Authors: Lee Lamothe
The Sixth Family (41 page)
He was just returning from Canada where he’d dropped off an unusual fare—an agitated, sweating passenger who had abandoned his car at a diner in a small New York State village. The passenger was exhausted and jumpy, muttering quietly to himself such things as: “Even if they find it, no one can prove it’s mine.”
It was a bizarrely long and lucrative 185-mile cash fare to Cornwall, Ontario, for the cabbie, who marveled at his good fortune. The driver’s luck, however, meant bad news for the Sixth Family. The traffic stop was the first thread to pull loose in what would be revealed as a complicated tapestry: another cross-border drug smuggling plot. In what would emerge as a trademark of the Montreal Mafia’s operations, the plot drew together disparate players in the underworld, this time natives living on a reserve that straddles the U.S.-Canada border and members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
The passenger who had flagged down the cabbie was having a rough couple of days, although his trip started smoothly enough, leaving Cornwall alone at the wheel of a rental car and heading south across the border. During his long drive to Texas he started cursing the fact that no one had been hired to share the driving with him; to compensate, he popped pills to stay awake.
After arriving in Houston, the driver made his rendezvous and loaded the car with duffel bags stuffed with 40 kilograms of cocaine, a $6-million load (at street-level prices). He immediately turned around and headed back. State after state, he made his way north. Pill after pill, he drew closer to home. Then the rental car, pushed to the limit, broke down in Falling Waters, West Virginia, a bedroom community along the Potomac River that had not seen so much action since Union cavalry charged through during the Civil War. Desperate to get back to Canada, the courier went looking for the cheapest replacement vehicle he could find. At a local used car lot, he settled on an old Plymouth Gran Fury, bought it for $300 and transferred the bags of dope into its trunk. This car, however, was in little better shape. About six hours and 355 miles later—tired, wired and paranoid—the courier parked the Gran Fury outside Wilborn’s Restaurant, a diner in Central Square, N.Y. When he returned to the car it would not start. That was when he hailed a taxi.
Before the cabbie agreed to drive the courier to Canada, he made the man prove he had the cash to pay the fare—about $350, more than it cost to buy the used Plymouth. The man showed him a large wad of cash and off they drove, with the passenger muttering as he tried to doze, the cabbie later told the state trooper.
With barely 1,500 residents at the time, the village of Central Square was not known for its big spenders, though its easy access from Interstate 81 often brought strangers through town. Suspicious about such an odd taxi ride, the trooper drove to Wilborn’s, where he found a Gran Fury parked in the restaurant’s only handicapped spot. Diner staff told the trooper the car did not belong to any of its customers. The parking infraction gave the trooper cause to call in a tow truck and, in accordance with laws on police seizures, it was subject to an inventory search. It did not take long to uncover the drugs.
“They realized pretty quickly that with 40 kilos in the trunk somebody would be coming back for the car,” said Richard Southwick, the U.S. government attorney who worked on the case. Officers put the Gran Fury back in the parking space and set up surveillance to watch it. A car with Ontario licence plates soon drove into the lot and cruised slowly around the Gran Fury before stopping. Someone got out, looked at it—but did not touch it—and then left. Police still waited. Not long after, a tow truck from the Akwesasne native reserve arrived, hoisted the car up and set off with it. State troopers swooped in but the driver clearly knew nothing of the drugs. There were no arrests, but officers were left with some pretty compelling clues and the largest drug seizure in the region.
It was not hard for U.S. authorities to link the Gran Fury to the Virginia car lot and then to the abandoned rental car from Canada. That led police straight to the courier. Canadian police then traced him to the Travelodge Hotel on Brookdale Avenue in Cornwall, where he worked. A joint U.S.-Canada investigation was launched.
CORNWALL, ONTARIO, AUTUMN 1994In the autumn of 1994, a young RCMP officer went undercover, hanging around the Travelodge Hotel and an attached bar, meeting the regulars and showing his face. Constable Michel Aubin soon became known at the hotel as an affable man and modest drug trafficker as he watched members and associates of the Hells Angels mixing with the hotel management, local barflies and men linked to the Montreal Mafia. Investigators believed the street-level trafficking at the hotel was connected to the seized cocaine from the Gran Fury, but were uncertain how. After this first taste of Mafia intrigue, Michel Aubin, a quietly efficient officer, would go on to play a startlingly important role—12 years later—in the history of the Sixth Family. Back in April 1995, however, Aubin’s undercover effort was more modest; he provided his fellow officers with enough evidence for the RCMP to legally tap into the phone lines of the hotel and the homes of two Cornwall residents: the courier who had bungled the cocaine delivery and the owner of the Travelodge Hotel, Giuseppe “Joe” Sicurella.
Living quietly in Cornwall but from a family from Cattolica Eraclea, Sicurella had avoided legal trouble except for an armed robbery charge 20 years earlier that had been withdrawn before trial.
The Cornwall traffickers could not have known their phones had been tapped, but they were clearly aware of the possibility. As the police monitoring began, investigators found their suspects already using secret codes. When trying to determine the size of an expected cocaine shipment, Sicurella would ask, “How many girls?” The answer from Julian Tabares, alleged to be their Miami supplier, was “Three to four hands,” meaning 15 to 20 kilograms, a kilo for each finger on that many hands. They also sometimes identified friends by combining the first two letters of their first and last names: Luis Caceres became “Luca,” for instance. For a time, the subterfuge left officers confused. Who were these apparently unknown and unidentified people? Then a call from Sicurella to a colleague at the Travelodge asking for “Luca’s” telephone number was heard. A police check on the Montreal phone number given in reply was traced to the pager of Luis Caceres. Their naming code was cracked.
Unknown to police at the time, the conspirators had already brought several shipments of cocaine from the United States into Canada, ranging in size from 10 to 22 kilograms each. Four days after the monitoring began, Sicurella took a call at his hotel from Tabares in Miami. A few days later, Sicurella called a pay phone in Miami that was answered by Tabares and a meeting between the two was arranged. Another load was in the works, police believed.
On May 6, 1995, officers secretly watched as Sicurella left his home and drove across the border at Massena, New York, telling border guards he and his female passenger were just going for breakfast. Meanwhile, Pierre Rossignol, a co-conspirator from St. Joseph du Lac, Quebec, was smuggled across the border by Akwesasne natives. He joined Sicurella and the pair headed to Syracuse airport, where they boarded a flight to Miami under the watchful eye of Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Tabares picked them up at the airport and the two Canadians checked into Room 6912 at the nearby Marriott Hotel. During quiet face-to-face meetings, the two sides haggled over the purchase price for bulk loads of cocaine.
Sicurella and Rossignol then returned to Syracuse, where an Akwesasne resident picked them up and drove them to the American side of the reserve. There they boarded a boat for the short hop across the St. Lawrence River to the reserve’s Canadian side. This same easy way of shuttling people across the border without passing through government checkpoints in either country was also being used to move drugs.
Over the next 18 days, details were negotiated and a deal was finally struck in a Laval restaurant, although price remained an issue. Despite the Canadians’ hunger for a steady supply, Rossignol announced he would not “go down on his knees” to make the deal.
On June 2, 1995, Aubin, the RCMP’s undercover officer, met with the man who had previously bungled the cocaine delivery. Aubin placed an order for one kilogram of cocaine. Such an order could not be filled at the moment.
“We’re waiting for things to happen,” Aubin was told. A week later, Sicurella headed south in a car that was stopped by New York State troopers as part of the investigation. He told the troopers he was going to Atlantic City to “hang around,” and allowed them to search his car. It was a bold gamble—he had $50,000 as a down payment for cocaine hidden in a box of tissues on his rear window ledge. The troopers’ search, however, found no luggage, no drugs and no money, and he was allowed to continue on his journey.
Despite the large down payment, arrangements came in fits and starts, requiring repeated telephone calls. Several calls received by Sicurella came from a man he seemed to answer to: Girolamo Sciortino.
The name Girolamo Sciortino meant nothing to American investigators. In Canada, however, Sciortino had been noted in police files not only because of his criminal record—dating back to 1973 with two convictions for running an illegal gambling operation, followed in 1988 by a conviction for drug trafficking—but also because of the company he kept. Born on September 27, 1941, in Cattolica Eraclea, Sciortino moved to Montreal, where he often went by the nickname “George,” dubbed himself “the king of the submarine sandwich” and started a casual submarine and pizza restaurant. He married into Montreal’s D’Angelo family, which, in the wickerwork of Sixth Family interrelationship, links back both to the Rizzuto and the Renda families. Sciortino is likely a relative of Giuseppe Sciortino, who arrived in America in 1925 alongside Vito Rizzuto’s grandfather and Calogera Renda. The families have remained close. In 1995, his name attracted more interest from police when Sciortino’s son, Bernardo, married Bettina Rizzuto, the only daughter of Vito. The lavish nuptials, with Bettina beautifully outfitted in a fairy-tale grown and a string of white pearls, came two years after the Gran Fury stuffed with cocaine was found but two years before Girolamo Sciortino would have to answer for it. (Bernardo Sciortino, often called Benny, has a criminal conviction for assault and manages the family’s submarine restaurant, George Le Roi du Sous-Marin, according to police. He and Bettina would later give Vito his first grandchild.)
To investigators in Cornwall deeply embroiled in the Travelodge drug probe, which was given the codename Project Office, Girolamo Sciortino became an important part of their investigation, although his specific role was still a mystery.
On July 18, 1995, Sciortino called Sicurella at his Cornwall hotel, asking, in code, for an update on the planned shipment of cocaine. Sicurella said he was working on it. Three days later, Sciortino phoned again, complaining that Sicurella was not returning his calls. The Cornwall hotel owner said there had been a number of “fuck-ups,” but that Sciortino need not worry. A week later at the Miss Cornwall Restaurant, down the road from the Travelodge, Sicurella received news that the cocaine shipment was finally ready for pickup. His courier arranged to borrow the vehicle of a reserve resident, promising there would be $500 in the glove box when it was returned. The next morning, the courier headed to New York City. Clearly learning from his mistake on the Texas run, this time he brought his wife with him to share the driving. Even so, the drive was a frantic one. His deadline for the pickup in New York was noon and yet he had not crossed into the United States until 9:57 that morning, at the start of a nearly seven-hour drive. Clearly, he was going to miss his pickup time by a wide margin. Repeated calls begging for more time, placed to a pay phone on the sidewalk outside Flushing Auto Salvage, almost in the shadow of New York’s famed Shea Stadium, were made during the drive.
“Time is the number one thing,” said the voice on the New York end. Once in Queens, the courier was given the keys to a gray Mercury Cougar. Behind the back seats, he was told, 30 kilograms of cocaine had been hidden. This was high-tech subterfuge: the secret compartment was hydraulically operated and could only be activated by tuning the car’s radio to a specific radio station’s frequency. The courier and his wife climbed into the Cougar. After an overnight stay, they drove it north, arriving at a house on the American side of the Akwesasne reserve where the cocaine was removed from the Cougar. The courier counted 27 one-kilo packages as he placed them in a cardboard box inside a garage. A little after 7:30 that evening, the cocaine was driven to the St. Lawrence River, loaded onto a boat that took it across to the Canadian side of the reserve, and packed into a waiting pickup truck.
The truck then headed into Montreal, an easy 90-minute drive. The driver had noticed a police tail, however, and from Highway 40 made a sudden exit onto St. Laurent Boulevard, disappearing into city traffic. Eventually, police say, the drugs were delivered to Sciortino in Montreal.
Now it was Sciortino’s turn to be on the receiving end of haranguing phone calls. He appeared to be having trouble pulling together the final payment, or was purposely reluctant to do so. In a sudden reversal of roles, Sicurella phoned Sciortino, whom he called “George,” at his Montreal sandwich shop, asking about the money.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sciortino told him. But others did. Sicurella’s courier was taking calls from the suppliers, asking when he was returning their Cougar and the rest of the money. The suppliers were told they “could not dance,” suggesting they were under police surveillance. By July 30, their Miami supplier had lost patience and said he was on his way to Cornwall to collect his car and cash. Under pressure, Sicurella told the suppliers they were all in danger of arrest.
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