Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  Working in the Rizzuto organization had started off well for Ponytail. He was still a chubby-faced, grinning young man when he was bought a luxury home in Laval with his high school sweetheart, Adèle Sorella. The couple’s first daughter, Amanda, was born in 1999, two years after Giuseppe and Adèle were married. A second child, Sabrina, arrived two years later, premature, and needed special care from the day she was brought home. One evening, Ponytail reeked of cigarettes when he returned from work, which wasn’t surprising considering what he did for a living. Aside from running a motorcycle shop, Ponytail also helped Paolo Gervasi manage the Cabaret Castel Tina, a downmarket strip club on Jean-Talon Street East. When Ponytail entered the house, his mother-in-law, who was visiting, told him a doctor had advised that no one should smoke near Sabrina. Giuseppe was quick to jump where his daughter’s health was concerned; he immediately went to a bathroom, removed his clothing with the offensive smell and took a shower.

  Sabrina also suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which caused her persistent joint pain, swelling and stiffness. Ponytail paid roughly twenty thousand dollars for a Vitaeris hyperbaric chamber, which was installed in a spare bedroom. Sabrina was afraid to go inside the chamber alone for pure oxygen treatments, and so Ponytail climbed in with her, reading her stories and soothing her fears. On the streets he was a feared mobster, but inside the walls of their family home he was a devoted dad who wasn’t too proud to do what was best for his kids.

  Just a few days after the Project Colisée arrests forced Ponytail to go on the run, Adèle tried to kill herself. Adèle’s mother moved in with her, and her family made a point of holding regular dinners with her. Unable to help his wife, Ponytail coped with the stress of life as a fugitive by working out hard in a gym. His previously soft face turned lean and the addition of a goatee made Ponytail appear almost like a new man.

  He was hardly ever able to see his daughters now, for fear the police might have his house staked out. Like many mobsters, he had a mistress and moved with her into a duplex on De Capri Street in Saint-Léonard. Still, his thoughts often drifted back to his home, his wife and his daughters.

  Adèle didn’t cry when she learned of her husband’s mistress. She couldn’t. Her tear ducts had been removed after Sabrina’s birth, when a surgeon cut away a tumour from behind her ear that also left her face partially paralyzed. Adèle felt her pain intensely, even if she would never shed tears for it. Two more suicide attempts followed. Her energy was sapped. Everything that mattered was often lost in darkness. Adèle’s family dearly loved her, but that just wasn’t enough.

  Ponytail greatly valued his relationship with bar owner Paolo Gervasi, who was close to Vito, Nicolò and members of the Rock Machine Motorcycle Club. The Rock Machine members felt so comfortable with Gervasi that they had their own reserved table at his Cabaret Castel Tina. Vito and Nicolò liked it there too. Nicolò and Gervasi often sipped grappa together in the downstairs bar while Vito used an upstairs room as his office.

  The relationship shifted as Vito began working with Hells Angel Mom Boucher. Together, they sought to maximize profits by jacking up the street price of cocaine. The Rock Machine wouldn’t go along with the new pricing, and kept undercutting Vito and Boucher. The Hells Angels didn’t appreciate Gervasi’s son Salvatore dealing drugs—cheap drugs—with the Rock Machine. They thought Vito, a fellow Italian, would be able to bring him into line.

  Three-hundred-pound Salvatore didn’t like being told what to do. Vito cautioned him that it wasn’t smart to carry on dealing with the Rock Machine. It wasn’t a direct threat, but it was a strong caution. Compare Frank Arcadi also warned Salvatore that it was a mistake to go on dealing with the club. The younger Gervasi ignored them both and kept on dealing with the Rock Machine—until April 2000, when someone shot him dead, wrapped his body in plastic and canvas, and hoisted him into his Porsche, which was parked in front of his father’s house. Paolo Gervasi’s once-comfortable world changed forever the day he peered inside that car.

  The murder of Gervasi’s son left the aging mobster with a haunting suspicion that just wouldn’t go away. Gervasi hired a private detective to solve the crime, and drew up a list of a dozen possible suspects. He travelled to Italy on the chance that someone there might help him identify the killer. He offered up a six-figure reward for information leading to the identity of the assassin. In the end, he concluded what had seemed painfully obvious to others in the milieu from the beginning: his old friend Vito was to blame.

  Business meant nothing now, and when Vito’s group offered to buy the Castel Tina from him, Gervasi bulldozed it instead, out of spite. Thoughts of vengeance consumed him. Police warned Vito and Arcadi that they were the targets of a murder plot. Not long after that, someone planted a bomb in Gervasi’s car, but it was a clumsy job and he drove away unharmed.

  Paolo Gervasi’s pain continued until just twelve hours before Vito’s arrest in January 2004, when someone shot him several times as he sat behind the wheel of his Jeep Grand Cherokee outside a Saint-Léonard bakery. Gervasi died just a few minutes’ drive from the site of his old strip club. His past four years had been so consumed with thoughts of avenging his son’s death, his murder seemed almost merciful.

  For Ponytail, Gervasi’s murder meant the loss of a friend and mentor, and he immediately stopped paying tributes to Vito’s organization. Then, on March 31, 2009, he turned on the television. The news that day broadcast that the lifeless bodies of his daughters, Amanda and Sabrina, had been found in their family home. The sisters had been discovered lying side by side in a main-floor playroom, dressed in their elementary school uniforms. Their school bags were nearby and their lunch boxes sat in the kitchen on a marble counter, filled with sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies. The girls’ beds were neatly made and one was covered with stuffed animals.

  The only sign of violence was a slight bruise on Sabrina’s head, and a pathologist concluded it could have happened immediately after her death, if someone had moved her body. There were no signs the sisters were poisoned. It was as though Ponytail’s little girls had taken a nap and never woken up.

  Ponytail also heard through the media that his daughters were in good spirits on the last night of their lives. They put on a dance show for their uncle, mother and grandparents. Then they badgered their grandfather, as little girls do, to teach them a traditional Italian dance. In the final hours of their lives, the sisters learned the tarantella, once believed to cure the poisonous bite of a tarantula.

  Ponytail knew that police would have their funeral staked out, waiting for him, so he stayed away. Through the media, he heard that the music that day included “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” All he could do was tattoo “S.A.D.” on his left bicep for “Sabrina Amanda De Vito,” along with the date of their deaths, and watch out for police and underworld enemies. How Ponytail’s grief might affect his actions was anyone’s guess. Vito didn’t need to be told that there are few things more frightening than a man with a grudge and nothing left to lose.

  Ponytail De Vito and Raynald Desjardins weren’t the only former allies who had drifted far from Vito’s camp. Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle had also stopped paying tributes to the Rizzutos on drug deals. Closure got his nickname for his ability to close deals, which often relied on the application of violence. His tensions with Vito’s group could be traced to his history with Frank Arcadi. Those problems had their root in Arcadi’s dealings with the D’Amico crime family of Granby. Arcadi’s extreme lack of diplomacy helped explain how things soured to a dangerous level between Vito’s family and the family of Luigi D’Amico, a former cheesemaker who was born in Italy on December 14, 1948, and immigrated to Canada at the age of eighteen. Aside from running a restaurant, making cheese, and raising goats and chickens, D’Amico trafficked drugs.

  Vito had been in custody less than two weeks when, on February 1, 2004, D’Amico telephoned the Consenza Social Club to make an appointment. He wanted to collect
nine million dollars that he felt was owed to his family. Arcadi replied by calling him a “damn wanker.” D’Amico wasn’t rattled, answering: “Don’t worry, new Montreal godfather, we’ll collect with me, with a gang of wankers.” Then a convoy of his men drove to the Consenza to confront Compare Frank.

  The Granby gunmen marched past Vito’s golf trophies, which stood over the bar of the Consenza, and continued on to the backroom. Arcadi was nowhere to be found, but the Granby wanker gang had made their point. It would have been impossible to imagine such a show of bravado in the Consenza if Vito were still at large.

  This is where Closure Colapelle comes into it, though only Arcadi could say how. Project Colisée tapes from the Consenza Social Club showed that Arcadi somehow blamed Closure for “tarnishing everyone” with the Granby affair. Clearly, Arcadi wanted to make Colapelle a scapegoat for his own bungling. He ordered Closure brought to the basement of a café for a beating. Exactly why Colapelle was to blame was a mystery, and there was no record of that beating ever taking place. What was certain was that Arcadi had just made yet another dangerous enemy.

  At least once after Gervasi’s murder, Ponytail met with members of the ’Ndrangheta in a York Region coffee shop near Highway 407 and Weston Road. He wasn’t well known in the Toronto area, but it was clear from the local Calabrians’ attentive demeanours that Ponytail represented an important opportunity for his hosts.

  The scent of blood in the water grew stronger. In September 2007, the body of fifty-six-year-old Francesco (Frank) Velenosi of the Montreal borough of LaSalle was found stuffed in the trunk of his Volvo. Velenosi had been part of the Arcadi cell of Vito’s organization, an association that was clearly no longer a ticket to wealth or security. Apparently neither Velenosi’s criminal activity nor the distribution company he ran was doing well, as he had slipped into debt and filed for bankruptcy. He died from multiple stab wounds. In the milieu, knives were an uncommonly personal way of killing a man.

  There wasn’t much time to ponder Velenosi’s demise before the milieu lost another member. Mario (Skinny) Marabella had been close to Ponytail De Vito back when Ponytail was considered one of Vito’s men. Skinny and Ponytail had been convicted together for the armed robbery of a liquor truck back in 1992. After he served his time, Skinny ran a Mafia hangout on Langelier Boulevard while compiling a criminal record that included extortion, loansharking and breaking probation.

  Since Vito’s arrest, Skinny had shifted away from Vito’s man Agostino Cuntrera and towards Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle and Raynald Desjardins. Skinny was suspected in Montreal’s first murder of 2008: the January 7 slaying of Tony Stocola, a former escort agency owner. On December 4, 2008, Skinny Marabella pulled his grey Acura MDX up to a gas station on Highway 440 in Laval’s Val des Brises district. Moments after he parked, gunmen forced Skinny into a waiting vehicle. Someone drove his Acura from the gas pumps and it was discovered nearby, torched. Skinny had vanished.

  Soon, the killings in Vito’s old world adopted a numbing sameness. They were as expected now by the general public as the massive potholes that appear every spring in Montreal streets. Gas stations, intersections, gyms, bars: routines had become dangerous, but human nature often wins out over good sense, even in times of war.

  CHAPTER 12

  Who’s next?

  Giuseppe Coluccio knew his time in Canada was up when he tried to drive his black Range Rover out of a suburban Toronto parking lot. His path was blocked by a circle of gun-packing members of the Immigration Task Force. Later, when they checked out his waterfront condo, they found a million dollars hidden in the walls.

  Coluccio’s arrest was a key part of Project Reckoning, which centred on the links between the ’Ndrangheta and the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel, with investigations in Canada, the United States, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and Italy. Raids netted authorities more than forty tonnes of illegal drugs, and crusading Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri described Canada as the Coluccio brothers’ “second home.” The case was so big that US attorney general Michael Mukasey, Italy’s defence minister Ignazio La Russa and Canada’s public safety minister Stockwell Day all made triumphant announcements, with Italian authorities calling Coluccio nothing less than the “King of International Drug Trafficking.” It was a rare day when Ontario generated such headlines with an underworld story, as the ’Ndrangheta preferred to operate in the province’s shadows. Somewhere in that darkness, contingency plans were being made.

  Back in Montreal, on the afternoon of January 16, 2009, Compare Frank Arcadi’s associate Sam Fasulo had stopped his Jeep at a red light at the corner of Henri-Bourassa and Langelier. He’d been paroled four years earlier at the end of a police operation playfully called Project Espresso, which targeted crack cocaine and heroin dealing out of Italian cafés and bars in Saint-Léonard and Saint-Michel. Fasulo’s National Parole Board decision noted that he headed a drug ring which, according to police estimates, netted $100,000 a week. Aside from drugs, the police who had arrested Fasulo had also seized automatic and semi-automatic firearms.

  Project Colisée tapes included a conversation in which Fasulo’s boss, Frank Arcadi, counselled the thirty-seven-year-old how to employ threats of violence. After a drug dealer with Mafia connections was roughed up, a police bug captured Arcadi commanding Fasulo to go into a bar and deliver a stern message. “You tell him: ‘Don’t touch this fellow or I will slit your throat like a goat,’ ” Arcadi ordered.

  That day, as Fasulo waited for the light to change, a sport-utility vehicle pulled up alongside his Jeep and someone inside opened fire, ending his life. Anyone keeping track would have been struck by the chilling similarity between Fasulo’s killing and that of Domenico Macri in August 2006. The killer’s motives were unclear, but police suspected the standard ones for the milieu: drug turf, debt, revenge. Whatever the cause of this latest murder, Vito’s crime family was a little weaker by the time the light turned green.

  On June 15, 2009, Rizzuto family soldier Dany (Dany Arm) De Gregorio exited a Jarry Street gym in Saint-Léonard into a cloud of bullets. De Gregorio lucked out and survived. There was no such good fortune on August 21, 2009, when old family friend Federico (Freddy) Del Peschio walked from his silver Mercedes in the parking lot of his La Cantina Italian restaurant at the corner of Saint-Laurent Boulevard and Legendre Street. Del Peschio was beginning his work-day and the hit man once again appeared well aware of a Rizzuto associate’s habits. It was no great secret where to find Del Peschio; his restaurant was an elegant spot for municipal political fundraisers, and Vito had felt comfortable enough there to use it as a meeting spot for his own business affairs.

  Del Peschio had a long and close connection with the Rizzutos. Nicolò, Del Peschio, Montreal discotheque owner Gennaro Scaletta and two others were arrested on August 2, 1988, in Caracas, after authorities found eight hundred grams of cocaine hidden in a belt, much like a tourist’s moneybelt. The narcotics were split into five different qualities, and police concluded that Nicolò was about to make a bulk order of several hundred kilograms of cocaine he had selected from the samples. Nicolò had lived in Venezuela on and off since the early 1970s, and it was no secret that he was a major player in the cocaine trade there. What had changed by the late 1980s was the political climate, which explained why he was forced to begin his first prison stint while in his sixties.

  Vito paid $500,000 to a Venezuelan lawyer to secure his father’s freedom and felt cheated when Nicolò went to prison anyway. When it became clear that his father wasn’t getting out any time soon, Vito asked Italian drug trafficker Oreste Pagano to kill the lawyer to gain some level of satisfaction for the family. Pagano ducked out of the request. In his roundabout way of speaking, Pagano later explained to authorities that this meant “avoiding the consequences and reactions from the Rizzutos that I knew could be serious, taking account [of] the fact that a favor requested by him had to be brought to term.”

  Nicolò and his associates, including Fred
dy Del Peschio, were finally freed on parole in early 1993. Four months after that, the parole board granted his request that he be allowed to return to Canada to be treated for a prostate condition. An RCMP undercover officer later heard that this consent was greased by an $800,000 bribe Vito paid to Venezuelan officials.

  Libertina couldn’t wait for her husband’s arrival and flew down to Venezuela with two of her friends so they could escort him back to Canada. When he finally landed at Dorval airport at 4 p.m. on May 23, 1993, sixty-nine-year-old Nicolò was greeted by Vito and thirty other friends and relatives, like a returning dignitary. Shortly after the elder Rizzuto’s return to Canada, a former mayor of Cattolica Eraclea paid him and Libertina a personal visit, staying at their home on Mafia Row. The politician’s house gifts included copies of Nicolò’s birth and marriage certificates, as if they were valued artifacts marking the life of a great man.

  The prison stay didn’t appear to have rattled Nicolò too badly. A part of him still seemed to feed off his notoriety. When he and Libertina celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995 at the Sheraton Centre-Ville among some three hundred guests, the accordionist played “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from The Godfather.

  Del Peschio’s killing prompted some familiar questions. As in the murder of Nick Jr., a black man was seen running away from the scene, again leaving police and the Rizzuto family to wonder if someone from a street gang had been contracted to carry out the hit. Attacks continued against Rizzuto-connected Italian cafés and bars in Montreal. Even the Rizzuto family funeral business, the Complexe Funéraire Loreto, was targeted by firebombers. Was this the way it would end for the family? Picked off by assassins, one by one?