by Lamothe, Lee
MONTREAL, DECEMBER 1972
Luigi Greco was a short and stocky man with a brooding face that betrayed a life spent on the wrong side of civility. He had dark brown, piercing eyes, a nose bent from a nasty break and a noticeable scar on his forehead. Born on September 19, 1913, he was still a teenager when he was convicted of assault; at the age of 23, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for armed robbery. His time in prison only solidified his criminal interests, and in 1954 he was leading a squad of strong-arm goons who marched to Carmine Galante’s orders.
“Luigi Greco—we called him Louie—was quite a character. He was an old-timer. He was loyal and tough. Once he made up his mind on something you couldn’t move him on it,” said Bill Bonanno. “He had a right hand that you wouldn’t believe. He was out riding a horse one day and it threw him. He fell hard to the ground but he pulled himself back up, dusted himself off, straightened his shirt. He walked up to the horse, looked the horse in the eye and said: ‘How dare you do that to me.’ And he punched the horse in the head—knocked it to its knees.”
Greco’s business holdings had grown alongside his stature in Montreal’s underworld. He owned several nightclubs and restaurants, including joint ownership of the Bonfire restaurant with Galante. He also controlled a pizzeria that was officially owned by other family members. By the late 1960s, flush with heroin profits, he had smoothed over part of his rough image and was dressing sharper, sometimes even strutting about with a swank silver-tipped cane.
The competition between Greco, a Sicilian, and Cotroni, a Calabrian, took a toll on their relationship, even after Joseph Bonanno settled their positions of authority. They were both strong-willed men, with Cotroni relying more on his brains, and Greco on his brawn. Police had become increasingly interested in Greco’s extensive travel: he routinely visited Detroit, Chicago and New York, trips that suspiciously followed travel to Mexico and France. Greco even accompanied Bill Bonanno on trips throughout Europe in the 1960s. Greco’s career, however, was tripped up early by his heroin dealings for Galante and, as a result, much of his international travel came to an abrupt end in 1962 when he was indicted on a narcotics charge in the United States. Although he remained safe in Canada, the indictment gave him “fugitive” status in America, clipping his wings considerably. Accordingly, his value to New York slipped substantially and, soon after, so did his standing in Montreal. At every turn, Greco had been outmaneuvered by Cotroni, who easily assumed leadership of the Montreal organization. This did not sit well with the Rizzutos, who maintained that a Sicilian should be at the top. Nick was not shy about expressing that opinion.
Cracks in the Sicilian-Calabrian alliance were already noticeable by the spring of 1967, with news of the “disharmony” between Greco and Cotroni even making it on to the front page of The New York Times that year. Although Greco had once had the upper hand in Montreal, Cotroni had eclipsed him to the point where a senior Canadian police officer was quoted in the Times as saying: “Greco is only a door opener for Vic Cotroni.” Still, even opening doors for Cotroni, in those years, made one a master of the Montreal underworld.
Greco’s businesses, appreciable underworld position and growing interest in the heroin trade did not mean he put himself above getting his hands dirty when it came to tending to his family’s Montreal restaurant. This is rarely a bad trait, but for Greco it brought unexpected disaster.
On a Sunday evening, December 3, 1972, he arrived at Gina’s Pizzeria, an outlet near the Jarry Park police detachment, to the south of Saint-Léonard. Greco and his brother, Antonio, were renovating the establishment. That evening, contractors were to lay new ceramic tiles over the worn asphalt floor. Greco first asked the workers to help him clear the furniture from the area to be tiled and then, while the contractors prepared to lay the new floor, Greco and his brother set about scrubbing the old one. For this Greco chose a mop dipped in kerosene to be used as a solvent and a metal scraper to remove the stuck-on gum and accumulated filth. It proved an unstable combination. The ensuing explosion and flash fire was brief but devastating. Greco was horribly burned and, four days later, died in Sacré-Coeur Hospital. Such an unusual death for someone in Greco’s line of work naturally led to lingering suspicion, but an official probe of the fire declared it to be the result of a careless tangle with a volatile solvent rather than underworld intervention. The death of the boss of the Sicilian faction was a stunning shock to the underworld of Montreal, a sentiment reflected in his funeral, which was a large, old-style mob send-off.
The loss of Greco was deeply felt by his family, close friends and criminal allies, Nick Rizzuto among them. Despite any lingering sadness, however, Greco’s death also presented an opportunity. Nick’s crew had grown mightily in the almost two decades since his arrival in Canada. He had gathered together a diaspora of Sicilian expatriate mafiosi who had come to Montreal to reap gangland spoils. As a wave of immigration continued, the few who arrived with references from mafiosi known to the Sixth Family immediately gravitated toward the Rizzutos. The family found them work—both legitimate, to aid in their bid for residency and citizenship, and otherwise—as Nick expanded his criminal empire. In the landscape of Montreal’s burgeoning underworld, Nick was now the obvious Sicilian candidate to replace Greco. It was not vanity that led Nick and his supporters to think he was the rightful heir to Montreal’s underworld, or at least to Greco’s share of it. In addition to his increasing power and presence on the streets of Montreal, his family’s merger through the marriage of his son, Vito, into the Cammalleri family of Toronto gave his organization a strong domestic presence and, more important, his alliance with the Caruana-Cuntrera clan had enhanced his position abroad.
“This Italian Sicilian Mafia family, with its international expertise in drug importation and money laundering, puts the once Cotroni-lieutenant Nicolò Rizzuto in a new position to lead the Sicilian faction on Canadian soil,” notes a private RCMP briefing on the early days of the family.
Nick had also put his Sixth Family links to good use elsewhere in Canada and around the world. Hinting at his wide-ranging criminal interests and international activities, for instance, is a curious arrest in Paris on June 22, 1972. Nick, along with unnamed others, was found in the French capital with approximately $1 million in counterfeit U.S. currency, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration files. The arrest appeared not to have impinged on him too much, as no conviction or period of incarceration in France can be found in his records. All of this suggested that Nick was a superior earner and a leading figure in Montreal, certainly worthy of being an underboss to Cotroni, in keeping with the Sicilian-Calabrian accord imposed by Galante. It was not to be.
Likely recognizing how deep the erosion was in his relationship with Luigi Greco in recent years, and the increasing push by the Rizzutos to open the city to their Sicilian drug-trafficking partners, Cotroni did not seem interested in bringing Nick closer to him; nor did he seem concerned with maintaining the delicate Sicilian-Calabrian balance. Instead of Nick—or any other Sicilian mobster—he chose Paolo Violi as his heir. Violi accepted both the position and Greco’s illicit operations, which came with the post. Underworld sources said that all of Greco’s mob assets were assigned by Cotroni to Violi: not only the soldiers in his crew but all outstanding debts owed to Greco and all of his ongoing scams were put on record under Violi’s name. It was a significant promotion for Violi, one that Nick and his kin did not much approve of. Many Sicilian gangsters felt slighted and insulted. For Nick Rizzuto, the stakes were much higher than the anticipated take from frightened businessmen and the gambling enterprises in Saint-Léonard.
In his long existence in the mob, Nick had hidden many things, but something he did not—or could not—hide was his feelings for Paolo Violi.
The sentiment was mutual, of course, with Violi and Cotroni frequently cataloging Nick Rizzuto’s many sins when chatting privately with any influential underworld figure who would listen. Both Cotroni and Violi accused Nick of actin
g inappropriately. Cotroni was heard complaining that Nick was a “lone wolf” who was more interested in the private internal affairs of his Sixth Family kin than in contributing to the Montreal organization. Cotroni complained that Nick failed to show adequate respect for his administration, especially for Violi. The catalog of complaints continued: Nick lied about his intentions within the family; he bypassed the proper chain of authority; he acted on his own initiative without seeking or obtaining permission from the administration, even on important matters. Violi complained that Nick and his inner circle came and went without deigning to inform him, or anyone else outside their clique, what he was up to and whom he was working with. That, Violi said, made him dangerous.
Their complaints were not without merit. After the death of Greco, Nick did blatantly ignore Cotroni and Violi wherever and whenever he could. Nick showed his disdain for the administration by avoiding its gatherings altogether, making himself noticeably absent from family-related functions. Whenever Nick did cross paths with Violi, he failed to display the expected deference that Violi’s position demanded—however forced or insincere it would have been for him to do so. There were plenty of underworld figures with grievances against Cotroni—and even more who disliked the bellicose Violi—but almost everyone managed to bite their tongue and go through the motions of accepting and respecting the position, if not the person. Nick was not so diplomatic.
Nick had complaints of his own. He objected to Violi interfering with his right to govern his own clan and he maintained that he had been personally insulted when Violi’s thugs had stolen presents from a Cuntrera family wedding. The wedding-theft story could be true, as it was a well-known scam that Violi had concocted, stealing the thick envelopes filled with cash that were typically given as gifts at large Italian weddings. The complaint about the Cuntrera wedding theft even appears in files of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Through it all, Nick was acting as if he were the boss of a completely separate organization. Which, of course, was precisely how Nick was beginning to see things.
“What is known is that there was a traditional rivalry between then-underboss Paolo Violi and Rizzuto,” an FBI report says. “RCMP reports indicate that Rizzuto was a lieutenant in the Cotroni organization until he became disenchanted with the hierarchy of the group.”
Despite the petty complaints and personal disregard between Nick and Violi, this was not the real meat of their disagreement. The core of their rivalry was not hubris or insult or being denied a promotion, or whether one was a Sicilian Man of Honor or the other a member of the Calabrian Honored Society. All of this helped to fuel the ensuing melee—and charge the emotions of supporters and detractors who were already hot and bothered even before Greco’s death. This masked, largely to this day, the real impetus for the fight, which was the unfettered access to the drug markets of America. The Sixth Family needed to have Montreal as its transit point in the movement of heroin out of Europe and into the United States. With Sicilian mafiosi in Europe shipping the product, and Sicilian mafiosi set up in several New York enclaves to receive it, the key transit route through Montreal, Nick felt, needed likewise to be controlled by Sicilians. And he knew that whoever held the keys to Montreal would become wealthy, powerful and important on the world stage.
Unlike the businessmen and junior mobsters in Montreal, however, Nick Rizzuto was not a problem Violi could easily manage. A stickler when it came to traditional Mafia etiquette, Violi knew he could not simply have Nick killed. Nick, as both a made man in Sicily and a fellow Bonanno Mafia member, was officially immune to such a dire action unless Violi sought and received permission in accordance with Mafia rules. Obtaining such permission would not be a simple thing. Because of Nick’s involvement in wider concerns—as an increasingly important link in the Sixth Family drug chain and a key part of the immense revenues associated with it—such a move would require permission from both New York and Sicily. Violi felt he was up for the challenge.
Rarely has a dispute between rival mafiosi been allowed to fester as long as it did with the Violi-Rizzuto feud, with so much effort expended in finding an amicable solution by mobsters on two continents. For seven years, senior mobsters from Italy and New York would make many trips to Montreal to listen to Violi and, separately, to Nick or his supporters, looking for common ground and a way to resolve the widening gulf between them. It represented a significant investment in trying to mediate an end to their feud. The seriousness with which the dispute was seen, the difficulty in finding a resolution and the involvement of such important players affirmed the tremendous value of both the city of Montreal and the men who controlled its underworld. It also suggests the power and respect that the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta accorded each other in such matters, something that did not transfer so easily to the New World.
NEW YORK, EARLY 1970s
The Bonanno Family in New York City, as short-sighted as it seems, was comfortable with the evolution of leadership in the family’s Montreal outpost. New York was probably too consumed with its own internal chaos to give much thought to the noises coming from its reliable money-maker to the north. As Violi was settling into his new, expanded role in Montreal, the New York end of the Bonanno Family was only just recovering from serious disarray. The long-time boss, Joseph Bonanno, had made so many enemies among rival Mafia families that in the mid-1960s the Commission had moved to depose him. A brief period of dissent and contested leadership followed, a tense time that sparked occasional shoot-outs. A quick succession of bosses were installed by the Commission but none lasted long in the job. Within a few years two of them had stepped down for health reasons, falling far short of the nearly 35 years that Joseph Bonanno had held the reins of power for.
By 1970, Natale “Joe Diamonds” Evola, a convicted heroin trafficker, had ascended the shaky Bonanno throne. Among Evola’s inner circle was Philip “Rusty” Rastelli. Rastelli had a modest personal obligation to the Montreal mob—although probably not directly to Violi—because, like so many other Bonanno members who ran into trouble with the police, he had hidden in Canada while on the run from the law. Around 1961, Rastelli was on the lam in Montreal, protected and accommodated by the Montreal mobsters, until the heat died down.
It was not the first or the last time the New York mob looked to Canada to hide its fleeing felons. It is one of the fringe benefits of having family outposts abroad. Joe Valachi, an old-hand soldier in the Genovese Family who partnered with Canadian-based mobsters in the heroin trade—and would, just a few years later, become a seminal Mafia turncoat—slipped across the border into Canada in 1959 and hid out in Toronto. And in July 1964, Joe Bonanno himself arrived in Montreal. His stay was intended to be a semi-permanent relocation, an escape from the pressure and threats from the other New York crime bosses. Like Carmine Galante before him, he even applied to the Canadian government for permanent resident status, trying to pass himself off as an honest businessman interested in cheesemaking and dairy products. In support of his claim, he presented a letter from the owner of the Saputo cheese company of Montreal, which offered him a partnership in the company, with one-third of its shares. (Such an offer was startling. Had Bonanno secured his immigration status and a piece of the Saputo cheese and dairy empire, it would have been a lucrative move. Saputo & Sons has gone on to become an international corporate juggernaut. Saputo is one of the largest dairy and cheese producers in North America, with 45 plants and 8,500 employees in the United States, Canada and Argentina that generated revenues of $1.03 billion in the 2005 fiscal year. The company founder, Giuseppe Saputo, later said he was unaware of any mob connections of Joe Bonanno’s at the time.)
Cotroni and Violi had built up substantial good will within the Bonanno hierarchy in New York, both institutionally and personally, through such ventures. They were connections both sides would remember and seek to profit from. A decade after Rastelli’s return to New York from Canada, when he was named Bonanno underboss, Violi would
not be shy in trying to cash in on the favor. Rastelli, likewise, reached out to Violi when he needed work done north of the U.S. border. In April 1971, soon after Evola and Rastelli’s installation as the new Bonanno Family administration, Montreal police began intercepting telephone calls between Violi and Rastelli. On May 14, 1971, Rastelli called Violi directly, asking him to help “deal” with someone in Toronto who owed him a significant amount of money. On January 21, 1973, Joseph Napolitano, from Pointe-Claire, Quebec, met with Violi at the Reggio Bar and passed on a request from New York for him to find and return a recalcitrant debtor who had fled to Canada from New York, where he owed $30,000, some of it to Evola. Violi, not missing an opportunity to curry favor with the boss, promised he would handle the matter personally.
Violi helped New York where he could. Such requests were an affirmation of his authority in Montreal, and he basked in the recognition. All the while, he used the contact to continually push his concerns over the growing impertinence of Nick Rizzuto. Violi showed he was as intent on countering Nick’s challenge as Nick was on pressing it. A colossal showdown seemed inevitable. If the Rizzutos could triumph, it would be a crucial step in their personal and organizational history.