The Sixth Family (56 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

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In the early 1990s, investigators watching Vito were also perplexed by a seemingly improbable venture that saw him traveling to Switzerland, Hong Kong and the Philippines. The travel was part of an attempt to get his hands on gold ingots from the fortune of Ferdinand Marcos, the deposed (and deceased) president of the Philippines. Vito claimed to have a mandate from the family of a Filipino general, who was a close associate of the former president, to retrieve assets from the Marcos estate on their behalf; it was believed to be hidden in Swiss and Hong Kong banks, the RCMP said. The talk of the gold stash surfaced during Project Bedside, another police operation investigating Vito for suspected drug activities. Officers found Vito in near constant contact with two brothers, twins, in Vancouver; their talk was not of Libyan hash, but Filipino gold.
Roberto and Antonio Papalia had once worked in Montreal nightclubs with Vito, when all three were young men. An older brother, Adolfo, was a co-owner, with Paolo Renda, of Complexe Funéraire Loreto, a Montreal funeral home that Vito had listed as his place of employment for several years, until 2001. (These Papalias are not related to the Ontario gangsters of the same last name.) After moving to Vancouver, the twins became controversial figures, making a name for themselves through several stock market deals and corporate ventures that ran afoul of market regulators. Roberto has been banned for life from being a director of any U.S. public company by the Securities and Exchange Commission, for defrauding investors; police have recorded Antonio, known as “Tony,” talking with Vito about a stock transaction in 1996 and was, until recently, in contact with Vito on a weekly basis, according to police. The Papalias reportedly controlled a small gold and iron-ore mine on Texada Island, a stretch of land 32 miles long and 6 miles wide that lies in the Strait of Georgia, about 190 miles north of Seattle. The mine might explain their interest in the Marcos gold plan or, conversely, why Vito might have sought their input.
Police in Canada were at a loss as to what to do when they realized what was under discussion. There was no easy evidence of a crime, certainly not one in Canada, and any investigation of such a global scheme would be an expensive venture. One thing they could do was alert the Philippines government to Vito’s interest.
“We were telling people in the Philippines that he’s arriving in Manila Tuesday, you should follow him from the airport, see where he is going, who he meets with,” said a Montreal police officer involved in the case. “And they said, ‘You have to pay us if you want us to tail him.’ We couldn’t believe it, we were like, ‘Hey, it’s your national treasury being pilfered, not ours’.” It is unknown if Vito’s attempt to act as an intermediary was successful.
SAINT-DONAT, QUEBEC, FEBRUARY 1995
The repetitive clunking sound coming from a cramped basement laundry room could easily have passed as a washing machine on its spin cycle, as unexpected visitors arrived at a chalet on a secluded lake near Saint-Donat, about a 90-minute drive north of Montreal. Instead of laundry facilities, a reconditioned printing press was found churning out counterfeit $100 U.S. banknotes. Piles of them. As police gathered the boxes containing sheets of uncut banknotes, which would later be tallied at some $15 million in face value, other officers arrested the man operating the press. In addition to being surprised by the sudden arrival of agents with the U.S. Secret Service, the RCMP and Montreal police, Lebanese-born Joseph Baghdassarian was frazzled from a cocaine binge. His erratic state only added to the marvel agents had for the quality of his work.
“He is a master craftsman,” said Paul Laurin, a counterfeiting specialist with the RCMP who led the raid. “I have to say that this man was a counterfeiter who put his heart into his work. There aren’t too many printers so good who go bad.” The key to the work of Baghdassarian, who became known by the nickname “the Artist,” was his ability to replicate the red and blue fibers that are embedded in genuine Federal Reserve bills. The Artist worked his magic with the printer, but it was the Sixth Family that moved his merchandise. The clan had long valued bogus banknotes and, as early as 1972, had been selling bulk loads of counterfeit notes and even using them to pay some of their bills. The notes from the Artist’s press, sold for about $15 each, were recovered in Albany, Buffalo, Boston, Cincinnati, Miami, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Reno, San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver. No less than $24 million had recently rolled off that press, and this was by no means the first batch. After the chalet raid, seven people were arrested and charged with counterfeiting, conspiracy and possession of counterfeit bills. The authorities boldly named the Montreal Mafia as the bank-rollers and distributors of the counterfeit bills but, again, no member of the Sixth Family was ever indicted.
The stock swindles and gold deals, bogus money and extortion kept various Sixth Family members busy and well fed over the years, but such activities were never designed to replace their primary business. Drugs remained the priority, and in that, they would soon encounter a new underworld force that was both collaborator and challenger.
CHAPTER 33
MONTREAL, 1995
Maurice “Mom” Boucher was an ambitious, charismatic and seemingly fearless leader within the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in Montreal, who headed a particularly bold and vicious chapter of the world’s largest and most notorious biker gang. Boucher’s Hells Angels chapter was the Quebec Nomads, a name denoting that they were, like the Sixth Family, not tied to a geographic territory. Also like the Sixth Family, the Nomads were obsessed with the staggering profits that the drug trade could bring. Mom Boucher’s first targets in Montreal were rival bikers and independent drug dealers, many of whom he beat into submission, drove into retirement or had killed. He was buying drugs in bulk and working hard to have all street dealers sell only drugs bought through him. Boucher soon wielded considerable clout throughout the province of Quebec, controlling a significant and growing drug-trafficking enterprise.
For Boucher, that was not nearly enough. Again like the Sixth Family, Boucher wanted to build his own monopoly, to become his own brand and run his own drug franchise. Quietly, he was planning for the day when he was strong enough to replace Vito Rizzuto at the top of the underworld, but he knew that time had not yet come. Meanwhile, he faced a challenge that demanded his more immediate attention. Not all of the street distributors in the area were interested in dealing with Boucher. A number of dealers, bar owners and distributors got together and went looking for a better deal, and they found it in the Sixth Family. When Boucher learned his monopoly was being challenged by a group calling themselves the Alliance, who had secured a source through the Sixth Family, he was furious.
“The Hells Angels complained like hell about it to the Italians,” said a longtime drug investigator in Montreal. He, like many police officers in Canada, even the Italian-born ones, used the word “Italians” as shorthand for the Mafia when talking about organized crime, just as “Russians” is used for Eastern European crime groups, and “Jamaicans” for the criminal posses of immigrants from Jamaica.
“The Italians said to the Hells Angels, ‘We will sell to whomever we want; we don’t ask permission for anything. If we have a buyer we will sell it to that buyer and if you have a problem with that, then work it out amongst yourselves,’” the investigator said. The Nomads, under the leadership of Boucher, took the mob at its word. If they could not stop the flow of drugs to their competition at its source, then they would stop it at the retail end. When the rival gang—which had by then formalized its structure and changed its name to the Rock Machine—refused to restrict where and from whom they bought their drugs, the war was on. The Hells Angels were unrelenting; the Rock Machine, unyielding. The violence of the biker war in Quebec was unprecedented in Canada. Beginning in earnest in 1994, the war would claim more than 160 lives. It was a battle that the Hells Angels were winning, a fact not lost on the Sixth Family.
For his part, Vito appears to have recognized the impressive breadth of the Nomads’ drug distribution network and the determination of its leader. Boucher came to represent a one-stop retail outlet. His reach was dominant in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and growing steadily across Canada. Like an oil-patch baron meeting a gas-station magnate, the two found good reason to talk. Never friends, but typically treating each other with courtesy, the Hells Angels and the Sixth Family started to hammer out an arrangement. The Sixth Family was the only criminal check on Boucher’s ambition and power, and Vito could do that through reputation alone. While violence filled the streets of Montreal, precious little of it involved the Sixth Family.
“They basically signed contracts to be the sole supplier,” said André Bouchard, the former head of the Major Crimes Unit of the Montreal police. “The Italians had the contacts in South America and the bikers didn’t, not at that point. The Italians said to the Hells, ‘We’ll bring it into the port, you arrange to get it out of the port and it’s yours to distribute in the province,’” Bouchard said of the early deal that set out the primary roles of the Mafia, the West End Gang and the Hells Angels. The West End Gang, an Irish-based mob, had a foothold in the Port of Montreal and, for a price, which might just as easily be a share of the drug shipment, they would make sure a load made it off a ship and into the hands of the Hells Angels, without anyone in the Sixth Family having to touch the drugs. Handling the bulk importation exposed the Mafia to the least risk of arrest. An agreement was formed between the three criminal organizations to control the supply and price of drugs, a forum called the Consortium.
By the summer of 1995, the deal was such that the supply of drugs was restricted considerably for most dealers—but not for Mom Boucher. Dany Kane, a biker well placed with senior Hells Angels who became an informant, told his police handlers on June 20, 1995, that the “drought continued” among drug dealers not tied to Boucher. The other Hells Angels realized that the Sixth Family was freezing them out, declining to sell to anyone but Mom Boucher. Boucher had formed an internal board of control for drug distribution, consisting of himself and four other Nomads, called
La Table
, “the table.” Most Hells Angels in Quebec were forced to buy their drugs through
La Table
.
On the streets of Montreal, the dealers realized they had two real options for supply, the Mafia or the Hells Angels. As these middlemen worked their schemes to move the drugs around the province and into the bars, cafés and nightclubs where they were sold, they developed a simple hand sign to alert the people on the other end of the transaction as to just whose product they were dealing. A flash of a V with the fingers, like the peace sign given backwards, with the knuckles facing out, meant it was Vito’s load; a twisting motion of the fist at the wrist, mimicking the turning of the throttle on a motorcycle’s handbar, meant it was Mom Boucher’s. Conversely, they might use two sets of letters.
“People will also say ‘V-R’ to refer to him. They will say, ‘This is coming from V-R’ or ‘This is coming from the ‘H-A,’” a Montreal gangster said, referring to the initials of Vito Rizzuto and the Hells Angels. Vito was also well-known by his nickname “The Tall Guy.”
The Hells Angels generated a lot of fear on the street, but a February 1997 incident is a telling display of Vito’s reputation. Dany Kane told his police handlers that two or three bikers, including Donald Magnussen, the right-hand man of a powerful Hells Angel, beat up Vito’s youngest son, Leonardo, outside a St-Laurent Boulevard bar. It was not meant as a challenge to Vito’s authority but simply a case of mistaken identity—the bikers just did not know who it was they were pounding. Talk rippled through the underworld of Vito wanting revenge and Magnussen, normally a thundering, murderous presence himself, cowered in fear. He refused to go out alone. Not long after the incident, he was calling his biker buddies looking for someone to go to the gym with him, Kane said. Few were willing to help out. Magnussen had also upset fellow bikers with an intemperate killing of a biker from the Los Brovos motorcycle gang, a group of bikers from Winnipeg that the Hells Angels were courting to join them. Whether one or the other enemy caught up with Magnussen, in 1998, he was found dead, floating in the St. Lawrence River. He had been savagely beaten before being killed. A Quebec criminal with long ties to organized crime said he doubts Vito would have gone after Magnussen.
“He was probably more upset with his son. He probably gave his son shit for getting into that kind of trouble; for causing a disturbance and allowing himself to be in that position. Vito likes to avoid that sort of thing,” the underworld source said.

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