The Sixth Family (24 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
Canadian police intelligence files showed Enzo meeting with senior mobsters in Montreal, almost all of them Sicilians linked to Nick Rizzuto and Pep Cotroni. At least one meeting, in the summer of 1971, narrowly preceded Enzo’s arrest in Italy, where he was later sentenced for Mafia activity. Safe houses in Toronto and Montreal were used to harbor the smuggled mafiosi while en route—in Toronto, in particular, the family shepherding the migrants through was related by marriage to the Rizzutos. The transit route through Canada was busy. American files show that in 1972 alone, as many as 10,000 Sicilians—most of them not part of any drug conspiracy—traveled from Canada to the United States. Those immigrants with no intention of joining the mob were charged $500 to make the crossing. However, they were preyed on at every turn. When they wanted to change their Italian
lira
into American dollars, they were charged a 25-percent service fee. False documents, including social security cards and driver’s licenses, were sold to them on a payment plan that often saw them handing over thousands of dollars. When they were given work—almost always in a pizzeria or construction company—the employers clawed back a portion of their salary. When they went for relaxation to gambling houses, they were cheated until they lost, then given loans at extortionate rates. Unable to pay, several agreed to travel back into Canada to pick up a shipment of heroin and return with it to the United States to pay off or reduce their debt.
lira
into American dollars, they were charged a 25-percent service fee. False documents, including social security cards and driver’s licenses, were sold to them on a payment plan that often saw them handing over thousands of dollars. When they were given work—almost always in a pizzeria or construction company—the employers clawed back a portion of their salary. When they went for relaxation to gambling houses, they were cheated until they lost, then given loans at extortionate rates. Unable to pay, several agreed to travel back into Canada to pick up a shipment of heroin and return with it to the United States to pay off or reduce their debt.
For Stefano Sciarrino, who came to America with Mafia roots and a criminal record, none of this abuse was an issue. In addition to Enzo the Quarrelsome One, his connections in his hometown included Gaetano Badalamenti, one of the key participants at the Grand Hôtel heroin summit. Badalamenti would later be revealed as a major player in the Pizza Connection. But that was years away. Many of the early clues to its formation, however, emerged from the Sciarrino murder mystery.
In Bucks County, Sciarrino had found work at a pizza franchise that was a thoroughly mobbed-up enterprise, with more than two dozen stores in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania—several of them identified later as being owned and operated by the pioneers of the Pizza Connection. As a sideline, the corporation sold basic supplies to other pizzerias. Many of the sales were used to disguise the laundering of heroin profits. The franchise outlet Sciarrino worked at in Pennsylvania was owned by the son of another franchise owner who, in turn, partnered with Frank Rappa, a Queens employee of a pizzeria in the same chain. He was a heroin smuggler whose ring, naturally, used Montreal as a way station.
Around the same time, Luigi Ronsisvalle, the mafioso who had worked for Pietro Licata, the old Knickerbocker Avenue boss, started working for the Zips, which meant dividing his time between smuggling heroin and illegal aliens out of Canada and into the United States. On at least three occasions, Ronsisvalle went to Canada.
“We have some connection to bring passports from Canada and give it to Sicilian people coming to the United States,” he said. “The first time I go, we go to Niagara Falls. There were six passports … which had, I remember, every picture [already] in [the] passport.”
By the time of the Bono wedding, the infiltration by illegal Sicilian gangsters was thorough. In a 1981 FBI status report on a probe of Gerlando Sciascia, agents said “an extensive investigation into organized crime’s influence on alien immigrants” had been initiated. The report noted that many illegal Sicilian immigrants with dubious pasts were being arrested at businesses owned and operated by a small circle of people with Mafia links. A law enforcement analyst said that background reviews of most of these people found they had first shown up as targets of interest to drug investigators in the late 1950s and 1960s and were traced back to Canada, and before that, Sicily. Sciascia and his Sixth Family kin in Montreal were clearly involved as middlemen, agents noted.
“They poured through Canada,” the analyst said of the Sicilian Mafia immigrants. “If you came from Canada you were almost automatically accepted.” Also coming through Canada to New York were several of the Zips gathering in Brooklyn, including Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato.
While the murder of Stefano Sciarrino was never solved, his slaying started to shed light on some of these other mysteries. It provided a glimpse into where the manpower for much of the new drug enterprises was coming from and, like the drugs, it was being linked by police to Montreal and the supportive hand of the Sixth Family.
FIUMICINO AIRPORT, ROME, 1980Because of its highly secretive nature, the success of a drug pipeline can be judged only by its failures. Until seizures are made or people are arrested, there is little evidence to appraise its size, test its purity levels or marvel at its ingenious methods.
By 1965, eight years after the heroin summit at the Grand Hôtel, the signs of success began to appear. That year, a drug and contraband ring—Italian police called it a “supergang linking the Sicilian Mafia with the American La Cosa Nostra”—was broken up. Among those indicted were Giuseppe “Genco” Russo, the head of the Sicilian Mafia, and several American criminal deportees. The following year, police tackled a Sicilian Mafia ring run by brothers Salvatore and Ugo Caneba. Based in Trapani, a provincial neighbor of Agrigento, the Canebas gained notoriety in the closing days of the Second World War when they were caught stealing and refining shipments of opium and morphine sent from America to help injured U.S. soldiers in army field hospitals in Italy. Fat on the profits from this audacious scheme, the Caneba brothers expanded into more sophisticated ventures.
Security concerns over America’s border with Mexico have long overshadowed any problems from the long, largely unguarded border with Canada, which has always been perceived as the more gentle neighbor. Almost without exception, however, undercover operatives with the old U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs found significant Canadian connections in their cases. Following the trail even further, they often found some link to the Sixth Family.
The Canadian city of Windsor is to Detroit what Montreal was to New York—a cross-border satellite of American Mafia interests. In the case of Windsor, the strategic value is even more narrowly defined: border access to the United States. Windsor lies just across the river from Detroit and, as such, it is not only Canada’s most southerly city and busiest border crossing, but, with a nod to Motor City, the heartland of its automotive sector. Along with seamless links between auto plants on both sides of the Detroit River, Windsor has also long been used by gangsters to move contraband back and forth between the countries.
Prohibition in the U.S., starting in 1920 and stretching until 1933, a law that banned the manufacture, sale, transportation and importation of alcohol, was a gift to gangsters on both sides of the border. Perhaps coincidentally, two of the men who traveled with Nick Rizzuto’s father from Sicily to America in 1925, Mercurio Campisi from Cattolica Eraclea and Francesco Giula from Siculiana, said they had previously lived in Detroit during the early years of Prohibition. If this was an early incursion to the area by associates of the Sixth Family, then there have been others in the decades since. During a probe into the Detroit drug market in the late 1960s and early 1970s, agents stumbled across members of the Badalamenti family. In the 1980s, the patriarch of the clan, Gaetano, would be convicted as a linchpin in the Pizza Connection, forever ensuring the clan’s notoriety. Earlier, however, Gaetano’s cousin, Cesare Badalamenti, was arrested for smuggling drugs into America and, when released from prison, moved to Detroit, where he quickly met up with Giuseppe Indelicato.
Indelicato, like the Rizzutos, left Sicily’s Agrigento province to settle in Canada. In the New World he retained his Sixth Family links while settling in Windsor, with an eye on the Detroit skyline across the river. In 1964, an RCMP surveillance team monitoring a meeting in Montreal between the Cotronis and Nick Rizzuto’s father-in-law, Antonio Manno—likely an early meeting to smooth ruffled feathers between the families—noted that a vehicle used by the Sicilians was registered to Indelicato.
An early smuggling foray, however, did not go well. Stopped when disembarking in New York City from a ship arriving from Europe, Indelicato was found with a half-million-dollar load of heroin stitched into the lining of his vest. He insisted it was icing sugar to decorate a wedding cake. His inability to explain why the confection needed such secretive transport led to the obvious conclusion and subsequent indictment. It is not known whether the border agents—or the jury—laughed at his feeble explanation; the 31-year-old Indelicato was sentenced to five years in prison. After serving his time, he was deported to Canada and immediately picked up where he had left off in Windsor. With Badalamenti on one side of the Detroit River and Indelicato on the other, they established a modest heroin route.
One of the men in regular contact with both Badalamenti and Indelicato was Nick Rizzuto, who, in 1970, turned up on the telephone records of both traffickers, police said. The Rizzutos were firming up key access points to the United States. Relations with the American Mafia in Detroit and the ’Ndrangheta bosses of Ontario were quite amicable. The Sicilian mobsters were careful to spread their profits around and not to encroach on their other activities. Everywhere accommodations were being made—everywhere but in Montreal.
From each of these successes and occasional missteps, the Mafia learned, perfecting technique, routes and methods. They were not seeking perfection, but something terrifically efficient. The next-generation heroin pipeline, part of which was captured and chronicled in the Pizza Connection case, would dwarf the previous machinations.
Signs of the success of the new pipeline were getting harder to suppress. Large shipments of impeccably pure heroin, leaving Italy and arriving in the United States, were being detected with unprecedented frequency, as production in the new laboratories in western Sicily moved toward capacity. Starting in late 1977, luggage stuffed with heroin, placed aboard Alitalia flights from Palermo’s Punta Raisi Airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, was being seized with some regularity. In June 1979, a suitcase arriving for Gaetano Badalamenti in Sicily was found to contain $497,000, with the cash haphazardly wrapped in pizzeria aprons. The Pizza Connection was up, running and immediately profitable.
Then, in 1980, came a seizure in Rome that, more than all of the other finds of drugs and money, highlights the success of the new operation.
Albert Gillet, a Belgian, had arrived at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport direct from New York when his luggage was checked at customs. Inside, inspectors made a surprising and perplexing find. There, neatly packaged, were 10 kilos of heroin that tests found to be 86 percent pure. In any North American city, such a find would have been almost routine, but in Rome it was unheard of, for the simple reason that the drug was moving in the wrong direction—heroin was supposed to flow from Italy, where it was produced, to New York, where it was being bought and resold at an inflated price. Nobody bought heroin at the premium price in New York and brought it to Italy, where it would have attracted only a fraction of its cost. Giovanni Falcone, the anti-Mafia magistrate, seized on the strange case and soon solved the riddle. The shipment, which had originated with the Sixth Family and been sold to one of their regular New York Mafia customers, was being returned, having been found unacceptable by the American buyer. So successful were the new pipelines, and so good was their merchandise, that the buyers had the luxury of being choosy.
“We did not know that, at the time, the Americans considered 86 percent purity not good enough, which was why the goods were being returned,” Falcone later said.
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