Business or Blood (10 page)

Calautti's big weakness was gambling, and whatever he won, he quickly lost. Some of his bigger losses came online through Platinum SportsBook, a Canadian-run, multi-million-dollar sports betting enterprise that linked Vito's group, York Region mobsters, independent criminals and some London, Ontario, Hells Angels. Platinum SB had an offshore server in Costa Rica, but local thugs collected its debts. Often, it was other thugs who were running into debt problems. In fact, Calautti owed Platinum about $200,000. He dealt with it like his friend Modica would: Calautti told his creditors to go fuck themselves.

Calautti sat beneath Modica in the mob pecking order, meaning that Modica bore ultimate responsibility for the lesser's conduct and debts. It wasn't just that Calautti was taking Platinum SB's money; his refusal to pay up was making all the organizations involved in running it, and
Vito himself, look as if they couldn't handle him. If Calautti wasn't made to pay up, others could be expected to shrug off their debts too. A string of meetings followed, in which senior mobsters resembled harried schoolteachers trying to decide what to do with a particularly troublesome student. Gambinos from New York City came up to York Region for some of the meetings, including one on April 9, 2004, that drew some thirty men to the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Woodbridge. Modica arrived with two mobsters from New York and another from Ottawa. He proposed at the meeting that Calautti just pay the principal on the gambling debt and not the interest. But Calautti argued that he had already covered this and refused to pay anything more. Suspicions emerged in the room that Calautti was telling the truth, and that in fact Modica had taken Calautti's money and pumped it into a drug deal, screwing over both Calautti and his creditors.

The mob diplomats made every effort to reason with Modica, but in the end it was futile. Scarcella, who had been asked to loan out even more since the original $300,000, stepped away from the man he had once hosted and sponsored. Marrese's driver, Raffaele Delle Donne, later said he heard about what had gone on from attendees at the hotel summit: “Scarcella [was not] told the whole truth … and Mike Modica asked Scarcella to help him out … and at that point Scarcella is saying at the hotel that he washed his hands … basically that he wanted nothing to do with Mike Modica.” According to Delle Donne, “Uh, after the meeting was over, this is what … I didn't see it but I heard that uh, [Platinum official] Mark [Peretz] … and uh, his bodyguard [Paris Christoforou of the Hells Angels] I guess … kicked [Modica] in the face and put a … gun in his mouth.” Delle Donne said that Modica responded with threats of killing Scarcella, Peretz, Christoforou and others in their circle, with the ungodly phrase “clean house.”

Later that month, Modica was out looking for an evening snack and stopped in at a shop called California Sandwiches in north Toronto. With him were Michael Marrese and Sicilian bodyguards Andrea Fortunato Carbone and Pietro Scaduto. These guys were serious protection befitting a tense time. Carbone was eluding Italian charges for shooting a police officer in Sicily, while Scaduto was the son of a
murdered mob boss whose name still carried weight in Bagheria, nineteen kilometres outside Palermo.

A van cruised by the sandwich shop and three dozen bullets were fired inside. Modica, Carbone and Scaduto each drew nine-millimetre handguns but fled out the restaurant's back door without firing a shot in return. When the shooting stopped, Louise Russo, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, lay on the floor paralyzed.

Up to that point in Toronto, the Mafia had thrived in large measure because it didn't draw attention. Great pains had been taken to avoid blood on the streets, as this invariably brought headlines and pressure on police and authorities to crack down on crime groups. Far better to allow politicians to pretend the Mafia didn't exist.

At the time of the California Sandwiches shooting, the Ontario Hells Angels had also been making a massive effort to distance themselves from the bloody, warlike image of their Quebec brothers. They had even taken out a billboard overlooking Toronto's heavily travelled Don Valley Parkway, likening themselves to war veterans and guardians of liberty. All of that public relations work was ruined in a matter of seconds with a hail of thirty bullets.

Modica knew his would-be killers wouldn't stop at a single botched attempt. When strangers approached him near Queens Quay at the Toronto lakeshore, he dropped to the sidewalk and clutched his chest. When they told Modica that he was under arrest and not about to be murdered, his apparent heart problems abated and he got up on his feet.

On May 21, 2004, Modica was deported once again to Italy. Distance didn't cool his fury or his lust for revenge on Scarcella, his one-time sponsor. For all his own lying and cheating, Modica believed that he was the victim. Delle Donne later told police that he'd heard Modica wanted revenge on Scarcella, Peretz and Calautti. One plan was to kill Scarcella, an avid soccer fan, when he attended the Euro 2004 soccer championships in Portugal. It didn't jell, but there would be other chances. In Modica's world, a vendetta need not be rushed.

It came as no surprise that such spasms of underworld tension increased when Vito went behind bars. This situation called to mind comments made decades earlier by Palmina Puliafito, sister of mobster
brothers Vic (The Egg), Frank (The Big Guy) and Giuseppe (Pep) Cotroni, to journalist Joe Marrazzo on the May 4, 1980, edition of Italian national television's
Dossier
program. She spoke proudly of relative peace when Vic the Egg was on the streets. “When my brother was in jail, someone was shot here every day,” the Egg's sister said. “My brother was not here and they all felt they were the boss. When he's around, he always puts peace ahead.”

Her words had a prophetic ring midway through 2005, as Vito's world felt ready to explode. Mobsters from Granby, Quebec, a small city east of Montreal, felt ripped off by Vito's group after an $11-million marijuana-smuggling operation was derailed. At the centre of the hostilities was an enigmatic strip club operator named Sergio (Grizzly, Big Guy) Piccirilli. Once a gunsmith in the Canadian Forces, he had returned to Saint-Léonard to work as a driver and muscle in the Rizzuto group. There was a story that he had fallen afoul of some of Vito's people when he refused to kill a woman and a child over a drug debt, and that he then shifted over to the Granby mob. Grizzly Piccirilli was neither a biker nor a Mafioso, but he did have connections in both camps, including Salvatore Cazzetta and relatives of Paolo Violi in Hamilton.

Some of Piccirilli's influence came from his girlfriend. Her name was Sharon Simon, but the press loved to call her “the Queen of Kanesatake” or “Smuggling Queen-pin”—she'd been previously convicted for cannabis production and smuggling tobacco and cigars, among other things—and she was the focus of a massive police operation named, in her honour, Project Cleopatra. Simon lived in a luxury home/bunker with a three-car garage on Simon Street in the Kanesatake Mohawk community fifty kilometres west of Montreal. Neighbours sometimes heard popping sounds from her backyard, as the Queen-pin undertook target practice on tin cans with an AK-47 assault rifle.

In a male-dominated milieu, Simon's connections were formidable, including links to the Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières Hells Angels and former members of the Magog municipal police. In the world of marijuana trafficking, she was a bulk distributor, moving some forty-five kilograms of Quebec-grown marijuana to the United States per week, mostly by truck at crossings between Coaticook, in Quebec's Eastern
Townships, and Cornwall, Ontario. When Piccirilli told her he'd heard that Vito's group had a contract out on him, she grabbed him an AK-47 out of her car.

On February 4, 2005, Piccirilli drove to Hamilton, Ontario, where he met with relatives of the late Paolo Violi. By this time, Vito had been in custody for more than a year and it wasn't looking as if he would be back any time soon. Rumours circulated that Piccirilli now planned to kill Nicolò Rizzuto, even though the former soldier had shown nothing but respect for the aging Mafioso while in his employ. He scoped out the Consenza. He also secured the right guns for the job. Like the former military man he was, he watched rooftops in case a sniper was drawing a bead on him.

A last-ditch attempt at negotiations in August 2005 failed miserably, and the
milieu
appeared on the verge of open warfare. Arcadi may have been talking about Piccirilli when he said that a “biker” in Granby desired “to cut off his head.” The Arcadi forces went on the offensive in a dramatic way, renting a helicopter, flying to Granby and opening fire on the home of one of the Granby mob with machine gun. It didn't cause any real damage, but it did serve notice that Arcadi was prepared to bring war literally to the homes of his enemies.

Such was the chaos that Vito heard about while fighting extradition in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, often in long and intense talks with his sister, Maria. When his battle to remain in Canada was finally lost, and he was being driven on August 17, 2006, to the airport, Vito lost his composure. Did no one see that he was necessary for keeping things from going even more crazy? Vito began lecturing Montreal police officers Nicodemo Milano and Franc Guimond that he was the only one who could keep relative peace among the city's criminal organizations. “You should go after the street gangs,” Vito told them. “Not me. They are the ones who would create trouble.”

Vito must have known that Frank Arcadi didn't have the chops to lead his organization, but
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Frank seemed to be the best they could muster. “You will rue the day that I leave Canada,” Vito ranted to the police officers. “You will see what will happen when I leave Canada.”

Then Vito's voice softened. With his final words before boarding the government plane, he made an emotionally charged plea to the officers. “Spare my father,” he said. “He's an old man. He's a sick man. Spare my father. He's not doing anything wrong.”

I
t took less than two weeks for Vito's dark prophecy in the police car to start coming true. On August 30, 2006, Domenico Macri, the thirty-five-year-old rising soldier in the Rizzuto mob, was riding in his Cadillac through the intersection of Henri-Bourassa Boulevard and Rodolphe-Forget Boulevard at mid-afternoon when a Japanese motorcycle pulled up alongside carrying two men. Macri was a guiding force in a Rizzuto operation that used corrupt employees at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal to help with cocaine smuggling. Macri and his driver would scarcely have had time to notice as the motorcycle's passenger raised a gun and opened fire. When the bullets stopped and traffic flow resumed, Macri's driver was bleeding from his neck. He recovered, but Macri wasn't so lucky.

Macri's murder sent shivers through Vito's crime family. No one was more nervous than Arcadi, who was Macri's uncle. He had been driving just ahead of his nephew in a vehicle that looked almost identical to Macri's Cadillac. Arcadi had run the yellow light while Macri had stopped on the red. That was where the hit team drew alongside Macri and started shooting. It was wholly possible—even probable—that someone got the wrong man.

Not surprisingly, the murder was a huge topic of conversation at Bar Laennec, a coffee dive in a small strip mall on René-Laennec Boulevard
in Laval. Bar Laennec was the junior version of the Consenza, where the Rizzuto family underbosses gathered. Like the Consenza, it was bugged by police.

“Yeah, bro, they shot DM, man,” Skunk Giordano said.

Francesco Del Balso, who ran gambling for the family, was more expressive: “He's dead! He's dead! What happened? What are we going to do now?”

When the underbosses huddled to talk strategy in the Laennec the next day, Arcadi did his best to sound statesmanlike: “Here we are father, son and holy spirit. I agree that it's things that we have to reason out, things have to be measured, things have to be evaluated, but when it gets to a certain point and we are touched by some stupidities, the discussions have to be short.”

Forever the diplomat, Paolo Renda said they should spare no expense on his funeral, calling Macri “a very nice young man.” Then the
consigliere
suggested Arcadi go somewhere far away and safe: “See, what you gotta do now, find an island, take your wife and leave.”

Skunk Giordano quickly agreed: “Even your wife, come on, I feel bad,
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, all this shit.”

“Arrange,
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 …” Renda continued.

“I have to decide if I go or don't go,” replied Arcadi. “Maybe I go to Italy with my brothers.”

It didn't take much more convincing to point Arcadi out of town. Before fleeing, though, he attempted to give his fellow mobsters a little pep talk, sounding like an officer on the
Titanic
poised to leap onto a life raft. He also sounded like he knew who he was looking for. “Nobody is going to get rid of me, but … we are looking, we are looking for that pig, we are looking for him because he's a sea of problems. What do we do, us, what we do, us, when one of us has been killed? To tell you the truth, we do what we have to do.”

Not long after that,
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Frank embarked on a European cruise with his wife. When push came to shove, Vito's new street boss donned casual slacks and played tourist while others inside the crumbling empire braced for more violence.