The Sixth Family (74 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

BOOK: The Sixth Family
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“
Sette, otto, nove
,” Nick Rizzuto said, counting in Italian. “
Uno, due, tre, quattro
,” said another man with him in the back office of the Consenza, who joined in the counting of a bundle of cash, about an inch and a half thick. The counting went on laboriously. “
Ventisette, ventotto, ventinove.
”
“That’s half,” the man said.
“Twelve and twelve is twenty-four, no?” replied Nick. He then lifted up his pant leg and stuffed his share of the money into one of his socks. It was a Wednesday afternoon but it could well have been any day, for there always seemed to be counting going on in the back office of the Consenza and much dividing of thick piles of cash. People routinely arrived at the Consenza offering
cote d’argent
, tribute money. Despite the gifts, their reception was often gruff.
“How much is it?” Nick would say, getting right down to the nittygritty. Sometimes, the bearer was invited to sit with the bosses at the back room table.
On May 11, 2005, after lunch, Moreno Gallo arrived at the Consenza and slipped into the back room with Nick, Renda, Arcadi and Sollecito. In his cream-colored jacket, Gallo, a veteran mobster on parole from a life sentence for a 1973 murder, stood out from the other men, who all wore dark clothing. Before Nick could even settle into his seat at the round table, Gallo pulled a large bundle of cash from the inside breast pocket of his jacket and held it aloft for Arcadi, who sat across from him, to gawk at. Arcadi beamed his broad, toothy smile. Gallo placed the bundle on the table in front of Renda, who then counted it and separated it into five piles. Renda quickly put Vito’s share into one pocket of his stylish grey suit jacket and his own share into another. Nick, Arcadi and Sollecito also grabbed a pile each. As Nick proceeded to recount his portion, as he typically did no matter who had handed him the money, the other men chatted. Renda smiled congenially at Gallo. After a few minutes, when Nick had finally sorted his money, they all got up and left. The scene would become routine. The person passing over the money would change from day to day, but the pattern was clear. Cash came in, was counted and divided into five piles, and the recipients happily stuffed their share into their pockets or socks or wallets. After Vito was arrested on the American charge, Nick or Renda would take Vito’s share, presumably for safekeeping. Police documented 191 occasions when substantial sums of money were delivered to the back room of the Consenza and divided at the table of five.
The men were not shy about the split. On May 23, 2005, the wires picked up Sollecito explaining it to Beniamino Zappia, the man who had decades before helped the Rizzutos set up their bank accounts in Switzerland.
“When they do something—and it doesn’t matter when they do it—they always bring something here so it can be divided up among us five: Me, Vito, Nicolò and Paolo,” he said. Unspoken but understood was that the fifth share went to Arcadi, who had become the street boss for many of the activities of the organization, police allege.
Money flowed in from across the country: from Montreal traffickers, from gangsters in Toronto and from smugglers on Native reserves; from extortions and gambling in most major Canadian cities; from enforcers and runners who made collections on behalf of the Sixth Family; and from criminals who sent bundles of cash without being asked—just because they thought it was the thing to do. Mike LaPolla, the man who would later be gunned down in the Moomba supper club, delivered packages of cash to the back room. Antonio “Tony” Mucci, a long-time mobster who gained notoriety in 1973 for shooting
Le Devoir
crime reporter Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, turned over money.
The flood of information being gathered by Project Cicéron investigators was immense. Officers identified a huge Mafia enterprise composed of many cells. The leaders of each of these cells kept in daily contact with the senior bosses.
Key secondary players who were involved in the hands-on running of a multitude of criminal ventures were soon identified, police say. Two men in particular drew their attention: Lorenzo Giordano, a muscular man known as “Skunk” because of the white strips through his black hair, and Francesco Del Balso, a heavy-set man with a taste for expensive cars. Police allege that these two men collectively acted as the right hand of Arcadi, supervising drug importations, sports betting, and contact with other criminal groups, and as leaders of a crew of aggressive enforcers who instilled a climate of fear for the Mafia on the streets of Montreal. These younger men—Giordano was born in 1963 and Del Balso in 1970—had a regular hangout of their own, the Bar Laennec, in a strip mall at 2004 Boulevard René-Laennec in Laval. In February, 2005, the Laennec was also wired by police.
The joy of finally peering into these inner sanctums of the Sixth Family, however, came with a growing sense of panic for police. The operation was moving faster than the team could efficiently manage. Officers were struggling to keep up with thousands of conversations spoken over telephones and in clubs in English, French and Italian, often all within the same chat. Some 1,200 conversations each week had to be listened to, transcribed and analyzed. Many chats were about criminal operations and others were just run-of-the-mill gossip and the daily trivia of living. For the officers on Project Cicéron, the conversations started backing up, suspects were going unidentified and surveillance photographs were left unsorted and unlabeled. The overtime logged by the too-few investigators was extensive. When officers finished a shift of live monitoring of the wiretaps they often moved right on to a second shift processing the backlog of recorded calls. Just as the investigators who had worked on the RCMP’s currency exchange operation in the 1990s had felt, there were fears that Project Cicéron would collapse under the weight of its own success.
The growing unease over the sprawling nature of the investigation—an officer described it as like “holding a tiger by his toenail”—was further fuelled by slips, leaks and screw-ups.
It was about 3:00 a.m. on a freezing cold night when plain-clothes police officers started working furtively in the dark to pick the lock on the front door of a modest tavern in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighborhood. It did not take them long to crack open the door, allowing a team of police specialists to slip inside with microphones and miniature cameras. Another penetration of a secretive club, believed by investigators to be yet another rallying point for Sixth Family members, was under way by the Project Cicéron team.
By now their moves were well-practiced. Many of the surveillance officers had become comfortable with their targets and knew their routines. There was little difficulty picking up their trail and, one by one, each surveillance team had checked in that their target was settled in for the night. Officers in unmarked cars were also in place, watching the club from the outside. This bugging operation was going like clockwork.
Then someone slipped up. The alarm inside the club had not been properly disabled and just as the technical team was preparing to get to work, an alarm was flashing at a private security firm and the club’s proprietor of record was being woken up with news of a suspected break-in. The proprietor, who lived just a few blocks away, quickly jumped into his car to investigate. The surveillance officer watching him immediately reached for his radio to send a warning that his target was on the move. In a case of compounding bad luck, the officer’s warning went out just as another officer had clicked his radio on to say something else. The surveillance officer’s warning was never heard by his colleagues at the club. It was not until the proprietor had pulled his car into the club’s parking lot that startled surveillance officers at the scene were able to radio a warning.
“He’s here, he’s here,” came a frantic call. As the proprietor got out of his car and walked towards his club, the officers inside dove for cover, awkwardly trying to hide under tables and chairs, yanking bags of tools and electronic equipment with them. The proprietor had walked up to the front of his club and was reaching out with his keys towards the door—which had been left unlocked by the officers inside—when a Montreal city police cruiser with its lights flashing screeched to a halt behind him.
“Don’t touch the door, there’s a bomb threat here,” the officer bellowed, getting out of his cruiser.
“No, no, I want to go in and check on my place,” the man protested, reaching up once more with his keys.
“No, there’s a bomb threat. You have to leave immediately. Don’t touch that door.” There was, of course, no bomb threat. It was hastily enacted crisis control, a way of stopping the man in his tracks, hopefully without him seeing or suspecting what was going on inside. Maintaining the ruse, city police roped off several city blocks around the club under the guise of public safety. In reality, the wide perimeter gave the Project Cicéron techies the time and space needed to crawl out from under the tables and slink away from the club. Before the “bomb threat” was declared “unfounded” and the area opened to the public, however, police had one last trick to pull. They erased the video tape from the club’s security camera that had captured the bungled entry and frantic hiding.
Scrubbing clean the tape did not erase the tavern owner’s suspicions, however. Not long afterwards he called in private electronics experts to scan the club for wires and bugs.
There were other scares as well. A microphone hidden in a couch at the club was discovered one day by a surprised Consenza regular. The entire couch was quickly disposed of. Later, the dowdy club was given a makeover. Police heard of the plans for fresh paint, new furniture, new window signs advertising its espresso and, in a quiet rechristening, a large new name to be posted above its door. Just before the renovation was scheduled to begin, an urgent police operation went into play to secretly remove all of their cameras and microphones to prevent them from being discovered. When the paint was dry and the Club Social Consenza had become the Associazione Cattolica Eraclea, an homage to the Rizzuto’s hometown in Sicily, another elaborate police operation was undertaken to put the wires back in.
Trouble of a different sort came to Project Cicéron when a newspaper reporter who had stumbled upon some elements of the Rizzuto investigation called the RCMP seeking official confirmation and comment. The reporter had used the probe’s supposedly secret codename in his query: Project Cicéron. Worries over the leak were not eased by the fact that the reporter was a veteran, well known and trusted by many of the officers. As a precaution, “Cicéron” as a codename was retired. The investigation, which was by then moving into its final phase, was renamed Project Colisée. Along with the new name, what was now known as Project Colisée got a boost in manpower. As the CFSEU’s other operation, Project Calvette, successfully wrapped up with arrests and seizures in late 2004, bringing the drug schemes of Raymond Desfossés to a close, officers from that investigation were reassigned to the Sixth Family probe. The team grew to include about 100 full-time officers, plus another 10 investigators from the Canada Revenue Agency who were tracing assets of the key suspects.
Project Colisée was also given a new commanding officer, one who had, as a young constable a decade before, worked undercover to tackle the Sixth Family’s cocaine importing schemes at the Travelodge Hotel in Cornwall. Back in 1994, the RCMP’s Michel Aubin had played a modest but important role in the drug case. Having steadily been promoted to the rank of Inspector, he was now calling the shots. It was his job to ensure that Project Colisée did not join the long list of case files that tried but failed to seriously debilitate the Sixth Family. Aubin had the unenviable task of plotting the endgame. Unlike other operations that had targeted the Mafia in Canada, Project Colisée was evolving into a broad, multi-faceted probe. It did not narrow its focus to concentrate on a single revenue stream, such as drugs or gambling, or on a specific incident, such as a murder. Nor did it seek to only scoop up the top bosses—it was casting its net wide. The Sixth Family as a whole was put under the microscope and Aubin and his Colisée colleagues were building an American-style racketeering case. They were finding murders, murder plots, shootings, bribery and corruption of government officials, drug shipments and drug conspiracies, multi-million-dollar gambling rings, money laundering, extortions and gun offenses on which to gather evidence.
The bill for the investigation was likewise exploding. The global reach of the Sixth Family meant investigators needed to travel the world to investigate it: the Unites States, Italy, England, Germany, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Belize, Aruba, Venezuela, Switzerland and the Bahamas.

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