by Lamothe, Lee
Alfred Nester, the U.S. consul in Palermo, reported in sworn statements that the quota immigration visa carried by Rizzuto when he arrived in New Orleans was not issued by the consulate. Further, Nester said, there was no record of the money for the fee stamps that are affixed to Rizzuto’s visa ever having been paid. Italian authorities found similar duplicity in his paperwork. They examined copies sent by the Americans and declared that Rizzuto’s medical certificate and identity papers were false because there had never been a Dr. Bellina nor a mayor named Margiotta in Cattolica Eraclea. The penal certificate, however, was genuine. (Rizzuto’s theft conviction was not listed on his record because, in accordance with Italian regulations, it was a first offense for a period of less than three months’ imprisonment, investigators reported.) When authorities went to Rizzuto’s home town in 1935 looking for him, they interviewed his wife, Maria Renda, who told them that her husband had never returned to Sicily after leaving for America and he had died there in 1933. Italian authorities could not confirm the death, however, as the vital statistics office in Cattolica Eraclea had not been informed of his death.
“Taking into consideration the circumstances,” wrote Inspector G.M. Abbate of the director general’s office of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “there is no doubt but that Rizzuto emigrated clandestinely.”
U.S. immigration investigators then painstakingly retraced Rizzuto’s steps in America, with the mandate of interviewing him as part of their probe. It was not until July 1935, that Frank Steadman, a federal investigator, learned of Rizzuto’s murder at the stone quarry two years earlier. In his report Steadman noted that other men had traveled to America with Rizzuto and that perhaps their visas should be looked into as well.
Indeed, with Rizzuto dead, the U.S. government went after the men who had arrived with him aboard the S.S. Edam.
Investigators found that Calogero Renda’s documents were also false. The same fictitious doctor and the same imaginary mayor had signed his papers and the U.S. consulate had no record of issuing his quota visa. Investigators found that after Renda’s arrival he had applied for U.S. citizenship in 1927, giving his home address as Morris Avenue in the Bronx. He had returned to Cattolica Eraclea in 1929, however, to marry Domenica Manno, the young sister of Antonio Manno, the most powerful Mafia boss in the area. On April 6, 1930, he’d returned to his home in the Bronx without her, presenting a fresh U.S. quota visa at the port of New York. He then applied for a U.S. immigration visa—legally, this time—for his bride. It was rejected. After Renda’s U.S. citizenship was granted in 1932, he again went to Sicily to spend time with his wife, returning to New York on March 24, 1933, five months before Rizzuto was murdered. In the summer of 1935, after Rizzuto’s death, Calogero Renda went to the Oradell street where Rizzuto had lived—a few weeks ahead of the U.S. immigration investigators—asking neighbors which house his brother-in-law had lived in. By the time U.S. Immigration Inspector Jacob Auerbach went looking for Renda in 1936, in the widening probe of the fraudulent visas, Renda was back living in Cattolica Eraclea with his wife, Domenica Manno.
The Manno name would prove to be important, although no one realized its significance at the time. This was one of the first official recognitions of the closeness of the Rizzuto-Manno-Renda family clique—the base of the Sixth Family. On March 17, 1937, Renda’s U.S. citizenship was canceled and, 11 days later, an arrest warrant for immigration violations was issued against him, removing any chance that he could legally return.
Mercurio Campisi, who had arrived at New Orleans with Rizzuto and Renda, was also found to have traveled on false documents. He fought to remain in America but was ultimately sent back to Cattolica Eraclea in 1938. Pleading destitution, he forced the U.S. government to pay for his return trip.
Giuseppe Sciortino, another of the S.S. Edam bunch, was also found. After he arrived in New Orleans he married and settled in Buffalo with his wife, where they had three children. Sciortino earned money selling bootleg alcohol made in an illicit still in his home. In 1936, police found counterfeit U.S. banknotes in his car. When the Secret Service questioned him about it, Sciortino was adamant about what kind of criminal he was: “I am not a counterfeiter, I am a bootlegger.” When quizzed about his travel documents, he claimed he properly paid the fees at the American consulate. Later, when pressed at a deportation hearing, he admitted he had bought them for about 3,000 liras from a man at the Concordia Hotel in central Palermo.
“First, he told me to go to the municipal authorities to get my penal certificate, then birth certificate and after I got them I turned them over to him,” Sciortino said. Eight or 10 days later, the man delivered the false visa. His proffered revelations brought him no slack. He was deported to Siculiana, but his wife, Jennie Zarbo, refused to go with him. He then began a 15-year letter-writing campaign—including flowery missives to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor—to convince U.S. officials to allow him back to be with his family. The government denied all requests. The letters end in 1950 on a sad note: one of Sciortino’s children had died and he himself had savagely lost an arm. “My condition requires a woman to help me out in the house,” he wrote. Since his wife was steadfast in not moving to Sicily, he begged the U.S. Attorney General to “abolish” his marriage so he could remarry. The government replied: “I am unable to offer any advice in the matter.”
Vincenzo Marino, the oldest of Rizzuto’s companions aboard the S.S. Edam, had more success at disappearing. An arrest warrant for Marino was issued on February 19, 1935. The search started in Los Angeles, where he had said he was going to settle. Two years later, however, Los Angeles police were still making “intensive efforts” to find him. Detectives concluded that Marino had never actually traveled to California.
The elaborate visa fraud was an important investigation for the American government. Reports on its progress were sent directly to Cordell Hull, President Roosevelt’s famed secretary of state. Curiously, documents uncovered show the government solving the visa crisis by clamping down on the gangsters who they found had used them. There is little evidence of what investigators discovered when they inevitably probed how the visas and fee stamps got out of the consulate and into their hands in the first place.
Although this Vito Rizzuto’s criminal activity led to his murder, that gruesome lesson did not dissuade his son or grandson from pursuing an outlaw life. As for Calogero Renda, he would continue to work closely with the Rizzuto family for the rest of his life. The offspring of these two men, who had tried but failed to move their clan to New York, would soon form the innermost core of the Sixth Family. And if it could not be based in America, then it would settle for the next best thing—Canada.
That would have to wait, however, for the next generation.
CHAPTER 3
CATTOLICA ERACLEA, 1940s
Back in the Sicilian town of Cattolica Eraclea, the son of the murdered Vito Rizzuto, Nicolò, came of age amid the death and tumult of the Second World War without ever knowing his father, although he had a stepfather for guidance after his mother, Maria Renda, remarried. That second marriage, to Liborio Milioto, gave Nicolò a half-sister, whose offspring remain close to the Rizzutos to this day.
At the close of the war, having grown into a strong and industrious man, Nicolò Rizzuto started a family of his own.
Nicolò’s choice of bride was not merely a matter of falling in love with the robust and determined Libertina Manno. Winning the hand of such a woman and—perhaps more important—gaining the approval of her father to marry her, would have been an intimidating but important affair, more so than for the average man navigating a relationship with a future father-in-law. Nicolò’s romantic success brought him more than a wife, lifelong companion and future mother of his children. Marrying Libertina brought Nicolò closer into the family of Antonio Manno, the head of a family of great note in the area, one designated in Italian police files as the Famiglia Manno, the “Manno Family.”
The Mannos w
ere the pre-eminent Mafia clan in the southwest of the province of Agrigento, ruling a territory that stretches out in a long triangle linking the towns of Cattolica Eraclea, Siculiana and Montallegro. Antonio Manno, who was born in 1904 and died in 1980, was the undisputed capo mafia of this important area. He is also ground zero for the formation of the Sixth Family and a showcase for the intermingling of the clans that would become notorious: his mother was a Caruana; his wife was a Cammalleri; his sister married Calogero Renda, who had earlier traveled to America with the Rizzuto patriarch.
When Nicolò married Libertina Manno, he “married up” in the underworld. With Antonio Manno as her father and her mother being Giuseppina Cammalleri, a woman from a prominent clan with similar outlaw traditions, Libertina was from rich Mafia stock. To be allowed to marry her was a crucial sign of acceptance and approval of Nicolò on many levels.
As a young couple, Nicolò and Libertina Rizzuto moved through Cattolica Eraclea in a social milieu that included friends and family; the distinction between who was merely a friend and who was family continued to blur and, indeed, be erased as the Manno clan expanded, by entrusting their many daughters (they had surprisingly few sons) to well-chosen grooms who were often “Men of Honor,” as the mafiosi call themselves. In Cattolica Eraclea, and within the Mafia triangle of nearby towns, the Famiglia Manno met and married a number of like-minded people from a few—a very few—families. Perhaps because of the smallness of their village and the insular clique they built for themselves within it—but likely by a clever plan to protect the family from betrayal—the closeness of the group was tightened further by marriages amongst these families. It is a family where the lines of connection stretch backwards and forwards simultaneously—with first and second cousins intermarrying—making it common for members to describe their relationships to each other in several ways, such as being both a cousin and a son-in-law. From the Manno clan springs a family tree with branches that would spread briefly to entangle a new family name, only to fold back in on itself.
The list of names and interweaving relationships is often hard to follow but each would distinguish itself in Sixth Family deeds: the Rizzuto, Manno and Renda families are joined by the Cammalleri, Sciascia, LoPresti, Ragusa, Arcuri, and Sciortino families—among others. Members of the sprawling clans of the Caruanas and the Cuntreras from nearby Siculiana, who are renowned for their drug prowess, and the Vella and Mongiovì families would also woo and be wooed into the Famiglia Manno through marriage, one of the strongest bases of power among the Sicilian clans. This is the traditional base of the Sixth Family.
After the ill-fated move to America in 1925 by Vito Rizzuto and Calogero Renda, other Sixth Family members also left Sicily under a cloud. Sometime during the night of August 14, 1955, the first democratically elected mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, Giuseppe Spagnolo, lay sleeping outdoors, in the rural stretch between his home town and Cianciana, a village seven miles north on the other side of the Plátani river. Spagnolo was heralded as the “peasant mayor,” the first and only peasant to be so elected, propelled into office by the popularity of his radical land reform policy. After his election in 1946, Spagnolo raised the ire of the Mafia by refusing to hand the most fertile land over to the local mobsters. Instead, Spagnolo insisted that the best land go to the neediest—and that clearly did not include the Famiglia Manno. Spagnolo soon faced their wrath. His own farm was vandalized, his barn set ablaze and threats made against him. He did not waver, although he appears to have moved into hiding, preferring outdoor sleeping quarters over his farmhouse. The move did not protect him.
From the darkness of the night emerged several men, each holding a lupara, the distinctive shotgun of Sicily. Seven shots rang out, tearing into Spagnolo where he lay. It was a shocking crime. The open assault on civility and democracy outraged the government and the townspeople. By the time authorities identified four men suspected in the assassination, three of the men had fled, apparently after hiding in a local church. Undeterred by their absence, the government moved to prosecute them. The accused included Leonardo Cammalleri and Giacinto Arcuri, who were found guilty, in absentia, of murder and handed life sentences. The sentences were later upheld on appeal. But the men were still not to be found. They had fled to Canada, where—despite an arrest warrant issued against them by the Italian government—they settled in Montreal and Toronto. When the Italian government was wrongly informed that Arcuri had died, the arrest warrant for him was canceled. In Canada, Arcuri, whose mother was a Cammalleri, joined up with his Sixth Family associates and remains free in Toronto where he is considered an important man of influence within the underworld. Similarly, Leonardo Cammalleri would somehow avoid prosecution, settling in Montreal and then Toronto, where he raised his family, including his daughter, Giovanna, who would later marry Nicolò’s son, Vito Rizzuto.
The deep relationships the clans forged in the lean years in Cattolica Eraclea would remain intact for generations as the family strategically spread across the globe.
Sitting on a hilltop along the Mediterranean coast, the city of Agrigento is both the capital and main urban center of the province that shares its name. The city has gained international recognition for the ancient Greek ruins of Akragas, the Valley of the Temples, an extensive and awe-inspiring site built along a sea-facing ridge, considered the best-preserved Greek ruins outside of Greece. Sandy beaches to each side of Agrigento draw locals from their homes on the warmest weekends and the rutted medieval streets exude the Old World feel sought by tourists. The nearby Porto Empédocle runs regular ferries to the Pelagic Islands, a pair of bleak rocks in the Mediterranean Sea that, since they lie closer to Africa than to Europe, place the historical remoteness of Sicily in acute context. These tourist draws do not translate into community riches, however. Agrigento, government statistics show, is one of Italy’s poorest cities.
Despite its poverty, the province of Agrigento has an old and sophisticated Mafia. Over generations, a small number of families, or cosche, emerged to dominate their towns along the coast and into the interior, engaging in crimes that seem almost quaint in their reflection of time and place—cattle rustling, stealing farm produce, misdirecting irrigation, organizing hired farmhands and thievery. Gradually, public institutions also fell under the control of the leading Men of Honor, who were grabbing and stealing what little there was to take, all the while accepting nods of “respect” from their victims. Their criminal ingenuity and prowess continued to evolve.
“Agrigento’s type of criminality,” an Italian judge said of the local Mafia clans, “is a form of almost scientific crime, especially if compared to the Mafia in Palermo. The latter is vulgar because it doesn’t think twice about shooting in a public street; it acts on impulse. The one from the province of Agrigento is sophisticated: it studies and plans crime with a scientific perfection.”
Similar to the ruins in the Valley of the Temples, there is another archeological site along the Mediterranean, just southwest of Cattolica Eraclea. Eraclea Minoa shares a portion of its name with the Rizzutos’ home town. In contrast to the community in Cattolica, leaders in Minoa try hard to attract tourists visiting the more famous ruins of Agrigento. The Sixth Family has not helped that cause. As late as the 1990s, the Famiglia Manno was accused of plundering the sites and selling archeological objects of historical value.
In Mafia circles, this passes for living off the land.
While such tawdry thievery certainly helped line the pockets of family members who remained behind in Sicily, the real family money would be generated abroad and the real family power stems from the men who left Agrigento for richer prospects in the New World.
As a geographic location, Antonio Manno’s Mafia triangle is as remote and insignificant to legitimate global commerce as any in Italy, but its impact on the international trade in illicit drugs would be unparalleled. This rural triangle became an incubator for a resource crucial to the mass transit of drugs—that resource being the skilled and strong Men of H
onor who would leave their family homes and set down roots in North and South America and parts of Europe to build an interwoven and seemingly impenetrable family-based organization that is the modern-day Sixth Family.
In Agrigento province, the Famiglia Manno—sometimes now called the “Famiglia Manno-Rizzuto,” as a nod to Vito Rizzuto’s prominence in international underworld affairs—is still tracked by the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, Italy’s anti-Mafia investigations department, and by organized crime investigators with the Carabinieri and the Polizia di Stato, the national police. The real concern, however, is with the diaspora that spread these gangsters around the world: to Venezuela, Brazil, Germany, Canada and the United States.
When it came time for Nicolò Rizzuto to wrap up his affairs in Cattolica Eraclea and to pack up his family for relocation, it was to Canada that he went. There he would forge a bold outpost in Montreal. Over time, the Rizzutos would be joined by members of the cluster of interconnected families Nicolò had known all his life: Sciascia, Renda, LoPresti, Ragusa, Cammalleri, Arcuri, Sciortino and Manno. Each would be welcomed into an organization forming in the New World, as the Famiglia Manno became the Sixth Family.