The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  The conversation, and its obviously titillating effect on the woman, likely seemed amusing to Canzano. Life was good. He was reaping the rewards of being the right-hand man of a bona fide leader in a Mafia-run drug smuggling enterprise, a job that allowed him to travel, mingle with legendary crime figures, impress those women who were attracted to dangerous men and earn far more than his salary from hauling fruits and vegetables, his usual cargo, would ever pay. The enterprise Canzano had found himself involved in, which gave him some right to so indiscreetly claim his Mafia association, was an important and timely venture for the Sixth Family.

  By 1992, Montreal was the Sixth Family’s northern trafficking gateway and Florida was rapidly becoming its southern front. There was a growing—and increasingly urgent—need for a new southern route.

  The 1980s and early 1990s saw an explosion in popularity of cocaine, a sharp, addictive stimulant that was being churned out in seemingly unlimited quantities in South America and hitting the streets of North America, typically through Florida. Thousands of traffickers, mostly relocated Colombians but also expatriate Cubans, ran cocaine networks from within Florida that brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the state. These new gangs also brought a wave of violence, echoes of the carnage in Colombia where well-armed and well-funded drug gangs amounted to full-scale insurgency groups battling for control of portions of the country. Bodies were dumped in the South Florida streets; the “Colombian necktie” was invented, where the victim’s throat was slashed and his tongue pulled out through the hole; “war wagons,” civilian cars and trucks stuffed with high-powered firearms clutched by high-flying gunmen, roamed the streets, opening fire indiscriminately on perceived threats or targets.

  Cocaine profits altered the economy in the southern part of the state. Thousands of businesses were opened, many of them inactive front companies used only to launder drug money, but others, real businesses used as a means of reinvesting the accumulating profits. Colombian drug traffickers were bringing in so much cocaine in the 1980s that they were competing for clients; murders were sometimes not over the drugs or the money, but over the theft of customers. For several years, the wrong parts of South Florida were something of a bloody, narco-capitalist war zone.

  The Mafia in Canada looked on this with more than passing interest. For many Canadians, Florida was already well within their comfort zone—it was a winter holiday destination for mobsters as well as the so-called “snowbirds,” the Canadians who spend their winters in Florida’s more temperate climate. For several decades, the old Cotroni organization in Montreal had members working in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and up the eastern coast. As Canadian representatives of the Bonanno Family, the Montreal mafiosi were welcomed by Gambinos, other Bonannos and members of the New Orleans Mafia family also operating there.

  Canadian mobsters showed up with some regularity in investigations, mostly drug cases. William Obront, a Montreal underworld financial genius, was arrested by the DEA in a 1983 drug case in Florida, sparking an emergency meeting between Joe LoPresti, Frank Cotroni and others. It was a huge loss to the Montreal Mafia when Obront was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years. Later, the Caruana-Cuntrera and Vella organizations in Venezuela started landing its cocaine in Florida, often through the Port of Miami, where Oreste Pagano, Alfonso Caruana’s key supplier, worked with Cuban criminals to get the drugs off the ships and out of the port.

  “I had my connections in Miami,” Pagano said. “[They] introduce me to Cubans who were working very hard and who had big connections at the port and they would be able to pick up any amount of merchandise that would be sent,” he said. Never ones to pussyfoot around, once the connection was made, Alfonso Caruana and Pagano shipped in 1,600 kilos in a single load. The interest of the Sixth Family and other expatriate Mafia clans in Florida stemmed not only from the Cuban connection being established in the Port of Miami, but also from the erosion of their base in South America. As a haven, Venezuela was heading into a meltdown. Under pressure from the U.S. government, the Venezuelan government was finally getting cold feet about offering sanctuary to the mobsters. Caruana was preparing to flee the country, Nick Rizzuto—as a sign of the trying times to come—was already in prison on cocaine charges and the Cuntrera brothers had been expelled.

  Astute businessmen, the Sixth Family leadership recognized that the evolution of their organization must continue apace and that new sources of supply and bases of operation had to be found and preparations made for the abandonment of its South American outpost. South Florida seemed an ideal replacement.

  With Nick in prison, the Montreal hub of the family was in the hands of his son. Vito had strong advisors all around him—Mannos, Rendas and Cammalleris, chief among them. They were family; he trusted them implicitly. He had Joe LoPresti at his side and, in New York, Gerlando Sciascia. The Sixth Family was imposing a more rigorous business approach onto their criminal enterprises. Several members were entrusted to run their own drug operations as best they could, with each network carrying the powerful Rizzuto imprimatur despite its semi-autonomy. It was a lesson drawn directly from corporate America: the franchising of crime. As the organization’s hunger for product increased, four new international cocaine smuggling routes were opened, each supervised by a different Sixth Family acolyte. The routes they built spanned the globe: one was built with Montreal contacts living in South America, another was securing its drugs in Texas, a third dealt directly with gangs in Asia and still another formed in Florida.

  For the foray into Florida, the job fell on Domenico Manno.

  Born on December 27, 1933, in the Sixth Family stronghold of Cattolica Eraclea, Domenico Manno is 11 years younger than Nick Rizzuto and 13 years older than Vito, making him a generational bridge within the Sixth Family. Manno was a true man of the Mafia. In his hometown, he had been born into Mafia royalty, as the son of Antonio Manno and Giuseppina Cammalleri, and the younger brother of Libertina Manno, Nick’s wife. Manno joined in the early exodus of the clans from Cattolica Eraclea to Montreal. He had tried to move to America when he was just 17 but faced expulsion in July, 1951. A file was started on him by U.S. immigration officials in January, 1958, and he was registered as driving across the U.S. border from Canada on September 3, 1959, at Champlain, New York. He fell under investigation in St. Albans, New York, in July, 1963, apparently sparked by another border crossing the month before.

  In Canada, however, Manno made his first blip on police radar when he was arrested and convicted for running a gambling den in 1967, during a crackdown on vice in Montreal that coincided with Expo ’67, the World’s Fair that was held in the city as the country marked its centenary year, an event that attracted huge foreign crowds. A decade later, he was a substantial underworld player, a key part of the Sixth Family as it was wrestling Montreal away from Paolo Violi. He had stepped in to help represent the family on the streets of Montreal during some of its most tenuous years, while Nick and, later, Vito moved to the safe haven of Venezuela. He then helped to settle the dispute once and for all, having an active hand in Violi’s assassination, a slaying that gave the Rizzuto organization control over the Montreal gateway to the American drug markets. Manno gained additional notoriety when he and his co-accused kin received such mild sentences for the slaying—Manno was handed seven years—that a local newspaper, The Gazette, lashed out, saying the sentence served “almost to sanction the planning of executions.” The defendants, the judge declared, were “model immigrants who performed the most modest tasks in an effort to earn a living and to slowly and laboriously build themselves a trade.” Manno would apply that same ethic to his drug enterprise in Florida.

  At the time of his Montreal conviction, Manno was a lean, hard-looking man with close-cropped hair and deeply creased facial features. He quietly did his time in prison, after assuring authorities—in writing—that neither Vito nor Nick had anything to do with the slaying. Clearly, Manno knew his place within the Sixth Family and accepted it. Well respected, he always ho
vered near the top—but never at the top—of the Canadian Mafia hierarchy. If he ever felt jealous that Vito, not he, was the successor to the family throne, there was no hint of it. After his release, he again offered himself as an advisor to, and protector of, Vito, when Vito returned to Montreal to claim the city as his own while Nick remained in South America. U.S. police intelligence files list Manno as part-owner of a trucking company based in Saint-Léonard that was used as a front for drug trafficking and money laundering. It was this firm that hired Pat Canzano, the Montrealer who seemed to like titillating his friends with his mob association. Manno had also attended major gatherings of the Sixth Family core, including a key organizational meeting in Montreal, in January 1983, where Manno was joined by Gerlando Sciascia, Paolo Renda and many others, police reports say.

  For Manno, his connections to career traffickers and ownership in a trucking firm was an opportunity not to be missed. With the Sixth Family’s South American outpost in jeopardy, the 59-year-old Manno stepped forward to create a cocaine importing scheme in Florida.

  LAKE WORTH, FLORIDA, 1993

  Manno was a jovial and polite buyer when dealing with Bertha Lucia Osorio de Reyes, who lived in Lake Worth, Palm Beach County, Florida, a midsize coastal community with the slogan: “Where the Tropics Begin.” Reyes liked to be called “Berta” and she responded to Manno’s friendly manner by being a charmer in return.

  Like Sicilian mafiosi, Berta also believed in keeping business within the family. Her business was using a good connection for cocaine in Colombia through a legendary smuggler named Herbert Luna-Luna to get the drug into the United States. With her son, Mauricio Reyes, her sister and two close associates, Berta specialized in couriering cocaine out of South America and into Florida. A typical Berta operation consisted of sending couriers to South America, where they were given relatively small quantities of cocaine to smuggle back, often hidden in tubes containing rolled-up paintings. One shipment of three such tubes, brought back from Quito, Ecuador, on commercial airlines, totaled a modest 10 pounds. The drugs were delivered to Berta’s Lake Worth home, where the courier was paid. Word would go out that Berta had dope to move and a buyer would come forward.

  Increasingly, that buyer would be Manno. Berta’s tight little group operated off the radar, the underworld equivalent of a prosperous but not ostentatious mom-and-pop corner store, and the always friendly chitchat between her and Manno, and Manno and her son, reflected that.

  “How are you, sweetheart?” Berta, in her South Florida home, said to Manno, who was calling from Montreal. It was November 1, 1992, just before 11 a.m., and both were ready for business but never let the pleasantries pass unspoken.

  “Not bad, you?” Manno replied.

  “Oh, fine, thank you, your family?”

  “Everything’s okay,” Manno answered. “How’s it going there?”

  “Oh, everything is fine,” she replied. The talk then moved into the typically disjointed terrain of furtive code words used when drug smugglers try to say things without actually saying them, on the off-chance that the conversation is being recorded by police. Berta, Manno and Mauricio Reyes would all appear to be talking about anything other than drugs. On the morning of October 5, 1992, the RCMP, who for two months had been secretly monitoring wiretaps placed on several members of the Sixth Family—with their prime target being Vito Rizzuto—heard Manno answer a call from Mauricio.

  “Hey, how are you?” Manno asked.

  “How are you doing, sir?” Mauricio politely replied. Manno told him that “his friend,” Pat Canzano, was leaving the following day for Florida in his truck.

  Did he have any “tomatoes,” Manno asked. Mauricio replied that he did.

  “Probably gonna get, uh, like five bushels this time,” Mauricio said, meaning five kilos of cocaine. Manno was hungry for the product.

  “We’ll take whatever ya got. It’s no problem.”

  Between them, Canadian police and U.S. federal agents drafted a list of 45 code words that Manno and the Reyes family would use in their conversations, forming something of a guide to drug traffickers’ code. “The hard ones” was cocaine, “the soft” was heroin. And sometimes

  “Cadillacs” meant cocaine and “Hondas” meant heroin. When the product was “like cement” it was in hard, brick form. “Good boys” meant good-quality merchandise. “Documents” meant money. The federal agents were “the bad guys” and “a gentleman” was a trusted drug distributor. “Fifteen cents a square foot” meant the price for a kilo of cocaine was $15,000. It made monitoring their conversations difficult for everyone—including, sometimes, themselves. When two shipments were on their way, one of heroin and the other of cocaine, and one got seized by police, Manno and Mauricio were quickly on the phone.

  “How are you doing?” Manno asked, on March 18, 1993.

  “I’m doing good and not so good,” Mauricio replied.

  “Good or no good?” asked a confused Manno.

  “Good and no good.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “OK, there are Cadillacs and Hondas,” Mauricio started, looking for a way to make Manno understand without being too explicit. Manno knew words beginning with C usually meant cocaine and H words typically referred to heroin.

  “Which one’s good?” asked Manno.

  “The Hondas,” answered the boy.

  “What about the Cadillacs?”

  “The Cadillacs? Well, we’re gonna have to wait until another guy can go. … We’re going to have to start all over again with these guys because the guy … the … the guy got, uh … How do you say? He got caught,” he said, finally giving up on finding a suitable code word for being arrested.

  Despite the occasional setback, business was good for Berta. And Manno was the only buyer she needed. He had endless clients lined up and was constantly demanding cocaine and edging for credit.

  “Anything more, I will accept it,” Manno said one day. “Whatever you can send me.” Berta’s sources in South America were increasing not only the size and frequency of their shipments of cocaine, but also introducing heroin, which had begun to be manufactured in labs hidden in the jungles of Colombia. It was all, Manno was told, earmarked for him. Heroin was like a magic word to Manno. He began ramping up his demands for the drug. Heroin was historically the underpinning of the Sixth Family; if cocaine was the modern meat of the criminal body, heroin was the very bones.

  Canzano was taking money hidden in his truck down to Florida and returning with cocaine. The organization became so active that Canzano had to find other drivers to assist him. Sometimes the deals were successful and Manno was able to market large quantities; other times there were backups, arrests of couriers, even a ripoff. One trafficker, known to the others only as “Chico,” took more than $70,000 of Sixth Family money and, instead of delivering cocaine, disconnected his telephone and vanished. When hunting for Chico, the traffickers did not know of the police wiretaps but someone had spotted a surveillance agent. With Berta living on a dead-end street in a residential community, stationary surveillance was difficult for police. Officers also noted with frustration that the traffickers frequently threw off their surveillance by conducting “heat runs”—driving through an area in which a trafficker has associates who watch his car pass and then look for any vehicles following it. Police had surreptitiously stolen the trash on several occasions from in front of Berta’s home in a search for additional evidence. Berta and her family were starting to feel the heat.

  “Bad guys showed up across the street for days and days and days,” Mauricio nervously told Manno one day. He believed the surveillance was on Canzano, who had stayed at Berta’s house and made several telephone calls from there while trying to locate Chico. Manno, fearing his carefully nurtured source for cocaine and heroin would evaporate if Berta got too nervous, hastily calmed Mauricio down, telling him that they had not slipped up on their end. Alas, they had. Between the RCMP, the DEA and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Departme
nt, the enterprise had been thoroughly compromised.

  Pat Canzano was under heavy police attention when he made a run to Florida in 1993. During a lengthy surveillance, Canzano met with several notable Florida traffickers. He also met with another Montreal truck driver being used to transport cocaine back to Canada. Similarly, when Manno himself traveled to Florida, police were all over him. Manno, frustrated at the money lost to the elusive Chico, flew into West Palm Beach airport in late March 1993. For nine days he and Mauricio Reyes tried to track Chico down. Attempts were made to find him through his social security number and credit records. Manno said that he had access to a lawyer who could obtain such information for him.

  In spite of the loss of the $70,000 and the increasingly obvious police surveillance, Manno did not slow down. When Berta showed an interest in obtaining counterfeit money, he sent a sample down, saying he had a huge amount in Montreal. Counterfeiting U.S. banknotes had long been a quiet specialty of Montreal crooks under the Sixth Family.

  On May 10, 1993, Manno called Canzano in Montreal and told him to go to an address on Bélanger Street to meet a man named “Pietro” to whom Canzano was to simply say he was a friend of Manno’s and ask for “some stuff.” Later that day Canzano was arrested in Montreal with a kilogram of cocaine. On the same day, RCMP and DEA surveillance teams watched Manno and a man authorities described as his son-in-law, drive out of Montreal and across the border at Rouses Point, New York. The pair ended up at the Marriott Hotel, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The following day, Berta Reyes, accompanied by two men, also arrived at the hotel, where they found Manno lounging near the lobby elevator. The group had a meeting, then Berta and her entourage left the hotel and easily dodged the surveillance team. Manno and his driver checked out the following day and drove to Manhattan, where they took a room at the New York Helmsley Hotel. On May 13, Manno was followed by agents to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, near Grand Central Station, where he waited in the lobby until Berta and her companions showed up again. Unable to get a cab for all of them, they headed into the subway and were lost by the surveillance team.