Business or Blood (30 page)

Manno's wife was the sister of Joe Lo Presti's wife, making him the uncle of the recently murdered Larry Lo Presti. If Manno held a grudge against Vito for his presumed role in that murder, it didn't show. These uncomfortable things occasionally happened in this life they led. Like the senior Lo Presti, Manno was also heavily involved in the drug trade. He pleaded guilty in Florida in 1998 to plots to traffic heroin, cocaine and counterfeit money, which included an effort to smuggle twenty kilos of cocaine into Florida in a suitcase on a commercial flight. For this, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

As he prepared to leave Fort Dix prison in New Jersey for Montreal in December 2012, Manno must have contemplated the fates of the cadre of killers behind the murders of the Violi brothers. It seemed that a time of reckoning had fallen upon them. Agostino Cuntrera, Paolo Renda and Domenico Arcuri Sr. had each played a role in Violi's murder, and now they were each murdered or abducted or dead under odd circumstances. And of course Nicolò Rizzuto, long understood to be the invisible hand guiding the Violi execution, was murdered most infamously of all.

Manno looked hulking and threatening back at the time of the Paolo Violi murder, with sweeping sideburns and long black trench coat to give him the full disco-era hit man look. He returned to Montreal a lumbering old man, but age wasn't much of a concern in the mob.

In late December 2012, word came that another senior citizen might join Vito's ranks. Seventy-five-year-old Pierino Divito was also expected to return from an American prison. Divito had been arrested in 1994 in
Nova Scotia for drug smuggling and later extradited to a Texas prison. Times were tense and Vito could sorely use all the men he could trust, even if they were a tad long in the tooth.

Meanwhile, in the courts, the foundation of the prosecution's case against Raynald Desjardins, Vittorio (Victor) Mirarchi and others charged for the murder of Bonanno crime boss Salvatore Montagna was something entirely unprecedented: encrypted BlackBerry messages.

One of the first clues that the case was travelling through uncharted territory came when Quebec Court judge Maurice Parent made the unprecedented decision to deny Desjardins access to some of the evidence against him in the Montagna murder case. Sealed documents in the Joliette courthouse included an affidavit and wiretap warrants used to intercept communications between the suspects. Federal prosecutor Yvan Poulin cryptically said it was in the public interest to keep the documents about the intercepted messages totally secret. “Read the authorization [for the warrants] in your office,” Poulin told the judge. “It speaks for itself.… I can't say anything more about it.… This is an exceptional case.”

A publication ban blocked the media from reporting the contents of intercepted BlackBerry messages. It was thought that the messages in question were sent by plotters before, during and after Montagna's murder in November 2011 on Île Vaudry. In short, the prosecution was building its case in large part on the surveillance of Montagna conducted by a murdered underworld spy: Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle.

It wasn't totally unprecedented for BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion to comply with search warrants. After a case in Pakistan, RIM issued a statement saying: “Like others in our industry, from time to time, we may receive requests from legal authorities for lawful access assistance.” The statement added: “We are guided by appropriate legal processes and publicly disclosed lawful access principles in this regard, as we balance any such requests against our priority of maintaining the privacy rights of our users.” By the time of the news release, some criminals had already moved on to messaging systems
such as WhatsApp and Viber, the latter trading on ultrasecurity and boasting on its website that “Not even the staff at Viber have access to your data with UltraSafe enabled.” There was also the Dark Web, or the Deep Web, which allowed communicators to burrow deep between the layers of the conventional Net, paying their way into exclusive, uncharted cyber tunnels.

It was looking as if Desjardins's trial for the Montagna murder would take place in the spring of 2013. No one expected public outrage if he managed to plea bargain. There had been minimal public response to Vito's relatively light sentence for his role in three gangland assassinations. The victim in the case was a major organized crime figure and a prime suspect in the failed hit on the accused. Who besides Montagna's wife, three daughters and mistress really mourned his death? Even the Bonanno family showed no sign that it was upset over the assassination of its leader.

It's a time-honoured tactic for mobsters like Desjardins to argue self-defence after killing another criminal. Desjardins could make this argument quite strongly after the failed attempt on his life. And if Desjardins played along and cut a deal of his own, the public also wouldn't hear embarrassing disclosure about the underworld's relations with the politically connected business people whom Montagna had tried to squeeze a little too hard. He had made plenty of money extorting businesses in New York, but he wasn't in tune with the climate of Montreal's
milieu
. Montagna hadn't just broken the law; he had upset the finely tuned balance between mobsters, politicians and business. There had been many reasons to kill him.

B
odies had kept falling that autumn, like leaves from the trees. On November 15, 2012, Montrealer Tony Gensale was shot dead leaving a martial arts class in what might have been a case of mistaken identity. He bore a dangerous physical resemblance to tough guy Giuseppe Fetta from the Arcadi faction of Vito's family. Not just targeted mobsters were in danger now, but their look-alikes too.

Fetta was just the kind of soldier Vito needed. At thirty-three, he was a battle-tested fitness and firearms enthusiast. He weathered an attack in an east Montreal jail while awaiting Project Colisée charges. In that confrontation, he was stabbed with box cutters and plastic knives and still managed to break a leg of one of his attackers.

On November 17, a gunman opened fire on Mohammed Awada in front of his north Montreal house. With that, another tough guy was suddenly gone from Vito's ranks, although there was a good chance that Awada's slaying wasn't directly linked to Vito's war. More likely, his death was a settling of old scores. That sort of thing happens often during an underworld war, as it's easier to hide murders with personal motives when everyone is focused on the bigger picture. There was also no one like Joe Di Maulo, Moreno Gallo or Vito on the streets now to peacefully mediate mid-level disputes.

Whoever ended the life of restaurant owner Emilio Cordileone on
December 8 clearly wanted to make a statement. His bullet-riddled body was transported to his street in Ahuntsic and left there inside his white Range Rover. He had once been close to Vito, but he was even closer to Joe Di Maulo. If he was killed by Vito's men for his association with Di Maulo, he received a token of forgiveness, as he was buried out of Complexe Funéraire Loreto.

On Friday, December 14, a masked gunman burst into the Café Domenica-In next to the Métropolitain highway at mid-afternoon. When he left, thirty-seven-year-old Domenic Facchini lay dead from a gunshot to his head. Another man fled to the nearby Montreal Choppers motorcycle store, bleeding from a non-fatal shot to his neck. Montreal Choppers was the old business of the aggrieved former Rizzuto soldier Ponytail De Vito, who was now in prison for cocaine smuggling.

At 10 a.m. on Monday, December 17, gunmen arrived for the real Giuseppe Fetta. This time there was no mistake. He was dropped by shots to the legs and throat as he stepped out of his car on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, and died close to where his look-alike Gensale had been cut down.

Police responded to the wave of violence with a handful of arrests and a whole lot of theories. Among them, authorities speculated that 'Ndrangheta members from Toronto and Violi's hometown of Hamilton were involved in some of the trigger pulling. There was so much to ponder: Was New York still interested in tightening its ties to Montreal? The Bonanno family still had a pulse, albeit a weak one. Was the murder of Agostino Cuntrera the death knell of the old Sicilian-born, Rizzuto–Caruana–Cuntrera alliance that had fended off the Bonannos in the past?

As the body count grew, Vito's war became something of a public spectator sport, but it was hard for anyone but an insider to keep score. Twenty Montreal mobsters had been shot dead over the past thirteen months and there was no sign of a slowdown. If the war spread to Ontario, police and other observers could finger at least a dozen more prime candidates for assassination. For those in the know, Vito was ahead in the body count, but not by much. And still, no one had reported
seeing the godfather himself since he'd shaken police and journalists the night of his arrival in Toronto.

Throughout the year before Vito's return, as gangsters were killing and getting killed, Montreal police had the unsettling feeling that someone from their own ranks was trying to profit from the bloodshed. Word sifted out that a list of two thousand confidential informants was being shopped around the underworld for one million dollars. Considering the damage that list could do, the asking price was a bargain.

Retired Detective Sergeant Ian Davidson heard that the mole's name would be made public in the press on January 18, 2012. Davidson, a twice-divorced former criminal intelligence specialist, had recently left the force after thirty-three years' service with an unblemished record. Upon hearing the news, he left his home in Laval's quiet Sainte-Rose district and took a hotel room. He then texted his wife, “This is the end.” Next, he swallowed the antidepressant trazodone as well as lorazepam, which treats anxiety and insomnia, and climbed into a warm bath. There he opened a vein and added his name to the list of victims in the underworld carnage.

Four months later, major crimes investigator Mario Lambert was found guilty of committing fraud by accessing a police database and funnelling information to mobsters. The veteran officer was caught in an elaborate sting, which included planting fake licence plate numbers into the system. For this, Lambert received three months' house arrest and a year's probation.

The first verified public sighting of Vito came in January 2013, more than three months after his return to Canada. It was as though he wanted to be seen as he strode through Dorval airport in Montreal, heading for a vacation in the sun. Pumped up and fit, Vito looked like a man who could handle a fight as well as a challenging round of golf. He often smoked, but there was no cigarette in his hands that day. Plainclothes police officers watched from a distance as he walked to the
gate for a 5:30 a.m. flight to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. In an apparent show of nonchalance, the
sportif
mobster had no bodyguards in sight.

The Dominican had long been a comfortable spot for Vito, even before Quebec Hells Angels set up a charter there. On January 3, 2003, he had flown to the island nation for a fairway vacation at Casa de Campo seaside resort that included
Compare
Frank Arcadi, Paolo Renda and Joe Di Maulo. The resort had three golf courses, the best of which was the world-class Diente de Perro, “Teeth of the Dog.” It was at that resort where Vito told Arcadi why he was avoiding setting foot in the United States, alluding to the Three Captains Murders. His description of the slaughter was a detailed one, mostly in an Italian dialect, with a few words of English. Vito described blood splashed all over the Brooklyn social club as Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip (Philly Lucky) Giaccone and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera fell dead. Vito and Arcadi had no clue that the room in which they spoke had been bugged by Dominican police, at the request of the RCMP. Vito's January 2013 visit was also to Casa de Campo, suggesting he either didn't know he had earlier been recorded there or had sorted out the security problem.

While Vito was sunning himself, at least some Montreal assassins stayed home and worked through the cold spell. At suppertime on Tuesday, January 22, on the coldest night of the year, a video camera outside the Jean-Tavernier Street home of sixty-nine-year-old Gaétan Gosselin in the Mercier district captured his image as he stepped from his car. The high-resolution camera then picked up two men opening fire upon him before he reached the door of his home. Were the killers too stupid to know they were being filmed? Or were they so brazen about their craft that they didn't care?

Vito resurfaced in Montreal ten days after his departure, looking sporty and buff in jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Again there were no bodyguards in sight and again he looked as relaxed as anyone in the centre of a mob war could possibly be. He dragged his own suitcase while Giovanna shot an exasperated look at a team of
La Presse
journalists.

As Vito stepped back into the chill of Montreal, mourners paid their condolences to Gosselin's family. While he had no criminal record, there was no doubt where he had stood in the city's underworld: deep inside the camp of Raynald Desjardins. The murdered man had once been related to Desjardins through marriage and lived in a building owned by a Desjardins relative. He had been considered Desjardins's representative at the Blue Bonnets Raceway. Most interestingly, the Montreal
Gazette
revealed that after his release from prison in 2004, Desjardins ran a construction company, the majority shareholder of which was a numbered company. The president of that numbered company? Gosselin.

The murder came just months after the slaying of Joe Di Maulo, another Desjardins relative. Gosselin's obituary noted that he was survived by family and friends “but especially his best friend forever, Raynald Desjardins.” The optics of taking down a man who declared Desjardins his BFF couldn't have been more poignant. For someone who had been written off as a dead man walking, Vito now looked surprisingly alive and dangerous.