by Lamothe, Lee
“When you say somebody is amico nostra [“a friend of ours”], you know he’s a made man. If you just say he’s a friend, he’s just a friend,” Lino explained. In accordance with that policy, it would have fallen upon Sciascia and LoPresti to do most of the introductions at the dinner party. They would have been among the few people in the room who could confirm that both people being introduced, from both cities, were, in fact, Mafia members.
Lino told the FBI that he was formally introduced to a Montrealer who bore a special distinction, one worth bragging about. LoPresti said the man Lino was meeting was both a Bonanno soldier and a politician, according to the FBI documents. Lino said the man was Alfonso Gagliano, an allegation the veteran former Canadian politician vehemently denies.
“[Lino] was shown a picture of Alfonso Gagliano,” says an FBI debriefing report. To protect their identities, informants’ names are not used in these reports, and the word “Individual” replaces the informant’s name. It is clear from the notes, however, that it was Lino making the statements, a point confirmed later in court. “[Lino] stated that he recognized Gagliano from his trip to Montreal, Canada, in the early 1990s. [Lino] advised that Gagliano was introduced to him as a soldier in the Bonanno Family by Joe LoPresti, another Bonanno member in Canada. At a dinner, LoPresti bragged to the individual that the Montreal Bonannos had such extensive connections, including that of Gagliano, a politician,” the report says. Lino also “socialized with Gagliano when he was hanging out with Vito Rizzutto [sic].” The statement is shocking. Alfonso Gagliano played an important and prominent part in Canada’s political life for two decades. He was first elected to Parliament to represent the people of Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighborhood in 1984 and held the riding through four straight elections, a tenure during which he became a powerful politician. He was in charge of the important Liberal Party caucus for the province of Quebec and was named to Cabinet in 1996, and to the post of Minister of Public Works in 1997. He later said his move into the federal Cabinet was delayed because of an RCMP investigation into his past associations. After leaving politics, he was named Canada’s ambassador to Denmark, but was recalled in 2004 amid the scandal of a damning report by the country’s Auditor-General documenting inappropriate government expenditures in a $332-million sponsorship program that Gagliano oversaw for a time. A monumental inquiry headed by Judge John Gomery found that the program amounted to “an elaborate kickback scheme,” that funneled money to the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada and to Liberal-friendly advertising executives. Judge Gomery’s report said that $147 million in public money went directly from the sponsorship program to the agencies as commissions and fees.
Lino’s allegations about Gagliano, first reported in the New York Daily News, created a furor in Canada. On the day the allegations became public, it was raised in Parliament by Stephen Harper, then the leader of the Opposition and now the Prime Minister.
“The report claims that in the 1990s he was a ‘made’ member of the Brooklyn-based Bonanno crime family. My question is simple: Since Mr. Gagliano was in Cabinet and ambassador during this period, was the government aware of this information and when did it become aware of these allegations?” Harper asked. The then prime minister Paul Martin replied: “Let me simply say that these are very serious allegations and everyone should be very careful about accepting or repeating such allegations.” The Opposition was unsatisified with the response, and Peter MacKay, a senior Opposition member said: “It is a very serious matter. … Prior to his appointment as ambassador to Denmark, Mr. Gagliano filled a number of Liberal Cabinet positions until the year 2002. Again, my question for the government, for the prime minister, for the minister responsible, is what steps did the Privy Council Office and the Department of the Solicitor General take to ensure that proper security clearances were obtained prior to Mr. Gagliano being admitted to Cabinet?” This question was responded to by Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister at the time: “I have no intention of commenting on these allegations. If the honorable member is asking about the operational activities of the RCMP, I suggest that the honorable member more appropriately direct his question to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” she said.
For his part, Gagliano has firmly denied Lino’s allegations explicitly and repeatedly.
“I was a very popular member of Parliament,” Gagliano told reporters, saying he might inadvertently have met some of the gangsters named by Lino in the course of glad-handing and politicking. “As a politician I might have—in social events, in public events, during an election campaign going door-to-door—I might have met some of those people. But really, it doesn’t mean that I know [them] personally.” He said he never attended a dinner with mafiosi and was never involved in criminal behavior.
“I’m not a member of a Mafia,” Gagliano said. In the annals of things that politicians feel they have to say to defend themselves, this surely ranks above even the famous denial by Richard Nixon, the former U.S. president: “I am not a crook.”
It was not the first time Gagliano had had to brush aside allegations of questionable ties to known mafiosi and organized crime figures. When it was revealed that he was the former bookkeeper for a business owned by Agostino Cuntrera, who helped to kill Paolo Violi in 1978, he said it was “an error in judgment.” Cuntrera and Gagliano shared another link. The Association de Siculiana, a cultural group in Montreal founded and presided over by Gagliano, was later run by Cuntrera, who was named president a few years after Gagliano gave up the post. Another bookkeeping client of Gagliano’s was Dino Messina, who was found during court proceedings over a stock fraud to be a financial representative of Vito Rizzuto’s. Another man with unsavory links, Filippo Vaccarello, a drug trafficker linked to the Sixth Family, was under surveillance when officers watched him walk into Gagliano’s bookkeeping office a year after he was first elected into federal office. Gagliano told police he did not know Messina or Vaccarello. And in 2001, Gaetano Amodeo, an accused Mafia assassin from Cattolica Eraclea who was wanted for murder and attempted murder in Italy and Germany, was arrested in Montreal, where he had been living for almost five years. Several Canadians had traveled back to Cattolica Eraclea for Amodeo’s 1986 wedding to Maria Sicurella. One of the crimes Italian courts blamed on Amodeo was the shooting of a Carabinieri officer who was probing the Mafia in Agrigento province. The Canadian public was outraged that the government knew Amodeo had been in Canada for two years before he was arrested; the RCMP had even sent Italian authorities a surveillance photo of Amodeo meeting with Nick Rizzuto. Indeed, Gagliano’s office had sent a letter to Canada’s immigration department seeking information on behalf of Maria Sicurella di Amodeo, Amodeo’s wife, who was applying to become a landed immigrant. She later sponsored her husband for entry to Canada. Before he was sent back to face justice in Italy, Amodeo made a statement that would later be echoed by Gagliano: “I was never part of the Mafia.”
Another mobster has also secretly suggested to police that the Montreal Mafia had direct access to a friend in the Canadian government. These statements, never before revealed, add to the allegations of the Montreal Mafia’s political ties.
Drug trafficker Oreste Pagano agreed to cooperate with authorities after he was charged alongside Alfonso Caruana for conspiracy to import drugs. During one of Pagano’s secret debriefing sessions, he spoke of the value to the mob of having contacts in the government. In Italy, he said, the Mafia was well entrenched in political circles.
“You have to realize that the Mafia in Italy, let’s say, in the last 40 years, were much supported by the politicians. By important politicians,” he said. The cooperation in granting huge government public works contracts was immensely profitable for both sides, the only illicit scheme that could compete with drug trafficking in terms of its financial return.
“The most important investments where they can profit are the government investments. So then there was a strong connection between the Mafia and the government. For every inv
estment of, for example, $100 million, the profit on $100 million was $30 million in profit. Fifteen million dollars would go to the Mafia and $15 million would go to the government,” Pagano said.
He was then asked by an officer with the RCMP’s Integrated Proceeds of Crime Unit in Toronto if the Mafia had a similar relationship with the government in Canada. Pagano was not as sure.
“I couldn’t tell you. I was not living in Canada,” he answered. But, Pagano was asked, did Alfonso Caruana ever speak to him about such relationships?
“We spoke once about it, that there was a person who was going into the Canadian government and was from the same village as Alfonso [Caruana]. From Siculiana,” Pagano said in a September 21, 1999, interview.
“He was from the same village as Alfonso [Caruana]. … I don’t know this person,” Pagano said. This was the kind of information that the Sicilian Men of Honor liked to keep secret from outsiders. And, although Pagano was one of Alfonso Caruana’s closest business partners, he was neither family nor a Sicilian and that made him an outsider.
“They don’t talk about it. It’s like I told you, these are things they keep to themselves,” he said. Investigators could not help but note that Alfonso Caruana’s family was based in Siculiana, a small Sicilian town in Agrigento province. Alfonso Gagliano is from Siculiana as well.
Mobsters are certainly more likely to claim access to a politician than an elected official is to acknowledge an association with gangsters. It may have been only an empty boast.
These scandals over Gagliano and John Franco, the ball player, that would later emerge from the Bonannos’ visit to Montreal were never envisioned by the gangsters at the time. The troubles stemmed, after all, from allegations of mere social—non-criminal—interaction. Of more importance to the Bonanno representatives at the time was the message they had for Vito from Massino, who continued to watch in dismay as the Sixth Family distanced itself even further from the Bonanno Family.
What was the purpose of their visit to see Vito?
“Well, to make them understand that they still had ties with New York,” Lino said. “That you [need to bring] the family closer together because, I guess, they might have lost ties.”
MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 1995
Despite the warm reception in Montreal extended to the New York gangsters, relations between the Sixth Family and the Bonanno Family were growing chilly. Montreal continued to withdraw from Bonanno affairs. Accordingly, life for Sciascia in New York was becoming similarly unpleasant. Increasingly at odds with the Bonanno Family leadership, he also had to contend with the notoriety of the drug case he had faced with LoPresti. Even with his acquittal, the charges and the Angelo Ruggiero tapes had given him an unwanted high profile among American and Canadian police. Although he often visited Canada while carrying out his drug-trafficking schemes, he had never obtained Canadian citizenship, remaining both a citizen of Italy and a permanent resident in the United States. His application to legally relocate to Canada was a tough sell. The process dragged on until February 1995, when Susan Burrows, an official at the Canadian Consulate in New York, notified Sciascia’s lawyers that she wanted to interview Sciascia in person.
Burrows had been well briefed on the Sixth Family and their business associates, and if Sciascia thought he was to face a test of his knowledge of Canadian history or to recount his investment potential as an immigrant, he was in for a surprise.
“Do you know Salvatore Ruggiero?” Burrows began.
“Yes,” a cautious Sciascia replied. “We met in the pizza place. His seven children used to hang out there,” he said of his California Pizza franchise at the Green Acres Mall. “We were friends. He was always ordering pizzas … that’s where my problems started.”
And, Burrows asked, how about Cesare Bonventre?
“I may have met him a few times,” Sciascia said, “through [Sal] Catalano.”
“Baldo Amato?” Burrows continued.
“I am the godfather of Mr. Amato’s daughter. I knew his father in Italy,” Sciascia said. “I see him once in a while—at his daughter’s birthday, etc.”
“Do you know Giuseppe LoPresti?”
“We were friends in Italy,” Sciascia responded. “He was a godfather at my daughter’s confirmation. He passed away.” No mention of murder; no mention of his involvement in it.
“Okay, Mr. Sciascia,” Burrows continued, “do you know Giuseppe Bono?” Again he nodded.
“Yes, he lived near my house. He asked my daughter to be his flower girl. I haven’t seen [the Bonos] since they were married and went back to Italy,” he said.
“Do you know Nicolò or Nick Rizzuto?”
“Yes, he was my paesano in our town of 5,000 in Italy. He lived on the same block, about 10 houses away from me. I met him once in Canada when my niece got married, then I used to see him at weddings. I haven’t seen him in a long time.” Burrows asked him about the circumstances of Nick being stopped at the border by U.S. Customs agents with documents for Sciascia’s Peugeot in his possession. Sciascia said it was “a mistake” that Nick had the papers.
Moving on, Burrows next asked about Vito Rizzuto.
“I know all the family,” Sciascia answered. “I have nothing to do with him. I see him at weddings and funerals.”
What about Paolo Renda?
“He lived across the street,” Sciascia said, adding that Renda was Vito’s brother-in-law. “I saw him a few times at family gatherings, nothing else.”
Six months later, Burrows notified him of the decision: “Having investigated further the responses to the questions which you gave me at your interview, I must confirm that I do consider you inadmissible to Canada.” She said she believed that Sciascia was a member of the Mafia and a danger to the public. On September 8, 1995, Joseph Sciascia, on his father’s behalf, appealed Burrows’s decision. Six weeks later, the immigration department certified that Sciascia was a danger to the Canadian public.
“George from Canada” remained in America.
CHAPTER 31
LONG ISLAND, MARCH 1999
At a silver wedding anniversary party for the nephew of Sal Vitale, held at a family-owned restaurant in Hempstead, Long Island, Joe Massino—who had arrived late to the festivities—pulled his underboss aside. Sitting down together at the end of one of the tables, Massino told him shocking news.
“George has got to go.” This was Massino’s simple way of issuing a death sentence against Gerlando Sciascia, the Sixth Family’s representative in New York. The news was not received well by Vitale, who was fond of Sciascia and his old-school ways. Vitale knew better than to question his boss but he could not hide the look of distaste on his face.
“If you have any problems with it, I’ll get other people. I don’t need you,” Massino snapped.
“Whatever you want to do, Joe,” Vitale said, throwing his hands in the air in an overt sign of surrender. Vitale knew the rules: “I don’t have no right to know nothing,” he said later.
Massino then told Vitale to contact Patrick “Patty from the Bronx” DeFilippo, another Bonanno captain, to arrange the hit and, if they needed anything in the way of a car or a van to do the job, to call Anthony “TG” Graziano. DeFilippo was one of the Bonanno men who had traveled to Canada in 1966 for Vito Rizzuto’s wedding, only to be arrested by Montreal police.
Massino was a cunning boss. To carry out this sensitive piece of business, he had tapped two gangsters that he knew had their own motivation to whack Sciascia. Graziano was something of a nemesis to Sciascia, after Sciascia pressed his complaints over his drug use, and he would happily help to topple his rival. DeFilippo, too, had an ongoing beef with Sciascia over a large marijuana deal and would benefit if he were to be removed from the equation. As with the assassination of Bonventre—and any hostile move against the Zips—killing Sciascia required special handling.
The plan called for Sciascia’s death to be made to look like a drug deal gone awry—and nothing to do with the Bonannos. Sciascia�
�s body would be dumped on the street in the Bronx rather than made to disappear, as is typically the case in mob hits.
“It would look like George got caught up in his own dirt,” said Vitale. Massino also had made plans for the timing of the murder, one that showed how sensitive it was and how anxious he was for it not to point back to him. Massino was leaving the following morning for St. Maarten, a Dutch-run tropical island in the Caribbean.
“Try to get it done before I come home,” he said. He wanted to keep the fact that he had ordered Sciascia’s death from two organizations. “Number one, law enforcement wouldn’t know, and two, Montreal wouldn’t know,” Vitale said.