The talk took place a few days after Desjardins was arrested for murdering Salvatore Montagna, so naturally the topic of his brother-in-law was inescapable. Di Maulo wasn’t about to step away from Desjardins, even though he would be one of the men in Vito’s sights now. “Raynald Desjardins, he is my family and I cannot deny him,” Di Maulo told Renaud. “He is still my brother.” Di Maulo then continued, in French, to talk about how he felt about his own security. Di Maulo was thinking of his place in underworld history as he continued: “I’m seventy years old, and there are people who are seventy-five years old and should be afraid for their lives, crossing the street. They could get hit by a bus and die. I do not have bodyguards and I do not look behind me when I walk in the street. I walk with my conscience, and my conscience is clean.”
There was talk in the milieu about Di Maulo receiving several visits in 2010 from a Hamilton Mafia family that hated the Rizzutos. Vito most likely was angered when he heard of this. Around the time Vito stepped back into Canada, police warned Di Maulo that his life was in danger, much as Paolo Violi had been warned before his murder a generation earlier. Di Maulo apparently responded just like Violi, with a shrug. When was a man in his milieu not in some danger? It was like asking when a fish was not wet. He wasn’t about to run from his luxury home in suburban Blainville, just a chip shot from a well-manicured, tranquil golf course. Di Maulo wasn’t a nervous man like Agostino Cuntrera, and eschewed armour-plated cars, bodyguards, bulletproof vests and thoughts of suicide, although he did refresh his weapons collection with what his brother-in-law liked to call a small “toy.” Di Maulo realized that if his enemies really wanted to kill him, they would do so. All he or the police could hope to do was postpone it. Death was inevitable, but death with dignity was still an option.
On November 4, 2012, no one reported hearing any gunshots outside the home of Joe Di Maulo as his body collapsed onto the driveway. Perhaps the gunman used a silencer, as Di Maulo was shot at least twice in the head. His wife, Huguette Desjardins, discovered her bleeding husband lying near his Cadillac Escalade. A neighbour said the first sound he heard from Di Maulo’s home that night was the widow’s screams, leading him at first to wonder if it was a heart attack. After Nicolò Rizzuto ’s murder at home, the businesslike conduct normally expected in mob slayings was clearly being set aside in favour of an intensely personal approach.
Smiling Joe’s murder incited comment from as high up the political ladder as Quebec’s public security minister, Stéphane Bergeron. He said police had been placed on high alert, as he didn’t want to see a repeat of the 1990s biker war. “We certainly want to avoid vigilante justice in the streets,” Bergeron told reporters. “When scores are settled, there’s a real danger of collateral victims.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Vito had been the one who would settle disputes to preserve the common interests of criminal enterprise and keep police at bay. It was Vito who urged Mom Boucher of the Hells Angels to talk with the Rock Machine in September 2000. That push came when Vito heard that tough anti-gang legislation was in the works, after the near-fatal shooting of reporter Michel Auger. Boucher met with leaders of the Rock Machine on neutral ground in a conference room at the Palais de Justice. Then they made their truce public by breaking bread in a crowded and trendy Crescent Street restaurant in the city’s downtown on October 8, 2000. The move was designed to quell public fears about organized criminals. Veteran crime reporter Claude Poirier and a photographer from the Quebec tabloid Allô Police were summoned to record the Thanksgiving feast that included Boucher and Rock Machine leader Frédéric Faucher, and about twenty of their lieutenants. Vito was the unseen hand behind the public relations move—but that was several lifetimes ago, and his place in the Montreal underworld had radically changed.
Smiling Joe Di Maulo had many friends, contacts and relatives, but the turnout for his funeral was poor. He would have understood their reluctance to step forward publicly. In uncertain times, funerals after mob hits are seldom well attended. Among those notably absent from Di Maulo’s funeral was Vito. More telling yet, Di Maulo’s visitation was not held at the Rizzutos’ upscale Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard. Vito’s family didn’t attend or send a wreath as a sign of respect. Flowery best wishes appeared in the form of a white wreath from Raynald Desjardins, who was in the Rivière des Prairies penitentiary. The Cotroni family sent flowers, as might be expected from in-laws. Di Maulo’s casket was open, so that mourners could see the rosary in his hands, and there were no signs of violence on the body. The undertaker had done his job as well as the hit man.
Mourners heard Di Maulo described as “a man of honour, a man of courage.” With no explicit mention of his role in the underworld, he was remembered as a lover of golf, wine and the music of Frank Sinatra. Others paid tribute to a man who gained respect “in the world of business, arts and politics.” Although Di Maulo had ties to the GTA, there were no out-of-province licence plates outside. When the service was almost over, Di Maulo’s widow, Huguette, and other close family members released white doves into the sky.
The Journal de Montréal reported talk that Di Maulo had been summoned to a meeting with Vito shortly before his death. Had this been Smiling Joe’s day of reckoning? Raynald Desjardins reportedly went into segregation in jail after his brother-in-law Di Maulo’s murder, but he was up to date on the news and clearly annoyed when some stories claimed that the Complexe Funéraire Loreto had flatly refused to deal with the Di Maulo family. That kind of speculation about tensions between Vito and Desjardins’s camp might excite fellow inmates and further endanger his life. After a request from Desjardins, a Loreto official sent out a public letter to say that Di Maulo’s family hadn’t asked to hold Di Maulo’s service at their establishment. There had been no snub from the funeral home. That still didn’t explain why no member of the Rizzuto camp—including Vito—attended the funeral. No explanation was needed, really, for those who understood Vito’s rage.
In fact, it was becoming impossible not to read dark motives into what otherwise might be considered accidents or coincidences. On October 8, 2012, seventy-nine year-old Domenico Arcuri Sr. dropped by to see how things were going at a Pompano Beach, Florida, construction site where his son, Domenico Jr., had been working as a subcontractor on a one-storey industrial garage for more than a week. Father and son lived in the same condominium development on the 4000 block of Galt Ocean Drive, Fort Lauderdale, as did a dozen Montreal-area construction and real estate business owners and their families.
As Domenico Jr. later told police, it was late in the morning and he went to retrieve something from his car. Before he reached the vehicle, he heard a crashing sound, turned and saw his father lying under the garage’s collapsed roof. After getting up, Domenico Sr. seemed his gamely self, even though he was seventy-nine, and claimed to have hurt only his shoulder. Domenico Jr. said that he decided to take his father to the hospital after he saw him turning pale and blood coming from the back of his neck. When an officer went to see him at North Broward Hospital, he was told to wait because the senior needed a CAT scan. Before the day was over, Domenico Sr. surprised hospital authorities by passing away.
It might have been considered a sad if somewhat commonplace death if not for Arcuri’s long-time criminal associations. Since August 17, three Montreal construction companies and an Italian ice cream company connected to the Arcuri family had been hit by arsonists. Domenico Arcuri Sr. had assumed control of the Ital Gelati ice cream firm after Paolo Violi’s murder in 1978. He had connections to both the Violi and Rizzuto sides in the murderous feud, and at one time was considered a potential peacemaker. For this, the Violi side ultimately considered him a traitor, as did Vito’s men.
Enterprising Montreal Gazette reporter Paul Cherry dug up the coroner’s report into Arcuri’s death, and it outlined reservations about whether or not the death was accidental. Rebecca MacDougall, associate medical examiner for Broward County, wrote in her report on the death that it w
as an accident, but “the context is worrisome.” MacDougall continued: “By report, the decedent was under a roof when the roof collapsed. Although the context of the death is worrisome, the manner of death, at this time, is best classified as accident. Should any probative information pertaining to this case become available, such information may be used to amend this report at that time.” The report didn’t elaborate on the context of the death. However, Domenico Jr. had been threatened in the month before the collapse.
Was it a coincidence that the dead man was the one who introduced Montagna to others in the milieu, setting in motion the decimation of Vito’s group while he was in prison? Was it also coincidental that, a generation earlier, he had helped lure Paolo Violi to the card game where he had been murdered? Or was it revenge, served stone cold?
CHAPTER 35
Friends in high places
Montreal has a long history of spirited efforts to shine light on its underworld. In 1909, a Royal Commission into municipal wrongdoing heard the head of the Light, Heat and Power Company testify that an alderman had leaned on him for ten thousand dollars in campaign contributions. Less than two decades later, Supreme Court of Canada justice Louis Codèrre conducted a probe of the city’s police force and found it sorely lacking. “Vice has spread itself across the city with an ugliness that seemed assured of impunity,” the justice concluded. The failed experiment with Prohibition only made things worse, enriching the underworld and semi-legitimizing it in the eyes of the public. During Prohibition days, the Montreal Customs House was used as a criminal terminal of sorts, where smugglers unloaded American tobacco, silks and narcotics to the point that a Crown attorney called it “one of the greatest clearing houses for stolen goods in Canada.” In the 1930s, French police ranked Montreal as the world’s third “most depraved” city, behind Port Said and Marseilles. Vic (The Egg) Cotroni was at the time a part-time professional wrestler who worked on “baseball bat elections,” mustering voters to support whatever candidates paid him.
Vito’s family hadn’t yet landed in Canada when crime-fighting prosecutor Pacifique (Pax) Plante probed corruption in Montreal’s municipal politics and police force with a Dick Tracy–like zeal during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In a series of articles written for Le Devoir with journalist Gérard Filion, Plante catalogued how police “protection” buttressed certain figures in the underworld. Future Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau was a junior member of Plante’s camp, as Plante’s crime-busting appealed to both the younger man’s puritanical streak and his political ambitions. Together, they gathered information that led to the arrests of several police officers.
Try as they might, their fevered efforts weren’t nearly enough to stem the river of sleaze. Martin Brett wrote in his potboiler novel Hot Freeze in 1954 about the enduring reach of the city’s organized crime establishment: “The Syndicate was probably the most subtle organization of its type in North America, tentacles reaching anywhere and everywhere, with pressure all the way.” Brett, the nom de plume of CBC Radio announcer (Ronald) Douglas Sanderson, described Montreal through the eyes of his protagonist, private detective Michel Garfin:
“It makes me puke,” I said savagely. “Look at it. An illuminated cross stuck up on the mountain, street after street full of the reverend clergy, a self-congratulatory city council, pious editorials in all the newspapers, and as much vice and aberration and corruption as any city this side of Port Said. One level stinking and the other level smirking, and in between a layer of supposed public servants trying to stuff their greasy pockets with graft. Oh sure, we have a vice probe every decade or so. It goes on and on, year after year, and then finally it peters out under the sheer dead weight of its own evasive evidence. A few honest officials are disgraced, a few more get eased gently out of their jobs, a couple of writs for slander are issued and settled out of court, and everyone sighs with relief and goes right back to smirking abnormal.”
That pretty much captured the tenor of things in the generations between the days of Pax Plante and Vito’s time. More huffing and puffing about cleaning up Canada’s underworld was heard in the mid-1960s, when the stench of corruption again became too rank. Some of this came from embarrassing revelations about the actions of long-time Montreal mobster Lucien (Moose) Rivard. His underworld contacts ran to Vic (The Egg) Cotroni’s younger brother Giuseppe (Pep) Cotroni and a network of Corsican heroin smugglers who later became known as the French Connection. Rivard also had strong Cuban criminal connections. In 1956, Rivard moved for a time to the island, working both the Communist and capitalist sides of the political spectrum as he supplied guns for Castro’s revolutionaries while also running a nightclub.
By March 1965, Rivard was in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison on fresh narcotics charges. He somehow managed to escape, after someone on staff let him outside onto the facility’s grounds and provided him with a garden hose to flood the skating rink. Suspicions naturally arose, as his ice-making duties took place on a warm spring day and the hose he was issued was strong enough to allow him to scale a jail wall. A jail employee told the Toronto Star that this could only be done with inside help, and that the going rate for such assistance was ten thousand dollars.
The press jumped on the story, dubbing Rivard the “Gallic Pimpernel.” Rivard basked in the attention, writing Prime Minister Lester Pearson from wherever he was hiding: “Life is short, you know. I don’t intend to be in jail for the rest of my life.” The full story was never disclosed, but a 1965 inquiry surprised no one when it concluded the justice department should have investigated reports that he tried to corrupt several key members of the Liberal Party.
Corruption remained a constant, and former Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was notorious for his relations with mobster Francesco D’Asti until Laporte was murdered by FLQ terrorists in 1970. In October 1974, Paolo Violi “invited” a political candidate to his ice cream shop, where he was successfully convinced that it would be best for all concerned if he abandoned his campaign to become mayor of Saint-Léonard.
Brett’s mid-century observations about the stinking, smirking nature of vice in Montreal, and its reliance on “a layer of supposed public servants trying to stuff their greasy pockets with graft,” rang true through the 1970s, when then Quebec premier Robert Bourassa called upon Robert Cliche to head up a public inquiry into construction violence. Cliche was assisted by thirty-six-year-old lawyer Brian Mulroney, a future prime minister of Canada. Cliche’s report, released in May 1975, spoke of “an organized system of corruption without parallel in North America,” with tales of ex-con union organizers who taught underlings how to break legs and goons willing to strangle the pets of people who stood in their way. Union leaders and cabinet ministers were discredited, as Cliche concluded that construction union corruption would not be so rife without active government support. Cliche’s final report contained a paragraph that was eerily reminiscent of Hot Freeze: “The work that this commission has done will matter little, even if the undesirables are purged from the positions they hold, even if the laws governing the construction sector are improved, if those who make the laws do not have the will to apply them and see that they are respected.”
Vito’s public profile was still low in the 1970s, when a parade of Montreal underworld figures was called to appear at another series of crime commission hearings. When Paolo Violi refused to testify, he was sentenced to a year in jail for contempt. Violi’s status was undermined by revelations that he had lowered his guard and inadvertently allowed undercover police officer Robert Menard to live above his ice cream parlour for years, secretly recording conversations of the mobsters downstairs. That created the opening Nicolò Rizzuto needed to move against him. The world of vice described so well by Brett survived the inquiry, but it did spell the beginning of the end for the Violi brothers. Small wonder that Nicolò had chosen the seventies to take his family to Venezuela, where he was close to his cocaine contacts in the Cuntrera family and far from the guns of his rival Violi and the s
potlight of the public inquiry.
Now, as Vito settled back into life in Canada in the fall of 2012, Quebec was awash in fresh stories of corruption. The revelations of a former Montreal chief of police and a series of investigative stories from Radio-Canada’s award-winning Enquête program set the stage for the public hand-wringing of yet another commission. The City of Montreal was awarding some $1.4 billion in contracts annually, providing plenty of opportunities for graft. Public confidence in the system was at a nadir. A Montreal Gazette reader wrote, with more than a little sarcasm, that perhaps Vito should run for mayor now that he was back in town:
Think of just some of the benefits:
No need for city councillors and the like; he has his own organization.
He has extensive experience with high finance.
He’s very familiar with Montreal’s infrastructure and construction needs.
There would no longer be a need for bribes, payoffs and the like; middlemen would be eliminated.
He might even give the blue collars’ union an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Essentially, I think Vito Rizzuto would run a much more efficient operation at city hall and probably save the taxpayers a pile of money in the process. What have we got to lose?
CHAPTER 36
Greasy pockets
Former Montreal police chief Jacques Duchesneau leaked a secret 2008 transport ministry report to the media, knowing it would change his life forever. The head of a government anti-collusion unit feared authorities wouldn’t act on it otherwise. The leaked Transport Canada study concluded this graft was costing taxpayers heavily. The bid rigging and protection money meant that it cost 37 percent more to build a kilometre of road in Quebec as compared with Ontario. The move cost Duchesneau his job but did attract attention. The province was also embarrassed when RCMP sergeant Lorie McDougall testified at a Mafia trial in Italy in 2010 and spoke of payments to the Mafia in the Quebec construction industry. He described how several firms in Quebec paid out a tithe of 5 percent of their contracts to the Mafia, as though it were another layer of government.
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