by Lamothe, Lee
“According to the police version, you had purchased 280 kilos of cocaine on behalf of Vito Rizzuto. However, you refused to pay for the amount owing for the drug, $1.7 million, to the Colombian cartel, claiming that the drugs were of poor quality,” states Canada’s National Parole Board records. In August 1994, Nicolucci was kidnapped by Colombian drug traffickers from a Montreal strip club. The Colombians demanded their money and first hustled Nicolucci to the Laurentians, a mountainous area north of Montreal that is famous for its skiing, then smuggled him across the border to Florida, and finally on to Colombia.
In the traffickers’ jungle hide-away Nicolucci, who was always a good talker, negotiated a deal with his cartel kidnappers; his life would be spared and he would work off his debt as an indentured servant for the cartel in Colombia. His conditions could not have been too onerous, however, for when he was found by Colombian officials he fought extradition to Canada, a battle he eventually lost. Back in Canada, he faced 437 counts for drug trafficking and money laundering; here he also lost, drawing a second 14-year sentence in 1997.
Nicolucci’s Colombian adventures were to come years later; at the time of his 1984 visits to Caracas and Aruba, he was a drug trafficker still in good standing. The RCMP alerted the Venezuelan authorities to the Montrealers’ activities, although they undoubtedly already knew of Nick and his business from their probe with the DEA of the shipments of “fish.” It is also believed that the intelligence dossiers they gathered were used by high-ranking police officials not to prosecute Nick but to ramp up the bribes they demanded to continue turning a blind eye.
In Venezuela, the expatriate Mafia were as comfortable as they had ever been. Nick and the Cuntrera brothers—Pasquale, Paolo and Gaspare—had been joined by Alfonso Caruana, a former Montrealer from Agrigento, and together they lived in style.
“He had a huge villa looked after by private people, by private police who made sure that he was never disturbed,” said Oreste Pagano, a former drug-trafficking colleague of Alfonso’s. The Caruana-Cuntrera family, and presumably Nick as well, felt at ease there.
“He felt completely safe and well protected by the big, important friends that he had there in Venezuela. They were friends with the former president,” Pagano said of a relationship between Pasquale Cuntrera and Carlos Andrés Pérez. His feeling of security seemed well founded. The Venezuelan government had already rebuffed Italian extradition requests for Pasquale Cuntrera several times.
“They felt as strong as steel,” Pagano said.
Protected by officials, the Cuntrera brothers, along with Nick and the Caruanas—the elite of the Sicilian expatriate underworld—organized a drug network that flowed multi-ton shipments of heroin, cocaine and hashish into North America and Europe.
“The fact is that when something happens in Venezuela, there is a lot of commotion at that moment, but afterwards, with money, it is corrected,” Pagano said. His words, although not directly referring to Nick, mirrored what apparently occurred when the Rizzuto patriarch finally ran afoul of Venezuelan authorities.
CARACAS, FEBRUARY 1988
As comfortable as Venezuela had been for the Sixth Family, no haven lasts forever. The first cracks in their southern sanctuary opened suddenly and unexpectedly. On February 12, 1988, officers with the Cuerpo Técnico de Policía Judicial, the national police agency responsible for organized crime investigations, arrived at Nick’s home. There, officers found a quantity of cocaine. (Official reports say the amount ranged from 700 grams to 1.5 kilos—regardless, it was a relatively small stash for someone in Nick’s position and likely constituted only a sample provided to him for assessment before larger loads were arranged.)
Wearing a collared shirt with narrow stripes, unbuttoned at the neck, Nick was arrested and taken to Policía Judicial headquarters in Caracas. He was not happy, and he glowered at officers who processed him.
Nick was not alone in being implicated in a cocaine operation. Arrested with him were four other men, two Montrealers and two Venezuelans: Gennaro Scaletta, suspected by the FBI of being behind several illegal financial schemes in Caracas before he moved to Montreal in 1987 to handle some of Alfonso Caruana’s financial affairs; Frederico Del Peschio, identified in RCMP reports as an old associate of the Cotroni organization; Camilio Porchio, another Montreal man; and Nicola Marturano, a resident of Caracas.
The arrests came as a deep shock to the friends and family of the men in Montreal, and in a show of love and concern, some of the wives and daughters immediately flew to Caracas to see what they could do to help. Among their stops in Venezuela, made on their husbands’ behalf, the women paid a visit to the Canadian Embassy in Caracas.
The small entourage turned heads as it made its way through the embassy’s security and reception area. Dressed in business attire, weighed down by big jewelry and with their hair in perfect order, they had obviously dressed to impress for their meeting with Canada’s diplomatic representatives in Venezuela. Although they remained unfailingly polite to all, they were nonetheless firm and assertive. Platitudes and quick assurances would not do. They wanted answers and action.
“Their wives came in the following day, maybe two days later,” said a former Canadian diplomat who was serving in Venezuela at the time. They wanted to know what had happened to the men, why they had been arrested and what was to become of them.
“I threw up my hands and said, ‘Look, talk to the Solicitor General’s department; they’ll know far more than we do,’” the diplomat said. “They said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ I said, ‘What you need is a lawyer. Here is a list of the six we recommend, go out and talk to them and see what they can do.’” The women took the list, thanked the staff for their attention to the matter and then left. “None uttered a harsh word or said anything nasty to us, that we were not doing our job. They were all very considerate,” the diplomat said.
Representatives of the accused men came to the embassy about two weeks later. “Right, we’ve talked to a lawyer and he said the only way to get these guys out is to bribe the judge,” one of the visitors said, according to the diplomat. “We’ve brought the money and here it is.” The visitors then heaved a suitcase on to a table in an office of the diplomatic mission and snapped it open. Inside was row upon row of American currency.
“I didn’t count it,” the diplomat said. “I was in shock.” The sight of the money brought stunned silence in the office.
“I said, ‘Well, look, we’re not going to touch that. It’s not our business. Don’t you give it to the judge, either. You give it to the lawyer; it’s your lawyer and if that’s his fee, then how he spends it—whether he sends his kids to private school in the United States, takes his wife on a holiday to France or he puts it in an account of somebody else somewhere—that’s his business.’
“Don’t you touch it, or you’ll find yourself in the can as well,” the diplomat advised. The entourage then closed up the suitcase, thanked the officials for their assistance, hauled the case off the table and left. Canada’s diplomatic officials did not have much more contact with the family, but diplomats maintained a level of contact with Nick.
Perhaps the suitcase almost worked. The prisoners had a near-glimpse of freedom when they were acquitted of the drug charges. Their hopes of release were dashed, however, when they were held in jail under a Venezuelan Minister’s Order, an RCMP report says.
Nick Rizzuto and his co-accused were housed in a special administrative prison near Caracas. It was, in fact, just a secure, separate wing of a larger facility where the general population prisoners were held in often overcrowded conditions. While such cells can be a miserable, tense and violent place—“a gringo in there might last a week and then they’d eat him,” said a man who has toured several of the facilities—the arrangements for Nick were far more comfortable.
Past the locked and guarded entrance was a long corridor that led to another hallway leading to four separate rooms where Nick and his co-accused were kept. Each man had his ow
n bedroom, with a private bathroom, and the prisoners shared a common area with cooking facilities, a sitting room with a small television and a bookcase stocked with a modest selection of reading material. Apart from the fact that the doors could not be locked from the inside, it was more like a motel than a prison, and the men had regular contact with visitors and private time with their wives, family and friends on weekends. Visitors seemed to come around frequently, in fact.
Some arrived unannounced and, while not invited by Nick, were nonetheless politely received. Embassy officials periodically dropped in on the men, as is the practice of the diplomatic corps, who regularly visit jailed nationals to ensure that they are in good health and not being mistreated, and to see if they are in need of any consular services.
The officials would bring Nick recent copies of Maclean’s magazine, a Canadian newsweekly, and a couple of pairs of clean underwear to replace undergarments that wore out quickly from repeated hand washing. However, while Nick and his colleagues were always polite, the visits were a little awkward. The men were clearly uninterested in confiding anything to a government official.
“They greeted us and we said who we were and they all said ‘Hi.’ And we’d say, ‘We brought you a pile of magazines from Montreal.’ And they said, ‘Thank you very much, that’s very nice,’” said a diplomat who made several of the visits.
“How are you? How are you being treated?” the men were asked.
“Oh, fine,” they answered.
“Everything is okay?”
“Yes.”
“We’re doing what we can to push this process along,” the diplomats assured the prisoners.
“Oh, well, you’re wasting your time. We have no confidence in the system here,” came the reply. There were a few minutes of forced small talk before the diplomats felt they had done their duty.
“We’ll come and visit you every few months and bring you some magazines,” one diplomat said, getting up to leave.
“Thank you very much,” the men answered.
“Is there anything more we can do for you?”
“No, we’re fine here. As you can see we’re well accommodated. Our lawyers are looking into this and our wives come and visit us.”
As the diplomats were leaving, Nick turned to one of them and said firmly: “Don’t worry about us. We’re fine.”
This was a far cry from the typical Canadian citizen imprisoned abroad, who is usually anxious for diplomatic access and consular support. There are usually plaintive calls for government intervention and pleas to get them back to Canada. Often, the families of the imprisoned parties are a thorn in the side of the government, constantly calling, lobbying and pressing for action.
“Usually with the imprisoned consular cases, they are asking for a lot of things,” a former diplomat said. “Whereas these people didn’t phone the Canadian government in Canada, ever. They didn’t phone us, ever. We had to actually go out and look for them—look for them in the sense that we went out and asked if we could call on them. They never asked for us to come in. They never asked us for anything.”
It was a time of uncertainty for the Sixth Family in Venezuela. While Nick’s arrest was a hostile gesture, the remaining expatriate Mafia remained intact and untouched. In fact, a 1991 U.S. Department of Justice report states that Vito Rizzuto was residing in Caracas that year as well. He must have been earning frequent-flier points, for throughout the year, the RCMP and Montreal police photographed him meeting with an array of criminals in Montreal. They watched him drive around town in a brown 1987 Porsche 928 S4 two-door sports coupe and monitored him on innumerable local calls with associates in Canada. Still, it was likely he was a frequent visitor to Caracas, meeting with his father, meeting with lawyers who might be able to help with the situation, and conducting the family’s business in his father’s place.
While Nick was imprisoned, police in Canada launched a large probe of Vito and several of his associates, code-named Project Jaggy, to investigate massive cocaine importation from Venezuela and cannabis from the African coast, a Montreal police report says.
Things were changing in Venezuela, however. There was a reluctant realization by some officials that their country could not be so close to Colombia and remain immune from the cocaine trade. For those in positions of power to whom the accommodation with the expatriate Mafia was merely out of naiveté—as opposed to those for whom it was a profitable arrangement—the realization was a depressing one. The arrest of Nick Rizzuto and his colleagues was a start in cleaning up, the government claimed, although there are certainly many who suggest it was merely a means to extract payments that exceeded what the Sixth Family was prepared to pay. Nonetheless, the arrest of Nick was proof, to those in Venezuela who needed it, that there were extensive links within their borders between the Mafia and the Colombian cartels. Far more shocking cases would soon emerge.
At the 1990 wedding of Pasquale Cuntrera, an invited guest brought with him a friend from the United States who, in turn, brought a couple of additional guests. They were all welcomed with open arms—primarily because they each brought an envelope stuffed with $5,000 cash as a wedding gift. Unfortunately for Cuntrera, two of the interlopers were DEA agents who engaged the host in a discussion of heroin transactions. With this proof in hand, the American government started asking the Venezuelan authorities to act against the Cuntrera brothers. In the backlash against the Mafia after the 1992 murder of Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone—who had targeted, along with Carla Del Ponte, the Sixth Family’s financial undertakings in Europe—the pressure became unbearable. Faced with the possibility of an armed DEA snatch team air-dropping in to grab the brothers in a midnight raid, Venezuelan authorities arrested them and deported them to Italy.
For Alfonso Caruana, who had become the leader of the Caruana- Cuntreras, the writing was on the wall: the Venezuelans had been glad to take his money and exploit his influence, but faced with worldwide pressure, his days were numbered. With the Rizzutos seemingly untouchable in Canada, unscathed by the American investigations into the Pizza Connection and still robust after many other law enforcement initiatives, Alfonso headed back to Montreal.
It was a place where, he said, “I feel safe.”
MONTREAL, SPRING 1993
At a swanky downtown restaurant, one of many fine eateries in Montreal, a city that loves its food, Dominico Tozzi was eating, drinking and in a friendly mood during a lengthy business lunch with a man he knew as an underworld money launderer. Tozzi, a Montreal businessman and associate of the Sixth Family, was known as an amiable, if not talkative, fellow to begin with. Perhaps it was the wine, or maybe he felt the need to boast about his close ties to important people, but for whatever reason, at the March 29, 1993, lunch, Tozzi confided to his guest that Nick Rizzuto had been freed from a Venezuelan jail after Tozzi personally had delivered $800,000 to somebody in Venezuela.
The news would have been surprising to almost anyone, but as the lunch companion was, in reality, an undercover RCMP officer, the information was doubly appreciated. Although a close relative of Tozzi’s has denied the incident, which is revealed in a sworn affidavit used by officers to obtain wiretaps in 1994, and a lawyer for Vito said a bribe was not paid to free Nick, police took the information seriously. The news was a shock to officers, who did not know that Nick had been freed, although they were pretty certain he had not returned to Montreal.
On May 19, 1993, Canadian passport No. PZ-362199 was issued through the Canadian Embassy in Caracas to Libertina Rizzuto, Nick’s wife. With their travel papers in order, she then escorted her husband home to Montreal four days later, where Nick was greeted at the airport by Vito and more than two dozen friends and relatives. The joy of that reunion, however, did not erase the bitterness over the arrest.
A few years after Nick’s return to Montreal, Vito still considered some business in Venezuela unfinished. The treatment of his father in Venezuela weighed heavily on Vito, and it came up when he was discussing bus
iness in that country with Oreste Pagano.
“He wanted me to do him a favor,” Pagano said. “He was very upset over a lawyer in Venezuela that had stolen $500,000 from him for when his father was arrested in Venezuela. Five-hundred-thousand American dollars,” Pagano emphasized, noting the lower exchange rate of the Canadian dollar at the time. “And he asked me if I could have this lawyer killed,” Pagano alleged to police in a debriefing session, although the statement has never been tested in court and remains unproved.
“I said yes to him. But I never did anything.”