The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  None of the attendees ever fully disclosed what was discussed, but years of analysis by police intelligence agencies show that one of the major items under discussion was the heroin trade. The French Connection was coming under increasing law-enforcement pressure—an assault led by the United States, which was reeling from the flood of high-quality heroin. American mobsters and European traffickers had long had pieces of the French Connection, but no one had made an effort to bring the entire trade under control. That proposition seems to have been the focus of the talks at the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes.

  The architect of the gathering, the man who brought together these American and Sicilian mafiosi, was the deported American Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Joining the discussions as one of the Bonanno representatives was Carmine Galante, who became the primary liaison between Montreal, New York, Sicily and mainland Europe when the Bonanno Family decided to forge ahead into drugs.

  Among the notorious mafiosi from Sicily who arrived for the meetings were Gaetano Badalamenti and Tomasso Buscetta. Buscetta later denied knowing anything about meetings at the Grand Hôtel but told of the elaborate dinner party at Spano, one that went on for more than 12 hours, he said. Buscetta, who much later in life became an important pentiti, or “repentant” mobster who cooperated with authorities, denied until his death that he—who was clearly one of the world’s most industrious drug traffickers—had ever dealt in narcotics. Despite Buscetta’s denial, the conclave seems to have had two major achievements. The first was the creation of the Cupola, to monitor the internal affairs of Sicily’s many Mafia clans. The Cupola is the equivalent of what the American Mafia calls the Commission, and while most of the traditions that bind the Five Families are imported wholesale from their Italian homeland, the idea of an underworld oversight board was a gift the American mob gave in return.

  The second achievement was a formal transatlantic heroin accord. A transit route was being planned; supply and distribution chains were being arranged; problems were being identified and ironed out. The Men of Honor in Sicily were borrowing and buying the expertise of corrupt French chemists who had mastered l’école française, “the French school” of production that sent the off-white powdered morphine base through the 17-step process of turning it into the pure-white crystals of European heroin. To consistently get it right, without wasting the precious substance through over-cooking or contamination, took the knowledge of a scientist and the touch of a chef. The Mafia were building clandestine heroin production facilities directly under their control in the western portion of Sicily, bypassing entirely the raucous French port of Marseilles. They were now looking for new ways to send ever greater amounts of the world’s most valued drug into North America, particularly New York City, the largest drug market. Although often portrayed as a merger of two monolithic organizations—the American Mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—it would be more accurately described as a cabal of select gangsters from a number of clans which were hungry for the immense profits attainable through the drug trade.

  The two achievements—the Cupola and the heroin accord—did not stand in isolation. Both were necessary for the orderly running of a permanent narcotics pipeline. Unless some measure of peaceful cooperation existed at each end of the pipeline, the entire enterprise could collapse through rivalry and jealousy.

  Such divisive emotions, however, emerged almost instantly.

  Gaetano Badalamenti, a dour and brooding mafioso in Sicily, quickly recognized that the U.S. marketplace would provide unparalleled profits for the Sicilian families willing to sell heroin to the Americans. He capitalized on his own contacts in America and sought a little added action. Through family—a cousin was a member of New York’s Profaci Family, later to become the Colombo Family, and other relatives lived in Canada—and through contacts he made during an ill-fated 1946 trip to the United States that resulted in his deportation to Italy in 1950, Badalamenti directed Tomasso Buscetta to head to North America. Rather than deal strictly through the Bonanno Family receivers, Buscetta was instructed to create a parallel pipeline from Sicily to Montreal, Windsor and Toronto and, from there, into the United States. Both networks would pass through Canada en route to America.

  Rivalries among the Five Families were well known in Sicily, mostly through Bonanno relatives who made up a Mafia group in Sicily’s Castellemare del Golfo, a fishing village midway between Palermo and Trapani. Joe Bonanno was seen in America as an arrogant man who considered himself an aristocrat, an offspring of Mafia royalty, which was an offensive contrast to the false humility preferred by many old-school mafiosi.

  Bonanno’s inflated sense of self was not pure delusion. He had come from good Mafia stock and was an educated, cosmopolitan man who had certainly made something of himself in his adopted homeland. By comparison, the other American leaders had little family Mafia history and only modest strategic visions for the future. The contrast was never lost on Bonanno and it fed his egoist’s feelings of grandeur, which grated on and frustrated the other bosses. Bonanno caused constant strife with the other American bosses, including his cousin Stefano Magaddino, who ran the Buffalo Mafia. Magaddino had his own outpost in Canada, firmly rooted in Hamilton, a tough steel town on Ontario’s Great Lakes waterfront. Magaddino’s man in Canada was Johnny “Pops” Papalia, who also earned the nickname “The Enforcer.” Papalia himself would grab a piece of the French Connection in the late 1950s, a move that would land him in an American prison, charged alongside his partners: Joe Valachi, the future Mafia turncoat; Alberto Agueci, a Sicilian mafioso from Trapani who had moved to Toronto; and Vinnie Mauro, a Greenwich Village soldier in the Genovese Family. Clearly, while the Sicilian Men of Honor were struggling to ensure that their clans had a place in the heroin trade, so too were the other American Mafia families.

  Bonanno and Galante retained a key card to play, however, in their bid to be central figures in the emerging transatlantic heroin business: they had a competent crew in Montreal ready to handle importation, and a large organization in New York ready to aid in distribution.

  NEW YORK, 1960

  With Montreal in pocket and the Sicilian-American alliance in place, it was not long before Galante’s efforts started paying him dividends. His Montreal colleagues were proving to be prodigious smugglers and his extensive network in New York was off-loading vast amounts of heroin to a populace with a voracious appetite for the drug. As quickly as the tap had been turned on, however, its flow was restricted, temporarily, by federal agents.

  On May 3, 1960, the U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York announced a sweeping indictment against 29 men for a massive conspiracy to import large amounts of heroin into the United States from Canada. Among them was Carmine Galante.

  “The conspiracy consisted of a group of Canadians, headed by Guiseppe ‘Pep’ Cotroni, who handled the exportation of the drugs from Canada. Couriers brought the narcotics across the Canadian-United States border and into the New York metropolitan area,” court documents say. In New York, distribution centers had been established where the high-grade heroin was received, unpacked, diluted and repackaged for further sale.

  “Overall responsibility for the continuing operation rested in its ‘chief executive,’ the appellant Carmine Galante,” a New York judge ruled. During the trial, the court heard riveting testimony from a cooperating government witness. Edward Smith, until then a little-known criminal, described meetings with Galante, Vic, Pep and Frank Cotroni, and others, as far back as 1957. In a Montreal apartment Galante picked up a suitcase, put it on the coffee table and opened it, Smith said, describing an early encounter with the group. Inside were rows of clear plastic bags containing white powder. Smith’s partner counted the bags, shut the case and left with Smith for a drive south to New York City, where they took the suitcase to Frank’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn. From there, colleagues would head out every week on a regular delivery route that took them to bars and nightclubs throughout the city.

  Fo
r more than three years, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, working with city police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Canada, burrowed their way into the conspiracy. Smith started to secretly cooperate in 1959 and introduced an undercover agent, Patrick Biase, into the group posing as a major buyer. The greedy Canadian mafiosi quickly agreed to sell him large quantities of drugs, despite it being in direct competition with their partners in Brooklyn. In June, Pep Cotroni and René “Bob” Robert, his driver and drug partner, were arrested by Canadian police in what was at that point the largest drug case in the country’s history. Pep Cotroni pleaded guilty a few days into his trial and accepted a 10-year prison sentence.

  The case against Galante in New York would not be tied up so neatly. The trial against the defendants arrested in the United States began on November 21, 1960, after several delays, including a postponement when one of the defendants fled the night before the trial was scheduled to begin. For six months it staggered along, sagging under the weight of “every conceivable type of obstruction and interruption,” an appeal court judge would later rule. In May, on the eve of summations to the jury, the trial was halted after the jury foreman suffered a broken back. The judge could not help but note that the mysterious injury was the result of an unexplained fall down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building in the middle of the night. With the pool of alternate jurors already expended, a mistrial was declared.

  A retrial got under way on April 2, 1962. It, too, was a mess from the start, reaching “violent and bizarre extremes,” a judge noted. The jury had not even been selected when Salvatore Panico, one of Galante’s co-accused, started shouting abuse. Panico would later climb into the jury box and walk from one end to the other, pushing the jurors in the front row and screaming angry slurs at them and the judge. Anthony Mirra, who decades later would be killed by his own kin for unwittingly introducing an FBI agent into the Bonanno organization, was also charged. He took the stand in his own defence and, under a testy cross-examination, picked up his witness chair and hurled it at the prosecutor who was grilling him. It narrowly missed the prosecutor and shattered against the jury box. Some of the defendants sat through the remainder of the trial shackled and gagged; 11 were later convicted of contempt of court.

  “More abhorrent conduct in a federal court and before a federal judge would be difficult to conceive,” the appeal court judges noted. The gangsters’ disruptive efforts were in vain. Galante was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

  While Galante had other things on his mind, what most concerned Vic Cotroni was that the removal of Galante from the streets stripped the Montreal boss of his conduit into New York.

  MONTREAL, 1960s

  Against the backdrop of international underworld intrigue, the city of Montreal continued to grow and to bleed as the newly reorganized Mafia tightened its stranglehold. An emerging presence in the milieu was a man who shared Joe Bonanno’s belief in the power of Sicilian stock: Nick Rizzuto.

  Considered a soldier in what police were then calling the “Montreal Bonanno Faction,” Nick had quickly become something of a lightning rod, attracting around him a tough, tight crew of transplanted Sicilian gangsters. Nick was a good earner, a contributor who was ambitious and strong, respectful and aggressive—depending on what the circumstances required. Within the Sicilian wing, led by Luigi Greco, Nick carried himself a noticeable cut above the rabble, drawing on his connections to his father-in-law, Antonio Manno, and his network of Agrigento clans to further his criminal interests. In these early years, Nick formed his Mafia organization in Montreal with support from his extended family, such as Calogero Renda, his uncle who had arrived in America in 1925 alongside Nick’s father, and Domenico Manno, Nick’s brother-in-law. The Sixth Family was starting to make its mark.

  As Nick’s criminal organization grew, so, too, did his personal family. At the time of the Palermo meetings, Vito Rizzuto, Nick’s only son, had not yet turned 11, his daughter, Maria, was a year younger. The Rizzuto children were growing up in Montreal’s Villeray district and in Saint-Léonard, two largely Italian neighborhoods. Vito was plodding his way through school in Montreal and would eventually complete Grade 9 at St. Pius X High School, an English-language Catholic school. He was also being tutored in what would become his true calling. Young Vito was immersed in outlaw culture from the day he was born and, as he grew, he assimilated the accepted and expected behavior of his family. Everywhere Vito looked, on both sides of the family, he encountered outlaw role models (just as his own children would a generation later). Vito was carefully groomed in the old ways, while having in his grasp all the latitude and promise of the changing times.

  At every turn, he was taught the importance of staying close to his kin.

  CHAPTER 6

  BOUCHERVILLE, QUEBEC, MAY 16, 1968

  The fire alarm sounded a little after 1 a.m. at the Centre d’Achat Place-la-Seigneurie, a small shopping mall in Boucherville, a suburb of Montreal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River.

  The clamor roused members of the town’s fire department, who quickly arrived in force; 23 firefighters would respond that night, hauling out the six hoses they would need to attack the flames that were thickest around the Renda Barber Shop, which seemed to be the center of the blaze. The first contingent of firefighters to arrive, however, were confronted by an even more alarming sight: two men burst through the shop’s back door and ran frantically into a field, their clothes ablaze. As the startled firefighters watched, the men dropped to the ground and started rolling in the dirt to extinguish the flames. The firemen rushed to help, but before they could reach them, one of the men jumped to his feet and dashed away in the other direction. The firemen watched as he disappeared into the night, his clothes still smoldering. The other man, apparently in too much pain to keep running, remained on the ground, where firefighters and, soon after, the police found him.

  The young man was rushed to hospital where he was treated for serious burns. Police would later identify him as Paolo Renda, 28, of Montreal, owner of the barbershop and known to the other businessmen at the shopping center as a simple barber. Detectives suspected that the mystery man who had fled would be in similar need of medical care, and police officers started visiting nearby hospitals. Hours later, they found a man who had arrived at Montreal’s Santa Cabrini Hospital seeking treatment for severe burns. He fit perfectly the description given to them by the firefighters.

  The man identified himself to police as Vito Rizzuto.

  Then 22 years old, Vito at first dismissed questions from suspicious investigators by saying he had suffered the burns when the gas tank of his car exploded that night. That explained both the damage to his skin and the unmistakable smell of gasoline, of which he reeked. After police learned that Renda was Vito’s brother-in-law, the weak alibi soon crumbled and, under questioning, Vito eventually admitted that, yes, he had in fact been at the Renda Barber Shop in Boucherville that night. But he insisted he had absolutely nothing to do with starting the fire. Detectives remained dubious.

  By morning, back at the fire scene, the last of the flames had been extinguished. The damage was significant. Renda’s Barber Shop was completely destroyed. A neighboring business was largely consumed by the flames and 16 other businesses were damaged by either the smoke or the water from the fire hoses. Damage was calculated at $115,000, a large sum by 1968 standards. Fire investigators quickly determined that the blaze had been deliberately set. They found that the two men had been pouring gasoline on to the floor of the barbershop with the intention of setting it ablaze. While they were pouring, however, the gas ignited prematurely, sending a fireball roaring through the shop and enveloping Vito and Renda. This was not the first time the business had been set on fire; the previous December, a smaller fire was doused before it could destroy the premises.

  Police slapped both Vito and Renda with serious criminal charges. More than three years elapsed before the case went to court. Judge Georges Sylvestre hea
rd how the fire at Renda’s Barber Shop had been set by the two men in a bid to fraudulently collect an insurance claim. Renda apparently was ready for a change of career.

  He was well-positioned for a move into crime. A native of Cattolica Eraclea, Paolo Renda is the son of Calogero Renda, the man who had made the ill-fated moved to America in 1925 before returning to Sicily to marry into the Manno family. Paolo, who immigrated to Montreal in October, 1958, later solidified his Sixth Family standing by winning the hand of Maria Rizzuto, who was Nick’s only daughter and Vito’s younger sister.

  Had the gasoline in Renda’s barbershop not ignited before the men could flee, they might well have gotten away with it. As it was, they were found guilty of a raft of charges: arson, criminal conspiracy, two counts of fraudulently burning property and nine counts of being negligent with fire. Renda, the business owner and beneficiary of the insurance policy, was found to be more culpable than Vito, who was seen as having been brought into the scheme merely to help out Renda. A dutiful member of the Sixth Family, Renda did not protest that view. On January 29, 1972, Vito was sentenced to two years in prison for the arson and conspiracy charge and nine months on each of the other counts, to be served concurrently. Renda was handed four years for arson and conspiracy and 18 months on each additional charge, also to be served concurrently. For Renda, it was his first—and only—criminal conviction. Vito, however, had one previous—tiny—stain on his record, a conviction for disturbing the peace in the summer of 1965 when he was the tender age of 19. He had been fined $25 and spent eight days in jail.