Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  He graduated to acting leader of the entire family at age thirty-five, earning himself the nickname “The Bambino Boss.” There were good reasons for promoting Montagna within the Bonannos. He was both youthful and a traditionalist, which doubled his appeal in some Bonanno circles. That said, Sal the Ironworker’s brains and ambition didn’t fully explain his quick rise. There was also a distinct shortage of non-murdered, non-arrested mobsters to compete with him for the job. Thanks to the betrayals of Big Joey Massino, once the most circumspect of New York’s Mafia family leaders, and a small host of others who had turned evidence on the family, Montagna had inherited a Bonanno organization in free fall, with no end in sight.

  Montagna’s ride on the Bonanno runaway train came to a sudden halt when he was charged with being a deportable alien, as the Canadian-born boss had never taken out American citizenship. Suddenly, his 2003 contempt conviction came back to haunt him, as it was enough to have him removed from the country. He chose to self-deport, which got him briefly out of the Bonanno disaster area. It also meant he could reapply to get back into the United States in a year. In April 2009, he flew to Montreal, watched by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

  Sal the Ironworker was not facing warrants for any crime, so he stepped onto Canadian soil a free man. Perhaps he thought Montreal would provide easy pickings after life in the cauldron of New York City and his formative years in Sicily. How tough could it be? Frank (The Big Guy) Cotroni was dead. Vito was locked away in prison, and even Vito’s octogenarian father, Nicolò, was behind bars on his Colisée charges. Hells Angels boss Maurice (Mom) Boucher was also out of the way, serving a life term for two murders. The New York tabloids seemed to think Canada was ripe for the taking. When Montagna headed north, the New York Daily News crowed, BONANNO BIG BOOTED BACK TO BOONDOCKS, with the subhead: SEEMS TO BE CHOICE OF BOZOS IN BROOKLYN OR EASY PICKINGS IN MONTREAL.

  If Montagna believed the newspapers, there was nothing more to conquering Montreal than setting foot in the city. The American papers hadn’t noticed that Canadian mobsters had guns too.

  CHAPTER 16

  Friends like these

  Soon after his move to Canada, Sal Montagna quietly appeared in the Greater Toronto Area and nearby Hamilton, meeting up with members of the camera di controllo of the local ’Ndrangheta. Curiously, he didn’t seem at all interested in meeting with the local Sicilian mobsters, even though this was the accepted protocol since he was Sicilian himself.

  By this time, fifteen Mafia groups had settled in Ontario. Most were families of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, the world’s most powerful Italian-based organized crime group. Nine of those Mafia groups were ’Ndrangheta families based around Toronto, mostly in York Region. ’Ndrangheta groups are notoriously hard to infiltrate, as membership is based on blood relationships, with sons routinely following in their fathers’ footsteps on the path to crime. (It goes without saying that daughters aren’t allowed into the mix.) The group’s members are screened through a lengthy grooming process before they can be considered one of the uomini d’onore, “men of honour.” Intermarriage often binds group members even more tightly.

  Since the heyday of Giacomo Luppino in Hamilton in the 1960s, the ’Ndrangheta had sunk its roots deep into Ontario’s relatively calm political and business environment. Between 1967 and 1983, Toronto police blamed sixteen murders on Italian organized crime. It wasn’t a huge number, but police weren’t playing it down. “These murders depict the realism of the ceaseless progression of the La Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta in our society,” cautioned an Ontario police report from the mid-1980s.

  By the time of Montagna’s arrival in Ontario, the province was the ’Ndrangheta’s unchallenged epicentre in North America. When Italian authorities referred to “America” in regards to the ’Ndrangheta, they meant Ontario. This was especially true for the old families of Hamilton and rich transnational newcomers in suburban York Region. The International Monetary Fund estimated some $225 billion was laundered each year in Canada, most of it ending up in Ontario. It was a cozy climate for investment, as few Ontario residents even knew the crime network existed and fewer still could properly pronounce its name (en-DRANG-gheta).

  It wasn’t just Canadians who underestimated the strength of the ’Ndrangheta. The crime network wasn’t really noticed internationally until August 15, 2007. On that day, a two-man hit squad from the Calabrian town of San Luca shot dead six men who were exiting a pizzeria in the normally peaceful German city of Duisburg. The victims had just attended a birthday party and one of the murdered men was an eighteen-year-old boy. The killings showed the reach and staying power and insane potential of a vendetta, as the escalating feud stemmed from an egg-throwing incident at a carnival almost twenty years earlier. The vendetta had led to more than a dozen tit-for-tat killings before the hit men made their bloody statement in Duisburg, including the slaying of the wife of an ’Ndrangheta boss on Christmas Day 2006.

  The Duisburg slaughter brought new attention to the ’Ndrangheta, and recognition that it was the most powerful and toughest to penetrate of the Italian Mafias. It dominated the European cocaine trade and was now pushing for control of the North American market by flooding it with almost pure product, squeezing out competition trying to move lower-grade goods. This strategy had worked in Europe and there appeared to be no reason why it shouldn’t also succeed in North America.

  Cocaine sales provided seed financing for a range of other activities, including marijuana grow operations, international weapons trafficking, environmental schemes like hazardous waste disposal, and stock market scams. But police experts noted that ’Ndrangheta leaders in Canada sometimes worked regular jobs, from accountants to garden centre operators, and even acted as youth soccer coaches. The legitimate activities would help them forge inroads into ostensibly legitimate businesses and governments, and a cloak of legitimacy that made mobsters appear non-threatening.

  Post-9/11 crackdowns on border security and foreign investment benefitted the Canadian ’Ndrangheta, as these new pressures forced money north and into their hands. On a broader global scale, the worldwide economic crisis was a blessing for the ’Ndrangheta. In particular, the European debt crisis created opportunities for loansharks and shady investors, especially in the weakened economies of Spain and Greece.

  Billions of dollars of drug money also helped banks ride out the global crisis of 2007–8. In turn, this allowed criminal organizations to wash illegal proceeds and insinuate themselves into the mainstream economy. Top Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri notes that banks sorely needed cash and were able to provide a safe investment environment for massive narco-revenues. “Drug dealers are the only ones with cash, especially in times of crisis,” Gratteri said in a 2014 interview. Criminal organizations enjoyed the new €500 bills and made them their unofficial currency, as up to €10 million could be packed into a forty-five-centimetre safety deposit box and the equivalent of a million dollars could be easily carried in a suitcase. In Switzerland, a country where Vito’s family had enjoyed stashing much of its fortune in the past, the law was slow to act against organized crime, and it wasn’t until 2013 that the banking country had an operational witness protection program. By then, Switzerland had become a favoured spot for the ’Ndrangheta to wash dirty money.

  For Montagna, meeting with the ’Ndrangheta in southern Ontario opened up refreshing possibilities for growth after being mired in the chaos of New York City. The 1950s and 1960s, when the ’Ndrangheta was sneeringly referred to as the “lunch-bucket mob,” were long over. The network had bases on five continents and sat fourth on the White House list of the world’s most dangerous criminal groups, behind only al Qaeda, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and Mexican drug cartels.

  The calm face of Ontario’s ’Ndrangheta stood in dramatic contrast to the bloody activities of their Mexican partners. From the Rio Grande to Central America, there were some ten thousand gunmen in the Los Zetas drug cartel alone, and
their cruelty knew no limits as they pushed ahead of established Colombian drug cartels. Former special forces soldiers in their ranks played a major role in the slaughter of some sixty thousand people between 2006 and 2012. In a veritable war zone, some of their victims were burned alive in drums of flaming diesel. Severed heads of others were rolled onto crowded nightclub dance floors or sewn onto soccer balls to intimidate rivals and justice seekers. As Montagna settled into Canada, the town of Ciudad Juárez already belonged to the Mexican cartels and their partners in the ’Ndrangheta, giving them control of the back door to the New York drug market. If Montagna could help them gain control of the Port of Montreal, they would enter North America through the front door as well.

  Even though his target was Montreal, Montagna looked to settle in Ontario rather than Quebec. He couldn’t speak French and wasn’t particularly happy with the pace of life in small-town Saint-Hubert. In affluent Woodbridge, just north of Toronto, he would be closer to family members who had already settled there, as well as to the North American base of the Coluccio ’Ndrangheta cell. A move to Ontario promised to make him more comfortable and prosperous, and likely safer as well. These were people who had tolerated Vito but were only too willing to turn on the temporarily deposed godfather for the promise of a better offer. If all went well, he and his family would settle into a house of their own in the Toronto area in the spring of 2011.

  But underworld politics in Ontario were complex. The Cuntrera–Caruana group in the province had been aligned with Vito’s group, and theirs was a profitable partnership. They maintained a strong presence in the Toronto area, even after Alfonso Caruana was arrested in 1998 for his part in trafficking 1,500 kilograms of cocaine (worth at least a billion dollars) between Colombia and Canada. Montagna would have to be able to convince them that he could offer something even better to ensure he was treading on safe ground. He wouldn’t need to start from scratch, though. Relations were warming up between the Cuntrera–Caruana group and the GTA ’Ndrangheta in Vito’s absence. While Vito’s group was burning bridges to the United States, the ’Ndrangheta was quietly building alliances and reaching out. Meetings were now held in Cuba, a throwback to the heyday of crime on the island in the 1950s, when Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista was in power. It wasn’t just the great weather or the fact that they could fly from Toronto to Havana non-stop in just over three hours; corruption at Cuban airports made the country a good drug drop-off point with negligible risk of surveillance from Canadian police.

  Hanging over all of their heads as they planned was the prospect of Vito’s release. He was due out in October 2012, and this raised the spectre of spectacular violence, and not just in Montreal. If Montagna and the other groups were going to consolidate their grip on Vito’s turf, they had better do it fast and they had better do it well.

  CHAPTER 17

  Clearing space

  There was a time, before mob hit man Ken Murdock pointed a gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, when it seemed Johnny (Pops) Papalia was as permanent a fixture of Hamilton as the limestone cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment. The son of a Prohibition-era bootlegger, young Pops apprenticed in Montreal under Carmine Galante in the 1950s. In the 1963 report of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic, Papalia was named as a key Canadian under the wing of the Buffalo mob. Counsel for that subcommittee was future American attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. Back then, Vito hadn’t even dropped out of high school yet and the Rizzutos weren’t anyone’s idea of a crime family.

  Less than two months after Pops’s murder on May 31, 1997, his lieutenant Carmen Barillaro was shot dead in the entranceway of his Niagara Falls, Ontario, home on the eve of his fifty-third birthday. Murdock was again the shooter. Neither killing was directly traced to Vito, although his shadow fell over both crimes. Certainly Murdock, a long-time Hamilton rounder, had never met the Montreal godfather. But just as certainly, the murder was orchestrated by forces that supported him.

  In the late nineties, Vito was seeking to cut links to the American La Cosa Nostra and create a Canadian-based Mafia that was no longer an appendix of the US organization. On October 22, 1997, four months after the Papalia murder, Vito met with fifteen men he considered loyalists in a Woodbridge restaurant, including Murdock’s one-time boss, Pasquale (Pat) Musitano of Hamilton. Also there was Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto of Toronto, the proprietor of a west Toronto gym and a cut-rate casket business with the motto “Do not make an emotional loss a financial loss.” His merchandise included free caskets for kids, and a country-styled, denim-covered model called the Tucson (also known as the “Bubba Box”).

  Musitano and his younger brother Angelo were originally charged with two counts each of first-degree murder for arranging the Papalia and Barillaro hits. Eventually, they pled guilty to one count each of murder conspiracy for Barillaro’s death. Vito’s name was left out of the court proceedings, although Ontario became a much more agreeable place for him to do business after the deaths. Other inconvenient Ontario bodies that fell conventiently dead included that of Papalia’s close friend Enio Mora of Toronto. His remains, with an artificial leg detached, were found stuffed in the trunk of his gold Cadillac just off Highway 400 in Vaughan.

  The removal from the scene of Papalia, Barillaro and Mora certainly helped Vito create more space for his own independent crime family in Canada, free from the stumbling Bonanno family of New York. While politicians in Vito’s home province talked for generations about separation from English-speaking Canada, Vito was making his own version of Quebec independence a reality, except he wanted to take Ontario with him. And the Bonannos were in no position to resist his interprovincial power play.

  Murdock later told the Toronto Star that he was instructed by senior members of the Musitano crime family to pull the trigger on a half-dozen others, almost all of whom were key members of the Ontario ’Ndrangheta. Most were blood relatives and in-laws of his father’s old rival, Paolo Violi: Jimmy Luppino and Paolo Violi’s two sons, four other family members and in-laws of the late Giacomo Luppino, and also mob enforcer and former professional wrestler Ion (Johnny K-9) Croitoru, who once rode with the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. Murdock chose not to carry out those jobs.

  In all of the cases, Murdock said that he wasn’t explicitly told by his superiors to kill someone. He just heard the mention of someone’s name, followed by the comment, “He has to go.” It was a no-brainer to fill in the blanks. There had once been talk that Jimmy Luppino had brokered a truce with the Rizzutos in the early 1980s in order to spare the male children of the murdered Violi brothers. Even if that had once been true, it was safe to say that all deals were now off.

  Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto remained Vito’s point man in Toronto, a position that required street sense, toughness, loyalty and a sense of criminal enterprise. His crew included a man nicknamed “Spiderman,” whose mother had an ongoing affair with Vito. Spiderman worked out hard to improve his gymnastic skills so that he could be a better burglar. There was also gym owner Constantine (Big Gus) Alevizos, a former pro football player who stood six foot six, tipped the scales on the portly side of 450 pounds and had “Big Kahuna” tattooed across his back. Panepinto’s crew smuggled marijuana, manufactured ecstasy tablets and peddled the date-rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), anabolic steroids, stolen painkillers and magic mushrooms. They made up bogus credit cards, which they used to buy products for resale on the black market. Common to members of Panepinto’s group was an affection for the gym and steroids, and also a closeness to local biker clubs, including the independent Toronto-based Vagabonds.

  Panepinto’s connection to Vito didn’t scare off members of the Ontario ’Ndrangheta, particularly Domenic Napoli, Antonio Oppedisano and Salvatore (Sam) Calautti. Napoli and Oppedisano were both recent arrivals from Siderno, where Napoli had been part of a hit team for boss Cosimo (The Quail) Commisso. For a time in Ontario, Calautti and Napoli were roommates, and even when they found separate places, they rem
ained good friends.

  Calautti wasn’t a physical presence like Panepinto, but out-of-shape mobsters are sometimes the most dangerous, as they are the most likely to start shooting when threatened or irritated. Despite his pudgy, short frame, Calautti commanded fear. Restaurant suppliers dreaded dealing with him, as he would often simply refuse to pay his accounts. At least once, he put a gun on the table to intimidate. “You don’t have to be a juice monkey to be a gangster,” said a police officer who knew him. “He loved inflicting pain on people and people knew it.”

  Calautti fell under suspicion in January 1996 when someone lured Toronto baker Frank Loiero from a Sunday family dinner. Thirty minutes later, passersby found Loiero’s bullet-riddled body hanging out of a broken side window of his van, which was parked in the deserted Woodbridge Mall. Loiero had been seated in the back and was shot multiple times at close range with a semi-automatic handgun. On the dead man, police found about $5,000 in cash, a $10,000 ring and a Rolex watch estimated to be worth as much as $25,000. He was also wearing a gold bracelet and necklace. Clearly, this was not a robbery. There were whispers that Loiero, who supplied guns and cars for the mob, had been speaking with police.

  Oppedisano and Napoli infuriated Panepinto by cutting into what he considered his video-gambling territory in York Region. In March 2000, the ’Ndrangheta men simply vanished. Rumours circulated that they had been cut up and their remains destroyed in the basement of Panepinto’s casket business on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto’s Corso Italia, but the building was too clean for police to pull traces for DNA tests. Meanwhile, Panepinto quietly relocated to Montreal to get away from the heat and closer to Vito.

  Within weeks, dour-faced ’Ndrangheta men from southern Italy came calling for Vito in Montreal, asking blunt questions about their missing relatives. Did Vito know anything about them? Had he ordered their murders? The people asking the questions were serious men and they expected satisfaction. Panepinto was now a liability for Vito. When the Calabrians left, Vito summoned him for a meeting, which ended with Vito reassuring Panepinto that it was safe for him to go home. Panepinto apparently trusted his boss with his life, and he returned to Toronto.