Authors: Lee Lamothe
The Sixth Family (54 page)
When asked by Vitale about the strength of the Montreal group, Vito told him that, with Sciascia now dead, 19 made men stood with him. This number included only the inducted American Mafia members—the few Montrealers who maintained dual membership in the Sixth Family, in accordance with the rules of the Sicilian Mafia, and in the Bonanno Family, in accordance with the rules of the American Mafia. The strength of the Montreal faction of the Bonannos, in fact, seems to have been set in stone at 20. In 1974, Paolo Violi, the former street boss of Montreal, was recorded as saying that he had 20 full members in the Bonanno organization. Nearly 30 years later the number remained the same. Vito seemed to use New York’s rigid view of Mafia membership to hide his organization’s true strength from Massino.
Vitale’s question about strength, however, shows the independence and control Vito had over affairs in Canada. It suggests that it was Vito, not Massino, who held the power over membership in his “crew.” Had the Montreal members been Bonanno soldiers in the traditional New York sense, their names would need to have been brought to Massino’s attention beforehand. Massino or his predecessors would have chosen which, if any, names received one of the valuable and sparse number of memberships available. The normal course of membership into the Bonanno Family was for Massino to pick and choose.
“The only one to approve a person being inducted is the boss,” Vitale said. Massino would tell Vitale, as his underboss, whom he wanted to bring into the family, and Vitale would pass the names on to other Bonanno captains so each one could be checked out. Any complaints, suspicions or concerns would be addressed. Then the names that remained unchallenged would go out to the other New York families. Since new members could only be brought in to replace members who had died—a strategy designed to keep the strength of each family steady in a bid to prevent one from moving to dominate—the other families would be given the names of proposed members in one column and the names of the dead gangster they were replacing in another, Vitale said.
“We ask the other people in our family, ‘What do you know about the individual?’ Then we propose him. We take his name, put him on four pieces of paper and send out the people to the other families, to shop the families. If we don’t hear from them within two weeks, we know it’s okay to ‘straighten him out.’” Had Vito’s men gone through such a process, presumably Massino and Vitale would know how many members there were in Montreal. Although, it could just have been that there had been so much tumult in the Bonanno Family over the years that such institutional knowledge had been lost and the ebb and flow of membership had not been carefully tracked. Regardless, it shows how little the Bonanno administration knew of the internal affairs of the Canadian operation and how much they eyed it with suspicion.
As with all mob business, Vitale’s visit to Montreal on Massino’s behalf closed with a quick discussion about money.
“I laid out the money for the hotel, for the food, for me and Tony [Urso] and when I got back, Joe said ‘How much did you lay out?’ and I said $900. He gave me the $900,” Vitale said.
It was a small investment by Massino in trying to reclaim what he appears to have lost after his murder of Sciascia. The Sixth Family seemed to have stopped paying their traditional tribute money to New York.
“I think the last time I was in their presence when they brought money down was approximately ’98, ’99,” Vitale said of the Montreal gangsters. He said Montreal might have continued with the traditional tribute arrangement but he had no evidence of this and could not be sure. An internal report by the RCMP suggests that the financial relationship between the Sixth Family and the Bonanno Family ended with Massino’s sneak attack on Montreal’s man in New York: “After the murder of Sciascia, the envelopes [of money] stopped coming from Canada,” the recent report says.
Their tie to the Bonanno Family was becoming less and less important as the Sixth Family’s enterprises grew. With the intense attention paid to the Mafia by the FBI, the relationship was also something of a liability for the Montrealers. The relationship with Massino and his gangsters was becoming irrelevant to the modern business structure that Vito had been building. It was a bit like a waning reliance on the postal system with the advent of the Internet.
Vito made it clear to Vitale that the ascendant Sixth Family had outgrown its subservience to the Bonanno Family in New York. Vito’s words to Vitale, spoken during their awkward lunchtime chat, were shocking in their clarity.
“We’re our own little family,” Vito said, according to Vitale. “There’s about 18, 20 of us, and we stay by ourselves and everybody respects everybody else.” The words were couched in politeness, as expected from such a gracious host, but New York had just been told to get lost. Vitale understood and dutifully carried Vito’s message back to New York, reporting to Massino: “They have their own little splinter group.”
The Sixth Family had not only eclipsed the wealth and strength of the Bonanno Family in New York, they now seemed to have extricated themselves from the family hierarchy and were truly setting themselves apart from any of the Five Families in New York.
CHAPTER 32
MONTREAL, 1990The sign, erected near the corner of Jean-Talon East and Buies streets in Montreal, should have blended easily into the neighborhood’s cluttered landscape as just another banal part of urban life: “Coming Soon—Pizza Hut.” As the first outlet in Quebec for the world’s largest pizza franchise, famous elsewhere for their deep pan pizzas, the planned Montreal opening in late 1990 was to be a beachhead, of sorts. A businessman in Quebec with a track record of success had secured the master franchise rights for the entire Island of Montreal, giving him the exclusive right to open and run dozens of Pizza Hut restaurants to feed the population of more than 3 million. It seemed only natural to locate the flagship outlet in Saint-Léonard—Montreal’s “Little Italy”—where it would be surrounded by the very people whose culture had made pizza a popular international dish. The corner lot seemed ideal.
The sign announcing the pending arrival of Pizza Hut, however, enraged at least one neighbor.
Despite the transfer of power that had come to the underworld of Montreal after the deaths of Paolo Violi and Vic Cotroni, it seemed some things had not changed under the leadership of the Sixth Family. Just as Mauro Marchettini, the would-be pool hall owner under Violi’s reign, had learned, the Pizza Hut owner would soon realize there were peculiarities to doing business in Saint-Léonard. The passage of three decades had changed little for the workaday mobsters on the streets of Montreal. With Vito and Nick Rizzuto in strict command, the mob men still considered themselves to be above the law and, in Saint-Léonard, at least, the makers of it. As such, the new Pizza Hut, located just across the street from Mike’s Submarines, which was owned by Agostino Cuntrera, was regarded as a flagrant offense, Montreal police officers said. Agostino Cuntrera had been convicted for his role in the slaying of Violi and was a thoroughly integrated part of the Sixth Family enterprise.
“Agostino doesn’t handle competition well,” said a former organized crime investigator who probed the mob for decades in Montreal. A simple message was conceived for the businessman, police allege.
“He hires a couple of neighborhood kids to burn down the sign,” the officer said. The next morning, the would-be pizza proprietor was greeted by a charred stump where his “Coming Soon” sign had stood. His response, however, was not what the mobsters expected. Had the Pizza Hut been run by a street-savvy Italian, the message of a burnt sign in Saint-Léonard might have been better understood as a not-so-subtle warning of ruffled mob feathers. This owner, however, was not Italian.
“Now, he is Jewish, so he doesn’t understand for nothing when it comes to the mob,” an officer said. “He doesn’t get the message. He responds the way he has always responded to such things—he goes and puts up a bigger sign.”
Work continued apace on the new restaurant and the frustration of the gangsters grew. Near the end of July, a more menacing message was sent. This time, it was not the sign but the building that was set ablaze. By mob standards, it was small-fry arson; the flames were doused before irreparable damage was caused. Only the bathroom area, where the fire was set, was hard hit. It was a setback for the opening, but the owner bravely pressed ahead. The restaurant, after all, represented an investment of approximately $1.2 million.
“We were focused on getting that place open and just running it as a business as best we could, like everyone else,” said a former senior manager of the company. “He [the owner] wanted to open the store and, I guess, innocently in whatever way, he just figured you are opening a business, you got the franchise license, you paid your lease, you’ve got a deal with your landlord, you put your building up and off you go, right? And then, after you open, you expect to compete at a level with respect to what you have to offer. The customers then either come to you or they go to a competitor. That’s business, and we were businessmen,” he said.
“I guess not everyone plays by the rules,” he added. Indeed not.
It was 2:37 a.m. on February 12, 1991, just a few days before the Pizza Hut was set to open, when an explosion erupted on Jean-Talon, waking neighbors and bringing the fire department rushing to the red-roofed brick building. This time, a serious player—a longtime member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club—had been brought in with instructions to do serious damage, police say. The fire department was soon joined by police officers and, in the morning,
Le Brigade des incendies criminels
, the Montreal police arson squad.
Le Brigade des incendies criminels
, the Montreal police arson squad.
Evidence gathered by investigators showed that two explosive charges—made up of sticks of dynamite—had been assembled outside the building, one at the rear and the other at the side, strategically placed near natural gas pipes. The dynamite was hooked up to a detonator and 250 feet of wire, suggesting that the bomber had been there to set it off, at a safe distance, before fleeing. Had the gas line caught fire, the resulting explosion and fire would likely have leveled the premises completely. As it was, there was a powerful explosion but little flame. There was significant damage to the walls, roof, gas lines and the bathrooms—again—but the building remained standing and salvageable. Defiantly, the rebuilding began that very day, likely driving anyone from across Jean-Talon into fits of rage. Stunned staff gathered at the pizzeria the next day, gossiping among themselves and wondering what was going on.
“We have never had any threats. It has nothing to do with revenge. Truly, we have absolutely no idea who would want to do something like this to us,” a company spokesperson said. Some staff soon left the firm, a reaction to the trouble at the flagship outlet, a former manager said. It was not only the local employees who were asking questions. The insurance company, too, was concerned over the fateful history of a business that had not yet opened its doors to customers. Awkward questions were also coming from the head office of Pizza Hut, which was owned at the time by powerful PepsiCo, the makers of Pepsi-Cola and one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. It was a significant ownership group, with annual revenues of $29 billion.
“There were certainly problems with respect to the store and the opening,” a former manager said. “At one point, what happened was the insurance [company] didn’t want to cover us any more, so we had to ask for assistance, for PepsiCo to support us, which they did. But try to explain this. Pizza Hut has restaurants all over the world and I’m not so sure they’ve encountered anything like that anywhere else. You can imagine, from an insurance perspective, what do you say? What’s going on there? It was something very particular to that area.”
What happened next was even more remarkable.
“PepsiCo is a big company, and they go and make a pointed inquiry as to what is going on in Montreal,” said a retired police officer who was involved with the case. “When they first started asking, the response was: ‘You’re trying to open a pizzeria in Saint-Léonard—are you crazy?’” That answer only infuriated the company. From the head office of PepsiCo, a stern letter was sent to the chief of police demanding intervention, the officer said. In the letter, the company put the force decidedly on the spot by asking: Who is in charge of Saint-Léonard, the Mafia or the police? The chief knew such a challenge could not go unanswered. Equally, he knew, the answer had better be the police, or more than just business would be lost.
Officers knew they needed to send a message to Vito Rizzuto. Police in Montreal have a history of turning to creative means to get the attention of bad guys. When it came to getting the Mafia to listen, they knew the language best spoken was money. A devious plan was hatched, although no one officially takes credit for concocting it. At the time, organized crime investigators knew that a lucrative means of illicit profit came to the mafiosi through black-market video gambling machines. This was before the government recognized what the mob had long known and took over the running of the gambling devices, pouring the profit into its own coffers instead of the mob’s. Two men associated with the Rizzuto organization were well known on the street for their string of gambling machines, set up in social clubs, cafés and bars throughout the city. Nicodemo Cotroni and Vincenzo DeSantis made a small fortune allowing Quebecers a fast and easy way to throw away their money, police said. Both men had ties to organized crime: Nicodemo was the eldest son of mob boss Frank Cotroni and had shown his own savvy by beating several gambling-related charges and another for assault; DeSantis was known by the nickname “Jimmy Rent-a-Gun” and earned an immediate place in the underworld by being the bartender at the Reggio Bar, Violi’s old headquarters. Each of the poker machines they had placed was earning between $500 and $600 a week, providing a steady stream of revenue to be divided up.
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