by Lamothe, Lee
It was a move of strategic brilliance, in keeping with their “scientific perfection” of crime.
CHAPTER 4
HALIFAX, CANADA, FEBRUARY 1954
There was just a trace of rain falling over Pier 21 in Halifax, the major seaport on Canada’s Atlantic coast, when 774 passengers who had started their voyage in Palermo, the principal city of Italy’s southern island of Sicily, disembarked in the New World. For people acclimatized to the heat of southern Italy, this was something of a lucky break as, just four days before, nearly five inches of snow had blanketed the city, and two days after that a deluge of rain had washed it into the ocean. Among that crush of travelers, mostly new arrivals with plans for permanent immigration, was Nicolò Rizzuto, following his father’s footsteps in leaving the family home in Cattolica Eraclea for brighter economic prospects in North America. Unlike the trip of his father some 30 years earlier, however, Nicolò came not with criminal colleagues but with his family.
Their 24,000-gross-ton ship, the M/S Vulcania, considered one of the finest transatlantic passenger vessels ever built, arrived from Palermo on February 21, 1954—young Vito’s eighth birthday. A future full of anticipation and promised opportunity might well have been gift enough for the boy.
Like most immigrants to Canada, the Rizzutos quickly headed to one of central Canada’s largest cities. A bustling and colorful city along the St. Lawrence River, with a large port of its own, Montreal was dominated by its French-speaking population and offered a European feel that English-Canadian cities could not match. In Montreal, a thriving “Little Italy” had evolved as waves of immigrants settled close together, enjoying the labor opportunities and social freedoms of the New World without giving up their culture, one complete with grocery stores carrying familiar food and churches and social clubs mimicking life in their former homeland.
Nicolò Rizzuto’s interest in Montreal, however, was not the abundance of imported meats or even the comfortable social setting. Along with the family he adored, the 30-year-old Nicolò brought with him to Canada an impressive underworld pedigree that gave him easy access to the world of crime.
That Nicolò would choose Canada, rather than America, as his new home was likely a consequence of the poor reception his father and his friends had received when the Sixth Family first eyed the New World back in 1925. Nicolò certainly knew that the U.S. government had uncovered his father’s visa fraud, particularly after American and Italian officials arrived in Cattolica Eraclea to question his mother about it. He also likely knew of his father’s involvement in the arson ring and, particularly upsetting, of his untimely and unpleasant death. Further, Calogero Renda, his uncle and most trusted mentor, was the subject of an arrest warrant in America after the massive visa fraud probe and had retreated back to Sicily. Nicolò’s brother-in-law, Domenico Manno, had also tried to make America his home, leaving Cattolica Eraclea and arriving in New York in 1951, only to face expulsion, according to U.S. immigration files. Canada must have seemed a far more welcoming place for the clan. Nicolò already had at least one friend settled in Montreal. Canadian immigration records show that, on August 10, 1953, six months before the Rizzuto family arrived in Canada, Giuseppe Cuffaro had settled in the city. The future master money launderer for the Caruana-Cuntrera clan was from Montallegro, another of the Agrigento towns in the Famiglia Manno’s Mafia triangle. Cuffaro would form both a friendship and partnership with Nicolò. As a sign of his growing sense of ease in North America, Nicolò soon started to be known almost exclusively by the natural anglicization of his name: Nick.
MONTREAL, 1950s
Post-war Montreal was a thoroughly corrupt city. Every level of government was riddled with the vexing influence of crime stemming from bribery and blackmail; from police who were sometimes in the pockets of gambling kings, drug traffickers and bootleggers to municipal politicians who relied on gang bosses for vote rigging and election-day goonery. The crooks were quietly repaid with lucrative kickbacks, un-tendered and inflated contracts, political cronyism and tacit permission to operate. Periodic bursts of public outrage would usher in a wave of law enforcement that would soon relax back into the old routine. From September 1950 to April 1953, 15 high-ranking police officers were fined, suspended or demoted for tolerating illegal activities such as gambling dens, brothels and speakeasies. Scandal was the order of the day, and almost every day, scandal was delivered.
The city’s underworld was a complex network of overlapping gangs: Jewish and francophone mobs, Italian and Irish gangsters and Corsican trafficking rings. The port was riddled with corruption as well, facilitating the movement of illegal goods into North America. Outside influence on the underworld of Montreal came from Paris and Marseilles, where Corsican and French smuggling rings saw it as their North American gateway. Since the early days of the French Connection—drug-smuggling networks that started in the mid-1930s when heroin laboratories were built near France’s port of Marseilles—virtually every major drug importation scheme originating in Europe used Montreal as a transit point.
Twenty years before the Rizzutos arrived in Canada, another notable family had immigrated to Montreal from Italy. In 1934, the Cotroni family of Mammola, Calabria, had made the city their new home, and 14-year-old Vincenzo Cotroni had quickly taken to its streets. A perceptive lad, he soon realized there was good money to be made from bootleg alcohol, prostitution, gambling and drugs—the mainstays of the underworld service industry.
For Vincenzo Cotroni—typically called “Vic” or “Vincent”—vice crimes were a fast and sure way to wealth and power. By 1945 he had emerged as a significant force in Montreal, with his fingers in an array of criminal activities, from theft and extortion to organizing votes and intimidating polling stations during elections. His two brothers, Giuseppe (called “Pep”) and Francesco (called “Frank”) would become increasingly active in the drug trade.
All of this activity was duly noted by Joseph Bonanno, the boss who in 1931 took the reins and gave his name to the Bonanno Mafia Family, one of the Five Families that had emerged in New York City as a powerful and controling criminal elite. By the close of the Second World War, the Bonannos were making moves on Montreal.
In 1945, Carmine Galante, a formidable senior representative of the Bonanno Family in New York, started crossing the border into Canada on business trips to Montreal, trips that increased in frequency and length.
“We used to have a lot to do with Canada,” said Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, son of Joseph Bonanno. Now 73 years old and a retired mafioso, Bill said his father’s relationship with Montreal began in the 1930s, soon after he became the boss and years before the Bonanno Family’s interest in the city was officially sanctioned by the Commission, the American Mafia’s board of control. “Toronto was the bailiwick of Buffalo and Montreal was apportioned to us after the Second World War. I don’t know why they did it like that, probably to keep some balance along the way. The guys in Canada were always old school,” Bonanno said recently. On this point, Bonanno and the Federal Bureau of Investigation agree.
“Joseph Bonanno assigned his underboss, Carmine Galante, to Montreal to establish a close working relationship with elements of organized crime already operating in Canada,” a report by the FBI said. Galante liked what he found in Montreal. Mature as the city’s underworld was by Canadian standards, it was a shadow of what Galante envisioned it could be: nightclubs and restaurants were not being shaken down thoroughly enough, pimps and madams operating brothels were paying a mere pittance and back-alley abortionists had somehow escaped altogether the underworld imperative of paying kickbacks to the mob to be allowed to work in peace. These were things Galante was in the process of changing, but most important, he saw first hand the substantial profits flowing from the France-to-Montreal-to-New York heroin trade. After the Second World War, when American ports were under scrutiny, Galante recognized that the port of Montreal could provide an easier and safer route to get heroin to the burgeoning American market.
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br /> This discovery would consume him for the rest of his life.
The diminutive Galante was well suited to muscle his way into the Canadian underworld. He had a record that went from the mundane—petty larceny and bootlegging—to the significant: he was suspected of killing a police officer in New York, wounding another officer and assassinating a prominent editor of a New York political newspaper. Police would unofficially pin 80 murders on Galante. Nicknamed “Lilo,” Galante was described by a prison doctor as “neat in appearance but dull emotionally.”
“He had a mental age of 14-and-a-half and an IQ of 90. He was shy with strangers and had no knowledge of current events, routine holidays or other items of common knowledge,” the psychiatric assessment continued. Galante was diagnosed as a “neuropathic, psychopathic personality; emotionally dull and indifferent.” The doctor’s prognosis for any chance of improvement was expressed in one word: “poor.”
In Canada, Galante did not let his emotional dullness or his supposedly low IQ get in the way of his progress. In the underworld, he flourished, marshaling all of his anti-social tendencies to great effect. Stories abound of his appetite for cruelty masquerading as comic relief, such as the time he smashed beer glasses on the floor of a restaurant and forced a young busboy to dance barefoot on the shards. He opened several businesses, including the Bonfire Restaurant on Decarie Boulevard, for which he partnered with Sicilian-born Montreal gangster Luigi Greco and local hoodlum Harry Ship. The Bonfire was a large eatery that was popular for offering customers a choice between its spacious dining room and a drive-in service. Hungry drivers would park their cars in the parking lot, facing the restaurant’s front windows, and flash their headlights for car-side service. As car culture gripped North America, this was seen as the pinnacle of modernity.
Part of Galante’s mandate from Joe Bonanno was to bring Montreal’s illegal gambling under control. Galante pressured American bookies, who had moved their operations to Canada when the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver committee was probing organized gambling. Galante’s message was clear—the bookies could leave New York but they could not escape the Bonannos.
“[Galante] dictated policy, set rates and tariffs for the American gambling syndicate in Montreal,” reads an FBI intelligence file from the time. Although he met with great success in bringing the gamblers to heel, he drew less and less satisfaction from such work. Soon, everything except the heroin trade ceased to fully engage him.
The French Connection was made famous by a book and two movies; as such, it is popularly seen as a Europe-to-New York network that ran for several months in the early 1960s until it was busted by a couple of colorful New York cops. In reality, it was a decades-long series of narcotics networks with Montreal as its hub. The Corsicans at the front end of the network in Europe included businessmen, spies and politicians. The American end of the network comprised relatively low-level operatives who shuttled the dope to the end users. In the middle, tying the conspiracy together, were Montrealers.
With so much heroin passing through his Canadian base, Carmine Galante felt he had found a better home. He even applied for permanent resident status on February 26, 1954, telling officials in Montreal that he had $5,000 to invest in a Montreal restaurant. He was told to get a medical examination, which he did. On March 1 he returned to fill out his forms and, when he was asked if he had a criminal record, he answered yes; further inquiries would have to be made about that, he was told. Four days later, Galante’s lawyer informed immigration officials their client had changed his mind and was returning to the United States. It was a preemptive move—any serious inquiry by Canadian officials to American police about his past would destroy any chance of him being ever considered as a suitable candidate.
Back in New York, however, he by no means cut his close ties to the growing Canadian drug connection. In fact, he jealously guarded them, attempting to rule by proxy through other trusted New Yorkers sent to Montreal in his place. By the spring of 1956, Canadian authorities were starting to crack down on the American bookies and gangsters in their midst and issued a list of undesirables who, if they were ever found in Canada or stopped at the border, were to be deported. On that list was Galante and his New York colleagues whom he had asked to look after Montreal in his absence.
Joe Bonanno and Galante then settled on a new tactic. They established a local two-man board of control to mind the Montreal store for New York. The Sicilian, Luigi Greco, who was close to Galante and shared his interest in drug trafficking, and the taciturn Calabrian, Vic Cotroni, were entrusted to jointly run the Montreal rackets on behalf of the Bonanno Family. It was a shrewd move, one that quelled the rivalry between the Sicilian and Calabrian factions within the Montreal Mafia and would bring nearly 20 years of relative peace and prosperity to its members. Montreal became an official satellite of the Bonanno Family, with Cotroni’s and Greco’s men becoming a crew of Bonanno soldiers operating in Canada.
Competition between the two men arose almost immediately as they jockeyed for favor with New York. Both men had strong qualities, but when it came to leadership, Joseph Bonanno gave Cotroni the edge.
“Cotroni was the head honcho. He was the captain of the crew. Louie was his right-hand man. We had to have a couple of sit-downs to straighten that out but we got it down. They trusted and listened to my dad,” said Bill Bonanno. “They had a sit-down at some place on Jean-Talon and the decision was that Vincent [Vic Cotroni] was the captain and Louie, you be the right-hand man. Louie was big enough to respect that. Louie knew it was best for everyone. Now, Louie had guys he was responsible for, but Vincent was responsible for everyone. If any of Louie’s guys made trouble, Louie knew he had New York to answer to.”
As agents with the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs stepped up their investigations into the myriad Canadian connections they were uncovering, and as the FBI continued to track increased north-south interaction between Montreal and New York, federal authorities started to better understand Galante’s interest in Montreal.
“Although the precise reasons for this move into Montreal are not known entirely, it is fair to assume that a primary reason was to establish an elaborate narcotic smuggling network,” an FBI agent wrote in an internal report. (Bill Bonanno insists neither he nor his father had anything to do with drugs, describing Galante as a “loose cannon” and a “rogue element” within their organization.)
Among those who quickly pledged allegiance to Greco, and who grew more and more appreciative of the new opportunities brought by Bonanno’s organizational intervention in Montreal, were Nick Rizzuto and several of his kin. The changing landscape put him at an increasingly important nexus: he was a Sicilian Man of Honor who had just become part of a major American Mafia family.
“I knew Nick. I met him in Montreal back in the 1960s,” said Bill Bonanno. “He was a young guy then. Another from the old country who had a lot of the same ideals as us and we accepted him. You can almost feel another Sicilian when you meet him—it is something that comes from the cradle.”
The Old World and the New World then came together in Nick, precisely at a time when the underworld elites on both sides of the ocean were arranging a similar intersection. It was an important time in the global development of the underworld. Decisions being made elsewhere among criminal cartels, led by the Bonanno Family, would have unimaginable consequences for crime, politics, economics, public health and social stability when mafiosi living in Sicily and America started working together. It was a partnership personified by Nick Rizzuto.
CHAPTER 5
PALERMO, SICILY, OCTOBER 1957
With a four-post colonnade at the entrance and intricate Art Nouveau details in its high-ceilinged foyer, the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes in downtown Palermo, an aristocratic home that was turned into a luxury hotel at the turn of the last century, has attracted many visitors of wealth and fame. Italian prime ministers have wined and dined in its restaurant and lectured in its meeting rooms. The German composer Richa
rd Wagner wrote his final opera, Parsifal, while a guest here in 1881. Today the hotel continues to put on a good show for tourists, but even by the mid-1950s it had become a bit of a cliché destination for well-to-do travelers, a bit like the Waldorf Astoria in New York—it still had the reputation but was a little tired around the edges for those seeking true luxury.
The waning tastes of trendsetters meant nothing, however, to a group of visitors who filled its suites from October 10 through 14, 1957. The guests in this entourage reportedly indulged extravagantly in food and drink but their primary purpose was one of serious business, and the hotel staff were kept well away from that. From the United States and from across Sicily, this was a gathering of leading gangsters. The intricate and often delicate discussions between them continued into the night, with an adjournment that saw them pause only long enough to travel to the Spano restaurant, a chic seafood emporium on Palermo’s waterfront. The Spano, long since closed, was sheer elegance. At the Spano and the Grand Hôtel, the cream of the Sicilian underworld met with the Bonanno leadership to discuss a partnership.