On Friday, December 14, a masked gunman burst into the Café Domenica-In next to the Métropolitain highway at mid-afternoon. When he left, thirty-seven-year-old Domenic Facchini lay dead from a gunshot to his head. Another man fled to the nearby Montreal Choppers motorcycle store, bleeding from a non-fatal shot to his neck. Montreal Choppers was the old business of the aggrieved former Rizzuto soldier Ponytail De Vito, who was now in prison for cocaine smuggling.
At 10 a.m. on Monday, December 17, gunmen arrived for the real Giuseppe Fetta. This time there was no mistake. He was dropped by shots to the legs and throat as he stepped out of his car on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, and died close to where his look-alike Gensale had been cut down.
Police responded to the wave of violence with a handful of arrests and a whole lot of theories. Among them, authorities speculated that ’Ndrangheta members from Toronto and Violi’s hometown of Hamilton were involved in some of the trigger pulling. There was so much to ponder: Was New York still interested in tightening its ties to Montreal? The Bonanno family still had a pulse, albeit a weak one. Was the murder of Agostino Cuntrera the death knell of the old Sicilian-born, Rizzuto–Caruana–Cuntrera alliance that had fended off the Bonannos in the past?
As the body count grew, Vito’s war became something of a public spectator sport, but it was hard for anyone but an insider to keep score. Twenty Montreal mobsters had been shot dead over the past thirteen months and there was no sign of a slowdown. If the war spread to Ontario, police and other observers could finger at least a dozen more prime candidates for assassination. For those in the know, Vito was ahead in the body count, but not by much. And still, no one had reported seeing the godfather himself since he’d shaken police and journalists the night of his arrival in Toronto.
Throughout the year before Vito’s return, as gangsters were killing and getting killed, Montreal police had the unsettling feeling that someone from their own ranks was trying to profit from the bloodshed. Word sifted out that a list of two thousand confidential informants was being shopped around the underworld for one million dollars. Considering the damage that list could do, the asking price was a bargain.
Retired Detective Sergeant Ian Davidson heard that the mole’s name would be made public in the press on January 18, 2012. Davidson, a twice-divorced former criminal intelligence specialist, had recently left the force after thirty-three years’ service with an unblemished record. Upon hearing the news, he left his home in Laval’s quiet Sainte-Rose district and took a hotel room. He then texted his wife, “This is the end.” Next, he swallowed the antidepressant trazodone as well as lorazepam, which treats anxiety and insomnia, and climbed into a warm bath. There he opened a vein and added his name to the list of victims in the underworld carnage.
Four months later, major crimes investigator Mario Lambert was found guilty of committing fraud by accessing a police database and funnelling information to mobsters. The veteran officer was caught in an elaborate sting, which included planting fake licence plate numbers into the system. For this, Lambert received three months’ house arrest and a year’s probation.
The first verified public sighting of Vito came in January 2013, more than three months after his return to Canada. It was as though he wanted to be seen as he strode through Dorval airport in Montreal, heading for a vacation in the sun. Pumped up and fit, Vito looked like a man who could handle a fight as well as a challenging round of golf. He often smoked, but there was no cigarette in his hands that day. Plainclothes police officers watched from a distance as he walked to the gate for a 5:30 a.m. flight to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. In an apparent show of nonchalance, the sportif mobster had no bodyguards in sight.
The Dominican had long been a comfortable spot for Vito, even before Quebec Hells Angels set up a charter there. On January 3, 2003, he had flown to the island nation for a fairway vacation at Casa de Campo seaside resort that included Compare Frank Arcadi, Paolo Renda and Joe Di Maulo. The resort had three golf courses, the best of which was the world-class Diente de Perro, “Teeth of the Dog.” It was at that resort where Vito told Arcadi why he was avoiding setting foot in the United States, alluding to the Three Captains Murders. His description of the slaughter was a detailed one, mostly in an Italian dialect, with a few words of English. Vito described blood splashed all over the Brooklyn social club as Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip (Philly Lucky) Giaccone and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera fell dead. Vito and Arcadi had no clue that the room in which they spoke had been bugged by Dominican police, at the request of the RCMP. Vito’s January 2013 visit was also to Casa de Campo, suggesting he either didn’t know he had earlier been recorded there or had sorted out the security problem.
While Vito was sunning himself, at least some Montreal assassins stayed home and worked through the cold spell. At suppertime on Tuesday, January 22, on the coldest night of the year, a video camera outside the Jean-Tavernier Street home of sixty-nine-year-old Gaétan Gosselin in the Mercier district captured his image as he stepped from his car. The high-resolution camera then picked up two men opening fire upon him before he reached the door of his home. Were the killers too stupid to know they were being filmed? Or were they so brazen about their craft that they didn’t care?
Vito resurfaced in Montreal ten days after his departure, looking sporty and buff in jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Again there were no bodyguards in sight and again he looked as relaxed as anyone in the centre of a mob war could possibly be. He dragged his own suitcase while Giovanna shot an exasperated look at a team of La Presse journalists.
As Vito stepped back into the chill of Montreal, mourners paid their condolences to Gosselin’s family. While he had no criminal record, there was no doubt where he had stood in the city’s underworld: deep inside the camp of Raynald Desjardins. The murdered man had once been related to Desjardins through marriage and lived in a building owned by a Desjardins relative. He had been considered Desjardins’s representative at the Blue Bonnets Raceway. Most interestingly, the Montreal Gazette revealed that after his release from prison in 2004, Desjardins ran a construction company, the majority shareholder of which was a numbered company. The president of that numbered company? Gosselin.
The murder came just months after the slaying of Joe Di Maulo, another Desjardins relative. Gosselin’s obituary noted that he was survived by family and friends “but especially his best friend forever, Raynald Desjardins.” The optics of taking down a man who declared Desjardins his BFF couldn’t have been more poignant. For someone who had been written off as a dead man walking, Vito now looked surprisingly alive and dangerous.
In their search for Gosselin’s hit men, police investigators soon zeroed in on the Reds street gang. The Reds were believed to operate under the umbrella of the Syndicate, especially since the murders of leader Chénier (Big) Dupuy and his lieutenant, Lamartine Sévère Paul, on August 11, 2012. The widely accepted explanation for their murders was that they had refused to be part of the Syndicate, with its Hells Angels and mob ties and control of the city centre. Such a move towards consolidation would help pave the way for Vito’s resumption of control on the streets.
The investigation pointed to a thirty-three-year-old known on the streets alternately as Dirty Harry and Harry Up. His real name was Harry Mytil. His criminal history included a three-year prison sentence for his role in a 2003 home invasion in the Vieux-Longueuil condo of a defence lawyer. He had also been convicted for the gunpoint robbery of a drug dealer, with charges pending for reckless driving and failing to stop at the scene of an accident. He appeared to have acted as a talent scout in the Gosselin murder, picking the hit men and paying them. Before police could move on Harry and his associates, they were called to his Laval home on April 16, where they found his body sprawled in his garage, pockmarked by several bullet holes. The door of the garage was still open. If there were links between Harry and Vito, they were suddenly as cold as the night Gosselin was murdered.
CHAPTER 39
Public spotlight
The Charbonneau Commission soldiered on, reputations and occasionally people falling dead along the way. Few people in the general public knew of Robert Rousseau, head of the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough department of permits and inspections, until he sat under the bright lights of the inquiry. He was interrogated for hours in March 2013 by Quebec’s anti-corruption unit about the construction of condos on Wilson Avenue by Tony Magi and Nick Rizzuto Jr., near the spot where Nick Jr. was murdered. He faced pointed questions about zoning changes, and also about a demolition permit approved by Rousseau for the site. Hours after the probing ended, the father of two children killed himself in his Châteauguay home.
That March, the city was faced with a difficult decision. After the snow and ice of a Montreal winter, plenty of potholes needed repair, but there were few companies with clean reputations to fill them. Mayor Michael Applebaum announced that the city had qualms about granting $5.2 million in road repair contracts to seven companies when at least three of them were accused of corruption at the Charbonneau Commission.
Giuseppe Borsellino knew plenty about how business got done in the world of Quebec construction. As president of Garnier Construction, his company had won millions of dollars in public infrastructure contracts. As he told the Charbonneau Commission, city works engineer Gilles Surprenant was the prime mover in the wave of slime that coated the industry. Borsellino argued that the contractors were the victims and not the villains in the drama. The commission heard that Borsellino and two other major construction bosses paid the city thousands of dollars in cash from the 1990s on for what Borsellino called “tips.”
“What I didn’t like is the power that those people [at the city] had acquired,” Borsellino said. “It became apparent that [the contractors] were in a system we couldn’t get out of.”
Justice Charbonneau wasn’t impressed, saying “there are limits” to her credulity. “So you’re telling me the great mastermind of all of this was Gilles Surprenant, when he was thirty years old?” Charbonneau asked.
“Yes,” Borsellino replied.
Asked to comment on why he attended a Rizzuto family wedding, Borsellino told the commission that his parents were from Cattolica Eraclea, the same village as the Rizzutos. He explained that he didn’t go to Rizzuto family events as a general practice. If he did attend the wedding of one of Vito’s sons, it was probably after he was invited by the bride’s family. Who could be sure of such things? “I think I was invited to one of the weddings,” he said. “But I’m still not sure. And I knew it coming here, that maybe if we get to that, I wouldn’t be able to confirm. But probably was invited to one wedding. And it’s probably because the bride, I knew the parents of the bride. But I’m still not sure. And I’m not sure if I went.”
Borsellino found conviction when speaking in more general terms about the mob, testifying that he had never had any business dealings with anyone associated with organized crime. “I’d rather hand over the keys to my business” than pay the Mafia, he said. “My parents came from Sicily,” Borsellino continued. “[The Mafia is] something you hear about, you feel … it’s never clear.”
Perhaps the most interesting part of his testimony concerned a 2009 beating from three men that forced him to undergo seven hours of facial reconstruction surgery. Borsellino said he wasn’t sure about the motive behind the attack, although it might have been for a construction project or unpaid debts. He admitted he did not report the assault to police.
Prosecutor Simon Tremblay offered two theories of his own to explain the pummelling. One was that Borsellino’s actions might have forced a top official in the city’s public works department to resign, when it was learned that Borsellino had paid the official’s way to Italy. The second hypothesis was that Borsellino didn’t pick Raynald Desjardins’s firm, Énergie Carboneutre, for decontamination work at one of his construction sites. Domenico Arcuri Jr. also had an ownership share in the company.
For his part, Borsellino wasn’t able to clarify anything further about the beating. He did say he had once been a political contributor, but halted his donations in the late 2000s.
“It was not ethical,” he explained.
Accountant Frank Zampino spent twenty-two years in municipal politics, rising to become executive committee chairman under ex–Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay. That made him the second most powerful official in Montreal’s civic government. Before this, he had been mayor of Saint-Léonard. In the course of his mayoral functions, he was invited to some fifty weddings a year and attended many of them, including the July 6, 1991, union of the son of Frank Cotroni to the daughter of Joe Di Maulo. “It wasn’t the most brilliant decision of the century to go to the marriage,” he testified. “Perceptions are worth more than facts in politics.” Commission prosecutor Sonia LeBel asked if he could recall a photo being taken of himself with Vito Rizzuto. Zampino replied that he did not know.
The commission’s mandate didn’t include a foray into federal corruption. National NDP leader Tom Mulcair told reporters of a conversation with police back in 1994 after someone tried to slip him a suspicious-looking envelope following a meeting between himself and Gilles Vaillancourt. At the time, Mulcair was a rookie provincial politician and Vaillancourt was five years into his six-term career as mayor of Laval, the municipality across the Rivière des Prairies from Montreal.
By the time Mulcair went public about the incident, in 2013, Vaillancourt was facing a dozen criminal charges, including influence peddling, breach of trust and gangsterism for directing a criminal organization. He had resigned after twenty-three years as mayor of Laval, pledging to devote his energies to proving his innocence. By May 2013, the City of Laval was placed under a trusteeship in hopes it would help contain the political mess.
Shocking as all this was, none of these public grillings and confessions felt like the inquiry’s main event. Desjardins and Vito were still expected to take the witness stand. The inquisition was far from over.
CHAPTER 40
Non-stop hits
Going home for supper was now a life-threatening activity in the milieu. Everyone seemed a little quicker to settle things with a gun. Saint-Léonard neighbours of Vincenzo (Vincent) Scuderi called 911 at 6:10 p.m. on January 31, 2013, after hearing a volley of shots outside his home on Robert Boulevard. Police arrived to find a handgun beside the forty-nine-year-old’s lifeless body on the sidewalk. He had ties to Ponytail De Vito, Raynald Desjardins and Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, suggesting his killer might be from Vito’s camp.
Scuderi’s old associates needed less than a day to respond. At 10:10 a.m. on February 1, fifty-one-year-old residential building contractor Tonino (Tony) Callocchia was felled by gunshots in a parking lot between two restaurants on Saint-Martin Boulevard West in Laval. Callocchia’s history with Vito’s group ran deep. He was busted in massive cocaine-smuggling and money-laundering cases in the 1990s by the RCMP. “You have … been identified on several occasions as an active member of the Italian Mafia,” his parole hearing panel wrote him in 2001. “The offences you have … committed are large-scale and they required organization and planning at a level that only a highly organized group can hope to execute.”
Good luck spared Callocchia’s life that day in the parking lot. Bleeding heavily from several bullets to the torso, Callocchia managed to stagger into a restaurant. The gunman chose to drive away rather than venture inside and finish the job. There would be plenty more chances.
As the bodies continued to drop, Vito seemed to be pulling ahead in the undeclared Mafia war. Secretly bunkered still in his downtown Montreal condominium, he ventured out only in the company of guards and rode in his armoured car, nothing like the lithe and open Ferrari he sometimes drove in the salad days of the early 1990s. As a possible omen of good fortune, someone finally made an offer to purchase Vito’s Mafia Row mansion in March 2013, almost two years after it went on the market. The offer was for $1.275 million, and it sold for almost three-qu
arters of a million under the original price. The new buyer would be a pioneer of sorts for Mafia Row, as listing broker Leon Derestepanian noted to the press that they were from a large family without organized crime connections. The Montreal Gazette had fun with the story, headlining it, THE OFFER VITO RIZZUTO COULDN’T REFUSE. Reporter Allison Lampert’s account began, “Vito Rizzuto’s former home in Ahuntsic has finally sold, but it appears the reputed Montreal crime boss has taken a hit.”
Some members of the ’Ndrangheta in Ontario now quietly pined for the big money they used to make while working with Vito in the 1990s and early 2000s. So much blood had been spilled; whatever opportunity had once tempted them was now long gone, replaced by loss and confusion. Baker Moreno Gallo was an exile of sorts in Acapulco, where a friend owned a hotel, and where he was close to other significant Calabrians in the underworld. His wife and sons had never left Montreal, even though he had sold his $1.2-million home, and he retained construction interests in the city. While Acapulco was warm and exciting, Gallo remained a Montrealer at heart, and a homesick one at that.
He filed papers in May 2013 with the Canadian immigration board, arguing he had a right to be in the country even if he wasn’t a citizen. He still had resident status, and he argued that this meant authorities didn’t have the right to push for his expulsion. He further argued that it wasn’t fair for him to be deported for serious criminality, since the murder for which he was convicted was committed before the Immigration Act was revised in 1978. His application included a letter of support from the Mammola Recreation Association, a six-hundred-member group of Montrealers of Calabrian background. Included in his appeal package was an affidavit from the association’s president, Francesco Ierfino, praising the frequency and generosity of his charitable donations. Like Vito and Di Maulo, Gallo had a civicminded side and his largesse included financial support for the Montreal Children’s Foundation, the Breast Cancer Foundation of Maisonneuve, the Rosemont hospital and the Canadian Multiple Sclerosis Association.
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