by Lamothe, Lee
OMG needed about $10 million in order to fulfill its existing contracts to install recycling bins and, to raise it, OMG turned to other outside investors. In April 2003, OMG started negotiating with Torstar Corporation, which owns Canada’s largest daily-circulation newspaper, The Toronto Star. Torstar was offering $6 million for OMG’s assets, except for the New York school board contract and OMG’s European and Asian subsidiaries, which OMG’s investors—chief among them the Campoli family—was holding on to. The deal was mired in civil lawsuits when competing investors questioned the other’s right to buy the firm.
Eventually, new ownership of the OMG assets was found. A Spanish firm, Eucan Urban Equipment of Canada Inc., a branch of the Spanish conglomerate Cemusa, bought what remained of OMG and pressed ahead with new contracts for a new style of recycling bin—with even larger advertising space. The new group of company directors, through their lawyers, deny they have any links to Vito, Campoli or any organized crime figure.
The incident cost Vito’s friends a lot of money and further exposed the involvement of some of Vito’s key people in Ontario.
Vito, meanwhile, pleaded not guilty to impaired driving.
When the Sixth Family had taken control of Montreal, it had meant toppling a single monolithic figure, the rival mobster Paolo Violi. In Ontario, they were suffering from a thousand tiny cuts, wounds that would continue to bleed to this day.
CHAPTER 36
MONTREAL, MAY 21, 2003
From the sidewalk, the repetitive hip-hop beat of dance music throbbed through the doors of the Joy Club, on La Montagne Street, one of many nightclubs in Montreal’s crowded downtown. The music became an ear-splitting roar when Mitchell Janhevich pulled open the doors and stepped inside. Janhevich, a Montreal city policeman, was one of several officers patroling downtown nightclubs, keeping tabs on street gang members and drug dealers who were filling the void left by the arrest of the Hells Angels leadership. Tuesdays are typically slow for the clubs, but it was the Joy’s busiest night. Billed as “staff night,” it was an opportunity for those who made a living by giving others a good time each weekend to relax and enjoy themselves. Tuesdays brought bartenders, bouncers, strippers, waitresses and busboys from many other clubs to party at Joy.
By the time Janhevich walked into the club, Tuesday night had become Wednesday morning hours before, but the place was still hopping. Several customers caught the officer’s attention: standing at the bar was one of the few men closely associated with the biker war who remained free; nearby were two men from a street gang he had arrested for firearm possession a few weeks before. Then, through the dim light, Janhevich saw five men huddled together in a raised and separate area of the club, the VIP section. He had to look twice to make sure, but there was Vito Rizzuto and four other men, sitting and talking.
“It was strange. You walk in and there is one of the last people from the Hells Angels and then some street gangs and then him—it was like the jackpot for a police officer,” Janhevich said. “He looked to be in a little meeting with them. I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ It was not the type of place you’d expect to see him. I thought this was strange. I went out and checked his name and when you check his name, the computer almost blows up—you have to call the intelligence unit and give them the details.” Janhevich and his team watched the club from outside. Vito and his friends soon walked out and climbed into a Mercedes, Vito into the front passenger seat beside the driver and three men into the back. The car pulled away but had not gone far before Janhevich pulled it over and approached the driver.
“Is there a problem?” the driver asked, handing over his driver’s license and registration.
“No, I just want to check things out,” replied Janhevich, who then noticed that one of the passengers in the backseat was not wearing a seatbelt. “That is an infraction. I’m going to have to see some ID,” he said to the man. The passenger refused, Janhevich said.
“Listen, if you don’t identify yourself, plain and simple, we’re going to arrest you. Whether it takes one guy or 10 guys, you are going to get arrested and we’re going to identify you,” Janhevich said, but the passenger continued to refuse. At that point, Vito climbed out of the front seat of the car and walked toward Janhevich.
“What the fuck is going on? What the fuck did we do? Why are you harassing us?” Vito said, according to Janhevich. “What the fuck are you guys doing? Why are you fucking with us?” Vito continued. Janhevich has a policy when policing the city’s streets: he is polite to a fault until he meets with obscenity; then he meets swear word for swear word.
“First of all, stop fucking swearing because if you want to make a show, I’ll make a show, that’s no problem. There is no need to fucking talk to me like that. I have a job to do, so stand back and let me do my job,” Janhevich said.
Vito seemed surprised. The two men, both tall and slim, were facing each other, inches apart, and their voices were getting louder. Passersby had stopped to watch; other officers watched with wide eyes.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” Vito said.
“Yeah. Do you have any idea who I am?” the officer shot back.
“This is my street. When you’re in your business or in your home, you do your stuff. When you are on my turf, you go by my rules. And right now you’re in my territory. It’s my show. It’s my game here.”
Vito seemed to suddenly relax. A slight smirk fell across his face, as if he liked the argument and the firm response from the officer.
“Okay, okay, take it easy, take it easy,” Vito said.
Janhevich then arrested the man in the backseat. Vito asked what would happen next, and when he was told that his friend would be taken to a local police station to be identified, he tried to intervene.
“Well, okay. I’ll give you his name,” Vito said. He was Vincenzo Spagnolo, Janhevich was told. With no identification forthcoming however, the officer still took the man into custody. Vito wanted to know where he would be taken and if he could go there to help Spagnolo out. Janhevich told him they were heading to the police operations center on Guy Street. When Janhevich arrived, the officers at the front desk called to him, saying in amazement that Vito Rizzuto was there to see him.
“I went out in the lobby and he put his hand out to shake my hand and said: ‘You remind me a bit of me. You stick up for your men, I stick up for mine. I respect that. I like the way you handled my men. I handle them the same way.’”
His men. Vito had plenty of those.
The tall, almost patrician, mafioso, standing in the brightly lit lobby of the police office, had come a long way. So, too, had the family he had become the leader of—not the “boss,” but the natural-born leader. His men, under Vito’s tutelage and that of his father, Nick, formed a criminal unit that far outstripped the position the Sixth Family held in official American organized crime charts. By 2003, the Rizzuto organization was variously listed in FBI and DEA files as merely “the Canadian crew of the Bonanno Family” or the “Montreal faction of the Bonannos.” The reality is far different. The territory under its control is huge—more than a million square miles of Quebec and Ontario directly fall under its influence, an area larger than one-quarter the size of the entire United States. It includes major cities, the busiest border crossings between the U.S. and Canada, and many mature Mafia clans that are, by and large, cooperating under the Sixth Family’s banner.
Where American Mafia bosses controlled criminal activity in portions of a city or a New York borough or the criminal activity in an industrial or commercial sector—such as construction or New York’s garment district—the Sixth Family was an enterprise with a true global reach. The Sixth Family had outpaced any crew in the Bonanno Family and, indeed, man-for-man, dollar-for-dollar, had eclipsed the family as a whole.
Vito could step onto an airplane and fly to any of a dozen countries where he would be immediately recognized and respected. He spoke to associates in several different languages—English, Fre
nch, Italian and Spanish. He fit in at the highest levels of commerce and industry without embarrassment or social allowances. While the turf of an American Mafia crew might expand street by street into a neighborhood, or into new criminal ventures, the Sixth Family expanded into countries and across continents, penetrating diverse economies and reaping untold reward. The 20 men the Bonanno administration considers to be Montreal’s membership are but a pale shadow of what the Sixth Family has become.
It is no surprise that Sal Vitale admitted the Bonanno administration feared a war with Montreal after the slaying of Gerlando Sciascia in 1999.
The Sixth Family’s organization is awesome.
The Sixth Family blends the traditions of the Sicilian Mafia with a modern corporate structure, building a rugged, durable, ever-expanding corporate Mafia. It maintains the secretiveness of the mafiosi tradition but keeps its inner circle far more tightly controlled than in the American Mafia. The Sixth Family has shed the old militaristic organizational structure of the Five Families—which has soldiers answering to captains who answer to a boss. It has been replaced with a structure that is even more ancient—the family. It is not merely a Mafia initiation ceremony that binds its core, but rather, almost without exception, marriage vows and blood ties. It is far more effective at engendering loyalty and trust; for protecting the organization from betrayal and infiltration. It is one thing for an informant to turn on friends, neighbors and colleagues, but quite another to turn on brothers, uncles and cousins. An informant from within the Sixth Family would need to sever all ties with their kin.
The Sicilian Mafia has been compared to an octopus, because it is a malleable, multi-tentacled beast that reaches out and grabs its prey but, when one arm is lost, another soon grows to replace it. It is a reasonable analogy. Beyond comparisons to the world of business, other criminal organizations and the animal kingdom, however, perhaps the best comparison of the Sixth Family is to a cult. From birth, its members are separated from mainstream society—intellectually, morally and culturally—and incubated in an insular world where each lives in accordance with the family’s special rules, values and beliefs. It demands total commitment and loyalty. Members are taught that the end justifies the means. It breeds an explicit and highly polarized us-versus-them mentality. It is not accountable to the rest of society. It is preoccupied with making money and benefiting the group even at the expense of an individual member. There are threats and consequences to leaving.
The cult model has served the organization well. Protected by its insular nature, made wealthy through drug transactions and powerful through its street presence, the Sixth Family has developed a dominant place in the underworld, with a commanding physical presence, forcing its fingers into all aspects of street life, politics, finance and crime, both sophisticated and petty. It is a blending of the old and the new, the best of the traditional Sicilian Mafia and the best of the American Mafia, to form an almost perfect criminal enterprise. Flexible, adaptable and rapacious, it finds a way of working around any obstacle, always consuming whatever lies in its path while at all times protecting its core. That core, for now, is formed by the Rizzutos, which provides the Sixth Family’s leadership.
“There is no crowning, no vote to make a leader in the clans you call the Sixth Family. The leader naturally emerges and he is more of a steward, guiding the interests and activities of several blood relatives and in-laws,” said an Italian police investigator who has studied the Sixth Family clans. “He doesn’t take power and he isn’t bestowed power. Power flows to him naturally. Not every interest is of the criminal. He is involved in or knows intimately the marriages; the marriages that are in trouble; the births of the children; the status of the older generation. He consults with the older generation, who may be retired but are still very knowledgeable of the Mafia and have connections and relationships of their own.”
Within the Sixth Family, for now at least, that head is Vito Rizzuto. He is an impressive leader. Had he not been brought up confined within the Mafia, he would likely have succeeded in legitimate business or perhaps politics; he is charismatic, efficient, energetic, intelligent and ambitious.
“Vito Rizzuto heads the family as a business,” says an RCMP report on the organization.
As a leader, Vito’s presence and name have meant much in the underworld, but his hands-on links are carefully hidden. He declares modest salaries on his income tax but drives luxury automobiles. He once maintained a Lincoln, a Mercedes-Benz, a Jaguar and three Corvettes, one of them a vintage 1959 model. He has led a busy and hectic life but one that rarely—if ever—involves steady nine-to-five employment. He played golf more than 100 times a year, often using the private time on the links to discuss intimate organizational details with other members of his carefully selected foursome. It is a gentleman’s version of the mob boss’s traditional “walk-and-talks,” where a gangster would go for a brisk walk with criminal associates to avoid having the chat caught by police microphones. Vito maintained a presence at the Club Social Consenza and three other clubs and cafés that were part of his regular routine. His job was largely to show up, to just show his face and lend his name. Transactions rarely took more than that. His father had prepared him well.
Vito has long relied on his father, Nick, as his most senior and trusted advisor, police say.
Nick spends much of his time at the Club Social Consenza, jovially playing cards with close friends behind a large window that looks out on to the public walkway of the strip mall where the club is located. He is invariably neatly dressed and often formally attired in shirt, jacket and tie when he moves about the city. He evokes a distinctive gangster chic with his penchant for wearing a fedora to cover his almost bald head and sunglasses as a bid, perhaps, at greater anonymity.
In his younger days, Nick could look menacing and forceful. He walked with confidence and could flash a look of disapproval that associates quickly learned to recognize and appease at the earliest opportunity. As a senior citizen, his image has muted considerably. He has shed much of his bulk and his facial features have been softened by time and frequent flashes of a teeth-baring smile. His grin might be provoked by what police say happens when many of these associates meet with him. At the Consenza, or other restaurants that he frequents in Montreal, such as the Roma, police say he has quiet discussions with visitors who outline plans and schemes; Nick then gives those plans that meet with his approval the family’s blessing, police believe. Nick then often leaves with a packet of money, what is referred to in French as cote d’argent—literally, “dues money,” but more accurately what American mobsters call “tribute money,” profit flowing up the hierarchy of the organization. Police say he hides the money in his jacket, topcoat or other articles of clothing until he can unload it. Most suitable for a man of his position and esteem, this is not money that Nick “collects,” but rather, money he “accepts.” His role, police say, is of utmost discretion. Vito would not want it any other way.
Nick’s leisurely routine, however, does not mean he is removed from the family’s affairs. He is a frequent ambassador at important meetings. Almost daily, Nick meets at the Consenza club with Paolo Renda and Francesco “Frank” Arcadi, described by police as a leading Rizzuto captain. Arcadi was convicted of operating an illegal gaming house in 1984, but came to fuller police attention when he was seen at Vito’s side at the funeral of Joe LoPresti in 1992. He then started spending time with Vito, turning up in cars with Vito when they were stopped by police and during police surveillance of family weddings and funerals, including the Toronto funeral of Gaetano Panepinto. Police believe that Arcadi is taking over supervision of much of the street level action on behalf of the family and has responsibility for both the Saint-Léonard and Rivière-des-Prairies areas of Montreal.
Paolo Renda is himself now a senior citizen, although a robust and often dapper-looking man with his hair graying and thinning at the front. A quiet operator, Renda has been at the Rizzutos’ side all his life. He is Nic
k’s cousin and went on to marry Maria, his daughter. As Vito’s brother-in-law, he bonded with Vito and the men’s friendship was baptized by fire in the botched arson in their early days.
Renda has been given little attention by police over the years, despite at one time being a suspect in the killing of Paolo Violi. Renda is a businessman. He runs a construction company, Renda Construction Inc., that at one time had Vito listed as a secondary shareholder, vice president and administrator. Its office address was in the same strip plaza as the Consenza social club, where Renda is seen most days. The firm was not a flourishing success, police documents show: in 2001, the company declared just $21,008 in earnings; the following year that dropped to $8,031, before bouncing back, in 2003, to a declared $34,032. Renda is involved in other companies as well, including a second construction firm, a motel, a bistro and a restaurant in Longueuil, Quebec. His wide business involvement has led police to suspect that he runs the financial wing of the family.
Police have also followed the careers of Vito’s sons. Investigators have pegged Leonardo, Vito’s youngest son, as the most capable of achieving leadership of the family enterprise. Leonardo is bright, having attended the University of Ottawa’s law school, and is now a lawyer in Quebec. Along with his sister, Bettina, he works at the law firm of Loris Cavaliere, which often represents Vito. Leonardo causes tremendous grief for police investigating Vito and his associates because of his special legal standing. Leonardo, police say, has frequently sat in on meetings between family members, including his father and brother—extending to the meetings the protection of lawyer-client privilege. Police have been reluctant to listen in on such conversations because these intrusions, as was shown when the RCMP previously bugged the dinner conversations of Vito’s lawyer, are viewed dimly by the courts.