The Sixth Family (38 page)

Authors: Lee Lamothe

BOOK: The Sixth Family

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To Dupuis’s dismay and disappointment, Salois did not seem overly interested. Some time after Dupuis left his office, Salois gathered together the photographs and the audiotapes and went to the authorities, presenting his evidence. Disappointed police then spoke with Dupuis and listened to his story of the inmate in Parthenais and the offers and threats against his family. The other inmates in the protected prison wing where Dupuis had served his time were interrogated by provincial police officers looking for something—anything—to corroborate the story. Finding nothing and faced with the compelling evidence offered by Salois, prosecutors felt they had little choice.

“As a result, we decided to charge Dupuis with instigating the incident,” government lawyer Louise Provost said. With a sick, sinking feeling, authorities charged Dupuis, their star witness against their biggest catch, with obstructing justice. It was August 16, 1989. Vito’s trial before a jury in Sept-Îles was set to begin in less than a month and the government could no longer call Dupuis as a credible witness. Fearing again for his own safety, Dupuis agreed to stay in prison until his preliminary hearing, where the key witness against him would be Jean Salois. On August 29, Dupuis pleaded guilty. Provost, the prosecutor, expressed appropriate outrage at the breach of judicial propriety attempted by Dupuis. She argued in court that his actions could encourage other witnesses to put a price on their testimony.

“It’s like holding out for the highest bidder,” she told the judge, asking for a stiff prison term on top of the unfinished four-year term for drug conspiracy that had been knocked off when he agreed to cooperate with the government, a deal the government now felt no obligation to meet. Dupuis was sentenced to 32 months in prison.

Without the testimony of Normand Dupuis, the case against Vito for the Sept-Îles hashish bust was in tatters, but the government glumly soldiered on.

“After Dupuis’s visit to my office there was first a rogatory commission in the Dominican Republic,” according to Salois. “After that, the trial took place in Sept-Îles. The authorities dedicated significant resources, going so far as to dispatch to the scene a senior Crown prosecutor.”

On December 18, 1989, after several days of trial, all pretense of a prosecution against Vito was dropped. He appeared once more in a Sept-Îles court where he was formally acquitted of all charges related to the 38 tons of hashish found by police aboard Dupuis’s boat. Police were deeply disappointed, for this was the stronger of the two smuggling cases against Vito, and the one they thought presented more compelling evidence of his involvement because of the cooperating witness.

Meanwhile, any joy felt by Vito and his family was tempered by the looming approach of his other trial, the one stemming from the Ireland’s Eye seizure. With the dismissal of the charges in Quebec, the case in Newfoundland became, for investigators, all the more crucial.

Some might say desperate.

ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND, FALL 1990

In October 1990, three years after police swooped down on Captain Brian Erb’s trawler and uncovered the huge hashish stash on Ireland’s Eye, Vito appeared in court in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to answer his other set of drug charges. Salois represented Vito; Pierre Morneau, another Montreal lawyer who often represents Sixth Family clients, represented a co-accused. With Vito in the prisoners box were Raynald Desjardins, Gerald Hiscock and Michel Routhier, who, like Vito, were contesting the charges. Prosecutors planned to map out the connections: how Hiscock had been seen meeting with Routhier, a Montreal man, a week before the shipment arrived; how Routhier was then seen meeting Desjardins in Newfoundland; and how Desjardins had spoken about “something happening next week” to Vito on the telephone. It placed two men between Vito and Hiscock and three between Vito and the fishermen who would be handling the drugs.

In what was becoming a pattern for Vito, this case would prove another spectacular fiasco for the government. And, as with his previous case, the best drama did not take place in a courtroom. Instead of a secretly recorded conversation in a lawyer’s office in Montreal, this one involved similar intrigue at a hotel restaurant.

Newman’s, a fine-dining establishment on the ground floor of the Radisson Plaza Hotel in St. John’s, attracted hotel guests and city dwellers alike, with its formal service and varied menu. The Radisson, now the Delta St. John’s Hotel, was Pierre Morneau’s choice of accommodation while working to defending the men against the drug charges. He was a creature of habit. Each night, he reserved Table 6 at Newman’s for himself and his fellow lawyers, who were defending Vito’s co-accused. Every evening, they retired to the restaurant to dine together, discuss the day’s events and prepare for the next day’s challenges. The lawyers’ chats did not go unnoticed by members of the RCMP. For whatever reasons, investigators—who swore in an affidavit that they were conducting a completely separate investigation from the one at trial—placed electronic bugs in a hotel meeting room, several of the bedrooms and at the lawyers’ favored dining spot—Table 6.

For three days, from Monday, October 15, to Wednesday, October 18, the lawyers dined at their regular table while a bug hidden in the base of a lamp secretly captured their conversations. On Thursday, however, before Morneau’s party arrived to take its usual place, a New Brunswick businessman named Guy Moreau arrived at the restaurant for dinner. The hostess who greeted him got the similar-sounding French names confused—Moreau? Morneau?—and, quickly scanning the reservation’s list, thought the businessman had reserved Table 6. She promptly seated him at the table normally used by the lawyers. By the time the lawyers arrived, Moreau was already settled in and, with apologies offered, the hostess sat the lawyers at Table 3 instead.

The restaurant’s manager, who was in on the RCMP operation, noticed the hostess’s mistake and was concerned that the secret mission could be in jeopardy. He discreetly called to Greg Chafe, a busboy, and told him to swap the lamps between Tables 3 and 6. Chafe, who could see that both lamps were working fine and that neither customer had complained of the lighting, balked at the strange command. The manager, however, insisted. Chafe realized something peculiar was afoot.

Meanwhile, Moreau, the businessman sitting at Table 6, had an issue unrelated to his seat or his lamp. His roast duck had arrived cold. He asked that the dish be returned to the kitchen and heated. The busboy saw his chance. When he swooped in to retrieve the duck, he also picked up the lamp. Moreau, thinking the busboy planned to use the lamp to heat his duck, objected. Promising that the duck would be properly heated, Chafe was able to make off with both the cold meat and the hot microphone. Chafe was a curious and questioning sort and, while he was carrying the lamp, he noticed it weighed less than the other lamps. Examining it, he saw that the metal base normally fitted to the bottom was missing. Before he could poke around further, the manager pushed him to get it over to the lawyers’ table. The lamps were switched and no one at the lawyers’ table seemed concerned by the activity. The manager no doubt was relieved that tonight’s meal was supposed to be the last night of the police operation, as the court hearings were set to adjourn.

The trial, however, was unexpectedly extended for another day, and so the following evening, the lawyers were back again for dinner. This time they secured their regular table.

It was likely with a wave of panic that the manager realized the bugged lamp had been left on Table 3, after the switch the night before. Again the manager called Chafe over and, just as he had the night before, ordered him to swap the lamps between Tables 3 and 6. Chafe quickly figured out what was going on and, for whatever reason, plunked the bugged lamp down on the lawyers’ table along with a handwritten note saying: “Be careful, you might be bugged.”

The note was like a bombshell for the lawyers, who knew their conversations were privileged. The real shock over “the zeal of the police,” however, came when Salois learned listening devices had also been placed in his suite and in a conference room, he said. “It was in this location that the lawyers talked with their respective clients or elaborated between lawyers on the strategy they would follow in the hearings,” according to Salois. To make matters worse for the government’s case, the defense team called into question the wiretap recording of Vito speaking with Desjardins.

On November 8, 1990, almost three years after he was arrested, Vito appeared before Newfoundland Supreme Court Judge Leo Barry, a former provincial government minister. Judge Barry examined the wording of the police request for judicial authorization of the wiretaps, then made his ruling: The recordings were illegal and, worse, so injurious to Vito’s right to a fair trial that the entire case against him had been tainted. It was an immense blow to investigators and to the prosecutor.

“You are discharged and free to go,” Judge Barry said to Vito.

Vito greeted the news with only the slightest sign of relief. He stood up, shook hands with the three co-accused seated with him and walked out of the prisoners’ box, taking a seat in the public gallery near the back of the court to watch the remainder of the day’s proceedings. Vito’s lawyer then asked for the return of his client’s $150,000 bail, posted back in 1987. Plus, he added with a flourish, $40,000 in interest. Afterward, a satisfied Vito Rizzuto walked out of the St. John’s courthouse a free man, having won his second acquittal on serious drug charges in less than a year.

“One word can mean so much,” Vito said, “especially when that word is acquittal.”

Vito’s elation contrasted sharply with the mood of an RCMP officer who watched the cases crumble: “We were devastated.”

A month after Vito’s acquittal, Hiscock, along with Desjardins and Routhier, were similarly freed after a judge declared that the illegal bugs targeting the lawyers in the hotel compromised their defendants’ right to a fair trial. Hiscock then applied to get back his speedboat, which had been seized by police.

Vito’s pair of stunning acquittals did more than merely enhance his reputation for being untouchable, although that it did. John Gotti, the publicity-hungry Gambino boss in New York, had recently been dubbed the “Teflon Don” by the press because charges against him never seemed to stick. Vito, in turn, was sometimes called the “John Gotti of Montreal,” a comparison that likely rubbed the unassuming Montrealer the wrong way. In fact, by contrast, a better name for Vito would be the “Quiet Don.”

The two acquittals had another, more important ramification: Prosecutors grew distinctly gun-shy in dealing with Vito. There was a fear of bringing anything less than ironclad charges against him out of concern that more cases would similarly backfire or, worse, suggest a pattern of harassment, incompetence or corruption among authorities. Instead of sparking a renewed drive to slap fresh charges on Vito, the result was that authorities retreated.

“They kept saying, ‘Next time, we’ll measure twice and cut once,’ but from then on they did a lot of measuring but no cutting. It was disheartening,” an organized crime investigator said.

A confidential RCMP report from 1990, noting the legal defeats, summarized the fallout a little differently, seeing some measure of success in the failures: “Rizzuto is keeping a very low profile,” it says.

Profitable as the massive hashish shipments were, cocaine offered an even better return for invested drug dollars in the 1990s. The Sixth Family was moving to be a leading player in that as well, but after the arrest of Nick in Caracas, the South American outpost was thrown into jeopardy. The Sixth Family was hungry for new sources of supply.

They found it closer to home.

CHAPTER 25

WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, 1993

The arrest of a man carrying 200 kilograms of cocaine in South Florida was cause for conversation but, because the poor wretch had nothing to do with the Sixth Family, no cause for alarm. The arrest was mentioned in passing by Pasquale “Pat Gappa” Canzano, a Montreal truck driver, when he was chatting on the telephone with a woman on April 29, 1993. The woman quickly turned the conversation around to something of much greater interest to her, namely, Pat Canzano.

“And you? How’s the Mafia?” she asked.

“Pretty good,” Canzano answered.

“You monster,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” he replied.

“Oh, I’m just kidding.”

“It’s all right. Hey, hey, the truth never bent anybody’s arm.”