The Sixth Family (48 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
Luca Giammarella can be excused for having to write down the names and addresses of the banks in Lugano in which he nominally held title to huge amounts of cash, for there is little evidence to suggest he had much to do with them between the time he opened them in late May 1988 and the time he apparently came with Libertina Rizzuto to drain them, six years later.
On May 24, 1988, Giammarella visited the Banque Populaire Suisse, a financial institution that holds art exhibitions as part of its cultural contribution to the city, and opened the “MICA” account, the first of what would be three Swiss bank accounts in his name later traced by authorities. That same day he visited the Banca di Roma, a Lugano branch of a Rome-based commercial bank, to open a second, the “ASPARAGINA” account. The next day, he was off to the Credit Suisse to open the third account, the one he was trying to get into in 1994 when arrested. All told, into these three accounts over those two days, he had deposited 4,646,100 Swiss francs, according to Swiss authorities. That was worth about US$3 million at the time.
Giammarella was not alone in Lugano on that visit, and if he was inexperienced in setting up Swiss accounts, there was another Rizzuto associate in the city who had plenty of experience in such matters. According to the registration of a Customs notice at the Chiasso border station on the Italian-Swiss frontier, where the busy rail lines stretching from Lugano to Milan are monitored, Beniamino Zappia also crossed into Switzerland on May 24. Swiss financial records show that Zappia was also conducting banking business in Lugano on the same day Giammarella was opening his accounts. Zappia personally made a withdrawal from an account at the Banca Privata Rothschild in Lugano—account No. 603.154, assigned the code name “SEBUCAN”—in which he shared signing authority with Paolo Renda, Vito’s brother-in-law. The Zappia/Renda “SEBUCAN” account had been bloated, just two months before, by a series of five consecutively numbered high-value checks, each drawn from the same Montreal bank.
That Zappia and Giammarella both found themselves in Lugano at the same time was no more a coincidence than Giammarella and Libertina’s simultaneous visits years later, authorities believe. Zappia was playing a key role in moving the Rizzutos’ riches.
What Swiss police believed Zappia and Giammarella were up to that May was the transferring of funds from the second phase of the Rizzutos’ complicated banking cycle, into the third phase.
The first phase of the money’s run in Switzerland had typically seen members of the Rizzuto family directly opening accounts in their own names with multiple family members having signing authority over them. There were four accounts, for instance, each in a different Lugano bank, opened between October 30, 1980, and August 25, 1981, in the name of Libertina Rizzuto, or jointly in the name of Libertina and Nick. On all four accounts, most of the immediate family had signing authority, granting each of them access to the cash. Two of the accounts granted signing authority to both Nick’s son and daughter—Vito Rizzuto and Maria Renda—as well as their respective spouses, Giovanna Cammalleri and Paolo Renda. Two other accounts dropped Paolo Renda from the list. During this phase, Joe LoPresti also opened a Swiss account, with signing authority granted to LoPresti’s wife, Rosa, and to Libertina Rizzuto. Another account was listed strictly in Beniamino Zappia’s name—the “PRETORIA” account—from which more than US$55,000 was transferred to LoPresti’s “BOUCHERVILLE” account.
This first phase of the money’s run ended when most of these accounts were closed, one by one, in May, June and July of 1985. Only one of the joint Rizzuto accounts, No. O-5722.089, given the code name “MARACAI” at the Société de Banque Suisse, to which all of the immediate family members had authorized access, remained open with a modest balance. It was, in fact, the smallest of the accounts when authorities froze the Cdn$109,000 and US$820 found in it.
By the summer of 1985, the Rizzutos were moving their cash holdings away from accounts listed in their own names, signaling the start of phase two of the money shuffle, according to the Swiss.
These accounts were entrusted to extended family members—and to Beniamino Zappia, whom police found had spent his youth in Cattolica Eraclea, the Rizzuto clan’s hometown in Sicily.
The account listed in one family member’s name was still open at the time of the 1994 investigation and authorities froze the balance of approximately 2 million Swiss francs.
Three other phase-two accounts, each opened at a different Lugano bank, were in the name of Beniamino Zappia. One of them retained Nick Rizzuto as an authorized signing officer; another, Paolo Renda; and on a third, a Giorgio Bissi was listed, the Swiss authorities say. These accounts were kept flush with transfers from the Fédération des Caisses Populaires Desjardins, a financial institution in Montreal that maintains two branches a few blocks apart on either side of the Club Social Consenza, the Rizzutos’ Montreal headquarters. Between December 11, 1986, and March 29, 1988, more than 5,412,000 Swiss francs, US$1,306,715 and Cdn$500,000 flowed from the Montreal Caisses Populaires into these three accounts.
The money’s third phase was launched when Giammarella went in May 1988 to open his accounts, according to the Swiss. Authorities believed that Zappia was secretly arranging things behind the scenes in Switzerland on behalf of the Rizzutos. The Swiss prosecutor’s office noted that the total number of Swiss francs sent to Zappia’s accounts from Montreal was just slightly more than the amount Giammarella deposited when opening the three accounts—4,646,100 Swiss francs.
“It is suspected that the funds deposited by Giammarella come from the transfers in Switzerland into the bank accounts of Beniamino Zappia, from [the] Canadian bank,” a Swiss police report says.
The substantial balance in two of Giammarella’s accounts was then slowly siphoned off through repeated transfers into accounts connected to Joe Lagana, the Montreal lawyer who was handling the Rizzuto organization’s drug money in Canada. On December 23, 1992, Cdn$500,000 was moved into account No. 001124870, code named “PINO” at the Banque Cantrade in Lausanne, Switzerland, which was in Lagana’s name. The following year, on November 29, 1993, 500,000 Swiss francs were transferred to the same account. On April 28, 1994, another 600,000 Swiss francs were sent to a Banque Cantrade business account in the name of Biolight S.A., a firm that belonged to Lagana. Similarly, on February 20, 1992, 500,000 Swiss francs were moved from the Credit Suisse to an account at the Banca Commerciale Italiana in Geneva. The holder of this account was Shield Enterprises, S.A., a company the Swiss said “seemingly belonged” to Lagana.
“It is important to emphasize the transfers from Giammarella’s accounts to Giuseppe [Joe] Lagana’s accounts, for a total of approximately 2,500,000 Swiss francs,” a report by the Swiss prosecutor’s office says. “According to the arguments presented by Mrs. Rizzuto’s legal counsel, Lagana would have immediately returned most of this amount to the Rizzutos. They have, therefore, admitted to a business relationship between the Rizzutos and Lagana.” With Lagana now a charged and soon-to-be-convicted launderer of drug money in Canada, that was a precarious relationship to have.
When Libertina and Giammarella were stopped at the Credit Suisse, apparently trying to drain the account, Swiss police believe it was another move in the Sixth Family’s money dance.
“It seems clear that at the moment of their arrest, Mrs. Libertina Rizzuto intended to open a fourth phase, after the closing of the Giammarella accounts,” the Swiss authorities concluded.
Switzerland and its neighbor to the east, the tiny principality of Liechtenstein, were awash in Sixth Family money. Switzerland was the early global leader in the secret money field, having offered financial services to European aristocrats for centuries. Bank secrecy was a Swiss law in the 1930s, making it an offense to disclose any information about an account, even to the government. The two nations, which have a Customs and monetary union, expanded their international reputation as havens for cash and other assets during the Second World War when both remained neutral. Postwar, they built on that trade by offering easy business incorporation, low taxes and limited banking regulatory oversight. It spawned outstanding growth in the financial sector, but brought condemnation from the international community for facilitating massive laundering of criminal proceeds. The crackdown in Switzerland that had been urged on by Carla Del Ponte was later matched in Liechtenstein, which implemented new anti-money-laundering legislation and, more recently, concluded a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States. The changes mean that those who wish to hide vast capital must be more imaginative and engage in far greater subterfuge—or avoid the Old World financial centers altogether, seeking out fringe nations who seek to replicate the unlikely economic prosperity of Liechtenstein, which has wealth beyond anything that could be expected from a doubly landlocked nation of just 62 square miles with little in the way of natural resources.
From the 1970s through to the late 1990s, however, the two European states were Sixth Family favorites. Alfonso Caruana had been stopped by Swiss Customs officials in November 1978 and fined for a currency violation relating to the US$600,000 he was carrying. The Caruana-Cuntreras, who were establishing a heroin and cocaine pipeline in Europe, based largely in Germany and England, were also building a money pipeline to Switzerland and Liechtenstein as a corollary enterprise to handle the profits. The arrangements were frequently handled by Giuseppe Cuffaro, the mafioso who emigrated to Montreal just before the Rizzutos and forged an early alliance between their clans.
Like their friends, the Rizzutos, the Caruana-Cuntrera clan used extended family members, hastily arranged businesses and corporate accounts to shuffle their money between North America, Europe and South America. In 1996, as Alfonso Caruana was being investigated by police in several countries, he continued to use an effective combination of Canadian-based companies and U.S.-based banks to get his drug money where he needed it.
“Information recently has surfaced which indicates that several millions of dollars originating from cocaine trafficking which [Alfonso] Caruana is a part of, has been forwarded to the City Bank of New York,” says a secured diplomatic transmission, sent in April 1996 from the RCMP’s liaison officer at Canada’s embassy in Rome, to police in Toronto, who were probing Caruana’s activities. The New York account was in the name of Bedford House International Ltd., with an address in Etobicoke, a district in the west end of Toronto. Similarly, money transfers linked to Caruana’s cocaine sales in Italy were tracked by Italian and Dutch authorities through a Holland-based company called Marshall Compton, S.A., to an account at the Schweizerische Bankverein in Zurich, held by Experta Trustee Comp. Ltd., according to another diplomatic note from that year. A Swiss investigation showed Experta Trustee to be a firm operating a Zurich bank account on behalf of other companies, including Hifalia Inc., formed in Montreal.
The Swiss were keenly aware of the possible implications of the types of suspicious financial activities they found occurring under the Rizzuto name: the large cash transactions; the seemingly dubious explanations of the funds’ origins; the involvement of known drug traffickers such as Joe LoPresti and Christian Deschênes; the involvement of accused money launderers such as Joe Lagana; connections between the primary account holders and confirmed drug seizures; the allegations in several countries of the Mafia interests and drug-trafficking role of the Rizzutos; their close association with the Caruana-Cuntrera and the Mafia clans investigated in the Pizza Connection case. There was an inescapable suspicion for Swiss authorities that the bank balances they were tracking represented the proceeds of crime, likely from international drug trafficking. And now they had a principal holder of the original phase-one accounts—Libertina Rizzuto—in their custody. They were as intent on seizing the Rizzuto assets as the Montreal officers running the currency exchange had been on laying charges against Libertina’s son.
“According to the information provided by the Italian authorities to Mrs. Del Ponte, Guiseppe (Joe) LoPresti was connected to organized crime in the United States and in Canada, notably in regards to individuals such as Nick Rizzuto, husband of Libertina Rizzuto, and Gerlando Sciascia, all of which come from Cattolica Eraclea in Sicily,” notes a Swiss government report on the Rizzuto financial dealings. “It is also obvious that the owners of these funds did everything possible to prevent being discovered (accounts in the names of third parties, periodic changes of account) and to cover the trace of the money (deposits and withdrawals in cash),” the report says.
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