The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  In late January 2001, some of the province’s most plugged-in police investigators started hearing whispers of a gathering of Mafia clans from across the country. A meeting was either being called or had already been held north of Toronto as an apparent attempt to forge an alliance among quarreling Mafia clans from Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and possibly New York State. The aim was to present a united front to the internationally linked and newly unified biker gang.

  “The Hells Angels are now in Ontario forming a unity with the Hells Angels in Montreal. Is that a threat to them? I’d say so,” said a Toronto police officer who investigates organized crime. “It seems it’s time for the Italians to put their differences aside, and if they perceive the bikers as a threat, then they have incentive,” he said of the Mafia clans. Police believed the meeting was chaired, or was planned to be chaired, by Vito. It was a strategic move to use the threat of the bikers as an excuse to let him have Ontario; as opposed to conquerer, he was branding himself as protector.

  Despite the dense population of notable mobsters in the province of Ontario, clustered mainly in and around Toronto, Hamilton and Niagara Falls, there was a distinct leadership vacuum. On the last day of May 1997, Johnny “Pops” Papalia, who had thrown his lot in with the Magaddino Family in Buffalo early in life and parlayed it into a four-decades long career as one of Canada’s leading crime figures, had been shot dead. Papalia had, like Vic Cotroni in Montreal, struck a deal with an American Mafia organization to be their representative in Canada. It made him strong when the Buffalo mob was strong and he then went on to outlive his American contemporaries. The demise of Papalia, at the age of 73, left the province without a central mob figure. The Sixth Family was anxious to fill that void but, in keeping with its tradition, it acted with caution. Investigators could not shake the belief that the Sixth Family’s ambition played a role in the demise of Papalia, a murder preceded by the slaying of his man in Toronto, Enio Mora—at the hands of Sicilian mobsters—and followed by the slaying of Papalia’s man in Niagara Falls, Carmen Barillaro. It seemed a purge of the old American Mafia presence in Ontario, as had occurred in Montreal two decades before. (Giacinto Arcuri was charged with killing Mora, but was acquitted.)

  The gunman who killed Papalia and Barillaro was caught and told police and the court that he was acting on the orders of the Musitano Family, a rival mob clan in Hamilton. Police suspicions over Sixth Family involvement, however, were not allayed when, in the middle of the night, investigators secretly tailed Pasquale “Pat” Musitano, the young boss of his family, to a restaurant in Woodbridge, north of Toronto. There, on October 23, 1997, exactly three months after Barillaro was murdered and five months after Papalia was killed, Musitano and his cousin, Giuseppe “Pino” Avignone, had a lengthy meeting with Vito and Vito’s hulking enforcer in Toronto, Gaetano “Guy” Panepinto. What, investigators wondered, was the connection?

  Panepinto had long been a fixture on the Southern Ontario crime scene and had grown from a street rowdy into a middle-level player, but had difficulty leaving the adrenaline rush of thuggery behind; bombings, arsons, loan sharking and extortion were his stock-in-trade. His connections with professional hijacking crews made him a ready supplier of weapons, stolen cars, motorcycle parts, steroids, cocaine and other drugs.

  “Guy was the go-to guy if you had something physical that needed to be done, or something with some risk attached. He was this huge motherfucker, but had a great smile. He knew everybody. The bikers loved him; the Italian guys always had a kind word for him. He wasn’t afraid to be a real criminal,” said a biker associate of Panepinto’s. At the same time, he was moving to a higher level of sophistication, establishing his own front companies and legitimate sources of income, including a Toronto franchise of Casket Royale, a storefront outlet in Toronto’s Little Italy that offered discount coffins and funeral merchandise. His caskets ran from $295 for thin pressboard to $4,900 for a bronze luxury model. He offered designer themes—such as denim-covered caskets with cowboy-themed decorations—and used, as a somber marketing ploy, an offer of “free” children’s caskets.

  “Guy had a great sense of humor. When he opened the casket store he said he’d become his own best customer,” said a long-time underworld friend.

  Panepinto quickly swore his sword to Vito. In Ontario, Panepinto joined a mix of old-time Sicilian Men of Honor, Calabrian gangsters, motorcycle gangs and other proven career criminals, who were attracted to Vito and his Sixth Family organization.

  Vito was far from being alone in Ontario when he made moves on the province. The Sixth Family had many friends there: Vito’s in-laws, who, according to police, had long been a presence in Ontario under the leadership of Antonio Cammalleri, who was Vito’s wife’s uncle; Peter Scarcella, a Sicilian mobster to whom Vito had been introduced to back in the 1960s when Vito was courting his wife, who later asked Vito to be the godfather to his daughter and went on to become a mobster of note in Toronto; Giacinto Arcuri, who had fled from Cattolica Eraclea after the murder of the town’s mayor and kept close to Montreal and New York allies of both the Rizzutos and Gerlando Sciascia. Arcuri is a man of note to Toronto’s underworld, pegged by police as above even Scarcella within the Sicilian coterie. Other men who had made a name for themselves but had largely managed to avoid the scrutiny of police were also with Vito. And their old allies, the Caruana-Cuntreras, had also relocated to Ontario in the early 1990s, with Alfonso Caruana running his drug empire from his new base north of Toronto, where he and other family members bought homes and businesses.

  Also in Ontario was Frank Campoli, who had married Vito’s wife’s cousin, who was a Cammalleri. Campoli was named in court as Vito’s “man in Toronto” in the Penway stock scam in Ontario in 1988, but he had greater business success with OMG Media Inc.

  OMG, originally called Olifas Marketing Group, was a Toronto-area firm that in the late 1990s came up with a way to blend the recycling craze with paid advertising; large metal bins would be placed on street corners where passersby could deposit their recyclable bottles or fast-food containers, and dispose of litter. The containers would display advertising. OMG urged municipalities and cities to sign contracts that would permit placement of the bins on busy thoroughfares. The more bins, the higher the advertising revenues. For OMG, ads were crucial to its revenue. Up-front expenses were considerable in that the container bins had to be built and trucked to the agreed locations. Yet the pitch to cities and schools seemed oddly to favor those clients.

  OMG normally paid its municipal and institutional clients approximately $10 for each container that it was allowed to place. OMG would then pay for the manufacturing of each bin (approximately $1,500 each), its shipping and installation costs, and then ongoing maintenance costs. In some cases, OMG was even responsible for collecting the weekly recyclables and refuse. In return, OMG was granted the right to sell and place advertisements on two faces of the bin. Most deals allowed the municipalities a certain number of bin faces for its own advertising, such as public-service announcements, for free.

  OMG had signed agreements with the city of Montreal, and in Ontario, the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Markham and Windsor. It also moved into the educational market, placing boxes or signing agreements with universities, colleges and elementary schools, including McMaster University in Hamilton and the Toronto District School Board. In 2003, OMG signed its largest contract in the United States with the Board of Education for the City of New York. It was a deal to place some 2,700 bins on school property. OMG also looked abroad, working on agreements in Italy, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

  In its early days, OMG had several men involved in the business. Frank Campoli, Giancarlo Serpe and Salvatore Oliveti among them. Campoli was in contact with Vito Rizzuto on a weekly basis, according to police. Serpe had been seen by police meeting with many mobsters over the years, notably murdered mafioso Enio Mora. According to court documents, Serpe was “the last witness to have
seen Mora alive.” Serpe was also seen with Giacinto Arcuri, who would later be charged and acquitted of killing Mora. OMG’s Quebec division was headed by Michael Strizzi, who had been a close personal friend of Vito’s for more than 20 years. These connections appear to have gone unnoticed by, or were of no concern to, city staff and politicians as OMG was negotiating its public contracts.

  The pitch to the city of Toronto, the company’s largest Canadian contract, was backed by Joe Foti, a Liberal fundraiser who held considerable sway before his death. He was famous for his annual barbecue, which attracted notable politicians, including Jean Chrétien, then Canada’s Prime Minister. OMG also hired a high-powered lobbyist, Paul Pellegrini, president of the Sussex Strategy Group, to help attract federal government advertising. Pellegrini registered as a lobbyist on OMG’s behalf on December 19, 2001, to make telephone calls, arrange meetings and conduct “informal” communications with government departments, including Canadian Heritage, National Defence, Revenue Canada, and Public Works, Pellegrini said. (Pellegrini said his relationship with OMG was short-lived and neither he nor his firm retains any connection to the company.)

  OMG’s proposal was well received in Toronto. Turning its back on a staff recommendation, the city’s public works committee voted to give OMG a 10-year contract without putting it out to public tender; this decision was later overturned by city council. When the bids from several companies were received, OMG was selected as the best. By 2003, it had placed 2,797 bins on Toronto’s streets, at an estimated cost to OMG of $4 million.

  As the recycling trend became rooted in the public consciousness, the company positioned itself to profit. In 2003, OMG budgeted for $8 million in revenue. Its public relations efforts with city politicians and staff were working wonders. As Lou Gallucci, OMG’s vice-president at the time, said in a sworn affidavit: “OMG is dependent on the goodwill of the municipalities in which it operates, as OMG requires the consent and approval of the municipalities in order to provide its services.”

  Altogether, Ontario was looking a lot friendlier to the Sixth Family than ever before. By October 2000 it had a fast-rising stake in the distribution of cocaine throughout Southern Ontario. With Johnny Papalia and the most powerful and volatile of his cronies out of the way, there seemed little appetite among the Ontario-based clans to give the Rizzutos much grief. The lucrative nature of their cooperation with the Hells Angels in Quebec bought them the immediate good graces of the independent biker gangs in Ontario that were being heavily courted by the Quebec Hells Angels.

  Following the successful strategy his father had used in Montreal when the Sixth Family began to raise its voice against Paolo Violi and strengthened his claim through an alliance with the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, Vito searched for a strong group with an impeccable pedigree with whom to forge an alliance with in Ontario. Shunning the Sixth Family’s traditional fondness for keeping their affairs closely Sicilian, he found the perfect coupling in the Commisso family. Based around three brothers, Cosimo, Rocco Remo and Michele, the Commissos had immigrated to Toronto from Calabria in 1961 and were about as street strong in Toronto as any mob clan could expect. The stage seemed set for the Sixth Family to make its move.

  From night clubs to fitness clubs, strip bars to fast-food outlets, drugs were being moved at the retail level in Toronto and surrounding cities, replicating the cocaine distribution system that had made Quebec gangsters rich. Legitimate businesses and corporate investments were in place and its Ontario manpower was not insignificant. The time had finally come for the Sixth Family to absorb its neighbor.

  “Was it a takeover? Yes,” said one of the Toronto police’s top organized crime investigators. “That was their intention.”

  “Vito was making his way here much more often. It was on a weekly basis to show his face and make his presence known. He was here in person to show people that maybe it was finally time for him to take control, that it was time to do things his way,” said another top anti-Mafia investigator. “He wanted to unite all of the Italian groups, just as the bikers united in Ontario. Vito was doing the same thing with the Italians. The bikers came together under the Hells Angels, and the Italians fell in under Vito.”

  Vito was hard to miss in Toronto, as he was always with at least two other men, apparently bodyguards, a contrast to his routine in Montreal, where he typically traveled alone, and drove his own car.

  “He walks with authority. He looks very distinguished. He dresses very businesslike. Most of the time I’ve seen him he is wearing a suit and tie,” said a police officer who worked surveillance shifts monitoring Vito’s visits to Ontario. “Not only does he play the part, he looks the part.”

  Toronto’s gangsters were largely recognizing his authority, if not exactly his control; but his position in Ontario was hardly comparable to the hegemony he maintained in Quebec.

  “Although Vito is the one who happens to be in charge, in Toronto, he really doesn’t seem to have a hold on his people in the same way as in Montreal,” said an organized crime investigator. “There are people who are affiliated with him, people who are related to him, people who are running things on his behalf or in his name or using his name. As long as they have his blessing and he basically knows what they are doing and he gets his cut from it, he is happy enough with the situation. He would come in once in a while to check on his friends and to check on his family. That’s all he has to do, show up. He has the standing, the name recognition.” Officers monitoring wiretaps that were running on some of the Sixth Family’s people in Ontario said the reporting structure was kept loose.

  “Although he is part of his family, there was no weekly reporting or monthly reporting. Not even really a quarterly report,” said an officer, speaking about Peter Scarcella, a leading Sixth Family ally in Toronto.

  “He would visit him—Vito is godfather to his daughter—but the conversations with his associates show the way the family works here in Toronto is a lot different from how it works in Montreal. There is still a lot of respect within the families in Montreal. They still have that respect, they still follow the hierarchy, they still tell the boss what they’re up to, and it is understood that when or if anything does happen the people at the top will get their cut. They don’t have to ask for it. In Toronto, it is not so smooth. There is not such respect within their families.”

  Vito appears not to have wanted to clamp down too tightly, perhaps as an opening strategy to gain further acceptance as a force to be embraced rather than resented or repelled.

  “The purse strings have opened up,” said one Mafia-linked career criminal of the new business model in Ontario. “There is now more money to go around. John [Papalia] kept things pretty tight.”

  In order to bring about some discipline, however, Vito started to directly place more of his own men in Ontario, with two setting up in Hamilton and others in Toronto and its suburbs.

  Giuseppe “Joe” Renda, a nephew of Gerlando Sciascia, was sent from Montreal to Toronto to work with Gaetano Panepinto, Frank Campoli and others to solidify the Sixth Family’s hold.

  Taking advantage of the new opportunities and manpower in Ontario, the Rizzuto organization established a sports betting enterprise that used Internet hook-ups and BlackBerries to register hundreds of millions of dollars in bets placed at video stores, gas stations and other small retail outlets in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton. They found a willing and hungry clientele; one man placed a $100,000 bet on a single football game. It quickly became one of the largest betting rings in Canada.

  The moves put Vito at the top of his game. His reach was unchallenged. His territory was staggerly large, not only in geographic size but in its population and economic might. Toronto and its surrounding suburbs offered almost 5 million people and Montreal another 3½ million. Vito also had outposts of friends and colleagues in other Canadian cities as well, particularly in Vancouver. The Sixth Family, noted a recent RCMP report, had “taken over the criminal underworld with the help of their associates a
cross the country.”

  With Ontario falling under the Sixth Family’s shadow, an alarm was sounded by intelligence officers working with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), a joint police unit of several police agencies under the leadership of the RCMP. Staffed by some of Canada’s foremost anti-Mafia investigators, the CFSEU was analyzing intelligence reports, tidbits of mob gossip from investigators and street snitches and slowly saw the pieces falling into place.

  The Sixth Family, a secret intelligence report noted, was dominating “not only the province of Quebec but the province of Ontario as well, making this organization one of the most influential and powerful traditional organized crime groups in North America.”

  That kind of alarm is difficult to ignore.

  “Unfortunately for Vito,” said a police investigator, “it started to fall apart.”

  CHAPTER 35

  TORONTO, JULY 15, 1998

  The first clear sign that Ontario was not the same sort of place as Montreal for the Sixth Family and its friends came on July 15, 1998, before Vito Rizzuto and his kin had even fully brought the province into their confederacy. The message was a harsh one: police cruisers closed down a quiet suburban street in Woodbridge, just north of Toronto, at 7:05 a.m., letting nothing but police vehicles through. A police convoy then snaked past the large detached homes and well-manicured lawns. Two minutes later, an RCMP officer rang the doorbell at 38 Goldpark Court. Inside, officers arrested Alfonso Caruana, the boss of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, which, for four decades, had been a firm ally and friend of the Rizzutos’. Also arrested that day were Alfonso’s two brothers, Gerlando in Montreal and Pasquale in Toronto, and other members of their drug network. In Cancun, the clan’s key drug facilitator, Oreste Pagano, was nabbed by Mexican police and flown to Canada.