The Sixth Family (60 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

BOOK: The Sixth Family
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“Panepinto took it upon himself to do these guys,” said a police officer involved in the investigation. “The people he killed belonged to other families. They probably approached Vito and said, ‘Why did you do that to our guys?’ Vito would say, ‘I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Handle it any way you wish. Do whatever you have to do to make amends.’” It was bad timing for Panepinto. If the traditional rules of the mob did not persuade Vito that he had to let Panepinto go, the efforts he was making to unify the mobsters in Ontario gave him a more pragmatic reason to step aside and not aggravate the influential Sidernese gangsters any further.
“Vito was trying to amalgamate the Italian families. Whatever it took, whatever had to be done to maintain the peace,” another officer said.
TORONTO, OCTOBER 3, 2000
Panepinto was only a few blocks from his home in an upscale west Toronto neighborhood when a van pulled up beside his burgundy Cadillac. From the van came a fusillade of gunfire. Panepinto suffered numerous bullet wounds and his car veered from the roadway and crashed to a stop, where his body was found slumped over the steering wheel by neighbors who had heard gunfire and screeching tires. In his car, police found blueprints for a nightclub in Barrie, a city north of Toronto, and a book about organized crime in Canada. Homicide detectives called it “a professional, organized hit” and immediately ran into a wall of silence from the victim’s friends and associates.
Mourners soon gathered at Panepinto’s house. Among the cars parked outside was a vehicle registered to Frank Campoli. If Toronto needed any reminder of the disparate underworld connections of Panepinto, it came seven days later at his funeral. The exhaust from 50 Harley-Davidson motorcycles rose from the street, as bikers, many of whom would soon trade in their own gang patches to become members of the Hells Angels, formed an honor guard for Panepinto’s hearse. Through the blue haze, police intelligence officers watched as Vito Rizzuto arrived at the church, walking in close quarters with five men who had traveled with him from Montreal, an entourage that included Paolo Renda, Francesco Arcadi and Rocco Sollecito—three of Vito’s top men.
“We expected some sort of turnout but this is beyond what we thought Panepinto rated,” an intelligence officer said. A biker at the funeral had little to say about the murder. “We’re here to show strength,” he said. “We’ll take him to rest and let things sort themselves out.” There seemed little to sort out. Panepinto’s blood erased the insult against the Siderno mobsters and the Sixth Family wrote off his loss as the cost of doing business in Ontario.
Such losses were mounting, however. In April 2001, RCMP Chief Superintendent Ben Soave, who headed the CFSEU, unveiled Project Oltre, a joint police operation targeting the Rizzutos’ large, new gambling network: 54 people were arrested in Toronto, Ottawa, Hamilton and Montreal, among them Joe Renda. Police said the ring took in $200 million in bets. Over 140 days, police could document $20 million placed on NFL, NHL, NBA and college sports games as well as horse racing. In keeping with Sixth Family tradition, dozens of low-level bookies pleaded guilty; large fines and asset forfeitures were accepted with little argument, including Joe Renda’s $50,000 Lincoln Navigator, in return for charges against the top players being dropped. Renda and some of his key associates in Toronto left court free men. With all of the attention and obvious police heat in Ontario, Renda moved back to Montreal.
To compensate for the setbacks, the Sixth Family sent a new hands-on representative to Toronto.
WOODBRIDGE, ONTARIO, OCTOBER 200
1
Juan Ramon Fernandez is a muscular man with a strong jaw, black hair and dark eyes. His Spanish features sometimes draw comparisons to Antonio Banderas, the movie actor, but his actions spoke more to the movie character Tony Montana, the murderous drug lord in Brian DePalma’s film
Scarface
. People who have watched Fernandez operate say he acts and talks like the tough, maniacal Cuban character depicted by Al Pacino. As a Spaniard, Fernandez would not have been an inducted member of the Sixth Family, but as a trusted operative with a proven criminal aptitude, he was accepted as a loyal associate.
Born on Boxing Day in 1956, Fernandez emigrated to Canada from Spain with his family when he was five and settled in Montreal. As he grew, he built a strong street persona, gaining a reputation for being efficient with his fists. It was a calling card that helped him earn a position that, traditionally, is considered a stepping stone to greater things in the underworld; he became a driver for a leading mobster, in his case, Frank Cotroni. Fernandez fit in perfectly; he was polite to his betters, loyal to his friends and unyielding to his enemies. In 1979, when he was 21, Fernandez demanded that his girlfriend, a 17-year-old stripper, have sex with one of his associates. When she refused, he struck out, punching her hard in the throat. She later died in hospital. Fernandez was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison. His prison file shows numerous complaints against him, including threatening other inmates. Ever the entrepreneur, Fernandez was a prominent drug dealer within the prison walls and sent associates around the prison to collect drug debts from fellow prisoners. He forced a prisoner to smuggle hashish into prison when he returned from an outside visit. Prison staff did not feel much safer; one female guard complained that Fernandez told her he knew her home address, and he told another employee: “You don’t know what I’m capable of.” A rumor persists that he also successfully seduced a smitten female prison guard inside his cell.
His ability to impose his will over a tough prison brought him to the attention of the Sixth Family. When released from prison, Fernandez was ordered deported by Canadian authorities, but he managed to fight the order for 12 years. By January 1990, he was selling Jaguar automobiles and working at a nightclub under the Sixth Family’s supervision. Eighteen months later, he was arrested again when police found him with $32,000 in cash and three kilograms of cocaine. He pleaded guilty to drug charges and was sentenced to 42 months in prison. While serving this sentence he was married in the prison chapel; he invited Vito and Sixth Family drug trafficker Raynald Desjardins to attend. Vito was denied admittance by prison officials. In 1999, Fernandez’s options in Canada expired and he was finally removed. Canadian authorities assumed they had seen the last of him, but not long after, he was found in a café in Woodbridge, Ontario, and deported a second time. He did not travel as far as authorities hoped. Fernandez moved to Florida, where he stayed at a Miami condominium that was linked to his then-lawyer, Carmine Iacono, before returning north on a false Canadian passport. By the summer of 2001, he had established himself on the streets around Toronto as an imposing figure named Joe Bravo.
“Bravo was closer to Vito than Panepinto,” an investigator said. “He was doing things for him directly. He was sent out to collect and to make sure that Vito gets his end. He was the eyes and ears for Vito and he reported back to him. He’d tell Vito: ‘These guys are doing good; these guys are doing nothing.’ And Vito would say: ‘It’d be nice if these guys gave us a piece of it,’ and then Bravo would go back and try to collect it for Vito. Bravo was doing Vito’s work directly. He didn’t really have any businesses here of his own. Plus, he was to keep peace with the bikers.” Bravo was often seen walking at Vito’s side, shorter than the boss but broader at the shoulders and thicker in the arms, and was often respectfully one step behind. As with other initiatives, this move by the Sixth Family in Ontario was set to stumble.
Now that the Quebec biker war was curtailed, police in Montreal were starting to turn their attention to the Sixth Family. A civilian agent, a former drug courier, had agreed to work with authorities in return for money and a judicial break. He was mingling with people associated with the Sixth Family. Using the informant as their linchpin, Montreal police and the RCMP launched a joint investigation, code-named Project Calamus. The prime target was Vito, with secondary objectives set at any high-level operative associated with the Sixth Family. There were plenty of leads to chase.
When the former drug courier told police that he met in Montreal with an alleged Colombian drug supplier named Abraham Nasser in 2001, the project took on another focus. Also at the meeting, the informant said, was José Guede, an old friend of the informant’s from a Spanish social club who was also a criminal defense lawyer working in the law firm of Loris Cavaliere, who was one of Vito’s lawyers. The law firm was of interest to police because it also employed two of Vito’s children, his younger son, Leonardo, and his only daughter, Bettina, who are both lawyers. Guede socialized on occasion with Vito, playing high-stakes poker games with him and others. Nasser, the Colombian contact, gave the informant his business card, which he signed on the back, and told him if he came to Bogotá to present the card at any of his restaurants and he could arrange to buy cocaine. The informant told police that when he mentioned this to Guede, the lawyer said to bring back as much as he wanted and he could move it through his contacts. The drugs, the informant said in court, were destined for Antonio Pietrantonio, a Montreal man with a previous drug conviction who earned his nickname “Tony Suzuki” because of his proprietorship of a large car dealership. Police have repeatedly documented Pietrantonio socializing with members of the Sixth Family and meeting with Vito, but he was not charged with any involvement in the informant’s drug scheme. This all came out in court after Guede was charged by police with conspiracy to import cocaine. A Quebec judge later ordered a stay of proceedings in the charges against Guede when it was found that an RCMP officer lied during his testimony in an attempt to bolster the credibility of the undercover informant. The informant also met with Fernandez, who was starting to shift his attention to Ontario but was still involved in affairs in Montreal. The two spoke of how best to smuggle the cocaine the informant was planning to bring from Colombia. They discussed registering an import company in Montreal and another in Venezuela to help mask the anticipated cocaine shipments.
“If the first container arrives, sure, the Customs guy will check,” the informant said. “But if the containers go through all the time, after a couple of months they’ll still check, but not as much. If we imported fruit 10 times, on the 11th time you put in coke and the chances of them checking would be much less.” The informant, Fernandez and others quibbled over what kind of companies to start and were thinking of textile firms, but when arrangements were ready, the informant called Fernandez.
“Okay, man, good news. Our friend says it’s a fruit store,” he told Fernandez. “Yeah, he has mangos to sell and everything.”
“Beautiful,” Fernandez replied. As Fernandez started spending more time in Toronto than he did in Montreal, the informant headed east with him, with his police handlers keeping watch.
In York Region, a suburban area north of Toronto that includes the town of Woodbridge, where several mobsters live hidden amongst the large population of honest Italians, police officers had been busy probing changes in the underworld that came with the Sixth Family’s re-invigorated presence. They had noticed the increasing swagger of Gaetano Panepinto and had started setting up a probe of him and his associates when the casket salesman was murdered. This gave York police the code name for their case, Project R.I.P., for “rest in peace,” a phrase usually reserved for tombstones. Officers running Project R.I.P looked into Panepinto’s old crew—and found Fernandez running the show—at about the same time that officers with Project Calamus were following Fernandez west from Montreal and finding him in Woodbridge. A joint police effort was launched, with Vito and his son Nick the prime targets of one of many strands of investigation that were emerging, according to police.

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