When the din of stories on corruption became too loud to ignore, an inquiry was called to expose connections between the mob, politics and business. Appointed to the helm of this latest tour of underworld sludge was Quebec Superior Court justice France Charbonneau, a hard-working, highly competent legal bulldog best known as the Crown prosecutor who put Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher behind bars for murder. His was one of some eighty murder cases she had prosecuted, with sometimes ferocious zeal. She was also durable. During the eighteen-month Boucher trial, she took only five days off. This time she was given a two-year mandate to expose corruption that had taken generations to put in place.
One might have expected the RCMP to welcome such an inquiry, especially considering the relatively limp results of its multi-million-dollar, four-year Colisée operation against Vito’s family. However, when Charbonneau’s staff requested voluminous tapes from the RCMP, they were met with a tough, taxpayer-funded fight. Among its many lines of legal reasoning, the RCMP argued that it had gathered some 1.5 million wiretap intercepts and 35,000 hours of video and prepared numerous reports as a federal agency, and shouldn’t therefore be obliged to comply with a provincial inquiry. The commission ultimately won the right to play the intercepts, but only after subpoenaing the police documents and using more taxpayers’ money to fight for them in court. Criminals clearly weren’t the only ones prone to infighting at the public’s expense.
Generations of mobsters had survived similar inquiries, but Vito recognized the danger he faced. The crime commission of the 1970s had helped set the stage for his father’s usurping of Violi’s place at the top of Montreal’s underworld. Now, the public was about to hear and see secret recordings from the old ground zero of Vito’s family, the Consenza Social Club. Vito might even be called to testify.
There were limits to the inquiry’s scope. It couldn’t deal with federal matters and it only reached back fifteen years, meaning it wouldn’t look into the Rizzuto family’s activities in the 1950s and 1960s. Nicolò had listed his occupation in 1956 as “cement contractor” when buying his fourplex on De Lorimier Avenue. The apparent success of his Grand Royal Asphalt Paving seemed at odds with the much smaller number of government contracts for things like sidewalk and sewer repairs in those years.
Linda Gyulai of the Montreal Gazette dug up records that showed Nicolò managed to set up five construction-related companies between 1962 and 1972, often with underworld associates and relatives. In September 1966, Nicolò and his half-brother Liborio Milioto were officials with Franco Electric Inc., even though they had no background whatsoever in electrics. By 1972, Nicolò was an official with D.M. Transport with his uncle Domenico Manno and Joseph Lo Presti. Manno was also an officer in four of Nicolò’s other construction companies. Nicolò’s construction activities slowed down but didn’t cease in 1972, when he relocated in Venezuela.
With its limits in time and scope, the enormously ambitious Charbonneau Commission wasted no time in getting to the point. Hearings opened with Duchesneau saying as a witness what many suspected: Quebec politics are financed by criminal proceeds. “Dirty money finances elections,” Duchesneau told Charbonneau. “This clandestine empire I’m talking about comprises links between the construction world and the illegal financing of political parties,” he continued. “According to the testimony [we gathered], we have before us a widespread and brazen culture of kickbacks.”
The former police chief described a corrupt system in which political organizers solicited money from engineering firms, who in turn pumped up their invoices and passed the added costs on to the public. As Duscheneau described the scheme, the mob was a silent partner, demanding pizzo, or protection money, from a select circle of just over a dozen construction firms.
Among the inquiry’s early witnesses was Detective Constable Mike Amato of York Regional Police, whose jurisdiction included Woodbridge, Ontario. In carefully measured comments, the veteran officer told the inquiry that ’Ndrangheta crime families originating in Italy’s Calabrian region dominate the Ontario mob landscape, while Quebec has been largely under Sicilian families. He added that, in the Toronto area, the ’Ndrangheta and Sicilian groups seem to coexist more easily, sometimes even helping each other. “Obviously, at times there’s conflicts,” Amato said. “There’s murder. There’s violence. There’s bombings.” For the most part, however, Ontario preferred to keep its corruption buttoned down and behind closed doors.
Still, the province had secrets that would have no doubt elicited colourful disgust from the late novelist Martin Brett. In the late 1970s, county court judge Harry Waisberg wrote a Royal Commission report on violence in the province’s construction industry. It described the strafing of a North York construction company office with a machine gun, arson and plenty of bribery. The report also spoke of a meeting between industry executives, some with strong political connections, and an “array of sinister characters,” including Toronto mobster Paul Volpe, who was later murdered and dumped in the trunk of his wife’s leased BMW at Toronto International Airport. Waisberg’s report inspired a brief flurry of headlines and then it was back to business as usual.
At the Charbonneau inquiry, Amato’s comments buttressed those of Italian scholar Valentina Tenti, who earlier told the commission that Mafia organizations around the world have infiltrated legitimate business. The commission heard that Ontario mobsters work as restaurateurs, trucking company executives, construction entrepreneurs, lawyers and accountants, and run banquet halls, nightclubs and garden centres, among other things. “They don’t want us to know about their legitimate businesses; they don’t want us to know about their wealth; they don’t want us to know about interaction in public life,” Amato said. “… There are persons who are criminals, who are suspects in murders.… They’re integrated into the community and most people don’t even know who they are.”
They also donate to charity, raise money for political parties and take part in community services. “It legitimizes your own persona,” Amato said. “It legitimizes your criminal past. It’s almost like absolving your sins.” Amato balked when asked about Ontario Mafia groups winning government contracts. “That question there is too close to something that we are working on right now,” Amato said. He certainly didn’t dismiss the question. It was a well-accepted truism that Mafia figures are only as powerful as their links to so-called respectable society. “If you accept that [the Mafia] exists, you have to accept that public corruption exists,” Amato said.
The commission heard that mobsters had been able to fly under the radar in Ontario because violence is kept to a minimum. “If there is numerous murders, if there’s a lot of violence, if there is a lot of bombings, it attracts attention. It attracts attention from politicians, it attracts attention from the community, it attracts attention from the police,” Amato said. “You cannot build a successful criminal enterprise if you are continually being investigated and monitored by the police. If you stay under the radar, you are going to expand.”
While the Charbonneau Commission was generating daily headlines about corruption, Montreal police quietly moved to stem Vito’s influence within their own ranks. In November 2012, just a month after Vito’s return, at least two Montreal officers were fired for leaking sensitive information to the Mafia. In the months that followed, leaks of information to Vito’s group continued, as there were clearly many moles inside the police force.
Towards the end of 2012, the public learned that the excitement from the witness stand had only just begun. Raynald Desjardins would be compelled to testify at the inquiry, despite his pending murder charges for the Montagna killing. And in a move that promised both headlines and security nightmares, Vito had been subpoenaed to testify. Unless something drastic happened, Vito was going to move from well below radar to the full glare of a public spotlight.
Inquiry lawyers would want to probe him on his deep and central role in construction corruption. It was a complex and deeply entrenched system, which pre
dated Vito, though he protected and refined it. If he took the stand, he would certainly face questions about how he seemed to control family interests, even while in custody. Lawyers would like to know how firm his grip was on a $10-billion union investment fund, but their questions would probe far beyond unions, through bureaucrats to politicians. Vito’s hands were everywhere on the wheels of corruption, and all of this would be up for discussion if he took the stand.
Vito himself had other things on his mind—namely revenge—but he could not take the subpoena lightly if he hoped to avoid returning to jail. Paolo Violi’s refusal to testify in the 1970s hearings had meant prison, and Vito had already been away from his empire for too long. He would have to say enough to satisfy the bulldog Charbonneau but not so much that his world was overturned. Even for a man with Vito’s finesse, it would require the performance of a lifetime. If anyone was nervous about what Vito might say, this was the time to silence him forever.
CHAPTER 37
Trusted few
At seventy-nine years of age, Domenico Manno was a well-seasoned Mafia artifact, with a massive skull, the body of a fridge and the pained expression of a constipated elderly bull. Wrinkled and creaking as he was, he was still the younger brother of Zia Libertina and beneath her in the family pecking order. Their Mafioso father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, had been trying to immigrate to Canada for a decade before he finally arrived on September 11, 1964. Don Nino lived in Montreal until his death by natural causes on October 1, 1980, at the age of seventy-six. He was entombed in a mausoleum alongside his wife, Giuseppa Cammalleri Manno, and their daughter Giuseppina Manno, younger sister of Libertina and Domenico Manno.
In the minds of many involved in law enforcement and law-breaking, Domenico Manno would always be connected to the hit that changed the Montreal underworld forever. Manno was present when a call was placed to his brother-in-law Nicolò Rizzuto from Montreal hours before Paolo Violi was killed in a card game in his old ice cream shop. In the telephone message, Nicolò was told, “The hunting has begun.” Hours later, just after Violi’s death, Manno was also present in the ice cream shop when another call south was made, saying, “The pig is dead.”
For his role in the Paolo Violi murder, Domenico Manno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, along with Agostino Cuntrera and Giovanni Di Mora. The identity of the man who pulled the trigger of the lupara was never disclosed, and no one publicly dragged the names of Nicolò or Vito into the proceedings. On the stand, Manno was the very personification of omertà. When a prosecutor pressed him about the murder, he replied: “I don’t remember.” Pushed further, he said, “I don’t remember, I don’t remember,” just in case the first lie wasn’t enough. All he could remember, he said, was having a cup of coffee and buying cigarettes in the café where Violi was slain, hours before the murder.
Manno’s wife was the sister of Joe Lo Presti’s wife, making him the uncle of the recently murdered Larry Lo Presti. If Manno held a grudge against Vito for his presumed role in that murder, it didn’t show. These uncomfortable things occasionally happened in this life they led. Like the senior Lo Presti, Manno was also heavily involved in the drug trade. He pleaded guilty in Florida in 1998 to plots to traffic heroin, cocaine and counterfeit money, which included an effort to smuggle twenty kilos of cocaine into Florida in a suitcase on a commercial flight. For this, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
As he prepared to leave Fort Dix prison in New Jersey for Montreal in December 2012, Manno must have contemplated the fates of the cadre of killers behind the murders of the Violi brothers. It seemed that a time of reckoning had fallen upon them. Agostino Cuntrera, Paolo Renda and Domenico Arcuri Sr. had each played a role in Violi’s murder, and now they were each murdered or abducted or dead under odd circumstances. And of course Nicolò Rizzuto, long understood to be the invisible hand guiding the Violi execution, was murdered most infamously of all.
Manno looked hulking and threatening back at the time of the Paolo Violi murder, with sweeping sideburns and long black trench coat to give him the full disco-era hit man look. He returned to Montreal a lumbering old man, but age wasn’t much of a concern in the mob.
In late December 2012, word came that another senior citizen might join Vito’s ranks. Seventy-five-year-old Pierino Divito was also expected to return from an American prison. Divito had been arrested in 1994 in Nova Scotia for drug smuggling and later extradited to a Texas prison. Times were tense and Vito could sorely use all the men he could trust, even if they were a tad long in the tooth.
Meanwhile, in the courts, the foundation of the prosecution’s case against Raynald Desjardins, Vittorio (Victor) Mirarchi and others charged for the murder of Bonanno crime boss Salvatore Montagna was something entirely unprecedented: encrypted BlackBerry messages.
One of the first clues that the case was travelling through uncharted territory came when Quebec Court judge Maurice Parent made the unprecedented decision to deny Desjardins access to some of the evidence against him in the Montagna murder case. Sealed documents in the Joliette courthouse included an affidavit and wiretap warrants used to intercept communications between the suspects. Federal prosecutor Yvan Poulin cryptically said it was in the public interest to keep the documents about the intercepted messages totally secret. “Read the authorization [for the warrants] in your office,” Poulin told the judge. “It speaks for itself.… I can’t say anything more about it.… This is an exceptional case.”
A publication ban blocked the media from reporting the contents of intercepted BlackBerry messages. It was thought that the messages in question were sent by plotters before, during and after Montagna’s murder in November 2011 on Île Vaudry. In short, the prosecution was building its case in large part on the surveillance of Montagna conducted by a murdered underworld spy: Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle.
It wasn’t totally unprecedented for BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion to comply with search warrants. After a case in Pakistan, RIM issued a statement saying: “Like others in our industry, from time to time, we may receive requests from legal authorities for lawful access assistance.” The statement added: “We are guided by appropriate legal processes and publicly disclosed lawful access principles in this regard, as we balance any such requests against our priority of maintaining the privacy rights of our users.” By the time of the news release, some criminals had already moved on to messaging systems such as WhatsApp and Viber, the latter trading on ultrasecurity and boasting on its website that “Not even the staff at Viber have access to your data with UltraSafe enabled.” There was also the Dark Web, or the Deep Web, which allowed communicators to burrow deep between the layers of the conventional Net, paying their way into exclusive, uncharted cyber tunnels.
It was looking as if Desjardins’s trial for the Montagna murder would take place in the spring of 2013. No one expected public outrage if he managed to plea bargain. There had been minimal public response to Vito’s relatively light sentence for his role in three gangland assassinations. The victim in the case was a major organized crime figure and a prime suspect in the failed hit on the accused. Who besides Montagna’s wife, three daughters and mistress really mourned his death? Even the Bonanno family showed no sign that it was upset over the assassination of its leader.
It’s a time-honoured tactic for mobsters like Desjardins to argue self-defence after killing another criminal. Desjardins could make this argument quite strongly after the failed attempt on his life. And if Desjardins played along and cut a deal of his own, the public also wouldn’t hear embarrassing disclosure about the underworld’s relations with the politically connected business people whom Montagna had tried to squeeze a little too hard. He had made plenty of money extorting businesses in New York, but he wasn’t in tune with the climate of Montreal’s milieu. Montagna hadn’t just broken the law; he had upset the finely tuned balance between mobsters, politicians and business. There had been many reasons to kill him.
CHAPTER 38
BFF
Bodies had kept falling that autumn, like leaves from the trees. On November 15, 2012, Montrealer Tony Gensale was shot dead leaving a martial arts class in what might have been a case of mistaken identity. He bore a dangerous physical resemblance to tough guy Giuseppe Fetta from the Arcadi faction of Vito’s family. Not just targeted mobsters were in danger now, but their look-alikes too.
Fetta was just the kind of soldier Vito needed. At thirty-three, he was a battle-tested fitness and firearms enthusiast. He weathered an attack in an east Montreal jail while awaiting Project Colisée charges. In that confrontation, he was stabbed with box cutters and plastic knives and still managed to break a leg of one of his attackers.
On November 17, a gunman opened fire on Mohammed Awada in front of his north Montreal house. With that, another tough guy was suddenly gone from Vito’s ranks, although there was a good chance that Awada’s slaying wasn’t directly linked to Vito’s war. More likely, his death was a settling of old scores. That sort of thing happens often during an underworld war, as it’s easier to hide murders with personal motives when everyone is focused on the bigger picture. There was also no one like Joe Di Maulo, Moreno Gallo or Vito on the streets now to peacefully mediate mid-level disputes.
Whoever ended the life of restaurant owner Emilio Cordileone on December 8 clearly wanted to make a statement. His bullet-riddled body was transported to his street in Ahuntsic and left there inside his white Range Rover. He had once been close to Vito, but he was even closer to Joe Di Maulo. If he was killed by Vito’s men for his association with Di Maulo, he received a token of forgiveness, as he was buried out of Complexe Funéraire Loreto.
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