The Sixth Family (44 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
By early 1994, despite these seizures, the operation was running full tilt. Chung Wai Hung had brought in heroin that had quickly been sold and, in typical Big Circle Boy fashion, he had reinvested his profits in the underworld. He created a wide criminal organization in Canada involving drugs, counterfeiting, gambling and credit-card fraud.
“He even discussed the prospect of opening a prostitution business,” said Zachary W. Carter, the United States Attorney for Brooklyn at the time, who prosecuted the case.
LoGiudice, working from his base in New York, was the eventual recipient of much of the heroin. He was an old-timer in the drug business. In 1981 he was caught accepting heroin brought to him from Europe by a Belgian smuggler. He was also well connected with some of the most active Sicilian traffickers, including Michele Modica, a mafioso who would become infamous in Canada after a failed attempt by a Sixth Family associate to assassinate him in a Toronto restaurant in 2004 left a bystander paralyzed. After LoGiudice was released from jail, he fell into old habits and became a prime heroin customer of the Sixth Family.
To sell it, he relied on men such as William Zita, a street player who had been arrested for assaulting a policeman in 1960 and for selling untaxed cigarettes in 1968. For the next two decades, Zita worked as a bookie and loan shark while maintaining a legitimate job at the John F. Kennedy Airport—a position that provided him with a steady stream of stolen goods to be fenced. He soon realized bigger returns came from drug sales and ended up dealing in heroin. Zita was caught in 1981 and sent to prison. After his release, he worked with LoGiudice, whom he called “Manny.”
Transport of the drugs was left to the Sixth Family, who had become experts. The family maintained a regular run from Montreal to New York and then to Florida and back—mirroring the Manno conspiracy. The trucks carried heroin south into New York and then pressed on to Florida, where they picked up cocaine and headed north, often stopping again outside New York to collect cash from drug sales before heading back across the border into Canada.
“That truck, I think, was on a run, an automatic run. It passed … every couple of weeks,” said Zita. “I think it was going to Florida. It was a Montreal, Canada situation to Florida. That was the run it was making.” There always seemed to be a truck on the move, on one leg of the journey or another.
LoGiudice was constantly caught in a financial squeeze, despite the flow of drugs, and Zita received only small amounts of cash for his considerable work selling the heroin, always with the promise of more money once LoGiudice formalized an ongoing relationship with the Sixth Family.
LoGiudice realized the power and wealth that could flow from working closely with the Rizzuto organization. It gave him incentive to ignore problems along the way. Trouble came, for instance, in the autumn of 1994 when a kilogram of heroin of inferior quality arrived at LoGiudice’s door. Despite the slight, LoGiudice felt he needed to maintain his business relationship with Montreal and ordered Zita to work harder to sell it.
“Manny has a problem selling this heroin,” Zita said. “He couldn’t move it and he owed money, somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000. He told me, ‘Listen, I can’t give you anything on this but there is a shot that we can open the door here and we can make some money in the future. … When this whole thing is over, I will give you something.’” Once the heroin was sold, “the people in Montreal” would give them more to sell but, Zita said, you had to be careful who you bought your heroin from in Canada.
“Manny said that he knew people, other people, up in Canada, that he could get it [from], but it wasn’t a smart thing to do. … I would assume that they let him know that he was responsible to [the Sixth Family] and that he should do business with them and nobody else.” And so the crummy heroin was ground down to a fine powder to make it look to be of better quality before it could be resold.
“I was a little surprised that somebody was going to take a kilo of this stuff,” Zita said. It was going to Canada, Zita was told. The story seemed preposterous.
“Nobody wanted it and it was going to Canada? Come on.
Canada
? They got the real stuff, you know. This stuff was Mickey Mouse stuff.” The suggestion that inferior heroin could be offloaded to Canadian traffickers was enough to arouse suspicion in any experienced dealer. Sending bad heroin to Canada was like sending wilted tulips to Holland. Zita immediately smelled a rat and he was right. By the time they figured out that their operation had been compromised, however, it was too late.
Canada
? They got the real stuff, you know. This stuff was Mickey Mouse stuff.” The suggestion that inferior heroin could be offloaded to Canadian traffickers was enough to arouse suspicion in any experienced dealer. Sending bad heroin to Canada was like sending wilted tulips to Holland. Zita immediately smelled a rat and he was right. By the time they figured out that their operation had been compromised, however, it was too late.
It was not long after Ragusa and Nicolucci had arranged their innovative drug scheme that the RCMP stumbled into the middle of it, according to court and police documents. A joint RCMP-FBI investigation was launched. Wiretaps and surveillance were placed on the Big Circle Boys, and the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), a joint anti-mob police team in Canada, loaned an informant—a former criminal named Gino who worked with police for cash—to the FBI. Gino was to infiltrate the distribution end in New York. The operation was called Project Onig—Gino spelled backwards—and it ran from 1991 until 1997.
When the police operation was brought to a close, a dozen traffickers were arrested in the United States and more than 40 in Calabria, Italy. In New York, several of the Big Circle Boys’ associates and many of LoGiudice’s men—including William Zita—all betrayed their bosses and agreed to cooperate with the government to reduce their own sentences. No one linked to the Sixth Family, however, said a word.
Onig was an eye-opener for law enforcement officials in several countries. It proved that formerly separate groups, usually suspicious of each other and protective of their turf, had found a way to conduct mutually beneficial criminal operations without violence or jealousy. The reward for such cooperation was enhanced profit.
Colombian cartels, Hispanic Florida drug gangs, New York mobsters, Sicilian mafiosi, Chinese Triads, the Big Circle Boys, the ’Ndrangheta, the Hells Angels—all were working seamlessly with the Sixth Family, an organization that had grown into a truly global criminal enterprise. Across the United States, court files were being littered with references to members of the clans of the Sixth Family. No one, however, seemed to be pulling it together to realize that these cases involving New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Buffalo, Detroit, Italy, Colombia, Montreal and Toronto were not disparate strands but, rather, part of a single organization based in Canada, where it was largely immune to the increasing efforts of American law enforcement to crush the Mafia. Few fully recognized the growing influence of the Sixth Family on international affairs and fewer still understood that what was once a small, outpost of subservient gangsters had grown into an independent and powerful entity that could hold its own in any underworld, on any continent.
“The most significant aspect of this investigation was in the revealing of the depth of cooperation between [Mafia] groups and other major organized crime groups,” says an FBI report on the success of Project Onig. The Bureau pointed to the investigation as a landmark probe against international organized crime.
The only disappointment from Project Onig for the FBI, the report notes, was that Emanuele Ragusa, one of the prime targets of the operation, remained in Canada, beyond their grasp. Unlike Manno, when this enterprise collapsed, Ragusa managed to escape.
Emanuele Ragusa was born on October 20, 1939, in Cattolica Eraclea. Like so many of the Sixth Family, he emigrated to Canada and settled comfortably in Montreal where he mingled with mafiosi in both the Rizzuto family and the Caruana-Cuntrera clan. Police on three continents would document his ties to both families.
Italian authorities say they have been trying to get their hands on Ragusa for years. In 1983, he was convicted
in absentia
for his role in a drug-trafficking scheme tied to Francesco Mafara, a Sicilian Man of Honor who, in 1977, was among the first to sell heroin from refineries in Sicily. Mafara confessed to his involvement as a top heroin man and was murdered shortly afterward by some of the mobsters he betrayed. Italian police also noted that Ragusa had been found in the home of Giuseppe Cuffaro, the money launderer, with Leonardo Caruana, the mafioso who shuttled between Montreal and Sicily. Alfonso Caruana and his wife, Giuseppina, also used a cellular telephone with a Montreal area code that was registered in Ragusa’s name. On November 11, 1993, when Venezuelan police raided the Caruanas’ villa they found an invoice for Ragusa’s cellphone, according to the Italian government.
in absentia
for his role in a drug-trafficking scheme tied to Francesco Mafara, a Sicilian Man of Honor who, in 1977, was among the first to sell heroin from refineries in Sicily. Mafara confessed to his involvement as a top heroin man and was murdered shortly afterward by some of the mobsters he betrayed. Italian police also noted that Ragusa had been found in the home of Giuseppe Cuffaro, the money launderer, with Leonardo Caruana, the mafioso who shuttled between Montreal and Sicily. Alfonso Caruana and his wife, Giuseppina, also used a cellular telephone with a Montreal area code that was registered in Ragusa’s name. On November 11, 1993, when Venezuelan police raided the Caruanas’ villa they found an invoice for Ragusa’s cellphone, according to the Italian government.
In 1996, Ragusa, at age 56, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in Canada for a conspiracy to import drugs—a charge unrelated to the Project Onig case. It was his first criminal conviction in Canada. In prison, officials took note that the RCMP had declared him an important leader in the Sicilian Mafia with many years of close association with the Rizzutos. As a mitigating factor, it was noted that he had never been linked to crimes of violence.
During his incarceration, Ragusa faced down two extradition requests, first from the United States for the Project Onig conspiracy, and later from the Italians for Mafia association. Prison officials were alerted to the U.S. extradition request in April 1998. Despite that, he was allowed out on day parole a month later to perform community service at the Mission Bon Accueil, a Montreal charitable shelter for the homeless. Supervisors at the shelter were pleased with his work until they noticed steaks were missing. A search found two slabs of meat in Ragusa’s bag. He was asked not to return to the shelter. He later faced stern denunciation from members of the National Parole Board for the “immoral” act of stealing from the disadvantaged people he was supposed to be helping. While he was slapped on the wrist for the steak heist, his greater concern of a U.S. extradition was settled in his favor when it was ruled that the American case was too circumstantial to merit his being sent to New York, according to government documents.
Just as that was being resolved, however, the Italian government joined the queue to get a piece of Ragusa. The courts in Italy were prepared to imprison him for Mafia association. In true Sixth Family style, this, too, ended in his favor when a court ruled that the Italian request be denied because, at the time, Mafia association was not a crime in Canada, according to Ragusa’s parole records.
During his stay in prison, Ragusa was rarely a problem prisoner, although guards once found him with a stash of 66 packets of cigarettes hidden in his cell, suggesting either an entrepreneurial streak or a tobacco addiction. He rebuffed suggestions by the authorities that he was a mafioso, declaring to parole officials that he was erroneously associated with the Mafia because of his Italian ancestry. Officials, however, noted his close personal ties to the Sixth Family. Parole records cite the marriage of Ragusa’s daughter to Vito’s son, Nick, going so far as to say: “Your son-in-law is the son of the reported chief of the Sicilian Mafia in Montreal.” Ragusa was denied permission in 2000 for a leave from prison to participate in the baptism of his grandchild, the offspring of his daughter and Vito’s son, on the grounds that Vito would also be participating in the service. Another important family event, a wedding, caused Ragusa problems as well.
On July 12, 2002, prison officials were informed that Ragusa’s son, Pat, was getting married the next day to Elena Tortorci, a woman whose family, not surprisingly, is from Cattolica Eraclea. The cream of the Sixth Family had been invited, including Vito, his father, Nick, and Agostino Cuntrera. Prison staff found that Ragusa had requested and received a pass for a temporary absence for that day. Suspicious officials questioned him about his plans for his leave before his departure. Ragusa said he had nothing special in mind; he was going to stay at home and relax. Police and prison security agents secretly monitored the wedding and noted Ragusa among the guests, trying to duck out of wedding photos. That night, while the wedding reception was in full swing, police stopped by Ragusa’s house and found it in darkness. No one answered their knock at the door. Ragusa later admitted that he had deliberately kept his son’s wedding from prison officials for fear of not being allowed to attend, as he had been refused two years earlier when he requested permission to attend the baptism.
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