Fernandez sported a sparkling gold Rolex believed to have been given to him by Vito, back when he was known on the streets of Toronto as Johnny Bravo and his benefactor Vito valued business over revenge. The Spaniard opened up a karate dojo that doubled as a dance studio in his new town, but it would soon become clear that his passion remained crime.
CHAPTER 42
Man in the middle
Almost immediately after his arrival in Sicily, police overheard Fernandez talking about transactions involving “vitamins,” “loaves of bread,” “grandmothers,” “girls,” “illegal immigrants,” “snapshots,” “photos,” “kimonos” and “things.” All the references really meant OxyContin, or oxycodone, known on the streets as OC, Oxy and hillbilly heroin. Addicts crush it into a powder, then inject or snort it for a morphine-like buzz. In an effort to curb its sale on the black market, it was banned for sale in Canada in early 2012, but that only drove up the price of tablets to one hundred dollars on the streets. For drug traffickers with connections to unwitting or unscrupulous doctors, the ban was a godsend.
Police wiretaps recorded Fernandez talking to a Toronto man named Danny, who remained a close associate. Danny was someone you might want beside you in a dark alley, but you would never invite him to sit at the big table. He was the sort of cement head who would be sent into a business and wouldn’t bother to cover his face when punching out the owner. He was capable of home invasions, extortion and even murder, and if he was nabbed, he would keep his mouth shut and do his prison time like an old-school criminal. Once, he enlisted a guard to help out with his drug ring when he was serving time. He was just Fernandez’s type of guy.
In the fictional Godfather, the Bagheria mob boss owns local politicians. The reality wasn’t any prettier. Police listening in to the mobsters’ phones also heard how a regional mayor asked the Mafia for fifty votes. On October 17, 2012, they heard another politician paying three thousand euros to buy a package of votes in Bagheria, much like one might buy a herd of sheep.
Tapes also recorded talk of how Fernandez met with a Hamilton, Ontario, friend after the latter arrived in Sicily on October 27, 2012. He brought money with him for Fernandez, who had been buying bars and pizzerias around Bagheria. Each transfer from Canada totalled €999 to avoid anti–money laundering controls.
On October 31, at 8:36 a.m., Fernandez talked with his friend about contacting a doctor who could supply the pills. They also wanted the doctor to help them find an elderly patient to move the drugs to Canada. “Most older people, people over sixty years or so, no one looks at them,” the friend explained.
A bug in Fernandez’s BMW X5 SUV caught them on November 29 talking about Lorenzo Carbone going to Toronto for a week. Fernandez wanted to know if there had been checks at the Toronto airport about “things” on his possession. Carbone replied that it had been very superficial, with most of the questioning about whether he was transporting Parmesan cheese.
Fernandez considered sending the next shipment of oxycodone to Canada through the mail. “I do not see why not … because the vitamins, do not smell or anything like that.”
On December 5, the second shipment of oxycodone from Italy to Canada was sent by courier post to Hamilton Mountain. The plan was simple and successful. On December 7, his friend Carbone bubbled over with the thought of getting fabulously rich. “I have always money, money is always.”
Fernandez preached caution, warning his associates to be careful of walking under video cameras. In Palermo and Bagheria, sometimes the walls literally have electronic eyes and ears. Despite his words of caution, Fernandez was feeling positive. A Sicilian contact told him he could get him a batch of oxycodone within two weeks, using his medical contacts. When Fernandez said he had a problem getting money from Canada, the contact suggested he pay him with narcotics.
Then the contact bragged that he had a godson in common with fugitive Trapani province boss Matteo (Diabolik) Messina Denaro of the Corleone Mafia. Messina Denaro was considered a new Cosa Nostra leader after Provenzano’s arrest on April 11, 2006, and L’Espresso magazine featured him on the cover with the headline HERE IS THE NEW BOSS OF THE MAFIA.
“Thirty-five years in hiding here in Sicily,” the contact said of Denaro, with a touch of awe.
Fernandez was intrigued by talk that Messina Denaro was considered more powerful than even Salvatore (Totò, The Beast) Riina, Sicily’s top Mafia boss in the 1980s.
“Say if it’s true or not. Is he bigger than Riina?” Fernandez asked. “Bigger than him?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck!”
Between January 10 and January 19, 2013, Fernandez talked many times by phone with two Toronto-area men. One of them owned the King City compound where Vito often stayed when he was in the GTA. They were both harsh critics of how Fernandez’s man in Toronto, Danny, was acting, showing a disregard for the “old guard” of the Rizzuto organization there.
On March 25, a Canadian associate named David had arrived in Sicily, and he and Fernandez were almost immediately talking about smuggling weapons into Canada. That day, the conversation shifted to what would happen if anyone took action against Danny. “I will return there in a second if something happens to Danny,” said Fernandez. “They all will be killed in the same day.”
On March 26, Fernandez’s voice was recorded talking with David. He said he was keeping an equal distance from both sides in the ongoing Canadian Mafia war. “I am good friends with Vito but also good friends with Raynald Desjardins,” he said. Then he added that he was made a member of the Mafia with Desjardins during a ceremony presided over by Vito Rizzuto. Fernandez’s tone was clearly aggressive. He demanded in English that his associate know that he wasn’t a second-class mobster, just because he was a Spaniard who had lived in Canada.
He made his comments on a winding street, forgetting his own caution about the dangers of omnipresent police cameras and bugs as he announced that Vito Rizzuto “makes the fucking rules.” He proudly announced that this meant he and Desjardins had been promoted to a status where they could sit as equals with fellow “men of honour.”
“Vito ‘made’ me and my compare, Raynald,” Fernandez said.
It was a breathtaking statement. The Spaniard’s respect for Vito was obvious, but he had just said something that could cost him his life, should word ever get back to Vito. He had called Desjardins compare, a term far closer than “friend” in local parlance. He had also unknowingly said it on a police surveillance camera, in the midst of a war between Rizzuto and Desjardins.
His boast stunned his companion, who replied, “You’re not Italian.”
“No, no. Me and my compare.” Then Fernandez restated that he and Desjardins were “made” men. Then he said the word again.
Did he not think that such words travelled?
For all his brashness with underlings and people on his level, Fernandez remained a suck-up when it came to bosses. When first trying to work into the milieu, he had courted the goodwill of Raynald Desjardins. When Desjardins brought him into Vito’s elevated circle, Fernandez sucked up to him with equal enthusiasm. Now that Desjardins and Vito were deadly enemies, it was tough to see exactly which side Fernandez supported, since he appeared to have ties to them both. Fernandez did stay in touch regularly by phone with the Rizzutos’ Montreal lawyer, who was also speaking with the Scadutos. It was as if Fernandez somehow refused to recognize the intensity of emotions involved in the war under way in Canada, as he traded on the names of both Desjardins and Vito.
As he and David wound down the ancient street, Fernandez also seemed to be disclosing family secrets. To be officially inducted into the Mafia, there is a ceremony, called pungiutu, which translates to “pinch and make blood,” performed by a boss. It involves burning the photo of a saint while pricking then squeezing the inductee’s trigger finger. He (all members are male) is then required to say, “I will burn in hell if I betray the organization.”
It was possible Fernandez was telling the tr
uth, and that Vito’s Canadian organization was unique in inducting non-Italian members. That would be a first, but Vito was capable of breaking ground and certainly didn’t lack for confidence. If so, it said a lot about life in the milieu that the first non-Italian inducted into the Mafia was now Vito’s mortal enemy. It was also highly possible that Fernandez was lying. He was boasting to someone who was not a Mafioso. There are few real rules in the Mafia, but those that do exist tend to be hard and fast. Among the most strictly enforced of them is that you can lie to anyone but another member, and David wasn’t a member.
Fernandez stressed again that he was attempting to remain neutral in the midst of the Canadian hostilities. “There is a small war over there and I am stuck in the middle between those people.… It’s a war between two of my best friends, my compare Raynald and my other friend Vito.” If Fernandez believed the hostilities were a spat that would pass in time, he couldn’t have made a worse misjudgment of Vito’s fury.
Then Fernandez told his guest that he wanted his Toronto friend Danny inducted into the Mafia too. There was a casualness to the comment, as if it was nothing more than joining a gym. “I want to make Danny a made man and I know that I can do it with some boss over there. We need a boss to do that.… If Danny would have come here, I could have asked Sergio [Flamia] to make him a made man right away.”
That same day, the bug in Fernandez’s car picked up the two men talking about moving guns between Italy and Canada. The conversation shifted to how a silencer for one of their guns had somehow been lost. Fernandez was upset because it was a quality item.
“These are fucking deadly, do not feel a dick,” he said, simulating the soft sound of two shots fired with the muffler.
Then Fernandez described the pains he took when sending such items to Canada.
“It is difficult to send to you; you can also send in a package.… In a bundle, you put it in a bottle of shampoo, a big bottle with carbon paper, they cannot see through it.”
On March 28, Fernandez’s strength in Bagheria was boosted further with the arrival of his long-time associate, a Portuguese national named Fernando Pimentel. The thirty-five-year-old was Modica’s and Fernandez’s type: someone not afraid to do a home invasion and crush a face. He had a UFC look to him, with short hair, big buff muscles, a tattoo the length of his right forearm and a watch the size of Fernandez’s Rolex. It was an international tough guy look that played just as well on patios in Mississauga or Madrid.
Pimentel had committed many crimes in Canada before he was deported for drug trafficking. From Portugal, he moved to Bagheria and lived there between 2006 and mid-2008 as a guest of sorts of Michele Modica. He had been arrested in the Azores for robbery and kidnapping in August 2009, and served three years in Portuguese prisons. He didn’t plan to stay in Sicily too long this visit, as he had a return ticket to Portugal for April 18.
His time behind bars apparently hadn’t made Pimentel any milder. He immediately jumped into a conversation with Fernandez on March 28 about beating up people in Sicily for associates.
“Brother, I had to beat people to make money!” he announced.
“This is a shit,” Fernandez said.
The Canadians were showing up at a time when the old underworld of Bagheria was in a dangerous state of flux. A police wiretap at the time picked up Flamia talking to a friend named Enzo of how he was tired of the current state of affairs and needed change. “I’m tired, Enzo, to see these twisted things.”
Enzo appeared to be pushing Flamia to distance himself more from the current leadership as he said: “I think you were wrong to sit down again at the table.”
On March 29, Fernandez and Pimentel were cutting through Bagheria’s traffic in Fernandez’s BMW when a familiar location brought back memories.
“This is where I fucking killed that person,” Pimentel said, out of the blue.
“Huh?” Fernandez replied.
“This is where I killed him, killed … I have beaten, I ripped the ear …”
They also talked in the car of the tragedy at California Sandwiches. Pimentel found humour in the bloodshed as he talked about Andrea Carbone, who was supposed to be a bodyguard for Modica that day. “He was shaking in his boots when those guys went at him … down there [at] California Sandwiches,” Pimentel said. “… He had the thing [pistol], and don’t even shoot back.”
“I know, bro,” Fernandez replied.
“So, pfff,” Pimentel continued, mimicking a spitting noise. “Buddy M. [Michele Modica] had to fucking grab the thing and, you know …”
“Yeah,” Fernandez said.
“Come on,” Pimentel continued. “You have a thing and you are fucking scared to use it? Stay home next time! Don’t come down like you are a hero.… Rather carry your water gun.”
Pimentel had been close to Modica back then, and Italian authorities suspected he had been part of the unresolved hit on Peter Lo Jacono, the important man of honour whom Modica had plotted to kill back in 2008 in Sicily. Few things make mobsters more edgy than an unresolved murder. On March 31, the police bug in Fernandez’s BMW picked up a cryptic conversation about what sounded suspiciously like another murder plot.
“So, what you do not understand … he told me that he had … said to M&M [Michele Modica] to do the …” At that point, Pimentel dropped his voice so that it was unintelligible.
Pimentel noted that they had spoken with the other man behind the plot recently.
“Yeah, what we met the other day,” Pimentel said.
“Who?” replied Fernandez. “Not with me, as I know, he was the one that [inaudible] this is what … and was the other man in jail.”
Bagheria was now flush with former Canadian residents. The Scaduto brothers had been back in Sicily since 2004, and where they stood in the current tensions wasn’t clear. Since returning to Sicily, the Scaduto brothers had pushed to reassert their family’s power, while staying in touch with Vito’s lawyer. The brothers’ ambitions also butted up against those of Fernandez’s new associate, Sergio Flamia. The Canadians had the always tense city feeling ready to explode. The carabinieri pondered moving in and making arrests early on the drug charges. Otherwise, they could be sure they’d soon be investigating yet another murder.
CHAPTER 43
Several churches
Vito’s long-time associate Pietro Scaduto had an appointment to meet with Fernandez and Pimentel on April 9, 2013, at the Bar Diva outside Palermo. It was a busy, modern stop just off the highway, where they shouldn’t stand out on a Saturday evening. They weren’t going to be there long anyway. The topic was to be marijuana seeds and cultivation, and it wasn’t hard to get Fernandez to the table. “If there was money to be made, Ramon was the right person to deal with,” Carbone recalled later. “He liked money.”
Ever since he had inquired about the price of fumo in the university town of Perugia, Fernandez had sniffed an opportunity in local marijuana cultivation. He first needed a secure location for production and some seeds, and Scaduto had said he could help. As Fernandez prepared for the meeting, he went to great pains to be discreet. He drove a rented compact Renault Clio hatchback rather than his more eye-catching SUV.
Moments after they met in the Bar Diva at 7:15 p.m., Fernandez, Pimentel and Pietro Scaduto were together in the little Clio, heading for a house under construction in Contrada Incorvino in a rural area of Bagheria. It belonged to Giuseppe Carbone, and Giuseppe had stolen a key. It wasn’t occupied yet and was surrounded by a fence, so they would have security and privacy. They passed through the gate of the house at 7:30 p.m.
Giuseppe (Salvatore) Carbone was waiting in the house with a loaded .765 pistol. Hiding in a large doghouse inside the grounds was Pietro Scaduto’s brother Salvatore. His gun that evening was a dependable .38 revolver.
None of the men in the Clio carried weapons. Salvatore Scaduto had stashed a Spanish nine-millimetre pistol by a pillar on the gate. The plan was for Pietro Scaduto to exit the car to close the gate behind the
m, and for him to pick up the gun and start shooting. That was the cue for the others to come out firing.
The two targets didn’t notice as Pietro Scaduto picked up the hidden gun and approached the car. Pimentel, oblivious to the danger, swung the Clio around so that he could make an easy exit after the meeting. “Ramon realized what was happening and he exited from the car and ran to open the gate,” Carbone later said.
Pimentel realized he had seconds to act or his life would be over. He tried to accelerate towards the gate and accidentally hit Fernandez and then caught Pietro Scaduto, knocking him to the ground and injuring his shoulder.
Pietro Scaduto came up firing. “At that moment, Pietro and I, we started shooting,” Giuseppe Carbone later said. “One shot after another. We shot at least thirty times.” They fired so many times that Carbone had to reload his pistol, and then they fired some more on the unarmed men.
Pimentel was half in and half out of the Clio when the shooting finally stopped. Fernandez lay on the ground inside the compound. During a lull in the shooting, he had enough breath left to ask his killers a question.
“He looked at Pietro and asked, ‘P., why?’ ” Carbone recalled. “And then he turned his face at me and said, ‘Why, Sal?’ ” There wasn’t much point explaining to Fernandez that there was no room for neutrals in Vito’s war and no place to hide. “At that point, Pietro took my gun and shot him in the head. But Ramon was still alive. We just carried him in the trunk of the car and we gave him another shot in the head.”
It was dark as Carbone drove the Clio, with the bodies crammed inside, to an old illegal dump in Contrada Fiorilli, a rural area between Altavilla Milicia and Casteldaccia, overgrown with chest-high weeds and grass. Pietro followed on Carbone’s Vespa scooter while Salvatore returned home in his Fiat Panda. The Panda had been a modest-enough vehicle when it was new, and that was more than a decade ago. Killers for the Sicilian mob often earned less than plumbers, and their scruffy vehicles reflected this.
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