Authors: Lee Lamothe
The Sixth Family (72 page)
With the Sicilian Mafia based at one end of the proposed bridge and the ’Ndrangheta at the other, it was impossible to expect organized crime not to try to claim a significant portion of what promised to be the largest public-works project in Southern Italy’s history. As such, when the government announced in 2002 that it would proceed with the ambitious eight-lane suspension bridge, a special task force was established to root out any Mafia involvement.
On February 11, 2005, news that surprised no one finally broke: government investigators said they had uncovered a plot by organized crime to control the consortium selected to build and maintain the bridge. At a press conference in Rome, senior officers with the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the federal force targeting organized crime, announced the arrest of a wealthy construction engineer and the issuing of arrest warrants against four other men accused of trying to infiltrate the bidding process.
The DIA then managed to elicit surprise: at the head of the criminal consortium, officials announced, was Vito Rizzuto.
Arrested at his home in Rome hours before the announcement was Giuseppe “Joseph” Zappia, born in 1925 in Marseilles, to parents originally from Calabria. Zappia had earlier moved to Canada and is best remembered as the controversial contractor responsible for building the Olympic Village in Montreal for the 1976 Summer Olympic Games. The job was mired in scandal: in 1988, he was cleared of fraud charges related to the work only after two key witnesses died. Zappia then shuttled between Canada and the Middle East—where he was involved in several large development projects—before settling in Rome in 1997. In 2001, he bragged that he had formed a friendship with Silvio Berlusconi, then the Italian prime minister. At the press conference announcing Zappia’s arrest and the arrest warrants against Vito and three business associates, a police spokesman said Zappia had established a construction company called Zappia International that was used as a front for Vito’s bid to build the bridge.
“Vito Rizzuto tried to participate in the tender for the construction of the Messina Bridge between Sicily and Calabria. Of course, Rizzuto himself cannot come here to Italy and say ‘OK, I’d like to build the Messina Bridge’,” said Silvia Franzè, a chief superintendent with the DIA. “In Italy, everybody knows of the Rizzuto Family. And so according to our legislation, a Mafia family cannot participate in a public tender to get a public works contract. Even if he doesn’t have a charge in Italy, everybody in Italy knows that he is connected with Caruana-Cuntrera and so on and so on. We know in Italy who Vito Rizzuto is.”
To help Vito in his bid to profit from the bridge project, he turned to his old friend Zappia, police say.
“Zappia was the president of a company that asked to participate in the tender and he had a lot of meetings with people to have this public work, it is a huge public work. He was the clear face of the Rizzuto Family,” said Franzè. A confidential Canadian police report on the investigation says that Vito and Zappia have known each other since the 1970s and that Zappia was well aware of police interest in Vito. That was why he tried to limit direct contact between them, preferring instead to deal with intermediaries.
“Vito Rizzuto and Zappia spoke together directly only twice,” said Franzè. One of those chats came on November 1, 2002.
“Everything is going smoothly. All the plans have been accepted,” Zappia said, according to a transcript of the conversation.
“So we have a good chance, no?” Vito responded.
“Not only a good chance, but a guarantee as well.”
“Good, good,” Vito said.
Most of the dealings documented by police, however, came through three intermediaries who looked out for Vito’s interests, Italian court documents say.
Filippo Ranieri, born in Montreal in 1937, was a business consultant and described by police in Italy as “a broker.” Canadian police describe him as a longtime associate of Vito’s. Italian police say Ranieri was the main liaison between Vito and Zappia. Hakim Hammoudi, born in Algeria in 1963 and dividing his time between Paris and Montreal, was another business consultant whose name appears on a confidential Canadian police chart listing Vito’s associates. Both Ranieri and Hammoudi dealt with Zappia by phone, fax and in person. A police report alleges that both men met with Zappia in Rome several times during the course of the bridge bidding process. Also involved, the authorities announced, was Sivalingam Sivabavanandan, born in 1953, a Sri Lankan businessman living in London, England, who goes by the nickname “Bavan.” Both Sivabavanandan and Hammoudi were accused of helping Vito invest his vast wealth.
“They were two businessmen, the guys who kept the contacts with the bank to find others who wanted to put money to invest. They were following all of the economic interests of Vito Rizzuto. They were brokers working for Vito Rizzuto. The Messina Bridge was only one of the investments that Vito Rizzuto was involved in,” said Franzè. Hammoudi and Zappia were working on ventures in Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that promised to provide Vito a substantial profit that was, in turn, to be reinvested in a large oil venture based in London, England, according to authorities. The Italian government is working to trace some of that money and investigators asked the Swiss to again look into the family’s banking records.
Prosecutor Adriano Iasillo in Rome charged that the group had more than $6 billion ready to invest in the project.
The probe began in October 2002 and investigators said the illicit consortium submitted a preliminary tender, regarding technical qualifications, two years later. It had already invested more than $4.3 million in the proposal, authorities estimated. At the time of the arrest announcement, police executed search warrants in several European cities and gathered a mountain of documents. The centerpiece of the government’s evidence is hundreds of wiretap conversations, some made in Canada and some in Italy, including one in which a conspirator says that, if all goes well, they will be able to build the bridge on behalf of a friend—whom investigators say is Vito—and then handle the accounting necessary to satisfy both “the Mafia and ’Ndrangheta.”
Arrest warrants were issued in Italy against Vito, Ranieri, Hammoudi and Sivabavanandan. Soon after, Sivabavanandan was arrested in France and extradited to Italy. He was sentenced to two years in jail after pleading guilty to Mafia association. He then caught a lucky break; about halfway through his sentence the Italian government, struggling with overcrowded prisons, decreed that all prisoners serving less than three years be released. On gaining his freedom, he returned to England. Italy requested Ranieri’s extradition from Canada, a request the Canadian government has declined to act on thus far, likely because he is charged only with Mafia association, which is not a crime in Canada, Italian authorities said. Hammoudi is likewise unavailable for prosecution. Neither the Italian nor the Canadian government knows precisely where he is, Franzè said.
Meanwhile, a lawyer for Zappia said his client is innocent of the charge. He suggested that Zappia is a victim of mistaken identity, saying there is someone else with the same last name who is involved with the Rizzutos, likely a reference to Beniamino Zappia, the man who Swiss authorities say set up several of the Rizzutos’ Lugano bank accounts.
“He says he doesn’t know Vito Rizzuto at all and is not involved in the case. We have some conversations on tape. During the trial these conversations will be produced and the judge will decide about it. We are waiting for that,” said Franzè.
Any extradition of Vito to Italy would have to come second to the claim against him by U.S. authorities. In Italy, if convicted of being the head of a Mafia association, he could face seven years in prison.
The sheer scale of the Sixth Family’s investment and leadership role in one of the largest public-works projects in Europe suggests the immense wealth and power resting in the hands of Vito and his organization; he had, authorities contend, found his way to the head of the mob’s most sought-after plum in the homeland of both the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta—and controlled a $6-billion investment, among others.
“Vito Rizzuto has a lot of money,” said Franzè.
For anyone questioning the power of the Sixth Family, the allegations from the Strait of Messina Bridge, if true, are an eye-opener. The arrest warrants for Vito and the others were no doubt disturbing to the Sixth Family, but had they known how Italian authorities first caught wind of the suspicions they would have been petrified. They would not find that out, however, for another 21 months.
“Problems are slowing them down,” a leading police Mafia investigator said of the Sixth Family’s status in 2006. “They know there have been several major investigations going on, from 1996, really, until now. A lot of intelligence has come out and they know it. Everything has come to a standstill. The understanding is that, because of him being in jail and until the extradition thing goes through, nothing is really going to happen.”
In the meantime, Vito Rizzuto waited behind bars.
The empire he worked so hard to establish was fraying around the edges. His organization, at the highest levels, was the target of intense police attention and the victim of increasing underworld unrest. Vito was disappointed by his failure to win a release on bail that would have allowed him to reestablish some sense of order in an underworld left confused and unruly. His jailing prevented him from enjoying his status as one of the world’s superbosses. But, despite these setbacks on the street, he seemed to rather desperately prefer the inside of a Canadian prison over an American courtroom.
For in New York, the rats were waiting.
NEW YORK, AUGUST 17, 2006Vito’s winning streak in the courts had already taken a bruising by the time the Supreme Court of Canada came to decide whether or not it would hear the mobster’s appeal of his extradition order. In the two and a half years since his arrest, despite his legal firepower, he had lost his motions and appeals in the Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal, withdrawn his appeal to the Federal Court of Canada, and had the Supreme Court of Canada decline to hear his appeal over being denied bail. By the summer of 2006, it must have been difficult for Vito to retain much optimism that the Supreme Court would agree to intervene at the eleventh hour to prevent his extradition and, as expected, the justices in Canada’s highest court were just as cool to Vito’s legal arguments as their lower court colleagues.
Almost immediately after the court declared that it would not hear his appeal, Rizzuto was whisked from jail and escorted by Montreal police officers to Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, where an aircraft supplied by the U.S. government was waiting for him.
Three hours later, he finally appeared in an American court. Facing Judge Nicholas Garaufis, Vito pleaded not guilty to his racketeering charge for the murder of the three captains and was ordered to be held in custody. For the Sixth Family, this was the most serious crisis it had faced since Vito’s father Nick was imprisoned in Venezuela.
There was more anguish to come.
CHAPTER 42
LAVAL, QUEBEC, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006Intruders found a stash of money crammed inside a sports bag and hidden under the basement stairs of a Laval home. Wads of hundred-dollar bills—more than 28,000 of them—and one lonely fifty-dollar bill were bundled and banded. The trespassers took their time removing the haul of almost $3-million. They knew that they would find serious cash here, in a comfortable home connected to a Sixth Family drug trafficker. They also knew that they had the house to themselves, since the residents were on holiday in Las Vegas, unaware that they were losing far more at home than they could ever hope to win at the casinos.
When the man who had hidden the money flew home the following day and discovered his loss, he was petrified. Some of the money was his—that was bad enough—but a large chunk belonged to Giuseppe “Pep” Torre, one of the Rizzutos’ closest associates and accused prolific drug trafficker. The victim gathered his wits and called Torre on the telephone with this alarming news.
“Pep, I’m finished,” he said.
“Don’t tell me this,” Torre warned.
“I feel like crying, man,” he replied. He suspected the cash had been stolen by his brother-in-law, one of the few people who knew where it was.
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