The Sixth Family (37 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

BOOK: The Sixth Family
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Despite all the planning, the operation ran into difficulty.
On October 17, 1987, RCMP officers boarded the
Charlotte Louise
, a 100-foot fishing trawler, while it was docked at Blanc-Sablon, a small port and Quebec’s easternmost community, just across from the northern tip of Newfoundland. Despite initial confidence in their tip, a thorough search of the filthy trawler did not uncover any drugs. Even drug-sniffing dogs brought in for a second search found nothing untoward. Officers were feeling a little uncomfortable when two investigators in the bowels of the ship suddenly noticed that a number of bolts were not encrusted with rust like most everything else on board. The officers asked one of the ship’s mechanics to come down and remove the fresh bolts, a request he nervously refused, at first declaring the cover to the trawler’s drinking water tanks was not meant to come off and then that he did not have the tools to do it. The officers were increasingly insistent and eventually persuaded him to start twisting off a dozen or so bolts. When the metal panel was lifted off, the officers instantly knew they had found what they were looking for.
“When it was finally opened, the odor of hashish burst out and we almost got high on the smell,” said Michel Michaud, one of the RCMP officers onboard at the time. Reaching deep into the darkened water tanks, they pulled out bale after bale of tightly packed hashish. “All of the bales of hash were wrapped in many layers of cheesecloth, plastic bags and other materials and all were submerged under the water.” When tallied and weighed, the officers found about 500 kilograms of hashish, a load with an estimated street value of $9.5 million. On deck, covered by a tarp, were a small speedboat and an all-terrain vehicle. Officers arrested four crew members, all from Quebec, but Brian Erb, the ship’s flamboyant skipper, managed to flee. Erb was a notorious seafarer who had become a modern-day pirate, a freebooter with liberal views on what constituted marine salvage rights.
Erb had gained some fame-cum-notoriety more than 10 years earlier when one of his marine stunts captured world attention. The irascible skipper had hauled a 2,500-ton abandoned freighter out of the St. Lawrence River, patched it up and renamed it the
Atlantean
, a ship that was later impounded because of unpaid debts. After it had been auctioned off, Erb led a ragtag co-ed crew of teenagers to reclaim her. In the middle of a late-February night in 1975, the
Atlantean
slipped her moorings and set off downriver on only one working engine, as Erb defiantly tried to make his way through the ice-clogged St. Lawrence in a slow dash toward open seas. His act of piracy led to a dramatic 11-day chase by police. Daily reports on the ship’s progress and evasive stunts were carried in newspapers around the world. Once stopped by police, Erb agreed to head for port, followed closely by the RCMP. During the night, however, Erb slipped a small boat carrying two storm lanterns into the water, turned off the
Atlantean
’s lights and bolted for sanctuary while the police icebreaker continued to follow the decoy’s lights. He was soon recaptured, but by then he had been dubbed the “Errol Flynn of the St. Lawrence.”
Erb’s more recent adventures along the coast of Newfoundland, however, were not the escapades of a lovable rogue. Police were certain the hashish they found in his boat was but a small portion of a much larger load; in fact, it was probably only his payment for services rendered. Weeks before she was seized at Blanc-Sablon, the
Charlotte Louise
had been anchored off the shore of Ireland’s Eye while bales of the hashish were dropped on to a small speedboat, whisked to shore through the narrow harbor and then shuttled about the island on an all-terrain vehicle to hiding spots among the ruins.
The allure of fast money and a break from the grueling work of the commercial fishery brought otherwise honest fishermen under the control of gangsters from Montreal. Gerald Hiscock was the alleged Newfoundland contact for the Montrealers, whom police say hired local strong-arm fishermen to help unload the cargo. Their pay of between $17,000 and $20,000 made it an attractive alternative to hauling in fish for a pittance.
The drug trade, however, was hard to swallow for most fishermen. While in the past they may have enjoyed the easy money from Prohibition-era rum-running, few had much desire to be involved in illegal street drugs. They soon confirmed police suspicions about the movement of drugs with tales of unusual sea traffic along the craggy shores of Trinity Bay. Police were starting to get a pretty good idea of what was happening on the supposedly deserted island.
When the RCMP descended on Ireland’s Eye, the island had not seen so much activity since Pirate Easton brought his ships to harbor. Three fishermen had already shuttled some of the hashish to the mainland. From there, it had been loaded aboard a truck, hidden under a layer of onions and was en route to Montreal. Police arrested the fishermen, seized the main load of hashish and went patrolling down the highway for a truck with Quebec license plates. They found it, 17 miles east of Gander, driven by a father-and-son team from the Montreal area. (The Newfoundland town of 10,300 people earned renown years later when, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it took in 6,000 passengers from diverted and grounded transatlantic jumbo jets.) The
Charlotte Louise
, with the drugs still in the tanks, was towed by a Coast Guard vessel to Sept-Îles on the Quebec north shore, with two RCMP officers taking turns guarding the dope, despite one being seriously seasick after too heavily celebrating the arrests with his colleagues the night before.
All told, the operation uncovered about 17 tons of hashish, with a retail street value estimated by the police at about $225 million. It was, at the time, the largest drug seizure in Atlantic Canada, but nabbing a handful of fishermen and two truck drivers did not seem to solve the riddle of the huge find.
On Monday, November 30, 1987, police significantly added to their catch of the day, however, when they arrested Vito Rizzuto, Raynald Desjardins and a third man, all in Montreal; Hiscock was arrested in Newfoundland. Vito was then 41 years old. It was six years after the New York slayings of the three captains, five years after Gerlando Sciascia and Joe LoPresti had been charged with heroin smuggling and three years after Vic Cotroni died. Until this arrest, Vito had not been in police custody for 13 years, since his release in July 1974 on the barbershop arson conviction, other than two brief tangles in September and December 1986, when he was charged with impaired driving. Desjardins was then 34 years old and nominally running an auto repair garage in Saint-Léonard. They were charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs and, after a quick court appearance the next day in Montreal, flown to Clarenville, Newfoundland, where, by week’s end, they were sitting with their alleged co-conspirators before a provincial court judge. Authorities were overjoyed at laying such serious charges against operators as renowned as Vito and Desjardins.
As evidence of Vito’s collusion in the plot, prosecutors would point to a three-page transcript of a telephone conversation between Vito, in Montreal, and Desjardins, in Newfoundland, in late November. The conversation was oblique. Vito wanted to know when Desjardins would be returning to the city and Desjardins said he would explain everything in person when he arrived. Desjardins then said there was “something happening next week.” Police and prosecutors claimed that this was a reference to the unloading of the hash from Ireland’s Eye a week later. Lawyers for the accused men described it as an innocuous conversation between acquaintances.
Vito spent Christmas in jail before obtaining bail in March 1988. He returned to Montreal while lawyers worked on his case.
SEPT-ÎLES, QUEBEC, OCTOBER 1988
Vito was out on bail when, on October 20, 1988, more than 60 officers with the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, fanned out through several rural coastal communities at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. They uncovered a second hashish importation scheme remarkably similar to the Ireland’s Eye find. Another modest vessel, the
Jeanne d’Arc,
was searched while anchored at the port of Mingan, near Sept-Îles, Quebec. On board, police found 38 tons of hashish, said to have a street value of more than $450 million, along with lesser amounts of cocaine, marijuana and weapons. This seizure was more than twice what had been found at Ireland’s Eye, and was in turn declared the largest ever found in the area. Nine people were arrested, including Normand Dupuis, 38, the boat’s owner and skipper.
Dupuis was wealthy by the standards of local fishermen and operated his vessel on the lower North Shore. He was also a self-confessed cocaine addict. Perhaps it was his drug habit that made Dupuis unstable, but his progress through the courts was anything but typical. Within two weeks of his arrest he had already agreed to cooperate with authorities and, to the glee of police, implicated as the mastermind of the venture none other than Vito Rizzuto. His demands in return for his cooperation were as modest as his ship, especially considering the stakes involved. In exchange for testimony against Vito he wanted $10,000 to help him resettle, a new identity, help in obtaining a passport, $120 a month while he was in prison and—perhaps the most sensible demand—drug treatment for him and his girlfriend. The authorities quickly agreed to it all and, on November 4, 1988, Dupuis and government representatives signed a contract for the seaman to become a cooperating witness. Six days later, his case was whisked before a judge and he pleaded guilty for his role in the hashish conspiracy. He was handed a four-year sentence that was to be served concurrently with a 30-month term for possession of 585 grams of cocaine. Dupuis then entered a protective wing of a provincial jail to keep him safely away from the general population while prosecutors digested their new evidence and drafted charges against Vito.
Just after lunch on November 17, 1988—precisely one week after Dupuis’s plea deal—Vito drove away from his Antoine-Berthelet home, backing out of his driveway and heading west. Officers with the Sûreté did not let him get far before they pulled in behind him and signaled for him to stop. There, officers broke the news to him that he was to face another court on another charge of large-scale hashish smuggling. He was taken into custody and, the next day, flown from Montreal to Sept-Îles and formally charged with conspiracy to import hashish.
Vito now faced two serious drug charges, stemming from separate, but nearly identical, enterprises. While police wondered how many similar boatloads they might already have missed, or how many more might be heading toward their shores, prosecutors settled down to prepare their cases. Confidence ran high that Vito was down for the count, if not on both of the charges, then at least on one. The government even started making preparations to seize Vito’s house and other property under new proceeds of crime legislation, legal actions that were supposed to be unveiled upon his conviction. The resolution of these charges, however, would come in unexpected ways. Both cases would take on the status of underworld legend, but it was Vito’s second charge that was settled first.
MONTREAL, SUMMER 1989
Normand Dupuis had not been in jail long when he started to have doubts about his deal with police. As part of his plea agreement, he had asked to be placed in a provincial jail, rather than a federal penitentiary, and as his accelerated parole date drew closer he grew increasingly agitated. One day, while in Parthenais detention center, a fellow inmate approached him and made him a surprising offer—a $1-million cash “reward” if he declined to provide evidence against Vito at trial, Dupuis said.
“I refused,” Dupuis said. “Then some time later the same prisoner came back with an ultimatum, warning that I had better cooperate or they would come after my family.” Dupuis had three school-age children and the news affected him deeply. He felt trapped. He had already testified at Vito’s preliminary hearing, implicating him in the hashish scheme, and signed the cooperation agreement with police.
“I did not want to commit perjury,” he said. About to be released from jail and fearing that his deal with police would not adequately protect his family, the troubled seaman started to hatch a scheme that might offer him a better option. “I had decided I wasn’t going to testify,” Dupuis said.
After his release from jail, Dupuis telephoned Jean Salois, a longtime lawyer for Vito who has handled many of his legal affairs. Dupuis introduced himself to Salois and then asked for a meeting. Salois said he rebuffed the offer as improper, but as Dupuis grew insistent he reluctantly agreed to have the government’s star witness against his client meet him in his law office. Salois then made careful plans.
“I hired a private investigator and told him to tape-record everything that was said and to photograph everyone who walked into my office that morning,” Salois said. “I feared a trap. I worried that the plan was to attempt to incriminate me or to do something that would force me to abandon the case.”
The day that Dupuis arrived at Salois’s Montreal office, July 7, 1989, started with a brief thunderstorm, and, although the rain quickly cleared away, the day remained cloudy. As the unsuspecting Dupuis approached the office, a photographer’s camera clicked away, unheard and unseen. Dupuis entered the office and announced why he was there: He was ready to disappear before Vito’s trial opened, thereby destroying the prosecutor’s case. In return, Dupuis wanted “a lifetime pension.” No amount was named, but Dupuis no doubt remembered the million-dollar sum the inmate had supposedly mentioned earlier. That might have been his starting point.

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