Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  On February 4, 2005, Piccirilli drove to Hamilton, Ontario, where he met with relatives of the late Paolo Violi. By this time, Vito had been in custody for more than a year and it wasn’t looking as if he would be back any time soon. Rumours circulated that Piccirilli now planned to kill Nicolò Rizzuto, even though the former soldier had shown nothing but respect for the aging Mafioso while in his employ. He scoped out the Consenza. He also secured the right guns for the job. Like the former military man he was, he watched rooftops in case a sniper was drawing a bead on him.

  A last-ditch attempt at negotiations in August 2005 failed miserably, and the milieu appeared on the verge of open warfare. Arcadi may have been talking about Piccirilli when he said that a “biker” in Granby desired “to cut off his head.” The Arcadi forces went on the offensive in a dramatic way, renting a helicopter, flying to Granby and opening fire on the home of one of the Granby mob with machine gun. It didn’t cause any real damage, but it did serve notice that Arcadi was prepared to bring war literally to the homes of his enemies.

  Such was the chaos that Vito heard about while fighting extradition in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, often in long and intense talks with his sister, Maria. When his battle to remain in Canada was finally lost, and he was being driven on August 17, 2006, to the airport, Vito lost his composure. Did no one see that he was necessary for keeping things from going even more crazy? Vito began lecturing Montreal police officers Nicodemo Milano and Franc Guimond that he was the only one who could keep relative peace among the city’s criminal organizations. “You should go after the street gangs,” Vito told them. “Not me. They are the ones who would create trouble.”

  Vito must have known that Frank Arcadi didn’t have the chops to lead his organization, but Compare Frank seemed to be the best they could muster. “You will rue the day that I leave Canada,” Vito ranted to the police officers. “You will see what will happen when I leave Canada.”

  Then Vito’s voice softened. With his final words before boarding the government plane, he made an emotionally charged plea to the officers. “Spare my father,” he said. “He’s an old man. He’s a sick man. Spare my father. He’s not doing anything wrong.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Undeclared war

  It took less than two weeks for Vito’s dark prophecy in the police car to start coming true. On August 30, 2006, Domenico Macri, the thirty-five-year-old rising soldier in the Rizzuto mob, was riding in his Cadillac through the intersection of Henri-Bourassa Boulevard and Rodolphe-Forget Boulevard at mid-afternoon when a Japanese motorcycle pulled up alongside carrying two men. Macri was a guiding force in a Rizzuto operation that used corrupt employees at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal to help with cocaine smuggling. Macri and his driver would scarcely have had time to notice as the motorcycle’s passenger raised a gun and opened fire. When the bullets stopped and traffic flow resumed, Macri’s driver was bleeding from his neck. He recovered, but Macri wasn’t so lucky.

  Macri’s murder sent shivers through Vito’s crime family. No one was more nervous than Arcadi, who was Macri’s uncle. He had been driving just ahead of his nephew in a vehicle that looked almost identical to Macri’s Cadillac. Arcadi had run the yellow light while Macri had stopped on the red. That was where the hit team drew alongside Macri and started shooting. It was wholly possible—even probable—that someone got the wrong man.

  Not surprisingly, the murder was a huge topic of conversation at Bar Laennec, a coffee dive in a small strip mall on René-Laennec Boulevard in Laval. Bar Laennec was the junior version of the Consenza, where the Rizzuto family underbosses gathered. Like the Consenza, it was bugged by police.

  “Yeah, bro, they shot DM, man,” Skunk Giordano said.

  Francesco Del Balso, who ran gambling for the family, was more expressive: “He’s dead! He’s dead! What happened? What are we going to do now?”

  When the underbosses huddled to talk strategy in the Laennec the next day, Arcadi did his best to sound statesmanlike: “Here we are father, son and holy spirit. I agree that it’s things that we have to reason out, things have to be measured, things have to be evaluated, but when it gets to a certain point and we are touched by some stupidities, the discussions have to be short.”

  Forever the diplomat, Paolo Renda said they should spare no expense on his funeral, calling Macri “a very nice young man.” Then the consigliere suggested Arcadi go somewhere far away and safe: “See, what you gotta do now, find an island, take your wife and leave.”

  Skunk Giordano quickly agreed: “Even your wife, come on, I feel bad, Compare, all this shit.”

  “Arrange, Compare …” Renda continued.

  “I have to decide if I go or don’t go,” replied Arcadi. “Maybe I go to Italy with my brothers.”

  It didn’t take much more convincing to point Arcadi out of town. Before fleeing, though, he attempted to give his fellow mobsters a little pep talk, sounding like an officer on the Titanic poised to leap onto a life raft. He also sounded like he knew who he was looking for. “Nobody is going to get rid of me, but … we are looking, we are looking for that pig, we are looking for him because he’s a sea of problems. What do we do, us, what we do, us, when one of us has been killed? To tell you the truth, we do what we have to do.”

  Not long after that, Compare Frank embarked on a European cruise with his wife. When push came to shove, Vito’s new street boss donned casual slacks and played tourist while others inside the crumbling empire braced for more violence.

  One of Vito’s associates was trolling the Internet and pulled up the website of Streit Manufacturing in Innisfil, Ontario, near Barrie, north of Toronto. Soon, members of Vito’s group were ordering armour-plated vehicles, including a Nissan Armada and Toyota 4Runner that could weather AK-47 blasts and bombs. They appreciated the quality of the workmanship provided by Streit, a reputable firm whose customers included the US Defense Department, the Red Cross and the United Nations, as well as Middle Eastern and African heads of state. Business at Streit improved with tough economic times, as executives and business people in the world’s danger zones were particularly concerned about kidnapping, carjacking and terrorist attacks. Streit rendered high-end vehicles bomb- and machine-gun-proof with modifications including ten-centimetre-thick windows and metal inserts inside the tires, so the car can keep going even when its wheels have been shot up. Window edges were shielded with bulletproof metal seams to foil even the most knowledgeable of snipers. Rear passenger windows were modified so they wouldn’t roll down, to prevent a playful child in the back seat from creating an opening for a sniper attack. Front airbags were often disabled so they wouldn’t inflate if a driver was trying to crash his way out of danger. Gun ports were discreetly built into the rear panels, allowing passengers to return fire.

  Meanwhile, Giuseppe Fetta and two others in the muscle end of Vito’s organization were stockpiling weapons. Fetta was tied to Rizzuto underboss Francesco Del Balso. Fetta was arrested after police filmed him and two other men handling weapons on September 4, 2006, inside a warehouse belonging to Del Balso on Saint-Laurent near Sauriol, close to where he had most recently been shot. Police surveillance recorded the three men checking out a pistol with a silencer and assembling two machine guns. When police finally raided the warehouse, the pistol with the silencer and one machine gun were already out on the streets, but they still were able to seize two AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, a machine gun, a twelve-gauge shotgun, two bulletproof vests and some ammunition. Fetta was released with a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to possession of a prohibited firearm and committing an offence for a criminal organization. The raid was an annoying loss of assets for Vito’s group, but nothing that couldn’t be quickly replaced.

  Del Balso and Giordano always travelled with bodyguards in those weeks between Macri’s shooting and the Colisée raids, and much of the conversation overheard by police in Bar Laennec was about weapons.

  “What you have?” Del Balso asked bodygu
ard Ennio Bruni.

  “A .38,” Bruni replied.

  “The old fucking cop [gun],” Del Balso continued.

  A few seconds later, there was the sound of a gunshot. One of them was clearly testing the firearm.

  “Bro, this is fucking nice one,” Bruni said, referring to the pistol’s magazine. “Once you place it inside, it loads the gun automatically.”

  “That’s what I want …” Del Balso replied.

  “The best gun to have is a .22, the long one,” Bruni opined.

  “Long nose …” Del Balso added.

  “.357, short nose,” Bruni continued. “Tha’s a power you don’t miss. The first shot that you’re getting, the first one you’re … you make him a hole like this.”

  The hoarding of arms by Del Balso, Fetta, Bruni and others built a fearsome stockpile, but it wasn’t one the Rizzuto camp would soon have a chance to use in its defence.

  By the time of the massive Colisée raids on November 22, 2006, Vito had already been extradited to stand trial in New York. Perhaps he saw some of the news images of his father, as Nicolò faced the media cameras with a perfectly knotted black tie against his crisp white shirt, along with a 1940s-style fedora that matched his tailored camel-coloured suit. Aside from the plastic handcuffs, Nicolò appeared dressed for a night at the theatre, not a jail cell, and as the old man was led into custody, he appeared to be grinning broadly.

  Police drew upon some 1.5 million wiretap intercepts and 1,500 hours of video to arrest eighty-two members of his organization. The four-year, multi-million-dollar RCMP investigation had received assistance from the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the police services of Montreal and Laval, Canada Border Services Agency and Canada Revenue Agency. Those arrested included such stalwarts as Paolo Renda, Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano, Francesco (Compare Frank) Arcadi and Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito.

  At the time, Sollecito was the least known publicly of the group, although his name frequently appeared in confidential police reports and photos. He was picked up on police recording devices receiving bundles of cash eighty-five times between February 2, 2004, and August 31, 2006, at “the Cos,” where he was manager. He had garnered little direct attention since the mid-1970s, when he’d served fifteen months in jail for forging a $26,000 cheque.

  Sollecito generated few headlines for the Rizzutos but plenty of money. He had been involved with Vito in Toronto stock market scams during the late 1980s, along with family stalwarts Gennaro Scaletta and Dino Messina. Schemes included wash trading, in which Vito’s group would establish artificially high prices for stocks they held. Sollecito spent extended periods of time in his native province of Bari in Italy, where he invested heavily in real estate.

  By the time Project Colisée had caught Sollecito on tape, he had settled tightly within the inner circle of Vito’s management group. He told an Italian visitor at “the Cos” on May 23, 2005, that while Vito was in jail, the Mafia was acting as a committee of sorts: “Whenever they do something, they always bring something and we split it among us, all five—me, Vito, Nicola (Nicolò) and Paolo,” Sollecito said. He might also have mentioned Arcadi as among the top level of the family.

  Sollecito was also picked up on a cellphone interception in Italy on July 14, 2006. Vito was still fighting extradition and Nicolò was back in charge of the family. Two days earlier, Richard (Rick) Griffin of the West End Gang was gunned down at 2:30 a.m. in front of his home on Terrebonne Street in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district. Killers had pumped some forty shots at him from the lawn of the Rosedale–Queen Mary United Church across the street. Griffin had drawn the ire of Nicolò —refered to on the Consenza tapes as “the old man”—after a failed effort to import 1,300 kilograms of cocaine in partnership with the Rizzutos. The Rizzutos wanted their $2-million share of the upfront money back, and Nicolò had grown impatient. Sollecito and his thirty-year-old son Giuseppe (Joe) were apparently talking about the Griffin hit when Sollecito said, “It would be a shame if they arrested someone because of that piece of shit. And they did it in front of his house, eh?”

  For Arcadi, the Colisée arrests were a rude welcoming back to Montreal, as he had barely returned from his extended European holiday when police scooped him up. There were a few inescapable ironies to the sweeping Colisée arrests. Investigators had originally targeted Vito, but he was tucked away behind bars for the American triple murders when the secret videotaping and wiretapping began. As the police mapped out their multiple raids, one of the Rizzutos’ former workers—Sergio Piccirilli—had just finalized his plot to murder his old boss, Nicolò. The elder Rizzuto was in custody by the time the former soldier was ready to tap his trigger. The four-and-a-half-year, multi-million-dollar operation that was designed to take down the Rizzutos had just saved Nicolò’s life and possibly spared Vito a much longer sentence than the one he would serve in Colorado.

  What the RCMP didn’t know the mobsters had planted a mole deep in their midst. The mole worked out of the RCMP District C headquarters on Dorchester Boulevard in downtown Montreal. Angelo Cecere was an unlikely-looking spy: he was a federal employee with a degenerative eye disease who guided himself about with a dog and a white cane. Cecere drew a government salary for a quarter century as a translator, interpreter and transcriber of wiretapped Italian-language conversations in about a dozen major Mafia cases involving Vito.

  The RCMP had an inkling something was wrong, but it took them some time to focus their suspicions on the nearly blind man. After their massive Colisée roundup, the Mounties received a credible tip that one of their employees was feeding information to Vito’s group. Cecere was among a small group of workers who had access to such information, so they decided to tempt him with some bait.

  The Mounties installed a hidden camera in his office and began monitoring his computer activity. Then, on July 17, 2007, they invited Cecere to a meeting in which they laid out plans for a fictitious investigation, complete with a fake underworld target list. Once the meeting was over, investigators recorded a call in which Cecere instructed his son to come to his home and to “bring your friend.”

  The Mounties staked out Cecere’s home in Saint-Léonard and saw that the “friend” was none other than Nicolas Di Marco, who had managed Nick Rizzuto Jr.’s clandestine casino. Around midnight, officers stopped Di Marco as he left Cecere’s home. In his possession was paperwork from two police investigations on which Cecere and another translator had worked. Di Marco was also carrying documents outlining what appeared to be vulnerable legal points in the police translations of Colisée conversations. In those notes, Cecere zeroed in on what he thought was an incorrect translation of Italian regional slang for sexual intercourse. “What kind of qualifications do translators for the RCMP have if they don’t even know how to say ‘fuck’ in Italian?” he’d written.

  A search of the translator’s home yielded a computer diskette containing a document entitled “Questions lawyers should ask.” On the diskette was a discussion of the case against Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito, who was currently on the run from Colisée investigators. De Vito had been a major money-maker for a time, smuggling cocaine through the Trudeau airport in Montreal and paying a cut to the Rizzutos. He had friends in the Hells Angels and wasn’t afraid to give the likes of Arcadi a piece of his mind if he felt cheated. But De Vito’s days of paying a tax to Vito’s family were over.

  The diskette included mention of how De Vito stopped paying tribute to Vito’s organization after the murder of De Vito’s boss, Paolo Gervasi, in 2004. De Vito was deeply unimpressed that the city’s Mafia bosses had somehow allowed their headquarters to be filmed and audio recorded by police. Information on that diskette noted that De Vito shouldn’t turn himself in to police because they were seeking a stiff fourteen-year prison term for his attempt to import more than two hundred kilograms of cocaine into Canada.

  Confronted by his employers, the best defence Cecere could manage was that he had purloined the paperwork because he had plans to write a book. Four month
s after he was sentenced to a year in custody, he wasn’t talking about literary aspirations. This time, he told the Quebec parole board that he had wanted to get at least $250,000 from the Mafia in exchange for information. He added that his conduct might have been influenced by his use of antidepressants. The parole board declined to set him free early.

  Colisée cost Vito’s crime family a half-dozen senior members at a time when leadership was sorely needed. It also exposed the Rizzutos as old and vulnerable, for all their power. The most memorable footage captured by hidden police cameras comes from the backroom of the Consenza Social Club, where Nicolò holds court at a linoleum table under a hanging light, and the top level of the family routinely huddles with construction leaders and others, playing cards. As Nicolò, acting head of the largest criminal empire in the country’s history, handles money some seventy-six times and stuffs wads of bills into his socks, there is something doddering, even quaint, about the way he and the others conduct their business.

  Quebec’s underworld was recoiling from the repeated body blows delivered by police, but Calabrian ’Ndrangheta members in Ontario were glimpsing the promise of a golden future. They made negligible ripples as they tightened up ties with the Gambino and Lucchese families in New York State on drug schemes and boiler room and stock frauds. They already enjoyed strong international drug ties, including ones to the Mexican cartels. Some things were obvious, even from Vito’s faraway cell in Colorado. ’Ndrangheta power was on the rise; his family’s was not.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ponytail’s nightmare

  Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito had a tattoo on his arm of the date November 22, 2006. That was the day his world started to crumble and he became a fugitive, a lone escapee from the massive Project Colisée bust. The tattoo would always remind De Vito what a mistake it had been to tie his fortunes to those of Vito Rizzuto.