Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  It was around the time of Del Pschio’s killing in 2009 that wealthy Montreal café owner and Desjardins protege Vittorio Mirarchi quietly made a trip to Woodbridge, Ontario, to attend the opening of a modest eatery in the heart of ’Ndrangheta territory—territory where his was becoming a familiar face as Desjardins’s group sought to firm up its Calabrian connections. The York Region restaurant was the business of a relative of Antonio (The Lawyer, The Black One) Commisso, who might have attended the opening himself had he not been extradited to Italy in the summer of 2005. There, he began a ten-year term for allegedly heading a Siderno-based group that an Italian judge described as “a dangerous, bloodthirsty Mafia association which had for long imposed on the town of Siderno the burden of a permanent criminal presence.” Their crimes included murder, drug trafficking and robbery. (In May 2014, Antonio Commisso won an appeal on the conviction when six other defendants were convicted instead.)

  Vito’s old milieu was changing by the minute. Helpless to staunch the bleeding on the streets or to secure the straying loyalties of his former soldiers, he began legal proceedings to get himself out of the Florence prison. He wrote Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who had heard his guilty plea in a New York courtroom, and argued he should be transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Colorado to a New York State penitentiary, so his family could more easily visit. The judge declined. Then Vito attempted to correct Garaufis’s “incorrect calculation” of the length of his prison term. The judge declined to alter the release date.

  Next, Vito wrote an appeal to expedite his release. If he failed, he wouldn’t be eligible for release until October 2012. He argued to the US Court of Appeals that his sentence conditions should have been those in place in 1981, at the time the crime was committed. That was before laws were toughened, requiring inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their prison terms rather than two-thirds.

  There were many who thought Vito was getting off lightly whichever way his sentence was calculated. Less than six years for three contract murders in a death penalty state looked more like an inconvenience than real punishment—a quick prison stint to shrug off responsibility for his murderous past before enjoying the spoils of his and his father’s work. But now bodies kept falling in Montreal and Vito kept writing appeals in the Colorado prison. It was at least something to focus on, to keep him from being overwhelmed by the big picture. It was a given that there would be more murders. The only question seemed to be: who would be next?

  CHAPTER 13

  Foreign shore

  It was natural for Vito to also look south in his search for answers. Americans had considered Montreal their turf since at least 1953, when cigar-chomping sociopath Carmine (Lillo, The Cigar) Galante of New York’s Bonanno crime family headed north and laid claim to the city’s underworld. The short, stocky, ultra-intense mobster wasn’t a particularly bright man—his IQ was assessed in prison to be 90—but he brought a stupid man’s single-minded zeal to his job. Where others might have used finesse, Lillo set a new standard for brutality. The diminutive mobster was a suspect in some one hundred murders in the USA and Canada, and once reportedly amused himself at a nightspot by making a barefoot busboy dance on cut glass. Galante’s immediate goal was to ramp up gambling enterprises and protection rackets for restaurants and nightclubs. He did that quickly, forging an alliance with local Calabrian mobster Vic (The Egg) Cotroni and Sicilian-born Luigi Greco. More importantly, he tightened up the French Connection heroin-trafficking route from Marseilles to Montreal to the United States, making use of Montreal’s natural harbour as a gateway to the New York drug market. In effect, he established a Canadian branch plant for the Bonanno family that endured until Vito’s days.

  The Rizzutos had a particularly unhappy connection to the United States that predated Lillo Galante’s rise to power. Vito’s paternal grandfather, Vito Rizzuto Sr., was the first of the clan to take a run at the opportunities promised by life in North America. Vito Sr. was born on April 12, 1901, in dusty Cattolica Eraclea to Nicola and Giuseppa Marra. The paper trail he left behind suggests early and frequent troubles with authority, long before his move to America. On June 23, 1921, Vito Sr. was sentenced by a military tribunal to two months in jail for theft and spent the summer sleeping in a sparse military jail cell with no more than a plank for a bed.

  On March 9, 1923, Vito Sr. married Maria Renda from his hometown. This was a step up in the world for him, although Maria did have baggage. At age twenty-six, she was five years his senior, a widow and the mother of a five-year-old son, Liborio. She had been just sixteen when she married her first husband, Francesco Milioto, on April 9, 1913. At thirty-three, he had been more than double her age. The young bride became a young widow when Milioto was shot dead in San Giorgio, a rural area in Cattolica Eraclea municipality, while trying to steal produce from another farmer.

  At the time of her marriage to Vito Sr., Maria was a woman of some status in the area. Her brother was Calogero Renda, an established campiere. A campiere was at the hub of an old and durable system. He was expected to collect some fifty kilos of grain a year from small farmers as protection money, with the understanding that such payments would save them the unpleasant business of someone destroying their crops and fruit trees, or worse. A campiere embodied power; he could ride into the centre of town and select, with a nod or a wave, the men who would be given work that day as labourers and those who would shuffle away with nothing.

  Vito Sr. and Maria had just one child of their own, a son. Nicolò Rizzuto was born on February 18, 1924, in the family home near Cattolica Eraclea’s Madonna Della Mercede church. Even closer to his home than the church was a severe-looking white concrete house on a boulevard in the middle of the street that was the residence of the local Mafia don, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno. Don Nino was seldom seen, but his presence was as real as the winds or the soil. The Mafia that he represented had been a fact of life in the area long before his birth. Back in 1828, local court documents referred to an organization in Cattolica Eraclea of more than a hundred people who shared an oath never to reveal the existence of their group, on pain of death.

  Nicolò was just ten months old in December 1924 when his father set off for America with a forged passport. It was common at the time for men to travel to the New World to make their fortunes, and then send for their families. Joining Vito Sr. on the voyage were his brother-in-law Calogero Renda and five others, and most likely it was Renda who supplied Vito Sr. with forged travel documents. Although Renda looked like a fresh-faced schoolboy in his passport photo, he was already experienced in the ways of the underworld.

  They sailed second-class aboard the masted steamer SS Edam from Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, to Rotterdam, Netherlands, and then on to Havana, Cuba, Tampico, Mexico, and finally New Orleans, arriving on January 19, 1925. Vito Sr.’s travel documents declared that he had a cousin named Pietro Marino in New Orleans. There is no record of a relative with any such name, but the lie smoothed his entry into the United States. He also declared that he was an unmarried labourer.

  Vito Sr. quickly moved to the Bronx, a magnet for Italian immigrants seeking work. On February 9, 1928, he filled out a form for the US Department of Labor’s naturalization service declaring himself to be a patriot of his new country. He signed his name to the statement: “I am not an anarchist: I am not a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy: and it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein: SO HELP ME GOD.” Vito Sr. was an arsonist, but certainly not a polygamist or an anarchist. He left the Bronx and settled in the hamlet of Oradell, New Jersey, forty-five kilometres (twenty-eight miles) from midtown Manhattan.

  This was a time in the early twentieth century when the manufacture, sale and distribution of alcohol were all prohibited, which created a massive growth opportunity for gangs to get into bootlegging. Emerging Mafia groups led by newcomers such as Giuseppe (Joe) Bonanno and Charles (Lucky) Luciano all scrambled
for money and power, forming a commission to attempt to regulate disputes among criminals. Although Vito Sr. would become a minor player in the expanding underworld, his first recorded brush with violence in his new country was of a personal, not professional nature, when he survived a shooting in his home on September 25, 1930. Questioned by police in hospital, Vito Sr. said: “I was shot by my best friend, Jimmy Giudice.” He decided not to press charges over the dispute, believed to be the product of an incendiary love triangle.

  It was around this time that Vito Sr. hooked up with publisher Max L. Simon, who had a degree in law, a string of newspapers and a deservedly nasty reputation. Syndicated newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler described him as an “inveterate rogue” who had once taken a severe beating that seemed connected to his rackets. “He has maintained files of delicate personal information on individuals in the community who might serve on grand juries and trial juries,” Pegler wrote. Soon, Vito Sr. was involved in a gang with Simon, in a business that thrived during the Great Depression: arson for insurance fraud. Arson was a relatively easy money-maker for mobsters, and decades later in Montreal, Vito Jr. and his brother-in-law/cousin, Paolo Renda, would be arrested for the same offence. Working in Vito Sr.’s gang in New Jersey was Stefano (Steve) Spinella from Cattolica Eraclea, who was related to him through his in-laws, the Rendas.

  On October 17, 1931, Vito Sr. and Spinella torched the printing plant of the Elizabeth Daily Times in Passaic, New Jersey. The Daily Times was one of Simon’s newspapers, and he expected a sweet insurance payoff for the fire. He had paid Vito Sr. and Spinella three hundred dollars upfront, with a promise of the rest when the job was done. When Simon reneged on settling the bill, Vito Sr. threatened his life and Simon ran to the police.

  It was during this time of tensions with Simon, on November 5, 1931, that Vito Sr. was granted his American citizenship. His address was listed as 94 Ridgewood Road, Oradell, New Jersey, and he now told the truth on his government paperwork and declared that he was married. His citizenship form described him as five foot six and 155 pounds, an average size for the time. He stared directly into the camera for the photo that would become part of his police file, looking prosperous in a fine-fitting suit, dress shirt and tie. His expression was deadly serious, with no trace of a smile.

  Rather than immediately follow through with his threat to punish Simon, Vito Sr. chose to move on to Patterson, New York, a rural town upstate in the Hudson Valley. (It’s often confused with Paterson, New Jersey, a much larger industrial community that featured in some episodes of the television mob series The Sopranos.)

  Summertime newcomers like Vito Sr. didn’t attract too much attention in Patterson. At the time, the tiny community’s population doubled during the summer, as tourists were drawn to its scenic hills and waterways. It was also a destination spot during all seasons for lovers of alcohol. Aside from its natural charms, bucolic out-of-the-way Patterson was home to several speakeasies and stills. In 1931, the smell of hops and malt hung in the air as the Patterson fire department was called to the home of Lillian F. Lloyd, where they found an illegal brewery capable of making five hundred gallons of beer per day. In March 1932, the New York Times reported that “women turned out by the hundreds and cheered” as federal agents carted out hundreds of jugs of whiskey and wine, dozens of barrels of cider and countless bottles of beer from restaurants, stores and homes throughout Putnam County, including Patterson.

  The few people who noticed the newcomer in the summer of 1933 called him “Vito the Watchman,” as he settled in a shanty by a swamp at the Tuckahoe-Patterson Marble Company’s limestone quarry, a mile off the main road. Limestone from the area was used in the construction of the Empire State Building, but it wasn’t a major industry, which left the shanty sitting in a fairly secluded spot. Vito Sr. lived alone by the quarry for about a month and then vanished. His exit was as quiet as his arrival. Oddly, the door to the shanty was found open and Vito Sr.’s clothes and belongings remained inside, as if he had planned to return. There was also talk of a car with New Jersey plates arriving at the quarry hours before Vito was noticed missing.

  Within days of his disappearance, a storm hit the area with such ferocity that it uprooted a tree by the swamp, leaving a large crater in the soil. The rain had subsided by August 12, when the local deputy sherrif was startled by an ungodly stench that wafted from that hole. He also noticed a faint trail through the grass from the foot of the uprooted tree back to the shack. Peering into the hole, the deputy sherrif saw something wrapped in canvas, peeking out of the dirt beneath a foot of water. The canvas turned out to be in the shape of a body, with two ropes around its neck. An autopsy at the Oelkert Cox funeral parlour in nearby Brewster determined that the dead man was Vito Rizzuto Sr. and that he had suffered a fractured skull, four cracked ribs on the right side and a ruptured liver. Cause of death, according to the coroner, was blunt-force blows from a heavy object, meaning murder.

  Vito Rizzuto Sr. had come to America from a highly structured world where funeral ceremonies were grand public statements of the deceased’s power, status and popularity. That made Vito Sr.’s final send-off particularly sad. No family or friends were in attendance as he was lowered back into the ground at taxpayers’ expense in an unmarked public plot at Patterson’s county farm. For the time being, the Rizzutos of Cattolica Eraclea were anonymous and defeated in the New World.

  Investigators suspected Simon had struck back in answer to Vito Sr.’s threats. Certainly the publisher seemed capable of such a thing. Vito Sr.’s murder also meant one less potential witness against Simon’s arson gang. Plenty of others fresh off the boat could be found to fill his place. Vito Sr. had already been ratted out by four of his former partners when police had probed a hotel fire; it was no great leap to believe they later plotted to kill him too.

  Vito Sr.’s relative Spinella was a natural suspect, as he was the only man from outside the Patterson area who knew where Vito Sr. lived. He was picked up and taken to Patterson for questioning. In a bizarre piece of policing that was perhaps intended to rattle Rizzuto’s former partner in arson, Vito’s body was exhumed and shown to Spinella for identification.

  Until his arrest, Spinella lived at 231 East 150th Street in the south Bronx, about ten blocks from the newly built Yankee Stadium. That placed him in the centre of the crime turf of Jewish-German gangster Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer, a particularly brutal Prohibition-era beer runner whose life ended on October 23, 1935, when two gunmen interrupted his dinner at the back of the Palace Chop House and Tavern in New York City. Flegenheimer’s murder marked the end of the big-time independent gangs, as Italian-American Mafia groups expanded their reach.

  A Putnam County grand jury probing Vito Sr.’s death indicted Spinella (incorrectly spelling his name as “Spinello”), Simon and Rosario Arcuri, also from Cattolica Eraclea, for first-degree murder on November 4, 1933. The indictment stated the three men, with “divers other person or persons,” killed Vito Sr. “on or about the 6th day of August, 1933” with an iron bar or other blunt instrument. The indictment stated that Simon didn’t commit the crime with his own hands, but declared that he was also guilty because he “aided, counseled, advised and procured” the others.

  Arcuri was nowhere to be found when charges were eventually dropped against Simon for what was said to be lack of evidence. That left Spinella alone in the prisoner’s dock in century-old Carmel courthouse, which was more cute than imposing. Murder trials were rare here, and neither the prosecutor nor the judge had previously been involved in a death penalty case. Not surprisingly, a crowd packed the courtroom for the rare drama.

  Spinella must have had a sinking feeling when he saw undercover officer Anthony Aurizeme from the National Board of Fire Underwriters walk towards the witness stand. Aurizeme had been placed in Spinella’s cell in Carmel County Jail as part of an undercover operation. Aurizeme testified that Spinella told him in their cell that Max Simon paid him six hundred dollars to kill Vito Sr.,
and that Spinella further confessed to clubbing Vito Sr. to death in his sleep with a heavy cement tamper.

  Spinella had a wife, two children and a father in Italy. If the jury accepted Aurizeme’s testimony, he would never see them again. Instead, he faced the very real possibility of a trip up the Hudson River to Sing Sing penitentiary, where his last sights would include “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. To escape death row, Spinella pleaded guilty to manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to a term of between seven and twenty years.

  Although authorities had dropped murder charges against Simon for lack of evidence, he still faced arson charges in June 1934, after gang member John Chirichillo turned on him. For this, Simon was sentenced to two to three years in prison and fined two thousand dollars, although he used his skills as a lawyer to string out proceedings with a series of delays and appeals. In the end, Simon served only nine months in the state penitentiary in Trenton. Even that wasn’t hard time, as he was allowed to continue editing his newspapers from prison, and had access to steaks and a stove for his dining pleasure.

  Arcuri fled the area, hunted by police, insurance investigators and mobsters alike. Perhaps he was thinking of his own childhood in Sicily late on the afternoon of August 20, 1934, as he stood under a tree in the Bronx on Crotona Park North, idly watching children play. Maybe he didn’t see the maroon sedan as it pulled up alongside him or the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun as it appeared from a window. The last sound he would have heard was its loud blast, which dropped him to the sidewalk and left fifteen pellets in his body.

  For Vito Sr., insult was added to fatal injury when an immigration and naturalization officer noted on August 22, 1935, that he had entered New Orleans with a fraudulent visa, supported by bogus documents. As he lay in his pauper’s grave, Vito Sr. was subjected to one final indignity: he was posthumously stripped of his American citizenship.