The Sixth Family (59 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
“Vito was making his way here much more often. It was on a weekly basis to show his face and make his presence known. He was here in person to show people that maybe it was finally time for him to take control, that it was time to do things his way,” said another top anti-Mafia investigator. “He wanted to unite all of the Italian groups, just as the bikers united in Ontario. Vito was doing the same thing with the Italians. The bikers came together under the Hells Angels, and the Italians fell in under Vito.”
Vito was hard to miss in Toronto, as he was always with at least two other men, apparently bodyguards, a contrast to his routine in Montreal, where he typically traveled alone, and drove his own car.
“He walks with authority. He looks very distinguished. He dresses very businesslike. Most of the time I’ve seen him he is wearing a suit and tie,” said a police officer who worked surveillance shifts monitoring Vito’s visits to Ontario. “Not only does he play the part, he looks the part.”
Toronto’s gangsters were largely recognizing his authority, if not exactly his control; but his position in Ontario was hardly comparable to the hegemony he maintained in Quebec.
“Although Vito is the one who happens to be in charge, in Toronto, he really doesn’t seem to have a hold on his people in the same way as in Montreal,” said an organized crime investigator. “There are people who are affiliated with him, people who are related to him, people who are running things on his behalf or in his name or using his name. As long as they have his blessing and he basically knows what they are doing and he gets his cut from it, he is happy enough with the situation. He would come in once in a while to check on his friends and to check on his family. That’s all he has to do, show up. He has the standing, the name recognition.” Officers monitoring wiretaps that were running on some of the Sixth Family’s people in Ontario said the reporting structure was kept loose.
“Although he is part of his family, there was no weekly reporting or monthly reporting. Not even really a quarterly report,” said an officer, speaking about Peter Scarcella, a leading Sixth Family ally in Toronto.
“He would visit him—Vito is godfather to his daughter—but the conversations with his associates show the way the family works here in Toronto is a lot different from how it works in Montreal. There is still a lot of respect within the families in Montreal. They still have that respect, they still follow the hierarchy, they still tell the boss what they’re up to, and it is understood that when or if anything does happen the people at the top will get their cut. They don’t have to ask for it. In Toronto, it is not so smooth. There is not such respect within their families.”
Vito appears not to have wanted to clamp down too tightly, perhaps as an opening strategy to gain further acceptance as a force to be embraced rather than resented or repelled.
“The purse strings have opened up,” said one Mafia-linked career criminal of the new business model in Ontario. “There is now more money to go around. John [Papalia] kept things pretty tight.”
In order to bring about some discipline, however, Vito started to directly place more of his own men in Ontario, with two setting up in Hamilton and others in Toronto and its suburbs.
Giuseppe “Joe” Renda, a nephew of Gerlando Sciascia, was sent from Montreal to Toronto to work with Gaetano Panepinto, Frank Campoli and others to solidify the Sixth Family’s hold.
Taking advantage of the new opportunities and manpower in Ontario, the Rizzuto organization established a sports betting enterprise that used Internet hook-ups and BlackBerries to register hundreds of millions of dollars in bets placed at video stores, gas stations and other small retail outlets in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton. They found a willing and hungry clientele; one man placed a $100,000 bet on a single football game. It quickly became one of the largest betting rings in Canada.
The moves put Vito at the top of his game. His reach was unchallenged. His territory was staggerly large, not only in geographic size but in its population and economic might. Toronto and its surrounding suburbs offered almost 5 million people and Montreal another 3½ million. Vito also had outposts of friends and colleagues in other Canadian cities as well, particularly in Vancouver. The Sixth Family, noted a recent RCMP report, had “taken over the criminal underworld with the help of their associates across the country.”
With Ontario falling under the Sixth Family’s shadow, an alarm was sounded by intelligence officers working with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), a joint police unit of several police agencies under the leadership of the RCMP. Staffed by some of Canada’s foremost anti-Mafia investigators, the CFSEU was analyzing intelligence reports, tidbits of mob gossip from investigators and street snitches and slowly saw the pieces falling into place.
The Sixth Family, a secret intelligence report noted, was dominating “not only the province of Quebec but the province of Ontario as well, making this organization one of the most influential and powerful traditional organized crime groups in North America.”
That kind of alarm is difficult to ignore.
“Unfortunately for Vito,” said a police investigator, “it started to fall apart.”
CHAPTER 35
TORONTO, JULY 15, 1998The first clear sign that Ontario was not the same sort of place as Montreal for the Sixth Family and its friends came on July 15, 1998, before Vito Rizzuto and his kin had even fully brought the province into their confederacy. The message was a harsh one: police cruisers closed down a quiet suburban street in Woodbridge, just north of Toronto, at 7:05 a.m., letting nothing but police vehicles through. A police convoy then snaked past the large detached homes and well-manicured lawns. Two minutes later, an RCMP officer rang the doorbell at 38 Goldpark Court. Inside, officers arrested Alfonso Caruana, the boss of the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, which, for four decades, had been a firm ally and friend of the Rizzutos’. Also arrested that day were Alfonso’s two brothers, Gerlando in Montreal and Pasquale in Toronto, and other members of their drug network. In Cancun, the clan’s key drug facilitator, Oreste Pagano, was nabbed by Mexican police and flown to Canada.
The case would unfold as the most successful investigation into the Sicilian Mafia in Canada, but it began humbly, with a comment caught on a wiretapped telephone in 1995, made by Enio Mora, a long-time gangster in Toronto. Mora, who was nicknamed “Pegleg” because he had lost part of one leg in a shootout, was heard discussing an upcoming wedding. Toronto police intelligence officers Bill Sciammarella and Tony Saldutto discovered the date, time and location of the wedding and the detectives and other officers with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU) watched guests arrive for the celebration at Toronto’s Sutton Place Hotel. The Sixth Family was well represented: Vito himself came, wearing a gray suit jacket; Rocco Sollecito, Francesco Arcadi and Frank Campoli were also there. Between the April 1995 wedding and the 1998 arrests of the Caruana brothers and associates, Canadian police ran Project Omertà, spending an estimated $8.8 million to capture the mobsters.
Concern among the Sixth Family at the news of the arrests was palpable; there had been a high degree of interaction between Alfonso Caruana and Vito and other family members and associates. Extensive records filed in court as part of Project Omertà revealed calls to pizzerias tied to drug traffickers involved with the Rizzutos, cafés that doubled as meeting places for the Sixth Family, lawyers linked to the family and car dealerships suspected of shipping cocaine into Ontario stashed in vehicles. In one call, Nick Rizzuto was heard talking to one of the Caruana brothers, telling him to bring two traffickers to a meeting. In another, police heard drug traffickers talking about “the old man.” According to a police summary of the conversation: “The ‘old man’ was identified through surveillance as Nicolò Rizzuto … [the traffickers say] not to speak to him because he talks too much and to go and speak to his son, believed to be Vito Rizzuto.” Surveillance teams following Project Omertà suspects from Toronto to Montreal took several photographs of Nick attending meetings. In all, more than a dozen members of the Sixth Family were observed interacting with the Project Omertà targets. Some were sent into the United States to transfer money or drugs—although no leading figures, including Caruana, Nick and Vito, felt comfortable crossing the border into America.
The obvious relationship between the Rizzutos and the Caruanas, coupled with their longstanding alliance, prompted one of Canada’s leading organized crime investigators to suggest they were two parts of the same operation. “I’ve long wondered how separate they really are,” he said, illustrating his point by weaving the fingers on both of his hands together.
Although Project Omertà uncovered extensive interplay between the Sixth Family and the Caruana drug network, and despite the overt accusations made against Vito by Oreste Pagano to police, once again no charges were laid.
TORONTO, SUMMER 2000Problems for the Sixth Family in Ontario did not stem only from aggressive law enforcement. The century-old traditions of the Mafia also conspired to damage its new assets, namely Gaetano Panepinto, its hulking enforcer who was moving cocaine and discount coffins in Toronto. Panepinto was pleased with his lot in life as Vito expanded his presence and power in Toronto. As an early adopter of the Rizzuto brand, he was using his association to its full extent and the aggrandizing feeling of power it endowed seemed to cause him to forget that he was not truly a member of its inner circle. In the underworld, such oversight is often tragic.
Like any active gangster, Panepinto disliked competition, which is why he was incensed when two newly arrived Calabrian mafiosi started to cut into his action. The two men were ’Ndranghetisti who had fled police in their hometown of Siderno, on southern Italy’s Ionian coast. Toronto was a good place for such men to hide, as a significant number of mafiosi from Siderno had, for generations, settled in and around the city, establishing what an Italian judge recently called the most important “colony” of the Sidernese ’Ndrangheta. When these two fugitives, who were believed to be cousins, left Italy, Toronto ’Ndrangheta leaders were told to expect them. The fugitives were welcomed, given permission to work in the city and, in accordance with their underworld code, came under the protection of the Toronto colony.
These two fugitives immediately looked around for ways to make money and found it by placing illegal slot machines. It was of little concern to them that their fledgling gambling business was in direct competition with a similar enterprise run by Panepinto. Vito’s man immediately complained that the Calabrian newcomers were squeezing him. As a major earner, supporter and contributor to the Sixth Family’s cause, Panepinto felt he could deal directly with the Sidernese.
“Remember, Guy was never made. He acted made—he had guys around him, a crew of his own just like a made guy, but he never won the jackpot,” a well-connected Toronto criminal said. Another man, who managed a gym Panepinto had a financial interest in, said Panepinto raised his complaints at a “sit-down” with a powerful organized crime figure north of Toronto.
“They told him there was nothing they could do,” the manager said. “They’d try to see that he got an end [a portion of the profits], but he basically could kiss his machines goodbye. The Siderno guys were the real thing and Panepinto wasn’t; he wasn’t made. In spite of everything, he was a link between the Rizzutos who brought in the drugs and the bikers and guys who distributed them. He might have got made eventually, but who knows? I’m told he went to Montreal; he went to Vancouver to discuss the situation with some bikers out there, maybe to get some muscle to bring east. But he got nothing. Montreal didn’t care about his machines or his grabs [truck hijackings]; they just wanted to move their drugs through him.”
The Sidernese likely tolerated Panepinto’s audacity in bringing the matter directly to them, despite his inferior underworld standing, because of his link to the Sixth Family, but that could carry him only so far.
Frustrated in his failed efforts at repelling the fugitives, Panepinto took a chance. He lured the two men to the basement of his St. Clair Avenue West casket business, where, with at least one other shooter, he gunned them down, police believe. The bodies were removed and have never been found. A fire was deliberately set to destroy evidence of the slayings. Panepinto then went about his business.
It did not take long for the lack of contact from the Sidernese fugitives to cause alarm among the ’Ndrangheta families, who then investigated the disappearances. The signs quickly pointed to Panepinto. The Sixth Family leadership was apprised of their concerns, according to police investigators. It was a serious problem because, within the Mafia, a made man is accorded protection under an underworld code that is surprisingly uniform on this point.
“When you join, it’s like getting a license,” a Toronto gangster said. “You get opportunities, you get protection and you get support. You get organization. No one can come and earn where you earn. You won’t find a card game opening on the same street; you won’t have a free-for-all when you’re moving dope, guys undercutting you. Whether it’s the Calabrese, the Sicilians, the American Mafia, you join so you can earn and you can earn safely. When you’re made, you’re like a god.” It is what puts the organization in organized crime.
One of the Mafia’s most important rules is that made men cannot be killed without permission from higher-ups. It was a rule that caused much grief for the Sixth Family when it wanted to push Paolo Violi aside in the 1970s. For a non-made man, no matter how powerful or productive, to murder an initiated member of a family is a transgression that cuts through finance, connections and underworld stature. Panepinto felt his financial contributions made him immune from this basic foundation of the Mafia. For a terrified, fleeting moment, he might have realized how wrong he was. Also conspiring against Panepinto were the ingrained traditions of the men he had insulted. The ’Ndrangheta operates under a code of conduct that is rigid and unforgiving. This mindset embraces honor, manliness, personal power and the
faida
, “the vendetta.”
Faida
is an important part of ’Ndrangheta culture. It was inconceivable to the Sidernese that this slight could be left unanswered.
faida
, “the vendetta.”
Faida
is an important part of ’Ndrangheta culture. It was inconceivable to the Sidernese that this slight could be left unanswered.
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