by Lamothe, Lee
The heroin purchase was not going well. In a call to his wife on May 17, Manno said he expected to be “finished” that same day and that someone should leave “it” with her cousin. But the negotiations dragged on. Manno wanted 10 kilos but did not like the $105,000 per kilo asking price; plus he wanted at least partial credit. On the Berta side, there was frustration over the delays in closing the deal. She was in the classic middleman squeeze, caught between the Colombian suppliers and the Mafia purchasers. Mauricio Reyes was told that things were “moving slowly” and there had been disagreements with Manno. The “old guy,” Mauricio was told, had become upset during negotiations. At one point Berta told her son that she hoped Manno “would quit being a pain in the ass.”
That heroin deal between Manno and Berta never fully came together, although Manno was able to buy a single kilogram for $105,000. Relations between Manno, whom the Florida associates started calling “the little old man,” and Berta, became strained, to the point where she began leaving her telephone off the hook to avoid his repeated calls. Such was his hunger for heroin shipments.
In spite of the tension between the Canadian mafioso and the Berta crew, Manno continued to move counterfeit money to her. At one point he sold $85,000 to one of Berta’s associates. When the man went to buy cocaine with it, he was arrested—the seller was an undercover policeman. At the end of 1993, Berta herself was arrested when she was found with $10,000 of Manno’s bogus bills.
On March 11, 1994, Manno and Pat Canzano—who was already facing a charge of possessing a kilo of cocaine in Montreal—and several members of Berta’s organization were indicted in the Southern District of Florida. The U.S. government sought the extradition of Manno from Canada, with court documents identifying Manno as “a Sicilian Mafia member” and Canzano as “his right-hand man.” Court papers record that Manno was “responsible for 29.5 kilograms of cocaine, 10 kilograms of heroin and $85,000 in counterfeit currency.” These were terribly conservative figures.
It was perhaps then that Pat Canzano started to regret his loose talk to his lady friend about being part of the Mafia. The phone conversation had been recorded and transcribed by police and presented in court, read from the witness stand by a DEA agent. If Canzano did not blush, others in court did it for him. Canzano later said that he “got blinded by stupidity.” But he had bigger things to worry about. His lawyer, Eddie Kay, described him in a Florida court as a “tweener.”
“[Canzano] was between cooperating and not cooperating,” Kay said. “And during that tweener period he told the government about the amounts of cocaine involved … [but] he wouldn’t tell the government about Manno. He just won’t go against Manno,” he said. “I tend to think that there’s something to be said for this type of philosophy of being a standup guy, and this is the last standup guy, here.” Despite his client’s apparent sympathy for Manno’s circumstances, Kay was not as forgiving. Manno was not, he said, a “good godfather.”
“Manno is all over the tapes. Manno is acting throughout this whole conspiracy, and there’s a guy named Rizzuto who’s on top of Manno. Now, it would be like Don Corleone going ahead and doing the acts himself,” Kay said, referring to the Mafia boss in The Godfather.
“This is some Don Corleone, you see, who takes his right-hand guy and puts [his family] on welfare.” Canzano was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
Twenty-two months after the request for Manno’s extradition from Canada, he appeared in a U.S. court. His criminal case was wrapped up far quicker than his battle to remain out of the hands of the American authorities. Within six months of returning to Florida in shackles, he struck a plea agreement admitting his role in running a criminal enterprise and a heroin and cocaine conspiracy in return for a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine. A pre-sentence report portrayed a broken-down, hardworking Italian immigrant. He said he had never attended school. He lived in a finished basement with his wife, who earned money as a self-employed seamstress doing piecework, and he had an ill daughter who had been institutionalized for more than 25 years, the court was told. He had no assets; in fact, he claimed a negative net worth of $115,097. He owned a truck and other equipment to run his business, but all was heavily encumbered by liens and had no resale value. How he would pay the fine that he had agreed to pay was a mystery.
“Mr. Manno, has anyone used any pressure, threats, coercion, force, intimidation of any kind to cause you to plead guilty?” the judge asked him.
“No, no,” he answered. Manno was contrite before the court. “The only thing I want to say is, on my own behalf, to give me as low a sentence out of consideration for my family … I’m so sorry for all of the problems that I’ve given to the United States. I feel very bad about it.”
The guilty plea—almost a mandatory action by all captured Sixth Family members to try to keep the Rizzuto name out of the public’s eye—was a strategic move on Manno’s part. Or, at least, so he thought. He had successfully played the justice system in Canada when pleading guilty in the Violi murder. He was going to find American justice a little more equal to his machinations.
Manno and his lawyer had cooked up a plan designed to shave years off his sentence and save him from having to pay the hefty fine. He would agree to the outrageous plea, then quietly apply for the Transfer of Offenders program, a treaty between Canada and the United States that lets citizens of one country imprisoned in the other serve their sentences in their homeland. Once in Canada, Manno knew, the Canadian penal system calculations of appropriate punishment would apply and, under its generous parole allowances, he would likely be out of prison after serving as little as one-third of his sentence. And further, once back in Canada, he had no intention of paying a cent of the $250,000 fine. This turned out to be a bad strategy. While his lawyer, Samuel DeLuca, had advised Manno that it should work out rather nicely, after his plea Manno was informed that he would have to pay every penny of the fine before he was eligible for an international transfer. Disgusted, Manno got new lawyers to appeal his sentence.
“As a result of bad advice, Mr. Manno agreed to a deal which subjected him to a longer sentence than he was willing to agree to serve because he was advised that he would not have to serve it,” his new lawyers argued.
In November 2004, his appeal was rejected. Outfoxed at every turn, Manno, the previously crafty mafioso, remains in an American federal prison, due for release in December 2012, when he will be 79 years old.
CHAPTER 26
CENTRAL SQUARE, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1993
Interstate 81, following the path of the Appalachian Mountains, stretches from eastern Tennessee to the Canadian border without passing through any major metropolitan areas, making it a popular route for impatient truckers. Not surprisingly, speed traps are common. It was on the south-bound lanes of the northern leg of that highway, as the pavement passes between the sprawling Adirondack Park and Lake Ontario, that a New York State trooper stopped a speeding taxicab in September 1993. While the trooper wrote out a ticket, the cabbie told him a curious story.
He was just returning from Canada where he’d dropped off an unusual fare—an agitated, sweating passenger who had abandoned his car at a diner in a small New York State village. The passenger was exhausted and jumpy, muttering quietly to himself such things as: “Even if they find it, no one can prove it’s mine.”
It was a bizarrely long and lucrative 185-mile cash fare to Cornwall, Ontario, for the cabbie, who marveled at his good fortune. The driver’s luck, however, meant bad news for the Sixth Family. The traffic stop was the first thread to pull loose in what would be revealed as a complicated tapestry: another cross-border drug smuggling plot. In what would emerge as a trademark of the Montreal Mafia’s operations, the plot drew together disparate players in the underworld, this time natives living on a reserve that straddles the U.S.-Canada border and members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
The passenger who had flagged down the cabbie was having a rough couple of days, although his
trip started smoothly enough, leaving Cornwall alone at the wheel of a rental car and heading south across the border. During his long drive to Texas he started cursing the fact that no one had been hired to share the driving with him; to compensate, he popped pills to stay awake.
After arriving in Houston, the driver made his rendezvous and loaded the car with duffel bags stuffed with 40 kilograms of cocaine, a $6-million load (at street-level prices). He immediately turned around and headed back. State after state, he made his way north. Pill after pill, he drew closer to home. Then the rental car, pushed to the limit, broke down in Falling Waters, West Virginia, a bedroom community along the Potomac River that had not seen so much action since Union cavalry charged through during the Civil War. Desperate to get back to Canada, the courier went looking for the cheapest replacement vehicle he could find. At a local used car lot, he settled on an old Plymouth Gran Fury, bought it for $300 and transferred the bags of dope into its trunk. This car, however, was in little better shape. About six hours and 355 miles later—tired, wired and paranoid—the courier parked the Gran Fury outside Wilborn’s Restaurant, a diner in Central Square, N.Y. When he returned to the car it would not start. That was when he hailed a taxi.
Before the cabbie agreed to drive the courier to Canada, he made the man prove he had the cash to pay the fare—about $350, more than it cost to buy the used Plymouth. The man showed him a large wad of cash and off they drove, with the passenger muttering as he tried to doze, the cabbie later told the state trooper.
With barely 1,500 residents at the time, the village of Central Square was not known for its big spenders, though its easy access from Interstate 81 often brought strangers through town. Suspicious about such an odd taxi ride, the trooper drove to Wilborn’s, where he found a Gran Fury parked in the restaurant’s only handicapped spot. Diner staff told the trooper the car did not belong to any of its customers. The parking infraction gave the trooper cause to call in a tow truck and, in accordance with laws on police seizures, it was subject to an inventory search. It did not take long to uncover the drugs.
“They realized pretty quickly that with 40 kilos in the trunk somebody would be coming back for the car,” said Richard Southwick, the U.S. government attorney who worked on the case. Officers put the Gran Fury back in the parking space and set up surveillance to watch it. A car with Ontario licence plates soon drove into the lot and cruised slowly around the Gran Fury before stopping. Someone got out, looked at it—but did not touch it—and then left. Police still waited. Not long after, a tow truck from the Akwesasne native reserve arrived, hoisted the car up and set off with it. State troopers swooped in but the driver clearly knew nothing of the drugs. There were no arrests, but officers were left with some pretty compelling clues and the largest drug seizure in the region.
It was not hard for U.S. authorities to link the Gran Fury to the Virginia car lot and then to the abandoned rental car from Canada. That led police straight to the courier. Canadian police then traced him to the Travelodge Hotel on Brookdale Avenue in Cornwall, where he worked. A joint U.S.-Canada investigation was launched.
CORNWALL, ONTARIO, AUTUMN 1994
In the autumn of 1994, a young RCMP officer went undercover, hanging around the Travelodge Hotel and an attached bar, meeting the regulars and showing his face. Constable Michel Aubin soon became known at the hotel as an affable man and modest drug trafficker as he watched members and associates of the Hells Angels mixing with the hotel management, local barflies and men linked to the Montreal Mafia. Investigators believed the street-level trafficking at the hotel was connected to the seized cocaine from the Gran Fury, but were uncertain how. After this first taste of Mafia intrigue, Michel Aubin, a quietly efficient officer, would go on to play a startlingly important role—12 years later—in the history of the Sixth Family. Back in April 1995, however, Aubin’s undercover effort was more modest; he provided his fellow officers with enough evidence for the RCMP to legally tap into the phone lines of the hotel and the homes of two Cornwall residents: the courier who had bungled the cocaine delivery and the owner of the Travelodge Hotel, Giuseppe “Joe” Sicurella.
Living quietly in Cornwall but from a family from Cattolica Eraclea, Sicurella had avoided legal trouble except for an armed robbery charge 20 years earlier that had been withdrawn before trial.
The Cornwall traffickers could not have known their phones had been tapped, but they were clearly aware of the possibility. As the police monitoring began, investigators found their suspects already using secret codes. When trying to determine the size of an expected cocaine shipment, Sicurella would ask, “How many girls?” The answer from Julian Tabares, alleged to be their Miami supplier, was “Three to four hands,” meaning 15 to 20 kilograms, a kilo for each finger on that many hands. They also sometimes identified friends by combining the first two letters of their first and last names: Luis Caceres became “Luca,” for instance. For a time, the subterfuge left officers confused. Who were these apparently unknown and unidentified people? Then a call from Sicurella to a colleague at the Travelodge asking for “Luca’s” telephone number was heard. A police check on the Montreal phone number given in reply was traced to the pager of Luis Caceres. Their naming code was cracked.
Unknown to police at the time, the conspirators had already brought several shipments of cocaine from the United States into Canada, ranging in size from 10 to 22 kilograms each. Four days after the monitoring began, Sicurella took a call at his hotel from Tabares in Miami. A few days later, Sicurella called a pay phone in Miami that was answered by Tabares and a meeting between the two was arranged. Another load was in the works, police believed.
On May 6, 1995, officers secretly watched as Sicurella left his home and drove across the border at Massena, New York, telling border guards he and his female passenger were just going for breakfast. Meanwhile, Pierre Rossignol, a co-conspirator from St. Joseph du Lac, Quebec, was smuggled across the border by Akwesasne natives. He joined Sicurella and the pair headed to Syracuse airport, where they boarded a flight to Miami under the watchful eye of Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Tabares picked them up at the airport and the two Canadians checked into Room 6912 at the nearby Marriott Hotel. During quiet face-to-face meetings, the two sides haggled over the purchase price for bulk loads of cocaine.
Sicurella and Rossignol then returned to Syracuse, where an Akwesasne resident picked them up and drove them to the American side of the reserve. There they boarded a boat for the short hop across the St. Lawrence River to the reserve’s Canadian side. This same easy way of shuttling people across the border without passing through government checkpoints in either country was also being used to move drugs.
Over the next 18 days, details were negotiated and a deal was finally struck in a Laval restaurant, although price remained an issue. Despite the Canadians’ hunger for a steady supply, Rossignol announced he would not “go down on his knees” to make the deal.
On June 2, 1995, Aubin, the RCMP’s undercover officer, met with the man who had previously bungled the cocaine delivery. Aubin placed an order for one kilogram of cocaine. Such an order could not be filled at the moment.
“We’re waiting for things to happen,” Aubin was told. A week later, Sicurella headed south in a car that was stopped by New York State troopers as part of the investigation. He told the troopers he was going to Atlantic City to “hang around,” and allowed them to search his car. It was a bold gamble—he had $50,000 as a down payment for cocaine hidden in a box of tissues on his rear window ledge. The troopers’ search, however, found no luggage, no drugs and no money, and he was allowed to continue on his journey.
Despite the large down payment, arrangements came in fits and starts, requiring repeated telephone calls. Several calls received by Sicurella came from a man he seemed to answer to: Girolamo Sciortino.
The name Girolamo Sciortino meant nothing to American investigators. In Canada, however, Sciortino had been noted in police files not only because of his crim
inal record—dating back to 1973 with two convictions for running an illegal gambling operation, followed in 1988 by a conviction for drug trafficking—but also because of the company he kept. Born on September 27, 1941, in Cattolica Eraclea, Sciortino moved to Montreal, where he often went by the nickname “George,” dubbed himself “the king of the submarine sandwich” and started a casual submarine and pizza restaurant. He married into Montreal’s D’Angelo family, which, in the wickerwork of Sixth Family interrelationship, links back both to the Rizzuto and the Renda families. Sciortino is likely a relative of Giuseppe Sciortino, who arrived in America in 1925 alongside Vito Rizzuto’s grandfather and Calogera Renda. The families have remained close. In 1995, his name attracted more interest from police when Sciortino’s son, Bernardo, married Bettina Rizzuto, the only daughter of Vito. The lavish nuptials, with Bettina beautifully outfitted in a fairy-tale grown and a string of white pearls, came two years after the Gran Fury stuffed with cocaine was found but two years before Girolamo Sciortino would have to answer for it. (Bernardo Sciortino, often called Benny, has a criminal conviction for assault and manages the family’s submarine restaurant, George Le Roi du Sous-Marin, according to police. He and Bettina would later give Vito his first grandchild.)