Carbone heard a cellphone going off in the back of the Clio, where the bodies lay. He heard the sound at 8:46 p.m. and again at 9:44 p.m. and yet again after he pulled to a halt, and Pietro Scaduto arrived on the Vespa. The caller was Fernandez’s girlfriend, Giovanna Landolsi, but none of the killers knew that at the time. Her calls went unanswered.
Pietro Scaduto’s arm was hurting and his patience was gone. He smashed the phone and the buzzing finally stopped.
On April 19, Giuseppe (Salvatore) Carbone discussed selling Fernandez’s Rolex with a jeweller on Via Paolo Emiliani Giudici in Palermo.
“I found a buyer for €3,500,” the jeweller said.
“Ask if he can give 4,000,” Carbone replied.
Later that day, Pietro Scaduto advised him against the sale: “Don’t do anything. I have a potential buyer who can give us more money.”
The next day, Carbone returned to the jeweller and retrieved the timepiece. After leaving the shop, he was stopped by the carabinieri in a routine check. When Carbone was unable to satisfactorily explain how he came into possession of the watch, a police officer seized it, but Carbone wasn’t arrested.
Later that day, Carbone went back to the jeweller and told of his encounter with the carabinieri.
“Don’t worry, I will say … if they ask me, that you asked me only to clean the Rolex, not to sell it.”
Italian authorities decided it was time to move in. Charges were drafted against Fernandez for transporting oxycodone from Italy to Canada from August 2012 to the present. Other charges were drawn up for smuggling a kilo of heroin into Perugia and for illegally possessing a gun and two silencers.
There was a blitz of twenty-one arrests, but when carabinieri moved to serve the warrants on Fernandez and Pimentel, the former Toronto-area residents could not be found. The last record of a signal from Fernandez’s BlackBerry was on the night of April 9, near the home of Carbone’s cousin. “The current unavailability could be a result of a hasty escape,” an Italian police document concluded. “We cannot exclude, however, that he may have been the victim of a double murder.”
By the time of his latest arrest, Giuseppe Carbone was forty-three years old and had been in and out of prison since he was nineteen. He had grown weary of the grubby reality of Mafia life, in which he was on call 24/7 to murder associates without question. Maybe he found something particularly soul-destroying about peddling the Rolex he’d stripped from the wrist of a dead man who had once trusted him. Perhaps he also realized that someday he could become a target himself.
Whatever the reason, almost immediately after he was taken into custody, Carbone told authorities he wanted to talk. There were no tears on May 8 when he sat down to give a statement to two magistrates and four carabinieri. “For so many years I was a fugitive in America and I don’t have any intention to hide anymore or to pay for things I haven’t committed,” Carbone told them. “I knew the risk was as soon as I leave jail I would be killed, so I want to collaborate.”
Exactly why Fernandez and Pimentel were targeted for murder wasn’t totally clear to him, and it wasn’t his business to ask. That didn’t stop him from wondering: “Most likely it was because Fernandez took the side of a Rizzuto enemy, a former right-hand man.”
Fernandez knew much about Vito, but failed to appreciate the recent and fundamental change in him. Vito’s priority now was revenge, and only revenge. There was no Plan B. Business just didn’t matter. Fernandez’s view of the world was the polar opposite: business was everything. “Ramon was one where, when he saw money, he really jumped on,” Carbone said. “He didn’t care about this Mafia or that Mafia. He knocked on all doors. He tried to be friendly with anyone. He didn’t understand our mentality here.… [You] cannot be friendly with everyone.”
Carbone said that Pietro Scaduto had made a similar comment after speaking with the Canadian lawyer who was in frequent contact with Scaduto and Fernandez. The lawyer had been sending money to Fernandez on a regular basis and Carbone noted that the investments directed by the Canadian lawyer were bound to change the balance of Mafia power in Bagheria. “Pietro Scaduto told me, ‘I called there and this guy told me what to do.’ He always told me that Ramon ‘attended too many churches.’ ”
For all his brashness, Fernandez didn’t realize that in Sicily a few genuine friends counted for more than several loose associates. He also didn’t comprehend how there are times when blood takes absolute precedence over business. “He did not have his own church. Instead, he was like a priest that entered all churches.… I know that in Canada now there is a war. A Mafia war. Vito Rizzuto is involved on one side. On the other side, there is a compare of Ramon.… Ramon was saying he was friendly with both of them. So he was trying to keep his foot in two shoes [tenere il piede in due scarpe].”
Carbone spoke from the vantage point of a weary mob journeyman who had always just done his job. There would be no extra pay for taking part in the murders, and no promotion within the group was offered or expected. It was simply an unpleasant part of his duties, like how a farmhand knows he is supposed to muck out a stable or slaughter a chicken or a hog. “I had a good relationship with Fernandez.”
Carbone had spent his entire adult life in the Mafia, although he had never been formally inducted. Old ceremonies and mystique didn’t seem to matter much in Carbone’s world. “No, no, we don’t use those things anymore,” Carbone said. “I’ve never been pungiutu. I never had a ceremony with anyone. We made all kinds of feasts where we had to eat with each other. But not pungiutu. Not those type of things.”
Carbone said that, at first, the Scaduto brothers were guarded in what they said to him about Fernandez. “They were not telling me things because they were afraid I would tell things to Fernandez.” Finally, they asked him, “You are with him or with us?”
“I’m not with anyone,” Carbone replied. “What do we have to do?”
Carbone said that Pietro Scaduto then replied: “You have to arrange a place and we will tell you what to do after.”
Carbone settled on his cousin’s property. Since it was under construction, no one would be there at night. His cousin wasn’t part of the plot: “He doesn’t know anything because I stole the key.”
Fernandez had earlier confided to Carbone that there had been tensions between himself and Pietro Scaduto when they travelled the previous year in Panama, Ecuador and Peru. Fernandez was a vain man and he cringed at the thought of being seen in public with Scaduto, although he didn’t expand on why his companion embarrassed him so. “Ramon liked to talk. [He said,] ‘I took a piece of shit there with me and he … embarrassed me.’ ”
That trip was a bust, and not just for the lingering ill feelings it created between Fernandez and Pietro Scaduto. The narcotics they sought were already sold by the time they arrived. Fernandez had hoped to get the cocaine into Palermo, where prices were premium, but now he had no product to sell.
Carbone heard from Scaduto that he was concerned the Spaniard Fernandez and the group collecting around him were growing in power. “The Scadutos were a little bit concerned that they were becoming stronger as a group and they could pull together against them.”
The orders to kill Fernandez and Pimentel came from Canada in late March, Carbone said. “We planned to kill them ten days earlier,” but Fernandez was constantly calling and texting Pietro Scaduto on his BlackBerry. Scaduto worried that it would be a red flag for investigators when they checked through Fernandez’s cell records and saw that they had so recently been in such constant contact. Better to let the calls cool down a little before they made their move.
Fernandez had a pass code on his smart phone, which he frequently changed. But for all Fernandez’s underworld experience, there remained a naïveté about him. During his frequent meetings with the Scaduto brothers, he appeared to have no clue that he and his group members were targeted for death. Carbone explained that the Scaduto brothers also intended to kill Sergio Flamia, and after that to eliminate Modica when he was
released from prison in April 2014. Flamia was expected to be an easy target. He recalled Pietro Scaduto saying words to the effect of: “We can kill him [Flamia] in the middle of the street.”
Modica was a particularly dangerous target: “If Pietro Scaduto didn’t kill Modica, it was because of my brother. He always said, ‘No, Michele Modica always was sleeping with a gun under his pillow.’ Scaduto was a bit scared. [He said,] ‘Let’s kill him, because this guy will eventually kill us.’ ”
Carbone told the magistrates and the carabinieri that his memories of the Fernandez and Pimentel murders and the subsequent cleanup were vivid. It was so easy to do and yet so haunting. “They did not have weapons. Not at home nor when we killed them. Otherwise they would have killed us. Shot back. But they didn’t suspect anything.
“It was dark,” Carbone continued. “We arrived at the dump and we burned the bodies with naphtha along with some tires.” The plan was to make them victims of lupara bianca, bodies that were never found. “The day after, we returned with Salvatore [Scaduto] and we covered the bodies with Eternit [a fibre cement]. The car of Fernandez and Pimentel, we left at the Bolonegnetta dump close to a river, where we put it on fire.” Carbone wore coveralls for the grim work. When it was completed, they were splattered in blood.
He also went through Fernandez’s home to remove any trace of their relationship. He scooped up photos of the killers with Fernandez in Peru with Vito Rizzuto’s drug contacts. Aside from the pictures, there was little worth taking. “No money, no guns, no passports. I didn’t find any of those things.”
Carbone knew the victims were not innocents, but he still couldn’t shake his memory of Fernandez’s face as he uttered his final words. “ ‘Why? Why?’ I can’t forget those words. They’re still in my head. Mamma mia, I can’t forget those words.”
At the end of his ninety-three-minute statement, Carbone directed paramilitary officers through the tall weeds of the dump. There they found the charred bodies of Fernandez and Pimentel, riddled with some thirty bullets, just as Carbone had said.
When authorities told Pietro Scaduto of Carbone’s confession, he dismissed it as the lies of a bitter man. He said that their relationship had become unpleasant when they were involved in cattle breeding together. “There were always fights for financial reasons related to our breeding business.”
Scaduto also dismissed the idea that Fernandez was anything but a friend. “When I was in jail in Canada, he helped me a lot and I did the same for him when he moved to Sicily. Only for friendship. Nothing else.”
Perhaps Carbone had grown weary of mob life because he could never really tell his friends from his enemies. Certainly, Scaduto’s words called to mind an old underworld saying: You never worry about your enemies. It’s your friends that bury you.
CHAPTER 44
Hit man gets hit
In May 2013, Vito’s former soldier Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito was in the early days of an eleven-year, seven-month sentence for conspiracy to import drugs and gangsterism when he testified at the trial of his wife, Adèle Sorella. She had been charged with the murders of their daughters, Sabrina and Amanda. There the gangster spoke of guilt and loss.
“I blame myself, I guess—yes,” Ponytail testified. “Maybe I could have been there. I could have done something, like a father should.”
He knew that Adèle was distraught over his lengthy absence while he was on the run from police. He had left the girls at home in her care. He had done the only thing that seemed to make sense, and still his world had exploded.
“How did you learn about the deaths of your daughters?” a prosecutor asked.
“Like everyone else, through the news,” De Vito said.
“Did you attend the funeral?”
“No. I was on the run.”
A pathologist told court the sisters may have been killed “gradually, slowly, gently” in the airtight hyperbaric chamber Ponytail had purchased to treat Sabrina’s juvenile arthritis. In the end, his wife was convicted, and Ponytail’s entire family was either dead or behind bars.
At the time of his testimony, Ponytail had been trying to get transferred from a protective unit to the general population at Donnacona, despite word that there was a contract out on his life. He was finally granted his request after calling upon his lawyer. A month after Adèle was found guilty, early in the morning of Sunday, July 7, guards were unable to revive De Vito when they found him unconscious in his cell. There was nothing around his neck and no marks on his body. He had been in good shape, as one might expect of someone who had burned off stress in a gym. Prison staff would have to wait for an autopsy to know what had happened.
Joseph (Big Joey) Massino appeared before U.S. district court judge Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 8, 2013, to say that he was sorry. That was the same judge who had sentenced Vito to his time in the Florence prison and the same judge who had once been the target of a Bonanno family murder plot.
“Every night I pray for forgiveness for all the people I hurt, especially the victims’ families,” Big Joey said.
That would take considerable praying, since Big Joey was serving two life sentences for seven murder convictions and was also facing an outstanding murder charge, which took place after the federal death penalty had been reinstated. Perhaps Big Joey was particularly sorry now that a trip to death row was a possibility. Whatever the case, as he stood before the judge in his two-toned sweatsuit, the highest-ranking rat in the history of the North American underworld apologized.
The judge said he had no illusions about Massino’s reasons for co-operating. That said, there was no questioning the results. “Quite simply, Mr. Massino may be the most important co-operator in the modern history of law enforcement efforts to prosecute the American Mafia,” the judge stated. “He has provided information about the highest levels of the Mafia, including testifying in open court, assisting dozens of investigations and helping lead to numerous additional arrests and convictions.” Then the judge commuted his two life sentences to time served and allowed the man who ratted on Vito to disappear deep into a witness protection program, under a new name. The only proviso was that Big Joey was obliged to help prosecutors if they needed him in future cases. Vito already faced parole conditions should he return to the United States. Big Joey’s ongoing relationship with American authorities was one more reason for Vito to stay out of the country.
With renewed confidence, Vito appeared in Saint-Léonard that summer, shaking the hands of old acquaintances and friends. There was a report of him dining in a downtown restaurant, and he was also seen teeing up on Montreal-area fairways. It was just eight months since he arrived back in Canada, after eight years in custody. The war for Montreal appeared to be almost won, just in time for golf season.
La Presse reported that there was some understandable unease at his old Blainvillier Golf Club, which billed itself as “a place of peace and tranquility.” Vito still had a membership, a carry-over from when he played there in the 1990s. Since his return, he had played at least four times, including once in a foursome with Stefano Sollecito, son of lieutenant Rocco Sollecito. Vito had the reputation of being a good golf companion, and sometimes even a humorous one and a gentleman. Still, it was hard not to think of Smiling Joe Di Maulo. He had been a member there too and lived beside the course, until he was shot dead on his driveway.
As Vito took some time to savour his victories on the fairways, he knew he couldn’t afford to get sloppy. He likely knew also that Salvatore (Sam) Calautti was one of five hundred guests attending a stag for a bookie at the Terrace Banquet Centre in Vaughan, Ontario, on the night of July 11. Stags are a chance for mobsters and folks from regular society, sometimes including politicians, to bump up against each other, double kiss each other on the cheek, and eat and drink. They’re an opportunity to renew things with old friends and acquaintances, sometimes to betray them with false smiles and complimentary drinks. It was at such a function that Fernandez had posed triumphan
tly for photos with Vito, in happier times, before Vito turned assassins on him.
As usual, Calautti didn’t travel alone when he went to the bookie’s stag. He rode in his black BMW X6 with his long-time associate, James Tusek. At the age of thirty-five, Tusek had a violent reputation that included turning a baseball bat on one unfortunate soul. He had also been acquitted in the same marijuana grow-op as Calautti’s friend Nick Cortese.
By the night of the stag, Calautti remained a suspect in five unsolved murders, including that of Nicolò Rizzuto. He must have trusted whoever walked up to him in the parking lot, within eyesight of the York Regional Police 4 District Headquarters, as the party wound down around one in the morning. The killer got up close before the gun came out and he opened fire, killing both men. “It’s hard to think someone snuck up on him,” a police officer familiar with Calautti said. “Sam was the type of guy who always carried a gun.” Although there were still a hundred men at the stag, it took them some fifteen minutes to call 911, and by then the killer or killers were long gone. It was the mob’s version of a public execution in the town square: a blunt assertion of its version of state power.
There was a time when GTA mob send-offs were impossible to miss, but on the morning of July 17 it would have been easy to drive past St. Margaret Mary Church on Islington Avenue and not take a second glance at the funeral of Salvatore Calautti. The modest turnout of 150 mourners certainly didn’t compare to the January 1980 funeral of Michele (Mike) Racco, which snarled traffic along Toronto’s St. Clair Avenue West for three kilometres after the elderly Mafioso died of cancer. Of course, Racco was a boss. Calautti was a murdered soldier whose killers were probably fixing on their next target.
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