Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  For the time being, all Vito could do was grieve alone in his cell, rising before 6 a.m. for breakfast, building wooden office chairs for $1.10 per hour and plotting against an invisible enemy.

  CHAPTER 2

  Nick Jr. and Nicolò

  Life should have been easier for Nick Jr. than for his father or namesake grandfather, if running an empire based on lies and murder can ever be called easy. Nick Jr. had the same probing eyes, aquiline nose and slicked-back Gordon Gekko hair as his father, and probably one day he would have become stooped and bald, like his grandfather, who sometimes resembled a grinning turtle. Nick Jr. was squatter and more powerfully built than his father, with a neck like a boxer and the occasional flash of a don’t-fuck-with-me expression. He also had enough of a temper to be kicked out of his private school as a teenager. Friends had nicknamed him “The Ritz,” lightly mocking his cushy upbringing and his to-the-manor-born confidence.

  Nick Jr. had some troubles with drinking and driving, a problem he shared with his father and grandfather. When he was twenty-two years old, he blew almost double the legal limit on a Breathalyzer test. He walked when the police officer who performed the test conveniently didn’t appear in court. He also walked from an assault charge when a witness’s memory suddenly went bad. Despite those strokes of legal good fortune, Nick Jr. was twice convicted of drinking and driving. The first time cost him his licence for six months and a laughable $600 fine. In October 1990, shortly after he got his licence back, he blew more than twice the legal limit after a police officer spotted his grey Porsche drifting across Highway 15 in Laval just before 3 a.m. That cost him his licence for a year and got him slapped with an $800 fine, plus $151 in court costs.

  That was the extent of the criminal record accrued for Nick Rizzuto Jr., heir apparent to the largest criminal empire in his country’s history. His record didn’t account for all the illegal activity he’d been up to, but Nick Jr. clearly had not been involved in real down-and-dirty mob activity such as debt collection or drug distribution. And many doubted he would ever have fully matured into his father’s or grandfather’s role. Perhaps he wouldn’t have needed to. He could have made a nice living simply by investing family money into legitimate and safer things than the drug trade. And yet someone had seen the need to kill him. There were always reasons to kill in the milieu … but why bother with Nick Jr., unless getting rid of Nick Jr. was never really the point?

  When he learned of his son’s murder, Vito may have thought back to Nick Jr.’s wedding day on June 3, 1995. The family rejoiced as Nick Jr. swore his vows to Eleonora Ragusa, daughter of Emanuele Ragusa of Saint-Léonard, one of Vito’s trusted long-time associates. The history of the Mafia is a history of relationships, and that day RCMP and Laval police photographers got fresh shots of the interactions of mob invitees, including Rizzuto family street boss Francesco (Compare Frank) Arcadi and Agostino (The Seigneur of Saint-Léonard) Cuntrera. Also among the six hundred guests at the wedding were Vito’s bull-necked uncle Domenic Manno, a serious criminal in his own right; millionaire drug trafficker Oreste Pagano, who attended with Alfonso Caruana and his wife; and Salvatore Scotto, a representative of the Bono Mafia family of Sicily. Pagano later told authorities that Caruana pointed out to him representatives of the major underworld families of New York in attendance, as well as interesting guests from Italy. “Caruana told me … that the same Scotto was a fugitive wanted for the murder of a policeman and his pregnant wife.”

  On that happy day, Nick Jr. married down, but just slightly. In the Canadian underworld there was really no one for a Rizzuto to marry up to. Ragusa, the proud father of the bride, looked like a humble shopkeeper, which is exactly what he once told the parole board he wanted to be. At a parole hearing, a prison psychologist described him as “a burn-out in a sense that the milieu and activities don’t attract you anymore.”

  Like many of those who attended the wedding, when pressed to explain his income, Ragusa had told authorities he ran a construction firm. In reality, Ragusa was a top lieutenant in Vito’s world. Crusading Italian anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone had called him a major player in Canadian organized crime, before Falcone was murdered by a Mafia hit man.

  Ragusa had been a fixture on the Montreal Mafia scene since the early 1970s, when he worked under Vic (The Egg) Cotroni and Paolo Violi. On the day of Nick Jr.’s wedding, Ragusa was on bail awaiting trial for a massive cocaine-trafficking plot, for which he would later receive a twelve-year sentence. He complained at a 2003 parole hearing that there was something stressful and anti-family about his release conditions. How could he attend family functions, such as the christening of his grandson, when he was barred from associating with known criminals?

  At the same hearing, Ragusa portrayed the Mafia as something as benign as the Shriners: “In Italy, I think the Mafia is an organization, a good organization. Anyone can call themselves mafioso. It comes from Sicily. Here are farmers (paesani) came from the same village, maybe fifteen to twenty people.” That sounded far softer than his tone on a police wiretap, when he was trying to retrieve an associate who had been kidnapped by Colombian cocaine traffickers for nonpayment of a bill. In that tape, Ragusa betrayed a combination of fear and awe of what would befall him if he ever angered his own organization: “The Mafia, you see, Earth will never be large enough to hide me.”

  Although Nick Jr. wasn’t a major power like the two Rizzuto men before him or their closer associates, he still moved in dangerous circles. Police watched him share a table in a Montreal restaurant late in the summer of 1999 with Louis (Melou) Roy, not long before the founding member of Montreal’s Hells Angels Nomads chapter mysteriously disappeared. Police looked on from a distance when Nick Jr. met on April 10, 2004, with Maurice (Mom) Boucher—another Hells Angel Nomad—before Boucher went to prison for ordering the murder of two jail guards. Police also noted with interest that Nick Jr. had run a mob mini-casino on the sixth floor of an office building on Montreal’s Jean-Talon Street East, outfitting it with tinted windows and security cameras. The casino had lasted a year before police shut it down in November 2006. Of more interest to those now concerned with solving his murder were Nick Jr.’s connections in the construction industry, which ran the gambit from Haitian street-gang debt collectors to bureaucrats and politicians at City Hall.

  Nick Jr. did have energy and he did try. He was also absolutely loyal to his family, and they were the same way towards him. Such trust was rare and went a long way. After the arrest of his father in 2004, Nick Jr. did his best to fill the void. He regularly met his father’s old contacts and stepped up Vito’s investment in condo development. He was also in the illegal gaming machine business, sharing the space set aside for the machines in bars, cafés, stores and restaurants with others in the underworld. Extortion was another avenue for cash, and one developer said that Nick Jr. unsuccessfully tried to get him to pay $40,000 for the privilege of working on renovations at Montreal’s City Hall. It wasn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it was a step above his usual activities. Nick Jr. only had to maintain the family business for a few years, until his father was out of prison again. He didn’t have to expand the empire, just help keep it from being ripped away.

  Business aside, Nick Jr. gave Vito two grandchildren. Something magical happened whenever Vito was around them. He didn’t look weighed down by expectations. He didn’t look as if he was being watched and probed and judged. There were zero expectations on Vito the grandfather, and no need for him to play the boss or dutiful son. The mask was removed, and what was left was undiluted joy. Those grandchildren would be feeling pure anguish now and needing their nonno.

  Nick Jr.’s funeral was scheduled for Saturday, January 2. As Vito’s family prepared for it, it was natural to wonder if this was the opening phase of an offensive against his family and their allies. His surviving son and daughter seemed unlikely targets. Vito appeared happy that the two lawyers had stayed out of the family business. Still, a prolonged war against Vito threatened
not just grubby drug dealers and the mobsters who directed them, but also many ambitious business people and politicians. How could he not fear for the rest of his family too?

  As a mortician prepared Nick Jr. for burial in the Rizzuto-run Complexe Funéraire Loreto in the Montreal neighbourhood of Saint-Léonard, Vito’s family kept telling him over the phone that he should rethink his plans to attend. Even if he did come for the funeral, he would have no time alone with his father. Both would have police escorts, as Nicolò was on probation after being scooped up in Montreal in 2006 on gangsterism-related charges. Nicolò’s arrest was the centrepiece of the massive RCMP-led Project Colisée—the reference to the crumbling Coliseum of Rome being a little jab at Old Nick himself. One of the eighty-five-year-old’s tight parole conditions was that he must refrain from associating with criminals. On this saddest of days, father and son would need special permission just to talk.

  The church ceremony threatened to become a media circus, with photographers vying for the best angles and reporters trying to sneak into the ceremony posing as mourners. Vito’s nature made it torturous for him to do nothing, but his family wouldn’t relent: he was Vito Rizzuto, not some zoo animal to be gawked at and photographed by strangers. Finally Vito acquiesced. He would not serve up a spectacle for the public. He didn’t need the indignity of being photographed in handcuffs. He would stay in his cell and suffer the day alone.

  Vito could deal with his enemies later, one by one, on his own terms.

  CHAPTER 3

  El Padrino

  Nicolò Rizzuto was a semi-literate, one-time South American chicken farmer who had managed to create a government within a government in Montreal. He had pulled himself up from a relatively humble birth in Sicily through hard scheming, contacts, travel, innovation, good fortune, risk taking, marriage and murder. Despite running several construction-related companies, and even more politicians and police officers, Nicolò retained a certain common touch. When he collected money in a backroom of the Consenza Social Club in Saint-Léonard, he sometimes tucked a wad of cash into a sock for safekeeping. There, between a cheese shop and a tanning salon, mobsters sipped espresso, settled disputes, and accepted tributes from associates in the underworld and the world of ostensibly legitimate business. Nicknamed “the house of problems” by his son-in-law, Paolo Renda, “the Cos” sat in a nondescript strip mall at 4891 Jarry Street East, a few minutes from the site of the late Paolo Violi’s old Reggio Bar.

  Even when things got rough, Nicolò maintained his ability to wink at the world, as though everything was under control. He courted the image of Mafia don, and was seldom seen in public without a sweeping Hollywood-style fedora on his bald head. When he fled to Venezuela for a time in the 1970s, he opened a restaurant in Caracas called El Padrino, Spanish for “The Godfather.”

  The old man was stuffing money into his socks well into his ninth decade of life because he had the survival instincts of a feral cat. In the dirty, chaotic milieu, Nicolò was also known for his catlike mania for cleanliness and order. Friends became rich and enemies became corpses, fueling the dual engines of greed and revenge that powered his world. Through it all, Nicolò’s family remained true to each other, if not towards the rest of the world.

  The only pronounced difference between Nicolò and his son was Vito’s notorious womanizing. Mistresses are a constant in North American mob life, but Nicolò continued to conduct himself like a resident of semi-rural Cattolica Eraclea in Agrigento province, where sexual indiscretious are hard to hide and often end in death. This was particularly true in his case; Nicolò never wavered in his fidelity to Libertina. Only a foolhardy man would brook the ire of the formidable woman and her father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno.

  Libertina was just eighteen and Nicolò twenty-one when they pledged their devotion to each other on March 20, 1945, in Cattolica Eraclea. There was no doubt that Nicolò was the one marrying up. His union with Libertina gave him strength and status, as he rose from campiere—an enforcer for local landowners—to the manager of a flour mill and a black market wheat vendor in Sicily.

  Nicolò was thirty years old when he and Libertina brought their young family to North America. He declared that he had just thirty dollars on him when they arrived in Canada on February 1, 1954, at Pier 21 in Halifax. It was Vito’s eighth birthday. In a photo taken around this time, Vito looks a bit grim, perhaps even scared. Standing up straight, he is a head taller than his sister, Maria, who is only six years old. Vito’s hair is neatly trimmed and combed back well out of his eyes. Both children wear carefully chosen clothes: Vito is in shorts, which would have been cold in the Canadian winter, a matching jacket, and light-coloured shoes; Maria, a party dress and white patent-leather shoes. The little white purse in her hands matches the ribbons in her hair. Neither child had any grasp of either of Canada’s official languages, but the camera captures something defiant in the young pair’s gaze. They give the impression of submitting to their parents’ photo out of obligation, and they do not feign joy. Vito’s left arm is around his little sister and he also holds her with his right hand in a protective gesture.

  By 1956, Montreal city records list Nicolò’s occupation as “cement contractor.” He evidently became a successful one soon after setting foot in Canada. By 1958, he was a player in Montreal’s construction world, with a scent of collusion and corruption already around his tangled and profitable dealings. He ran his own firm yet somehow borrowed $1,777.50 from a rival contractor, and he won a municipal contract despite not being the low bidder. His company, Grand Royal Asphalt Paving, was involved in bidding with the City of Montreal, winning a contract in January 1962 to make over Parc Masson. His paving firm also worked for the municipalities of Laval, Pierrefonds and Saint-Léonard. The City of Jacques-Cartier (now part of Longueuil, on the south shore) was considered particularly corrupt, and Nicolò made money there too.

  The early 1960s was a time of mass migration out of Sicily’s Agrigento province. In Montreal, Nicolò was soon reacquainted with members of the Cuntrera–Caruana clan, who were originally from Siculiana, just twenty-four kilometres from Cattolica Eraclea. The Cuntrera–Caruanas, who were also known to police as the Siculiana crime family, had existed for generations in Agrigento. They graduated from working as guards for a local land baron to being powers in the twentieth-century drug trade, with a firm grip over local politics. It was an accepted truth in their home region that people got hurt when things didn’t go their way. Pasquale Cuntrera and his brother-in-law Leonardo Caruana were each acquitted in 1953 of double murder, cattle theft and arson before heading abroad. In the early 1960s, Pasquale Cuntrera, the head of the Siculiana Mafia family in Agrigento, moved to Caracas, Venezuela, as the family gained international scope. A key to their success in the illegal drug trade was their flexibility: they worked with anyone who could help them but steadfastly refused to align themselves exclusively to any of Sicily’s feuding Mafia families. As they gained power and connections, the Cuntrera–Caruana men developed their own look. They differed from old-school fedora-wearing mobsters and staid, buttoned-down, pinstriped international financiers. Instead, they tended to resemble mildly successful Florida used-car dealers, with an affinity for white shoes, eye-popping gold watches and poorly dyed jet-black hair.

  On September 11, 1964, Nicolò’s father-in-law, Antonino Manno, immigrated to Canada as well. Like several of the Cuntrera–Caruanas, Don Nino had been forced to serve a period of court-imposed internal exile in Italy. The sentence was called a soggiorno obbligato, and for its duration a mobster was banished from living near his hometown or criminal associates. Such a record might have been an impediment if Canadian authorities had been more vigilant.

  In 1967, Canada was marking the one hundredth anniversary of its arrival as a nation with year-long Centennial festivities. There was plenty for Nicolò Rizzuto to celebrate in his new home. He was now a partner in four construction-related firms and had secured construction work on the Expo 67 world’s fair in Mon
treal. His mob counterparts Paolo Violi and Vic (The Egg) Cotroni were also involved in the Expo fun, supplying the international showcase with hot dogs made from tainted meat. Opportunity found Nicolò’s son, Vito, as well. After he had dropped out of high school, there was work running the New Cheetah nightclub at the corner of Beaubien Street and Saint-Laurent Boulevard.

  Nicolò Rizzuto was sponsoring many Agrigento residents to move to his new city, expanding the Cuntrera–Caruanas’ Canadian base, and expanding the clan’s financial base too, bringing heroin to Montreal by boat and then transporting it to New York by car. For three months in late 1969, they hosted Tommaso Buscetta, the hound-faced senior member of the Porta Nuova Mafia family in Palermo, Sicily. Buscetta would become a key figure in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, as the network’s first major informer. At the time of his arrival in Montreal, his mob credentials were still intact and impressive, as he had helped set up the Sicilian Mafia Commission, which ruled upon disputes between members. His acquaintances included top-level New York mob figures Charles (Lucky) Luciano and Joe Bonanno.

  Buscetta’s Montreal visit was at least his second trip to Canada. He had been in Toronto in the fall of 1964, travelling under the name Manuel Lopez Cadena and trying to gain a visa under this false identity to enter the United States. While in Toronto, Buscetta stayed at the home of Antonino (Nino) Cammalleri, the uncle of Vito Rizzuto’s future wife. Decades later, Buscetta would remember playing cards at the Il Gatto Nero café.

  When Buscetta returned to Canada in 1969, staying in Montreal from October until just after Christmas, he did so for medical reasons. He sought treatment for a genital infection, long rumoured to be a venereal disease. He feared he actually had cancer, although he would later claim to have learned he suffered from an African fly bite.