by Lamothe, Lee
Nick had been imprisoned for more than four years. Despite the loss of his leadership, the Sixth Family had progressed well while he was away, expanding the franchise. The organization had seen growth in its customer base, its product line and its list of suppliers. And, like most businesses, it had experienced a few setbacks and tense moments.
CHAPTER 24
IRELAND’S EYE, ATLANTIC COAST, OCTOBER 1987
Just off the rugged northeast coast of Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province, the rocky hills that form the tiny island of Ireland’s Eye rise steeply from the seawater of Trinity Bay. From the north, the approach to the tiny island is one of imposing red-and-gray-streaked rock, poking through a green canopy of stubby coniferous trees, that forms a threatening barrier from the sea. To the south, however, lies a narrow sound that cuts its way inland, twisting so deeply into the center that it very nearly cuts the island in two before coiling around to form a tranquil, protected lagoon. The round, dark pool may well have given the island its odd name, but this natural harbor certainly did offer settlers protection from the hard wind and choppy water. Which is why, despite its remoteness, Ireland’s Eye was first occupied in the 1600s by fishermen who drew from the teeming cod stocks and hid their meager earnings from Peter Easton, the marauding “pirate admiral” who led an armada of privateers in shaking down these maritime communities, one of North America’s first acts of organized crime.
Covering just two square miles, Ireland’s Eye reached a population peak of 157 people in 1911 before decline set in. Under a government relocation plan, people living in dozens of tiny outport fishing communities were moved to larger, better-serviced towns and, by the 1960s, Ireland’s Eye was abandoned, becoming a picturesque ghost town of well-spaced clapboard houses, some with tiny wharves jutting out into the harbor, a post office, schoolhouse and the once-impressive St. George’s Anglican Church, with its tall spire and stained-glass windows. The buildings are now a rubble of weathered planks and stone foundations that are slowly being reclaimed by nature.
It was this unlikely spot, in the fall of 1987, that the Sixth Family chose as its base for another revenue stream, part of a purposeful diversification plan to expand its portfolio. Man cannot live by heroin alone, and, like good businessmen and astute investors, the Rizzuto organization moved diligently to ensure relevancy, profitability and flexibility in an uncertain market. The expansion of the drug enterprises came through a startling array of contacts, both international and local, forming a multicultural stew of global underworld confederacies that would frustrate and bewilder police investigators trying to sort through, and, more important, penetrate them.
Some partnerships were more successful than others.
For the Ireland’s Eye enterprise, the Sixth Family turned to Raynald Desjardins, who had his first drug conviction in 1971, and later married the sister of Joe DiMaulo, a veteran Montreal mobster, bringing him into the Sixth Family orbit. Desjardins was one of several men over the years to be described by police and the media as the “right-hand man” of Vito Rizzuto, and his purchase of a home at the far southwestern corner of the Rizzuto clan’s exclusive neighborhood was further evidence of Desjardins’s standing. His interest in this stretch of Newfoundland coast seems to have been piqued, in part, by Gerald Hiscock, a corrupt Newfoundlander with a criminal past. Between them, police suspected, they worked to arrange the tail end of a series of transactions that started far from Ireland’s Eye, in the Middle East.
For years, Montreal’s mafiosi had been buying hashish by the ton from Christian Phalangist militia factions in Lebanon. The city’s underworld connections to Lebanon were both broad and deep. As far back as 1975, police wiretaps on Frank Cotroni’s telephone revealed that he made calls directly to the home of Suleiman Franjieh, the then-president of Lebanon. Cotroni was also meeting personally with high-ranking Lebanese government officials. When the Rizzuto organization seized Montreal, they inherited the rich connections in Lebanon as well.
Mostly their business involved straight cash transactions, proceeds from which the militia fighters funded their war efforts in strife-torn Lebanon. Sometimes the drugs were swapped for explosives, high-powered guns and clips of ammunition. Such firepower is rare in Canada, and authorities had long suspected that the Montreal gangsters were using their links to New York gangsters to secure the weaponry in the United States and smuggle it into Canada before forwarding it to the Middle East. This theory was proven in 1980, when the FBI managed to track a large shipment of weapons, including U.S. military assault rifles and matching ammunition, that had been stolen from a Boston armory; it made its way first to Montreal, and then to Lebanon in exchange for hashish.
Some time later, police informants recounted how Montreal mobsters had made a visit to Lebanon to meet with their business partners, swapping samples of their respective wares. During a meeting, automatic weapons were test-fired at the unfortunate residents of a Palestinian refugee camp. As horrific a scene as that was, Canadian investigators also worried about possible ramifications closer to home—for it showed that the Montreal mob had easy access to high-powered weaponry. They worried what might happen if it was ever needed. The Lebanon-Montreal connection flourished and, by the late 1980s, the RCMP estimated that 90 percent of the hashish smuggled into Canada came from Lebanon. Never ones to stand still for long on such matters, though, Montreal gangsters found other sources of the drug to supplement even this rich supply. They were quick to expand supply lines, looking to add to the routes from Lebanon, rather than replace them.
With backing from the Rizzuto organization, Allan “The Weasel” Ross, the boss of the West End Gang, a tight group of Irish gangsters, forged a new supply line for hashish through his connections with the Irish Republican Army and the Irish mob of Boston. The IRA talked loudly about its political agenda against the British, but tried to keep hush-hush its role in international drug smuggling as a means of financing its struggle. Montreal gangsters also forged ties in Pakistan when Adrien Dubois, one of the notorious Dubois brothers, who formed a feared francophone gang in Montreal, introduced a Sixth Family associate to his impressive source for hashish—a corrupt government official in Pakistan who had a ministerial position and a thirst for foreign currency. With financial backing from the Sixth Family, and its assurance that no amount of hashish would be too large, the Montreal organization was able to command the minister’s exclusive attention. The official agreed to sell them the entire year’s production of hashish from the portion of the Pakistani border region under his watch.
Then, in the early 1990s, yet another considerable source of hashish was secured in Libya. A scheme to import 50 tons of hashish from Libya was intercepted by police, however, and during an extensive investigation, code-named Project Bedside, they traced telephone conversations between Desjardins, Vito Rizzuto, Joe LoPresti and Samir Rabbat, among others, according to Montreal police. Rabbat was once decribed as one of the world’s top-10 drug traffickers and was in the process of building a large house in Montreal, just blocks from Vito’s home, when he was arrested.
All of that hashish made for a hugely profitable supply, with bulk loads being arranged—sometimes simultaneously—in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, all of it making its way to the Canadian coast and then into Montreal for redistribution across the country and into the United States. High-quality hashish was a cash cow, particularly in Canada, where the drug remains strangely popular. The hashish added another revenue source to Sixth Family holdings, as it continued to diversify from its near-dominant position in the heroin trade.
In the fall of 1987, gangsters arranging their latest hashish load from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley thought the toughest part of their operation was over—its purchase in unstable Lebanon, the loading of the drugs onto a freighter and the paying off of harbor masters, Lebanese officials and senior Christian Phalangist militia leaders to allow the vessel to slip, unfettered, out to sea. When word arrived in Montreal that the shipment was en route
, the receiving end of the arrangements swung into action. This was supposed to be the easy part.
With past shipments, the Canadian end had gone like clockwork, apart from one disappointment. For at least a decade, large loads of hashish had been smuggled successfully into Canada on foreign freighters traveling from Lebanon and arriving on Canada’s East Coast. One such ship certainly passed through the Port of Halifax in 1980. Police learned of a larger shipment—12 tons—that had been secretly offloaded in 1985 from a freighter anchored off the desolate coastline of Nova Scotia and placed onto small boats. When a 1986 shipment into Halifax was discovered and seized by police, the gangsters went looking for more remote drop-offs.
Ireland’s Eye seemed perfect. With its hidden harbor and no prying eyes for miles—and with a rudimentary infrastructure, including pathways and wharves—it was a smuggler’s paradise. What’s more, once a shipment was shifted over to the Newfoundland mainland, the area was not so remote as to make transport by land unreasonable. There was an access road to the Trans-Canada Highway.
Despite all the planning, the operation ran into difficulty.
On October 17, 1987, RCMP officers boarded the Charlotte Louise, a 100-foot fishing trawler, while it was docked at Blanc-Sablon, a small port and Quebec’s easternmost community, just across from the northern tip of Newfoundland. Despite initial confidence in their tip, a thorough search of the filthy trawler did not uncover any drugs. Even drug-sniffing dogs brought in for a second search found nothing untoward. Officers were feeling a little uncomfortable when two investigators in the bowels of the ship suddenly noticed that a number of bolts were not encrusted with rust like most everything else on board. The officers asked one of the ship’s mechanics to come down and remove the fresh bolts, a request he nervously refused, at first declaring the cover to the trawler’s drinking water tanks was not meant to come off and then that he did not have the tools to do it. The officers were increasingly insistent and eventually persuaded him to start twisting off a dozen or so bolts. When the metal panel was lifted off, the officers instantly knew they had found what they were looking for.
“When it was finally opened, the odor of hashish burst out and we almost got high on the smell,” said Michel Michaud, one of the RCMP officers onboard at the time. Reaching deep into the darkened water tanks, they pulled out bale after bale of tightly packed hashish. “All of the bales of hash were wrapped in many layers of cheesecloth, plastic bags and other materials and all were submerged under the water.” When tallied and weighed, the officers found about 500 kilograms of hashish, a load with an estimated street value of $9.5 million. On deck, covered by a tarp, were a small speedboat and an all-terrain vehicle. Officers arrested four crew members, all from Quebec, but Brian Erb, the ship’s flamboyant skipper, managed to flee. Erb was a notorious seafarer who had become a modern-day pirate, a freebooter with liberal views on what constituted marine salvage rights.
Erb had gained some fame-cum-notoriety more than 10 years earlier when one of his marine stunts captured world attention. The irascible skipper had hauled a 2,500-ton abandoned freighter out of the St. Lawrence River, patched it up and renamed it the Atlantean, a ship that was later impounded because of unpaid debts. After it had been auctioned off, Erb led a ragtag co-ed crew of teenagers to reclaim her. In the middle of a late-February night in 1975, the Atlantean slipped her moorings and set off downriver on only one working engine, as Erb defiantly tried to make his way through the ice-clogged St. Lawrence in a slow dash toward open seas. His act of piracy led to a dramatic 11-day chase by police. Daily reports on the ship’s progress and evasive stunts were carried in newspapers around the world. Once stopped by police, Erb agreed to head for port, followed closely by the RCMP. During the night, however, Erb slipped a small boat carrying two storm lanterns into the water, turned off the Atlantean’s lights and bolted for sanctuary while the police icebreaker continued to follow the decoy’s lights. He was soon recaptured, but by then he had been dubbed the “Errol Flynn of the St. Lawrence.”
Erb’s more recent adventures along the coast of Newfoundland, however, were not the escapades of a lovable rogue. Police were certain the hashish they found in his boat was but a small portion of a much larger load; in fact, it was probably only his payment for services rendered. Weeks before she was seized at Blanc-Sablon, the Charlotte Louise had been anchored off the shore of Ireland’s Eye while bales of the hashish were dropped on to a small speedboat, whisked to shore through the narrow harbor and then shuttled about the island on an all-terrain vehicle to hiding spots among the ruins.
The allure of fast money and a break from the grueling work of the commercial fishery brought otherwise honest fishermen under the control of gangsters from Montreal. Gerald Hiscock was the alleged Newfoundland contact for the Montrealers, whom police say hired local strong-arm fishermen to help unload the cargo. Their pay of between $17,000 and $20,000 made it an attractive alternative to hauling in fish for a pittance.
The drug trade, however, was hard to swallow for most fishermen. While in the past they may have enjoyed the easy money from Prohibition-era rum-running, few had much desire to be involved in illegal street drugs. They soon confirmed police suspicions about the movement of drugs with tales of unusual sea traffic along the craggy shores of Trinity Bay. Police were starting to get a pretty good idea of what was happening on the supposedly deserted island.
When the RCMP descended on Ireland’s Eye, the island had not seen so much activity since Pirate Easton brought his ships to harbor. Three fishermen had already shuttled some of the hashish to the mainland. From there, it had been loaded aboard a truck, hidden under a layer of onions and was en route to Montreal. Police arrested the fishermen, seized the main load of hashish and went patrolling down the highway for a truck with Quebec license plates. They found it, 17 miles east of Gander, driven by a father-and-son team from the Montreal area. (The Newfoundland town of 10,300 people earned renown years later when, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it took in 6,000 passengers from diverted and grounded transatlantic jumbo jets.) The Charlotte Louise, with the drugs still in the tanks, was towed by a Coast Guard vessel to Sept-Îles on the Quebec north shore, with two RCMP officers taking turns guarding the dope, despite one being seriously seasick after too heavily celebrating the arrests with his colleagues the night before.
All told, the operation uncovered about 17 tons of hashish, with a retail street value estimated by the police at about $225 million. It was, at the time, the largest drug seizure in Atlantic Canada, but nabbing a handful of fishermen and two truck drivers did not seem to solve the riddle of the huge find.
On Monday, November 30, 1987, police significantly added to their catch of the day, however, when they arrested Vito Rizzuto, Raynald Desjardins and a third man, all in Montreal; Hiscock was arrested in Newfoundland. Vito was then 41 years old. It was six years after the New York slayings of the three captains, five years after Gerlando Sciascia and Joe LoPresti had been charged with heroin smuggling and three years after Vic Cotroni died. Until this arrest, Vito had not been in police custody for 13 years, since his release in July 1974 on the barbershop arson conviction, other than two brief tangles in September and December 1986, when he was charged with impaired driving. Desjardins was then 34 years old and nominally running an auto repair garage in Saint-Léonard. They were charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs and, after a quick court appearance the next day in Montreal, flown to Clarenville, Newfoundland, where, by week’s end, they were sitting with their alleged co-conspirators before a provincial court judge. Authorities were overjoyed at laying such serious charges against operators as renowned as Vito and Desjardins.
As evidence of Vito’s collusion in the plot, prosecutors would point to a three-page transcript of a telephone conversation between Vito, in Montreal, and Desjardins, in Newfoundland, in late November. The conversation was oblique. Vito wanted to know when Desjardins would be returning to the city and Desjardins said he would exp
lain everything in person when he arrived. Desjardins then said there was “something happening next week.” Police and prosecutors claimed that this was a reference to the unloading of the hash from Ireland’s Eye a week later. Lawyers for the accused men described it as an innocuous conversation between acquaintances.
Vito spent Christmas in jail before obtaining bail in March 1988. He returned to Montreal while lawyers worked on his case.
SEPT-ÎLES, QUEBEC, OCTOBER 1988
Vito was out on bail when, on October 20, 1988, more than 60 officers with the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, fanned out through several rural coastal communities at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. They uncovered a second hashish importation scheme remarkably similar to the Ireland’s Eye find. Another modest vessel, the Jeanne d’Arc, was searched while anchored at the port of Mingan, near Sept-Îles, Quebec. On board, police found 38 tons of hashish, said to have a street value of more than $450 million, along with lesser amounts of cocaine, marijuana and weapons. This seizure was more than twice what had been found at Ireland’s Eye, and was in turn declared the largest ever found in the area. Nine people were arrested, including Normand Dupuis, 38, the boat’s owner and skipper.
Dupuis was wealthy by the standards of local fishermen and operated his vessel on the lower North Shore. He was also a self-confessed cocaine addict. Perhaps it was his drug habit that made Dupuis unstable, but his progress through the courts was anything but typical. Within two weeks of his arrest he had already agreed to cooperate with authorities and, to the glee of police, implicated as the mastermind of the venture none other than Vito Rizzuto. His demands in return for his cooperation were as modest as his ship, especially considering the stakes involved. In exchange for testimony against Vito he wanted $10,000 to help him resettle, a new identity, help in obtaining a passport, $120 a month while he was in prison and—perhaps the most sensible demand—drug treatment for him and his girlfriend. The authorities quickly agreed to it all and, on November 4, 1988, Dupuis and government representatives signed a contract for the seaman to become a cooperating witness. Six days later, his case was whisked before a judge and he pleaded guilty for his role in the hashish conspiracy. He was handed a four-year sentence that was to be served concurrently with a 30-month term for possession of 585 grams of cocaine. Dupuis then entered a protective wing of a provincial jail to keep him safely away from the general population while prosecutors digested their new evidence and drafted charges against Vito.