos and had been sent off to New York to mind the Sixth Family’s interests in their primary marketplace. As such, the Sixth Family could deal with both of them as it wished, even if it caused some ruffled feathers in New York.
“George from Canada came to see me and said that Big Joe from Canada was out of control; he was doing drugs, he was snorting drugs, he was using drugs, he was selling drugs,” Vitale said. The implication was clear to Vitale. Sciascia was saying that LoPresti was dangerous and had to be killed.
“If that is what you want to do, do it. You have to protect the family,” Vitale told him, authorizing Sciascia to “take care of business,” meaning the kill would be a sanctioned hit. “But he led me to believe that business was already taken care of,” Vitale said. “George, for the sake of this conversation, he was [being] cute. … He led me to believe he might have already done it.” Sciascia previously had the same conversation with Anthony Spero, the Bonanno
consigliere
. When Vitale and Spero compared notes, they knew that they would not be seeing “Big Joe” ever again.
“Me and Spero agreed, when George came to us, the gentleman was already dead,” Vitale said. Sciascia, it seems, was trying retro-actively to seek official permission to eliminate Joe LoPresti. If Sciascia had followed the American Mafia’s rules, he would have needed the permission of the Bonanno administration before LoPresti was killed.
“Big Joe was a made member of the Bonanno Family,” Vitale said.
This was another example of how the Sixth Family flouted the accepted rules of the Bonanno Family and operated independently as its own crime group. Vitale, seeming to realize the futility of taking issue with the decree of the Montreal organization in dealing with its own man, did not pursue the issue further. Why Sciascia and, presumably, the Sixth Family administration, would have wanted LoPresti dead is a mystery. One reason he certainly was not killed for, however, was one of the excuses Sciascia had complained of to Vitale: that he had been selling drugs. That was not a problem.
The unexpected, unapproved and unexplained murder of LoPresti, apparently by or with the complicity of Sciascia, was not the only sign of a deteriorating relationship between Montreal and New York. At the highest levels, there were overt signs that the Bonanno administration had already noticed that the Sixth Family was starting to pull away from its expected orbit around New York. That did not mean, however, the Montreal organization was withdrawing from international affairs.
CHAPTER 23
CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1982
The sparkling reception for Nick Rizzuto and his colleagues in Venezuela first started to tarnish in the spring of 1982—although the mobsters did not yet know it. Venezuelan security intelligence officers had been probing foreign influence in the capital city and were concerned over the volume of overseas telephone calls being made for no apparent or legitimate reason. Tracking the calls led agents to Nick Rizzuto and his expatriate Mafia allies, the Caruanas and the Cuntreras. The country’s security forces at first believed the calls were related to espionage activities by a foreign government and, if some in the government were not overly concerned with mobsters investing drug profits in their country, a potential breach of security in this easily destabilized part of the world was not taken as lightly.
The Venezuelan authorities turned to the CIA for help in tracking down this suspected foreign menace but the U.S. agency, realizing pretty quickly that it was drug trafficking, not insurgency, being plotted, turned the case over to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Tom Tripodi, a DEA specialist in international drug trafficking, was sent from Washington to look into the matter. Tripodi met with Venezuelan officials at a coffee shop near the American Embassy in Caracas and from there was taken to the investigators’ secret apartment where the telephone calls were being monitored and recorded.
Many of the voices were speaking the Sicilian dialect particular to Agrigento. On one, the caller spoke of “fish” being shipped from Venezuela to Sicily. Each fish seemed to weigh a kilogram and they were putting a thousand of these beasts into a single shipment. Tripodi knew immediately that it was really a 1,000-kilogram shipment of cocaine. The more conversations he listened to, the larger the scale of the operation was uncovered—cocaine was going to Italy and heroin was being returned in huge amounts. Although cracking that part of the traffickers’ code was simple, the DEA could not penetrate the system they used for passing on the date and place that the shipments were scheduled to arrive.
While the Venezuelan authorities lost some of their enthusiasm for the case once the non-political nature of the conspiracy was deduced, the DEA’s interest remained strong. Their investigation started to focus on Giuseppe Bono, who seemed to be at the root of the activities on the European side of the transactions. A prosecution in Italy would also be far easier than in South America, especially when it was learned that Italian police were monitoring some of the same calls from their end. They traced calls from Bono, through the phone lines of Citam, a powdered milk company used for laundering drug profits, to many members of the Sixth Family. Throughout the summer of 1982, the Italian police also monitored Bono’s constant contact with Nick Rizzuto. That the investigation so quickly became a European affair, however, was of great relief to the Sixth Family. Most of their activity at that time was divided between North and South America.
On February 4, 1984, Vito Rizzuto and Sabatino “Sammy” Nicolucci left Montreal for Caracas. Nicolucci, a thin, almost nerdy-looking man who might have been able to pass for Bill Gates’s impoverished brother, had a minor drug possession conviction in 1973 and a more serious conviction for possessing $2 million of counterfeit money from 1978. His association with the Sixth Family would eventually lead to more prison time and even more frightful ventures. In 1984, however, his Sixth Family connection meant a winter break from the cold of Quebec. Nicolucci also visited the island of Aruba, a Caruana-Cuntrera stronghold in the Caribbean Sea, off the northern coast of Venezuela. RCMP officers following him later asked the management of the Holiday Inn where he had stayed to let them review the phone records for Nicolucci’s room, but no registration could be found for him. Officers discovered that his room had been reserved and paid for by Pasquale Cuntrera, one of the senior members of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan.
A year after his visit to Venezuela and Aruba, Nicolucci was charged in Canada with conspiracy to import drugs and laundering the proceeds of crime. Vito, again, was side-stepped when it came to charges. Nicolucci was sentenced to 14 years in prison but was released on full parole in January 1991. By August 1994 he had stopped making personal appearances at the office of his parole supervisor, as he was required to do. He telephoned in to the office instead, claiming he did not have the money to travel by public transit. Suspicious officials revoked his parole and ordered him back into custody. When he failed to appear, police officers went looking for him. Their suspicion proved to be well founded—he was not even in the country. Nicolucci eventually turned up in Colombia in May 1996.
“According to the police version, you had purchased 280 kilos of cocaine on behalf of Vito Rizzuto. However, you refused to pay for the amount owing for the drug, $1.7 million, to the Colombian cartel, claiming that the drugs were of poor quality,” states Canada’s National Parole Board records. In August 1994, Nicolucci was kidnapped by Colombian drug traffickers from a Montreal strip club. The Colombians demanded their money and first hustled Nicolucci to the Laurentians, a mountainous area north of Montreal that is famous for its skiing, then smuggled him across the border to Florida, and finally on to Colombia.
In the traffickers’ jungle hide-away Nicolucci, who was always a good talker, negotiated a deal with his cartel kidnappers; his life would be spared and he would work off his debt as an indentured servant for the cartel in Colombia. His conditions could not have been too onerous, however, for when he was found by Colombian officials he fought extradition to Canada, a battle he eventually lost. Back in Canada, he faced 437 counts for drug trafficking and money laundering; here he also lost, drawing a second 14-year sentence in 1997.
Nicolucci’s Colombian adventures were to come years later; at the time of his 1984 visits to Caracas and Aruba, he was a drug trafficker still in good standing. The RCMP alerted the Venezuelan authorities to the Montrealers’ activities, although they undoubtedly already knew of Nick and his business from their probe with the DEA of the shipments of “fish.” It is also believed that the intelligence dossiers they gathered were used by high-ranking police officials not to prosecute Nick but to ramp up the bribes they demanded to continue turning a blind eye.
In Venezuela, the expatriate Mafia were as comfortable as they had ever been. Nick and the Cuntrera brothers—Pasquale, Paolo and Gaspare—had been joined by Alfonso Caruana, a former Montrealer from Agrigento, and together they lived in style.
“He had a huge villa looked after by private people, by private police who made sure that he was never disturbed,” said Oreste Pagano, a former drug-trafficking colleague of Alfonso’s. The Caruana-Cuntrera family, and presumably Nick as well, felt at ease there.
“He felt completely safe and well protected by the big, important friends that he had there in Venezuela. They were friends with the former president,” Pagano said of a relationship between Pasquale Cuntrera and Carlos Andrés Pérez. His feeling of security seemed well founded. The Venezuelan government had already rebuffed Italian extradition requests for Pasquale Cuntrera several times.

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