The Sixth Family (40 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
“How are you doing?” Manno asked, on March 18, 1993.
“I’m doing good and not so good,” Mauricio replied.
“Good or no good?” asked a confused Manno.
“Good and no good.”
“What’s the matter?”
“OK, there are Cadillacs and Hondas,” Mauricio started, looking for a way to make Manno understand without being too explicit. Manno knew words beginning with C usually meant cocaine and H words typically referred to heroin.
“Which one’s good?” asked Manno.
“The Hondas,” answered the boy.
“What about the Cadillacs?”
“The Cadillacs? Well, we’re gonna have to wait until another guy can go. … We’re going to have to start all over again with these guys because the guy … the … the guy got, uh … How do you say? He got caught,” he said, finally giving up on finding a suitable code word for being arrested.
Despite the occasional setback, business was good for Berta. And Manno was the only buyer she needed. He had endless clients lined up and was constantly demanding cocaine and edging for credit.
“Anything more, I will accept it,” Manno said one day. “Whatever you can send me.” Berta’s sources in South America were increasing not only the size and frequency of their shipments of cocaine, but also introducing heroin, which had begun to be manufactured in labs hidden in the jungles of Colombia. It was all, Manno was told, earmarked for him. Heroin was like a magic word to Manno. He began ramping up his demands for the drug. Heroin was historically the underpinning of the Sixth Family; if cocaine was the modern meat of the criminal body, heroin was the very bones.
Canzano was taking money hidden in his truck down to Florida and returning with cocaine. The organization became so active that Canzano had to find other drivers to assist him. Sometimes the deals were successful and Manno was able to market large quantities; other times there were backups, arrests of couriers, even a ripoff. One trafficker, known to the others only as “Chico,” took more than $70,000 of Sixth Family money and, instead of delivering cocaine, disconnected his telephone and vanished. When hunting for Chico, the traffickers did not know of the police wiretaps but someone had spotted a surveillance agent. With Berta living on a dead-end street in a residential community, stationary surveillance was difficult for police. Officers also noted with frustration that the traffickers frequently threw off their surveillance by conducting “heat runs”—driving through an area in which a trafficker has associates who watch his car pass and then look for any vehicles following it. Police had surreptitiously stolen the trash on several occasions from in front of Berta’s home in a search for additional evidence. Berta and her family were starting to feel the heat.
“Bad guys showed up across the street for days and days and days,” Mauricio nervously told Manno one day. He believed the surveillance was on Canzano, who had stayed at Berta’s house and made several telephone calls from there while trying to locate Chico. Manno, fearing his carefully nurtured source for cocaine and heroin would evaporate if Berta got too nervous, hastily calmed Mauricio down, telling him that they had not slipped up on their end. Alas, they had. Between the RCMP, the DEA and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, the enterprise had been thoroughly compromised.
Pat Canzano was under heavy police attention when he made a run to Florida in 1993. During a lengthy surveillance, Canzano met with several notable Florida traffickers. He also met with another Montreal truck driver being used to transport cocaine back to Canada. Similarly, when Manno himself traveled to Florida, police were all over him. Manno, frustrated at the money lost to the elusive Chico, flew into West Palm Beach airport in late March 1993. For nine days he and Mauricio Reyes tried to track Chico down. Attempts were made to find him through his social security number and credit records. Manno said that he had access to a lawyer who could obtain such information for him.
In spite of the loss of the $70,000 and the increasingly obvious police surveillance, Manno did not slow down. When Berta showed an interest in obtaining counterfeit money, he sent a sample down, saying he had a huge amount in Montreal. Counterfeiting U.S. banknotes had long been a quiet specialty of Montreal crooks under the Sixth Family.
On May 10, 1993, Manno called Canzano in Montreal and told him to go to an address on Bélanger Street to meet a man named “Pietro” to whom Canzano was to simply say he was a friend of Manno’s and ask for “some stuff.” Later that day Canzano was arrested in Montreal with a kilogram of cocaine. On the same day, RCMP and DEA surveillance teams watched Manno and a man authorities described as his son-in-law, drive out of Montreal and across the border at Rouses Point, New York. The pair ended up at the Marriott Hotel, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The following day, Berta Reyes, accompanied by two men, also arrived at the hotel, where they found Manno lounging near the lobby elevator. The group had a meeting, then Berta and her entourage left the hotel and easily dodged the surveillance team. Manno and his driver checked out the following day and drove to Manhattan, where they took a room at the New York Helmsley Hotel. On May 13, Manno was followed by agents to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, near Grand Central Station, where he waited in the lobby until Berta and her companions showed up again. Unable to get a cab for all of them, they headed into the subway and were lost by the surveillance team.
The heroin purchase was not going well. In a call to his wife on May 17, Manno said he expected to be “finished” that same day and that someone should leave “it” with her cousin. But the negotiations dragged on. Manno wanted 10 kilos but did not like the $105,000 per kilo asking price; plus he wanted at least partial credit. On the Berta side, there was frustration over the delays in closing the deal. She was in the classic middleman squeeze, caught between the Colombian suppliers and the Mafia purchasers. Mauricio Reyes was told that things were “moving slowly” and there had been disagreements with Manno. The “old guy,” Mauricio was told, had become upset during negotiations. At one point Berta told her son that she hoped Manno “would quit being a pain in the ass.”
That heroin deal between Manno and Berta never fully came together, although Manno was able to buy a single kilogram for $105,000. Relations between Manno, whom the Florida associates started calling “the little old man,” and Berta, became strained, to the point where she began leaving her telephone off the hook to avoid his repeated calls. Such was his hunger for heroin shipments.
In spite of the tension between the Canadian mafioso and the Berta crew, Manno continued to move counterfeit money to her. At one point he sold $85,000 to one of Berta’s associates. When the man went to buy cocaine with it, he was arrested—the seller was an undercover policeman. At the end of 1993, Berta herself was arrested when she was found with $10,000 of Manno’s bogus bills.
On March 11, 1994, Manno and Pat Canzano—who was already facing a charge of possessing a kilo of cocaine in Montreal—and several members of Berta’s organization were indicted in the Southern District of Florida. The U.S. government sought the extradition of Manno from Canada, with court documents identifying Manno as “a Sicilian Mafia member” and Canzano as “his right-hand man.” Court papers record that Manno was “responsible for 29.5 kilograms of cocaine, 10 kilograms of heroin and $85,000 in counterfeit currency.” These were terribly conservative figures.
It was perhaps then that Pat Canzano started to regret his loose talk to his lady friend about being part of the Mafia. The phone conversation had been recorded and transcribed by police and presented in court, read from the witness stand by a DEA agent. If Canzano did not blush, others in court did it for him. Canzano later said that he “got blinded by stupidity.” But he had bigger things to worry about. His lawyer, Eddie Kay, described him in a Florida court as a “tweener.”
“[Canzano] was between cooperating and not cooperating,” Kay said. “And during that tweener period he told the government about the amounts of cocaine involved … [but] he wouldn’t tell the government about Manno. He just won’t go against Manno,” he said. “I tend to think that there’s something to be said for this type of philosophy of being a standup guy, and this is the last standup guy, here.” Despite his client’s apparent sympathy for Manno’s circumstances, Kay was not as forgiving. Manno was not, he said, a “good godfather.”
“Manno is all over the tapes. Manno is acting throughout this whole conspiracy, and there’s a guy named Rizzuto who’s on top of Manno. Now, it would be like Don Corleone going ahead and doing the acts himself,” Kay said, referring to the Mafia boss in
The Godfather.
The Godfather.
“This is some Don Corleone, you see, who takes his right-hand guy and puts [his family] on welfare.” Canzano was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
Twenty-two months after the request for Manno’s extradition from Canada, he appeared in a U.S. court. His criminal case was wrapped up far quicker than his battle to remain out of the hands of the American authorities. Within six months of returning to Florida in shackles, he struck a plea agreement admitting his role in running a criminal enterprise and a heroin and cocaine conspiracy in return for a 20-year sentence and a $250,000 fine. A pre-sentence report portrayed a broken-down, hardworking Italian immigrant. He said he had never attended school. He lived in a finished basement with his wife, who earned money as a self-employed seamstress doing piecework, and he had an ill daughter who had been institutionalized for more than 25 years, the court was told. He had no assets; in fact, he claimed a negative net worth of $115,097. He owned a truck and other equipment to run his business, but all was heavily encumbered by liens and had no resale value. How he would pay the fine that he had agreed to pay was a mystery.
“Mr. Manno, has anyone used any pressure, threats, coercion, force, intimidation of any kind to cause you to plead guilty?” the judge asked him.
“No, no,” he answered. Manno was contrite before the court. “The only thing I want to say is, on my own behalf, to give me as low a sentence out of consideration for my family … I’m so sorry for all of the problems that I’ve given to the United States. I feel very bad about it.”
The guilty plea—almost a mandatory action by all captured Sixth Family members to try to keep the Rizzuto name out of the public’s eye—was a strategic move on Manno’s part. Or, at least, so he thought. He had successfully played the justice system in Canada when pleading guilty in the Violi murder. He was going to find American justice a little more equal to his machinations.
Manno and his lawyer had cooked up a plan designed to shave years off his sentence and save him from having to pay the hefty fine. He would agree to the outrageous plea, then quietly apply for the Transfer of Offenders program, a treaty between Canada and the United States that lets citizens of one country imprisoned in the other serve their sentences in their homeland. Once in Canada, Manno knew, the Canadian penal system calculations of appropriate punishment would apply and, under its generous parole allowances, he would likely be out of prison after serving as little as one-third of his sentence. And further, once back in Canada, he had no intention of paying a cent of the $250,000 fine. This turned out to be a bad strategy. While his lawyer, Samuel DeLuca, had advised Manno that it should work out rather nicely, after his plea Manno was informed that he would have to pay every penny of the fine before he was eligible for an international transfer. Disgusted, Manno got new lawyers to appeal his sentence.
“As a result of bad advice, Mr. Manno agreed to a deal which subjected him to a longer sentence than he was willing to agree to serve because he was advised that he would not have to serve it,” his new lawyers argued.
In November 2004, his appeal was rejected. Outfoxed at every turn, Manno, the previously crafty mafioso, remains in an American federal prison, due for release in December 2012, when he will be 79 years old.
CHAPTER 26
CENTRAL SQUARE, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1993Interstate 81, following the path of the Appalachian Mountains, stretches from eastern Tennessee to the Canadian border without passing through any major metropolitan areas, making it a popular route for impatient truckers. Not surprisingly, speed traps are common. It was on the south-bound lanes of the northern leg of that highway, as the pavement passes between the sprawling Adirondack Park and Lake Ontario, that a New York State trooper stopped a speeding taxicab in September 1993. While the trooper wrote out a ticket, the cabbie told him a curious story.
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