The Sixth Family (47 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
Of the 25 criminal organizations that did business at the exchange office, the RCMP mustered the resources to properly investigate only two of them. Unfortunately for Joe Lagana, he was the frontman for one of them. As the largest volume mover of the clandestine cash, Lagana was an obvious target. His open candor with the men running the exchange did not help him duck scrutiny; the fact that he was a lawyer and that some officers believed he was a relative of Vito Rizzuto’s—a contention one of Vito’s long-time lawyers disputes—might well have been the clincher.
After watching Lagana pass large loads of cash across their counter, police finally settled in, on June 26, 1993, to watch and listen to Lagana interact with his associates. One man he repeatedly spoke to was Vito Rizzuto. Lagana soon emerged in investigators’ eyes as the intermediary between Vito and other associates. Over secretly installed wiretaps, police heard numerous conversations between the two discussing what were clearly financial matters, but the men spoke in a mutually understood code that made it “impossible to determine their exact nature,” a police report notes. In each case, police say, Vito spoke in “an amicable and familiar tone.” The two also met in person. On January 18, 1994, during police surveillance, officers watched Vito pull up in a Jeep Cherokee in front of a 12-story Peel Street office building, one packed with financial and travel companies. He then waited until Lagana emerged from the building and hopped into the Jeep. On February 4, 1994, police watched Vito meet at the same building with Lagana and Luis Cantieri, an experienced drug importer who was still on parole for a 1986 narcotics conviction. Vito and Cantieri also met without Lagana. Months earlier, on September 23, 1993, police watched Vito and Cantieri eat together at Montreal’s Latini restaurant.
Despite the chronic shortage of investigative resources, the officers made some solid progress. They had gained the trust of several of their regular underworld clients who were connected to the Rizzutos and would socialize with them, discussing mob gossip and criminal plans. One client, Dominico Tozzi, was a 52-year-old jetsetting businessman who was ostensibly involved in an import-export business and as a nightclub owner. He was also a mob associate of the Rizzutos, who rented an office across from the exchange house, one floor above Lagana’s law office, and dabbled in both cocaine conspiracies and high-value money laundering. Tozzi bragged to an undercover officer working at the exchange company about his contacts in law enforcement, both the Montreal city police and the Montreal office of the federal RCMP. His contacts were not as plugged-in as Tozzi might have hoped.
On March 29, 1993, one of the undercover RCMP officers working at the covert currency exchange counter met with Tozzi at a downtown Montreal restaurant. Tozzi, of course, took the man to be an underworld colleague who had worked for almost three years in moving the organization’s drug money through the exchange.
Over lunch, Tozzi, a business associate of Joe Lagana’s, spoke of their mutual interest—the movement of lots of dirty cash. Tozzi was in need of laundering services for about $2 million, he said. As the lunch stretched on and the wine flowed, Tozzi started talking more than he should have, according to police reports filed on the meetings. He said the “big boss” was Italian. The boss was the one who made the major decisions, he said. Going further, he confided that the boss’s name was Vito Rizzuto.
Tozzi had, in fact, met with Vito just the day before, he boasted, and Vito was the one who was calling the shots on the $2 million he was looking to process at the currency exchange. Likely leaning in a little closer and lowering his voice, Tozzi then told the agent that the “big Italian boss” never directly got his hands dirty in such affairs. The boss refused to “touch anything,” Tozzi said. The boss was very well known to police and could not risk being caught by them or else he would surely find himself in prison, Tozzi said. The investigators were thrilled, stoking their hopes that the Tozzi slip and their other efforts in the operation would make those words prophetic. This time, officers were certain, Vito would be nabbed.
The undercover officer later mentioned Tozzi’s name to Lagana. Lagana said that if Tozzi were ever arrested and told police all he knew, half of the people in Montreal might end up in jail. Lagana then warned him to be careful what he said around Tozzi. The officer replied that Tozzi might find himself killed if he was so dangerous.
“I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened,” Lagana replied.
The interactions between the undercover officers and their new criminal customers went beyond such gossip. In 1994, they were approached with an additional business proposition. Could they help “take care” of a cocaine shipment from Colombia into the United States and Canada? The agents readily agreed. This was the chance they had been waiting for, to be able to conclusively connect the masses of cash to illegal drugs. As the plans for moving the drugs unfolded, they revealed the seamless way the Sixth Family worked with both Colombian cocaine cartels and members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
COAST OF COLOMBIA, AUGUST 17, 1994An ocean-going freighter steered slowly south toward the warm coastal waters off the Colombian coast, not far from the city of Barranquilla, one of the four major industrial centers of Colombia and among South America’s busiest ports. The ship had been secretly leased by RCMP officers working with agents from U.S. Customs and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and was being passed off as an underworld asset in the control of the supposedly crooked men behind the International Monétaire.
On August 17, 1994, as the ship slowed to a halt offshore, near the mouth of the Magdalena River, its covert police crew was met by Norman Rosenblum, a wealthy and enthusiastic businessman from Vancouver who, despite his expensive tastes for designer clothes and high-end watches, was not above doing some of the heavy lifting himself. When the freighter arrived at the rendezvous point, Rosenblum shot from the Colombian beach and helped push aboard 14 bales of cocaine, weighing in at 558 kilograms. The freighter then headed north, stopping first in Miami, then making its way along Canada’s eastern seaboard and down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Montreal.
Once it arrived at the Port of Montreal, the drugs were supposed to be transshipped to England. In London, two Quebec members of the Hells Angels waited to collect the load for distribution in Europe. But the drugs never made the journey across the Atlantic. Police removed the cocaine from the freighter in Montreal and held it as a key piece of evidence in their four-year-long money-laundering investigation, the needed proof that the cash coming into the Centre International Monétaire was, in fact, drug money.
With the seizure, police could finally start to wrap up their frantic money-laundering operation. Working with federal prosecutors, officers started sorting out who should—and could—be arrested. Police were anxious to place Vito Rizzuto under arrest for what investigators saw as his obvious role in the background of so many of the key money and drugs players. Government lawyers were not so sure.
Debate ensued while the investigation was ending.
MONTREAL, AUGUST 30, 1994At 6 a.m. on August 30, 1994, police officers who had literally synchronized their watches started moving in on more than 40 suspects in coordinated raids on homes, businesses and financial institutions across Montreal and in other Canadian cities, including Quebec City, Trois-Rivières and Vancouver. About 480 officers from federal, provincial and city police forces participated in the sweep. One of the accused lawyers, Vincenzo Vecchio, was arrested as he dropped his six-year-old son off for his first day of school.
“It was all done very discreetly,” his wife said. “My children didn’t know what was happening. I told them he was just going off somewhere with a client.” The two Hells Angels who were waiting patiently in London for the cocaine to arrive were arrested by British police.
By mid-morning, the RCMP’s Quebec headquarters in Westmount was flush with accused gangsters, drug dealers, illicit money movers and excited police officers. To handle the crowd, the gymnasium was partitioned into 40 temporary holding areas where suspects were questioned and processed separately.
The arrests cut close to the bone for the Sixth Family. Emanuele Ragusa, who was described as “the banker” for the network, was scooped up by police, as was one of the family’s most trusted drug contractors, Sammy Nicolucci. Lagana, Vito’s lawyer and a relative, and two other lawyers in Lagana’s law firm were also arrested. Vincenzo “Jimmy” DiMaulo, a longtime friend of Vito’s, who, a dozen times a year or more, would be included in Vito’s foursome in a round of golf, was among those taken to RCMP headquarters. Rosenblum, who was described as the network’s “transportation manager,” was picked up in Vancouver. Cantieri and Tozzi were also caught in the dragnet.
Nowhere among the downcast throng, however, was Vito Rizzuto.
At the insistence of federal prosecutors who had evaluated the extensive evidence gathered by investigators—including 3,500 recorded conversations and videotaped meetings—Vito could not be charged. Police had to satisfy themselves with naming Vito as an unindicted co-conspirator, offering him bad publicity rather than a judicial fight. He would not be arrested, nor would he face the courts. While search warrants and affidavits filed in the case openly refer to the “Vito Rizzuto group,” his name was glaringly absent from the list of those arrested or wanted for arrest. Vito’s name was also included on the search warrant authorizing officers to enter Joe Lagana’s law office; Vito was one of 26 people and 34 companies whose records could be seized if any were found there. All were alleged to have been involved in the Rizzuto organization’s drugs and dirty money enterprise.
“We know that he is part of the conspiracy but, because of legal principles, we cannot file this evidence against Mr. Rizzuto,” prosecutor Danielle Côté said at the time. Once again, Vito walked away. Police tried to mask their disappointment.
“We’ve seized their dope and we’ve frozen their homes and bank accounts. We left them 25 cents for a phone call. It’s going to hurt them a lot,” said Sergeant Claude Lessard, a chipper RCMP spokesman, when announcing the sweeping arrests. He should have known better.
Vito and his associates were left with far more than 25 cents.
BERN, SWITZERLAND, AUGUST 31, 1994There was little diplomatic fanfare when a representative of Canada’s embassy in Switzerland arrived at the Federal Police headquarters in Bern on the morning after the Montreal arrests. He was there on urgent business and in need of their help. Presenting official requests received from the RCMP, the ambassador was seeking “urgent judicial assistance” from Swiss authorities.
The undercover police operation against the Rizzuto organization in Canada had apprehended some of the men, but did little to capture the money. The RCMP was anxious to recover the money it had laundered for the traffickers. The ambassador presented the Swiss Federal Police with the names of those who were charged with moving the drug money through the RCMP’s currency exchange, with a request that their banking activities in Switzerland be examined and accounts frozen. The Swiss quickly focused on Joe Lagana’s role. A number of accounts that had either sent or received transfers from Lagana’s numerous business or personal accounts were blocked from further activity with a notification that, should anyone try to gain access to the funds, police were to be called immediately. Three of those accounts were listed in the name of Luca Giammarella. One was at the Credit Suisse Trust in Lugano.
Wasting no time, after the covert money-laundering sting in Montreal had been revealed, Libertina Rizzuto and Giammarella headed to their banks in Lugano. They arrived one day too late. Police in Switzerland were already sifting through the accounts and banking records, tracking the international movement of huge amounts of money in several foreign currencies through personal and corporate accounts. The Credit Suisse Trust branch had already received the government order of August 31 and immediately informed the Public Minister of the presence of Libertina and Giammarella. This is what led to their arrest.
A curious pattern of account openings and closings was emerging for Swiss investigators, experienced in tracking money; they noted three distinct “phases” in which Rizzuto money was cycled every few years through a fresh set of bank accounts.
“It can be said that the moving from one phase to another was done in order to create difficulties for any future investigations,” the Swiss authorities concluded.
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