by Lamothe, Lee
At the FBI office, while LoPresti was fingerprinted and photographed, he became deeply quiet; his mug shot shows him sullen, with his mouth in a frown and his eyes downcast.
Almost two years younger than Vito Rizzuto and 14 years younger than Sciascia, Giuseppe LoPresti was another of Agrigento’s favorite sons. Over six-foot-two with a strong build, bushy dark hair and a prominent nose, “Joe” or “Big Joe,” as he was often called, had known the two men all his life. LoPresti was essentially born into the Sixth Family, and then, as if to make certain, married into it as well.
LoPresti was born in Cattolica Eraclea, the son of Lorenzo LoPresti and his wife, Giuseppina Sottile, on January 24, 1948, he told FBI agents when he was arrested. (Some police charts, however, list his parents as Giuseppe LoPresti and Antonina Mongiovì; the Mongiovì clan is linked to both the old Agrigento Mafia of Giuseppe Settecasi and the Cuntrera clan.) In true Sixth Family style, he married a woman who was also from Cattolica Eraclea, Rosa Lumia, who was four years his junior. And, like Vito, LoPresti emigrated to Canada, becoming a naturalized citizen, living in Montreal and adding English and French to his language skills. The LoPrestis had two children, one who suffered from a form of bone cancer, he told the FBI. Among his family and friends were the highest-ranking members of the Canadian and Sicilian underworlds.
In Montreal, he owned or had interests in several legitimate businesses: among them, LoPresti Construction, of which he was the sole owner, and a board-game venture in which his involvement was so vague he could not even remember the company’s address or phone number when asked. The business connections, however, were sufficient to justify his comfortable lifestyle. LoPresti had made his way into police files in the 1970s as a conspirator in the murder of Paolo Violi, but was never arrested for it. After he was identified as one of the men posing with Vito Rizzuto and Giuseppe Bono in the 1980 wedding photos, the FBI started to take an interest in him as well. Although Sciascia was known in New York as “George from Canada,” it was really LoPresti who made most of the cross-border trips for the Sixth Family’s heroin pipeline. LoPresti was a well-traveled man. Police in Canada documented his routine appearance in Montreal at Vito’s side, while at the same time American law enforcement frequently tracked him on visits to New York, where he mingled easily with Bonanno, Gambino and DeCavalcante Family mobsters.
“LoPresti is a narcotics trafficker and serves as liaison … between the Montreal Sicilian Faction and the Sicilian Faction in the Bonanno LCN [Mafia] Family,” an FBI report from 1985 says. “LoPresti, despite his frequent role as diplomat, clearly owes his allegiance to Rizzuto and the Montreal Sicilian Faction,” the report adds. LoPresti managed to keep a low profile despite the growing police interest and, in fact, had no criminal convictions—which, of course, made him the perfect choice for such frequent cross-border travel.
The Eastern District indictments were aimed at both the Montreal and New York ends of the heroin scheme and revolved, in large measure, around the evidence gathered from the bugs in Ruggiero’s Long Island home. Along with Sciascia and LoPresti, Gambino soldiers Ruggiero, Eddie Lino, John Carneglia and Gene Gotti were also indicted. While the FBI managed to catch LoPresti during a trip to New York, Sciascia, ironically, was back in Montreal, ostensibly involved in his Canadian construction business, when the New York indictment came down. The U.S. government applied for Sciascia’s extradition from Canada and, in November 1986, he was arrested by the RCMP and jailed.
“He was clean,” said Yvon Thibault, who made the arrest as a sergeant with the RCMP’s Montreal office. “No weapons, no drugs, no fuss. He was a gentleman.” Sciascia then began a two-year fight in Canadian courts to prevent his return to the U.S.
Sciascia was concerned about facing trial with someone with the notoriety of the Gotti name, and someone with the mouth of Ruggiero. By October 1988, he saw a more favorable climate in New York: his codefendants had all received bail and the case had been broken into separate trials, effectively distancing him from both the tainted Gotti name and his talkative co-accused. On October 28, 1988, in a letter to Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin of the Eastern District of New York, Benjamin Brafman introduced himself as Sciascia’s lawyer and informed the court that his client was returning to face trial. Describing Sciascia as a 55-year-old father of two with a wife of 25 years and no criminal record, Brafman started his campaign to win Sciascia bail.
“At the time of his arrest, Gerlando Sciascia learned that he was one of many defendants named in the same indictment,” Brafman wrote to the judge. “Sciascia was advised [by both his Canadian and New York counsel] that it was not in his best interest, as a peripheral defendant, to proceed to trial in the same proceeding with all the other defendants, because of the prejudicial spillover that was certain to result.” Sciascia had spent two years in Canada—in detention—rather than risk an appearance before a jury with such bad elements.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not let the lawyer’s spin pass without comment. In his reply letter, prosecutor Andrew Maloney lampooned the idea that Sciascia had voluntarily surrendered. “After his arrest in November 1986, Gerlando Sciascia, in fact, sought to prevent his return to the United States by opposing our application for his extradition,” Maloney wrote. “For almost two years, Gerlando Sciascia had been unsuccessfully seeking to overturn the order of extradition.”
After returning to the United States to await his trial, Sciascia was allowed to return to Canada briefly—for just 28 hours—on the occasion of the January 14, 1989, marriage of his son, Joseph, to Laura Bruno, at the Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal. While in Canada, he was to stay with his nephew, Luciano Renda. A year later, Sciascia finally secured a little more freedom, although his bail restrictions did not allow him to travel outside Manhattan, the Bronx or Brooklyn nor anywhere near an airport. At his bail hearing, when the issue of organized crime involvement came up, Sciascia looked up at the judge and appeared confused.
“Who’s in organized crime?” he asked.
Notwithstanding, he was released on a $2.5-million bond, signed as a surety by Sciascia’s wife, son and Giuseppe Arcuri, a relative of both Domenico Arcuri in Montreal and Giacinto Arcuri in Toronto.
Putting Sciascia, LoPresti, Ruggiero and Eddie Lino on trial was, as was becoming the custom for large mob cases, fraught with difficulty. After a mistrial, prosecutors forged ahead a second time, this time without Ruggiero as a defendant. The talkative mobster had died of cancer.
At the trial against the remaining three men, Assistant United States Attorney Gordon Mehler highlighted the clannishness of the Sciascia- LoPresti axis. If the Bonanno hierarchy did not realize where Sciascia’s loyalties lay, then Mehler certainly did when he declared: “George and Joe, Joe and George; they are one and the same.” Brafman, Sciascia’s lawyer, appeared to be playing to the jury’s preconceptions about “the Mafia” and his client’s Italian ancestry when he used objectionable terms to counter Mehler’s contention. “In Agrigento, when they were little greaseballs, they knew each other, too,” Brafman said at one point.
Waiting until their cases could be severed from that of Gotti and Carneglia proved its value. Gotti and Carneglia were sentenced to 50 years in prison. On February 9, 1990, however, after a month-long trial, Sciascia, LoPresti and Eddie Lino were acquitted.
“Thank you very much,” LoPresti called out to the jury, after the foreman delivered the verdict. “God bless you.” At least one member of the jury should have been thanking LoPresti, instead.
Earlier, a captain in the Gambino Family told Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano that the daughter of a customer at his Brooklyn fish store was a member of the jury. The captain said the woman “would be talked to and that for an appropriate gift of $10,000 she would do the right thing,” Gravano claimed. Gravano checked first with John Gotti and then turned over the money.
MONTREAL, SPRING 1992
Both Sciascia and LoPresti knew they had dodged a bullet with their acquittals and t
hat their operations would forever be under close scrutiny by American law enforcement. For LoPresti, that did not appear to be an untenable problem. He was Canadian, and he returned to Montreal where he immersed himself in the daily activities of the Sixth Family. It was not long before Canadian police would again hear LoPresti on wiretaps, this time in Canada. On March 21, 1991, at 12:58 a.m., as part of Operation Bedside, one of several RCMP drug probes targeting Vito Rizzuto, officers intercepted a telephone conversation between Vito and LoPresti. LoPresti was back in business.
Something, however, turned sour.
On the last day of April 1992, Montreal police were called to a set of railway tracks that ran through an industrial plot on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard East. There, wrapped in a large gray dropcloth, the kind used by painters, and tied up with the type of cord commonly used at construction sites, was the body of a tall, dark-haired man carrying a large roll of cash but no identification. He had been shot in the head at close range with a small-caliber bullet. The next day, the body was identified as that of Joe LoPresti. Police later found his red Porsche abandoned at a nearby restaurant. He was 44.
“Joe was involved a lot more in the background and was very discreet in Montreal. Unfortunately, he was not discreet enough in New York,” a long-time Montreal drug investigator said. The murder investigation was not helped by LoPresti’s grieving family. A lawyer for the family wrote a letter to the Montreal police asking detectives investigating the murder to stop contacting them.
“His point was clear: Lay off. He said for us to stop harassing the family, cease and desist. It effectively shut down the investigation,” said André Bouchard, who retired in 2004 as head of the Montreal police’s Major Crime Unit. It went unsolved and is periodically reviewed by detectives. “We took a look at it again in the last year I was there,” Bouchard said. “Still nothing.” Perhaps some members of the family knew more about the murder than the police. Although the murder was never solved in Montreal, LoPresti’s killer had revealed himself in New York.
LoPresti was well known to most of the New York gangsters. He spent enough time in the city for the Bonanno captains to know him by name and by sight. LoPresti was officially recognized by the Bonanno administration as Sciascia’s acting capo-regime, or acting captain, meaning he was second-in-command to Sciascia in New York and was a suitable stand-in for Sciascia, should Sciascia not be available. The New Yorkers had been looking at things only from their perspective and, by their standards, LoPresti was the number-two man in Montreal, behind only Sciascia. They failed to realize that both men were underlings of the Rizzutos and had been sent off to New York to mind the Sixth Family’s interests in their primary marketplace. As such, the Sixth Family could deal with both of them as it wished, even if it caused some ruffled feathers in New York.
“George from Canada came to see me and said that Big Joe from Canada was out of control; he was doing drugs, he was snorting drugs, he was using drugs, he was selling drugs,” Vitale said. The implication was clear to Vitale. Sciascia was saying that LoPresti was dangerous and had to be killed.
“If that is what you want to do, do it. You have to protect the family,” Vitale told him, authorizing Sciascia to “take care of business,” meaning the kill would be a sanctioned hit. “But he led me to believe that business was already taken care of,” Vitale said. “George, for the sake of this conversation, he was [being] cute. … He led me to believe he might have already done it.” Sciascia previously had the same conversation with Anthony Spero, the Bonanno consigliere. When Vitale and Spero compared notes, they knew that they would not be seeing “Big Joe” ever again.
“Me and Spero agreed, when George came to us, the gentleman was already dead,” Vitale said. Sciascia, it seems, was trying retro-actively to seek official permission to eliminate Joe LoPresti. If Sciascia had followed the American Mafia’s rules, he would have needed the permission of the Bonanno administration before LoPresti was killed.
“Big Joe was a made member of the Bonanno Family,” Vitale said.
This was another example of how the Sixth Family flouted the accepted rules of the Bonanno Family and operated independently as its own crime group. Vitale, seeming to realize the futility of taking issue with the decree of the Montreal organization in dealing with its own man, did not pursue the issue further. Why Sciascia and, presumably, the Sixth Family administration, would have wanted LoPresti dead is a mystery. One reason he certainly was not killed for, however, was one of the excuses Sciascia had complained of to Vitale: that he had been selling drugs. That was not a problem.
The unexpected, unapproved and unexplained murder of LoPresti, apparently by or with the complicity of Sciascia, was not the only sign of a deteriorating relationship between Montreal and New York. At the highest levels, there were overt signs that the Bonanno administration had already noticed that the Sixth Family was starting to pull away from its expected orbit around New York. That did not mean, however, the Montreal organization was withdrawing from international affairs.
CHAPTER 23
CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1982
The sparkling reception for Nick Rizzuto and his colleagues in Venezuela first started to tarnish in the spring of 1982—although the mobsters did not yet know it. Venezuelan security intelligence officers had been probing foreign influence in the capital city and were concerned over the volume of overseas telephone calls being made for no apparent or legitimate reason. Tracking the calls led agents to Nick Rizzuto and his expatriate Mafia allies, the Caruanas and the Cuntreras. The country’s security forces at first believed the calls were related to espionage activities by a foreign government and, if some in the government were not overly concerned with mobsters investing drug profits in their country, a potential breach of security in this easily destabilized part of the world was not taken as lightly.
The Venezuelan authorities turned to the CIA for help in tracking down this suspected foreign menace but the U.S. agency, realizing pretty quickly that it was drug trafficking, not insurgency, being plotted, turned the case over to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Tom Tripodi, a DEA specialist in international drug trafficking, was sent from Washington to look into the matter. Tripodi met with Venezuelan officials at a coffee shop near the American Embassy in Caracas and from there was taken to the investigators’ secret apartment where the telephone calls were being monitored and recorded.
Many of the voices were speaking the Sicilian dialect particular to Agrigento. On one, the caller spoke of “fish” being shipped from Venezuela to Sicily. Each fish seemed to weigh a kilogram and they were putting a thousand of these beasts into a single shipment. Tripodi knew immediately that it was really a 1,000-kilogram shipment of cocaine. The more conversations he listened to, the larger the scale of the operation was uncovered—cocaine was going to Italy and heroin was being returned in huge amounts. Although cracking that part of the traffickers’ code was simple, the DEA could not penetrate the system they used for passing on the date and place that the shipments were scheduled to arrive.
While the Venezuelan authorities lost some of their enthusiasm for the case once the non-political nature of the conspiracy was deduced, the DEA’s interest remained strong. Their investigation started to focus on Giuseppe Bono, who seemed to be at the root of the activities on the European side of the transactions. A prosecution in Italy would also be far easier than in South America, especially when it was learned that Italian police were monitoring some of the same calls from their end. They traced calls from Bono, through the phone lines of Citam, a powdered milk company used for laundering drug profits, to many members of the Sixth Family. Throughout the summer of 1982, the Italian police also monitored Bono’s constant contact with Nick Rizzuto. That the investigation so quickly became a European affair, however, was of great relief to the Sixth Family. Most of their activity at that time was divided between North and South America.
On February 4, 1984, Vito Rizzuto and Sabatino “Sammy” Nicolucci left Montreal for
Caracas. Nicolucci, a thin, almost nerdy-looking man who might have been able to pass for Bill Gates’s impoverished brother, had a minor drug possession conviction in 1973 and a more serious conviction for possessing $2 million of counterfeit money from 1978. His association with the Sixth Family would eventually lead to more prison time and even more frightful ventures. In 1984, however, his Sixth Family connection meant a winter break from the cold of Quebec. Nicolucci also visited the island of Aruba, a Caruana-Cuntrera stronghold in the Caribbean Sea, off the northern coast of Venezuela. RCMP officers following him later asked the management of the Holiday Inn where he had stayed to let them review the phone records for Nicolucci’s room, but no registration could be found for him. Officers discovered that his room had been reserved and paid for by Pasquale Cuntrera, one of the senior members of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan.
A year after his visit to Venezuela and Aruba, Nicolucci was charged in Canada with conspiracy to import drugs and laundering the proceeds of crime. Vito, again, was side-stepped when it came to charges. Nicolucci was sentenced to 14 years in prison but was released on full parole in January 1991. By August 1994 he had stopped making personal appearances at the office of his parole supervisor, as he was required to do. He telephoned in to the office instead, claiming he did not have the money to travel by public transit. Suspicious officials revoked his parole and ordered him back into custody. When he failed to appear, police officers went looking for him. Their suspicion proved to be well founded—he was not even in the country. Nicolucci eventually turned up in Colombia in May 1996.