The Sixth Family (36 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
The news would have been surprising to almost anyone, but as the lunch companion was, in reality, an undercover RCMP officer, the information was doubly appreciated. Although a close relative of Tozzi’s has denied the incident, which is revealed in a sworn affidavit used by officers to obtain wiretaps in 1994, and a lawyer for Vito said a bribe was not paid to free Nick, police took the information seriously. The news was a shock to officers, who did not know that Nick had been freed, although they were pretty certain he had not returned to Montreal.
On May 19, 1993, Canadian passport No. PZ-362199 was issued through the Canadian Embassy in Caracas to Libertina Rizzuto, Nick’s wife. With their travel papers in order, she then escorted her husband home to Montreal four days later, where Nick was greeted at the airport by Vito and more than two dozen friends and relatives. The joy of that reunion, however, did not erase the bitterness over the arrest.
A few years after Nick’s return to Montreal, Vito still considered some business in Venezuela unfinished. The treatment of his father in Venezuela weighed heavily on Vito, and it came up when he was discussing business in that country with Oreste Pagano.
“He wanted me to do him a favor,” Pagano said. “He was very upset over a lawyer in Venezuela that had stolen $500,000 from him for when his father was arrested in Venezuela. Five-hundred-thousand
American
dollars,” Pagano emphasized, noting the lower exchange rate of the Canadian dollar at the time. “And he asked me if I could have this lawyer killed,” Pagano alleged to police in a debriefing session, although the statement has never been tested in court and remains unproved.
American
dollars,” Pagano emphasized, noting the lower exchange rate of the Canadian dollar at the time. “And he asked me if I could have this lawyer killed,” Pagano alleged to police in a debriefing session, although the statement has never been tested in court and remains unproved.
“I said yes to him. But I never did anything.”
Nick had been imprisoned for more than four years. Despite the loss of his leadership, the Sixth Family had progressed well while he was away, expanding the franchise. The organization had seen growth in its customer base, its product line and its list of suppliers. And, like most businesses, it had experienced a few setbacks and tense moments.
CHAPTER 24
IRELAND’S EYE, ATLANTIC COAST, OCTOBER 1987Just off the rugged northeast coast of Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province, the rocky hills that form the tiny island of Ireland’s Eye rise steeply from the seawater of Trinity Bay. From the north, the approach to the tiny island is one of imposing red-and-gray-streaked rock, poking through a green canopy of stubby coniferous trees, that forms a threatening barrier from the sea. To the south, however, lies a narrow sound that cuts its way inland, twisting so deeply into the center that it very nearly cuts the island in two before coiling around to form a tranquil, protected lagoon. The round, dark pool may well have given the island its odd name, but this natural harbor certainly did offer settlers protection from the hard wind and choppy water. Which is why, despite its remoteness, Ireland’s Eye was first occupied in the 1600s by fishermen who drew from the teeming cod stocks and hid their meager earnings from Peter Easton, the marauding “pirate admiral” who led an armada of privateers in shaking down these maritime communities, one of North America’s first acts of organized crime.
Covering just two square miles, Ireland’s Eye reached a population peak of 157 people in 1911 before decline set in. Under a government relocation plan, people living in dozens of tiny outport fishing communities were moved to larger, better-serviced towns and, by the 1960s, Ireland’s Eye was abandoned, becoming a picturesque ghost town of well-spaced clapboard houses, some with tiny wharves jutting out into the harbor, a post office, schoolhouse and the once-impressive St. George’s Anglican Church, with its tall spire and stained-glass windows. The buildings are now a rubble of weathered planks and stone foundations that are slowly being reclaimed by nature.
It was this unlikely spot, in the fall of 1987, that the Sixth Family chose as its base for another revenue stream, part of a purposeful diversification plan to expand its portfolio. Man cannot live by heroin alone, and, like good businessmen and astute investors, the Rizzuto organization moved diligently to ensure relevancy, profitability and flexibility in an uncertain market. The expansion of the drug enterprises came through a startling array of contacts, both international and local, forming a multicultural stew of global underworld confederacies that would frustrate and bewilder police investigators trying to sort through, and, more important, penetrate them.
Some partnerships were more successful than others.
For the Ireland’s Eye enterprise, the Sixth Family turned to Raynald Desjardins, who had his first drug conviction in 1971, and later married the sister of Joe DiMaulo, a veteran Montreal mobster, bringing him into the Sixth Family orbit. Desjardins was one of several men over the years to be described by police and the media as the “right-hand man” of Vito Rizzuto, and his purchase of a home at the far southwestern corner of the Rizzuto clan’s exclusive neighborhood was further evidence of Desjardins’s standing. His interest in this stretch of Newfoundland coast seems to have been piqued, in part, by Gerald Hiscock, a corrupt Newfoundlander with a criminal past. Between them, police suspected, they worked to arrange the tail end of a series of transactions that started far from Ireland’s Eye, in the Middle East.
For years, Montreal’s mafiosi had been buying hashish by the ton from Christian Phalangist militia factions in Lebanon. The city’s underworld connections to Lebanon were both broad and deep. As far back as 1975, police wiretaps on Frank Cotroni’s telephone revealed that he made calls directly to the home of Suleiman Franjieh, the then-president of Lebanon. Cotroni was also meeting personally with high-ranking Lebanese government officials. When the Rizzuto organization seized Montreal, they inherited the rich connections in Lebanon as well.
Mostly their business involved straight cash transactions, proceeds from which the militia fighters funded their war efforts in strife-torn Lebanon. Sometimes the drugs were swapped for explosives, high-powered guns and clips of ammunition. Such firepower is rare in Canada, and authorities had long suspected that the Montreal gangsters were using their links to New York gangsters to secure the weaponry in the United States and smuggle it into Canada before forwarding it to the Middle East. This theory was proven in 1980, when the FBI managed to track a large shipment of weapons, including U.S. military assault rifles and matching ammunition, that had been stolen from a Boston armory; it made its way first to Montreal, and then to Lebanon in exchange for hashish.
Some time later, police informants recounted how Montreal mobsters had made a visit to Lebanon to meet with their business partners, swapping samples of their respective wares. During a meeting, automatic weapons were test-fired at the unfortunate residents of a Palestinian refugee camp. As horrific a scene as that was, Canadian investigators also worried about possible ramifications closer to home—for it showed that the Montreal mob had easy access to high-powered weaponry. They worried what might happen if it was ever needed. The Lebanon-Montreal connection flourished and, by the late 1980s, the RCMP estimated that 90 percent of the hashish smuggled into Canada came from Lebanon. Never ones to stand still for long on such matters, though, Montreal gangsters found other sources of the drug to supplement even this rich supply. They were quick to expand supply lines, looking to add to the routes from Lebanon, rather than replace them.
With backing from the Rizzuto organization, Allan “The Weasel” Ross, the boss of the West End Gang, a tight group of Irish gangsters, forged a new supply line for hashish through his connections with the Irish Republican Army and the Irish mob of Boston. The IRA talked loudly about its political agenda against the British, but tried to keep hush-hush its role in international drug smuggling as a means of financing its struggle. Montreal gangsters also forged ties in Pakistan when Adrien Dubois, one of the notorious Dubois brothers, who formed a feared francophone gang in Montreal, introduced a Sixth Family associate to his impressive source for hashish—a corrupt government official in Pakistan who had a ministerial position and a thirst for foreign currency. With financial backing from the Sixth Family, and its assurance that no amount of hashish would be too large, the Montreal organization was able to command the minister’s exclusive attention. The official agreed to sell them the entire year’s production of hashish from the portion of the Pakistani border region under his watch.
Then, in the early 1990s, yet another considerable source of hashish was secured in Libya. A scheme to import 50 tons of hashish from Libya was intercepted by police, however, and during an extensive investigation, code-named Project Bedside, they traced telephone conversations between Desjardins, Vito Rizzuto, Joe LoPresti and Samir Rabbat, among others, according to Montreal police. Rabbat was once decribed as one of the world’s top-10 drug traffickers and was in the process of building a large house in Montreal, just blocks from Vito’s home, when he was arrested.
All of that hashish made for a hugely profitable supply, with bulk loads being arranged—sometimes simultaneously—in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, all of it making its way to the Canadian coast and then into Montreal for redistribution across the country and into the United States. High-quality hashish was a cash cow, particularly in Canada, where the drug remains strangely popular. The hashish added another revenue source to Sixth Family holdings, as it continued to diversify from its near-dominant position in the heroin trade.
In the fall of 1987, gangsters arranging their latest hashish load from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley thought the toughest part of their operation was over—its purchase in unstable Lebanon, the loading of the drugs onto a freighter and the paying off of harbor masters, Lebanese officials and senior Christian Phalangist militia leaders to allow the vessel to slip, unfettered, out to sea. When word arrived in Montreal that the shipment was en route, the receiving end of the arrangements swung into action. This was supposed to be the easy part.
With past shipments, the Canadian end had gone like clockwork, apart from one disappointment. For at least a decade, large loads of hashish had been smuggled successfully into Canada on foreign freighters traveling from Lebanon and arriving on Canada’s East Coast. One such ship certainly passed through the Port of Halifax in 1980. Police learned of a larger shipment—12 tons—that had been secretly offloaded in 1985 from a freighter anchored off the desolate coastline of Nova Scotia and placed onto small boats. When a 1986 shipment into Halifax was discovered and seized by police, the gangsters went looking for more remote drop-offs.
Ireland’s Eye seemed perfect. With its hidden harbor and no prying eyes for miles—and with a rudimentary infrastructure, including pathways and wharves—it was a smuggler’s paradise. What’s more, once a shipment was shifted over to the Newfoundland mainland, the area was not so remote as to make transport by land unreasonable. There was an access road to the Trans-Canada Highway.
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