The Sixth Family (43 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
Among those arrested was Stephan Zbikowski, 32, of Longueuil, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. Zbikowski is the son of a wealthy mining engineer in Quebec who shares his name. The elder Zbikowski was involved in mining operations in Venezuela and had a leadership role in a firm with exploration rights over 8,600 acres in Venezuela from where it hoped to discover gold. The arrest threw the Zbikowski family into turmoil. His mother flew twice to Venezuela to make representations on her son’s behalf. By March 1997, the younger Zbikowski was still being held without a conviction in a tough Venezuelan prison. The case prompted questions in the Canadian Parliament by two Quebec politicians, Stéphane Bergeron and Philippe Paré. In 1997, Bergeron presented a petition to the prime minister, signed by close to 2,500 people, asking the government to implore the Venezuelans to release Zbikowski.
The family’s situation did not improve, however. A year after the arrest of the young Zbikowski, the father was himself arrested on drug charges in Canada after a joint probe by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, New York State Police and the Quebec provincial police. Officers seized 75 kilos of cocaine and issued arrest warrants against 12 people; along with the elder Zbikowski, then 58 years old, police issued an arrest warrant against the Sixth Family’s Emanuele Ragusa. Zbikowski was deemed a leader in the network that involved the United States, Canada, Mexico and Venezuela, according to government documents. He was later sentenced to 13 years in prison.
“You were one of the directors of this criminal plan. Your role consisted of planning, controlling, directing, financing, coordinating and taking charge of the transportation of cocaine,” National Parole Board records say of his crime. Two notes in his file linked him to the Mafia.
MONTREAL, JANUARY 1995News of the Puerto Cabello arrests and cocaine seizure reached Canada at about the same time, coincidentally, as Oreste Pagano. The prodigious trafficker arrived in Montreal to meet with Vito and Alfonso and to find out how their test scheme had gone. The seizure seemed to have happened while he was en route and he was unaware of what had occurred in Venezuela.
“Vito Rizzuto handed me a newspaper that was talking about the seizure. And the newspaper said that 500 kilos were seized,” Pagano said. “I told him that this was not the merchandise that I sent. I handed over a hundred kilos, not 500.” Somewhere, someone seems to have gotten greedy. It was not the first time such a thing had upset Pagano’s carefully made plans. The alleged 100-kilo shipment had been substantially boosted and eventually became so overloaded it tipped. The mobsters were spun into some confusion. Whose drugs had been seized? Who was responsible? Was it really their shipment that had been found? Or someone else’s? Was their smaller shipment still on the way? Everyone had questions for the others.
“He was sending someone to find out how it was seized,” Pagano said of what he claimed was Vito’s plan to sort things out. “And he was saying that he didn’t know how [or] from where this gentleman had gotten the other 400 kilos. … They said that they did not know and that they would find out; that they would make the person pay for the shipment and the [lost] earnings as well,” Pagano said. He was told to “have a little patience,” and that Vito “would be sending the money to me.” The seizure, of course, did not upset only the gangsters.
“After finding out about his son’s arrest … [the young Zbikowski’s father] worried that he also may be arrested. He had gotten himself admitted to a clinic in Montreal,” Pagano said. “To have an alibi,” he claimed.
Pagano continued to work closely with Alfonso, but his relationship with Vito waned over the screw-up on their first job together, Pagano said. Vito and Pagano met a few times more after that. Both were at the wedding of Alfonso’s daughter in Toronto on April 29, 1995, at which Vito was cordial toward him and even invited Pagano to a wedding in his own family two months later.
Pagano waited without word on the investigation into what went wrong in Venezuela and, more importantly, without receiving the money he had fronted the consortium in buying the 100 kilos of lost product. Pagano wanted to make one last approach to Vito about getting reimbursed, he said, when he next had a chance to meet with him. And he now had his invitation to an event where Vito was guaranteed to be present.
MONTREAL, JUNE 3, 1995On the day of his wedding, Vito’s oldest son, Nicolò, looked as dapper as his father. Named for his grandfather, Nicolò was 27, with dark hair and his father’s brooding, furrowed brow but a wider, more robust face. His wedding was cause for family celebration. Making matters even more comfortable for all concerned was his choice of bride: Eleanora Ragusa. In a perfect example of the family’s tight-knit structure, Vito’s son’s bride was the daughter of Emanuele Ragusa, a long-time family confidant. Ragusa’s other daughter, Antonina, had married Luigi Vella, who was Alfonso Caruana’s cousin. Emanuele Ragusa’s sister similarly married into the Sciascia family.
The wedding, at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in downtown Montreal, was formal and impressive, attended by “people of the family, the entire Mafia clan,” Oreste Pagano said. Vito had invited Pagano to attend, likely out of respect for his close association with Alfonso Caruana. Although decidedly uninvited, police thought it impressive as well. It did not take long for intelligence officers to learn of the impending nuptials as the RCMP were in the midst of Project Choke, yet another large operation targeting the Rizzuto organization. Officers were probing a conspiracy to import large loads of heroin and cocaine from South America and were keeping close tabs on Vito and many of his associates. Police interest in the family made such private events as weddings and funerals prime targets for surveillance by intelligence officers looking for fresh photographs and clues to who was friendly with whom. There seemed to be less of a frenzy by police over the marriage on June 19, 1999, of Vito’s other son, Leonardo, to Maria Tutino, a chartered accountant.
For the wedding of Vito’s son Nicolò, the RCMP and Laval police mounted an extensive operation to monitor the celebration, taking possibly as many photographs of the guests as any official wedding photographer. Many of the Sixth Family members were there as were other relatives: Emanuele Ragusa, Domenico Manno, Agostino Cuntrera, Francesco Arcadi, Frank Campoli and many others. Although invited to attend such an important family event, Pagano clearly never became personally close to Vito; during an early police debriefing after Pagano agreed to cooperate with authorities, Pagano mistakenly recalled Vito’s name as “Paolo Rizzuto.”
Pagano wisely chose to refrain from confronting Vito about the overdue payment on that day, a day when Vito likely would not have his mind on such matters.
“I wanted to, because I still had not received the money,” Pagano said. But he waited—until the next morning.
“The morning after the wedding, we met at the hall and he told me to remain calm and that he would be sending me the money, which I never received,” Pagano said. “I never got it.” That sour start to their business relationship halted any further dealings between Pagano and Vito, he said.
“This drug-trafficking deal went bad because the drugs were seized. … It was later broken off because the job, the first job, went bad and I lost trust. And even the people that had sent me the merchandise lost—not having received the money—lost their trust.” Pagano was merely reiterating an old mafioso maxim: “Lose my money, lose my trust.”
Pagano told Canadian police of the cocaine scheme during secret debriefings in early 1999, and then again in more detail in late 1999. He obviously felt it was something the authorities could or should act upon.
“What I want her to understand,” he said to the translator during one of his debriefing sessions, referring to the female RCMP officer asking him questions, “is that everything that I am saying is not hearsay, because, as [for] hearsay, I could tell you lots of things, but I prefer to speak of things that I know directly.”
Could this spark another investigation and possible charges against Vito? The grounds seemed compelling. There was evidence from Venezuela of the arrests and the seizure of the drugs in the mining company barrels, coupled with Pagano’s testimony of personally making the arrangements to send drugs to Vito and, later, personally delivering them to the mining official in Venezuela. More than eight years later, no such charges had been laid.
Other deals for the Rizzuto organization, many others, went far smoother than the mining scheme. Still, the Sixth Family had their share of slip-ups and bad luck as they diversified their holdings from heroin to cocaine to hashish to counterfeit currency, continually seeking to maximize profit.
For the leading members of the Sixth Family, the dirty days seemed far behind them. The messy murders in Montreal in the 1970s of the Violi brothers and the prison terms served by their kin in return, the bold, frightening purge of the rebellious Bonanno captains in New York in the early 1980s, the uncertainty that came with Vito’s serious drug charges in the late 1980s and the unpleasantness of Nick Rizzuto’s incarceration in Venezuela that stretched into the early 1990s—the memories of such turmoil were fading into the past. Business was booming.
CHAPTER 28
NEW YORK AND MONTREAL, 1994The Sixth Family was unmoved by the failure of the occasional new venture or the lengthy sentence issued against a senior member, even one as close to their core as Domenico Manno, and refused to retreat from the fervent cross-border movement of drugs. Around the same time as Manno’s South Florida escapade, Girolamo Sciortino’s cornwall cocaine blues and the cocaine debacle in Venezuela, another core member of the Sixth Family was similarly busy expanding the franchise. This operation was built on sound economic theory: the law of supply and demand.
Cocaine had become so plentiful in North America that the price was steadily dropping. At the same time, Europe was awash in cheap heroin, thanks to bumper crops in Afghanistan. The Montreal mafiosi saw an easy business model for enhanced profit; all they needed to do was get their cocaine to Europe to sell at a premium and, in return, move their heroin to sell in the United States with a similar markup.
For this scheme, the Sixth Family relied on Emanuele Ragusa, according to U.S. law enforcement and court files. Ragusa worked with the family’s trusted drug intermediary, Sammy Nicolucci. This time, rather than a Hispanic family linked to Colombia or a biker gang or native criminals, the Sixth Family formed an alliance with the Big Circle Boys, an Asia-based crime syndicate, and the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia of Italy’s Calabria region.
For the Sixth Family and the Big Circle Boys to work together was a meeting of two seemingly perfect criminal entities. The organizations are strikingly similar. Both hark back to the tradition of their ethnic criminal roots. The Big Circle Boys, who take their name from the circle of prisons around the Chinese city of Canton, come from the traditions of the Triads of China. Both groups, however, recognize the weaknesses of a rigid hierarchical structure and the vulnerability it creates and adjust their structure accordingly. Like the Sixth Family, the Big Circle Boys’ motive is purely one of profit, and at the root of their power and wealth is the global heroin trade. Like the Sixth Family, the Big Circle Boys are active in dozens of countries around the world, in both legitimate and illicit activities and, like the Sixth Family, they are master networkers. The Big Circle Boys’ chief representatives in their venture with the Sixth Family were Cheung Wai Dai, known by the street name “Ah Wai,” and Chung Wai Hung, known as “Thai Gor Hung.”
Also in on their scheme was Emanuele LoGiudice, a New York- based Sicilian mafioso who was working to distribute whatever heroin the Sixth Family could get him. Ragusa and Nicolucci held several meetings with their Asian heroin connections, according to police. The conspiracy they mapped out was for the Big Circle Boys to bring in heroin from Asia to Canada, which the Sixth Family would buy and ship to New York. Once there, a portion would be sold to LoGiudice for the Mafia to distribute and the remainder sold to the Kung Lok Triad, another Asian crime group with its roots in Hong Kong. Further, cocaine would then be bought in Florida by the Sixth Family and shipped to Canada where some of it would be sold to the Big Circle Boys for resale and the rest shipped to Italy to the Sixth Family’s own trafficking contacts.
At a meeting at the Great Wall Tea House in Montreal in the early 1990s, Nicolucci and Ah Wai finalized the narcotics trading post.
For the Sixth Family, it was a perfect win-win plot. As middlemen—the prime position for the organization—they would profit simply by taking the heroin from the Chinese and passing it to traffickers in New York. Similarly, the price markup on their cocaine in Europe was a substantial jump that more than made up for the risks and costs of the transatlantic journey. The business model came together in late 1991 and operated for several years. With so many criminals involved, however, it was not long before the drug trafficking came to the attention of the RCMP. The first slip came from the Big Circle Boys. Officers in Canada learned that Chung Wai Hung was playing an increasing role in the drug world and, by 1993, police had placed wiretaps on his phone lines.
On May 6, 1993, a package containing 3 kilograms of cocaine—which had been mailed by some of the targets of the police probe and destined for ’Ndrangheta members in Siderno, Italy—was seized in Brooklyn. With the international scope of the operation growing, the Polizia di Stato, the Italian national police, joined the probe. It was soon discovered that this package was not the first to have been sent. Colombian gangsters in Bogotá were identified as the original source of the cocaine that was being bought in Florida. In November 1993, a shipment of 167 kilograms of cocaine that was destined for Rome was seized in Colombia.
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