Business or Blood (22 page)

It was unthinkable, but it was happening right in front of the intelligence officers. What police witnessed was bonding between the Ontario Sicilians and the 'Ndrangheta, less than seven months after the murders of Agostino Cuntrera and his bodyguard in Montreal, and two months after the murder of Nicolò. It had been widely assumed that the Sicilian and Calabrians mobsters were at war in Montreal, but that was clearly not the case in Toronto.

There had never been impenetrable divisions between the 'Ndrangheta and the Sicilian Mafia, nor its American cousin, La Cosa Nostra, especially when the Cuntrera–Caruana family was involved. The flow of money has a way of washing away even the most rigid barriers. Criminals who weren't touched personally by vendettas remained open for a deal. Business was business when blood didn't cry out for revenge.

If the men at the anniversary party could form a working relationship with the Desjardins–Mirarchi group, they would have a death grip on the Port of Montreal. In a new power alliance between them, the Coluccio–Aquino Calabrian 'Ndrangheta faction and the Caruana–Cuntrera Sicilian Mafia group, Vito would be the odd man out.

J
oe Di Maulo was an easy guy to like, which explained why he and Vito had often golfed together and shared tables at downtown nightclubs. Smiling Joe had a quick sense of humour, liked to banter and carried himself with natural confidence. His roots ran deep, to the old Cotroni crime family, who predated the Rizzuto group in Montreal. When strangers approached—like the summer day in 1993 when a
Toronto Star
reporter arrived unannounced at his café—he was apt to be more amused than perturbed. That day, at his business in the Métropolitain Est–Viau Sud area of Saint-Léonard, kitty-corner to his nightclub, he smiled broadly and kept his bodyguards at bay. Di Maulo looked cool and casual in an understated silk Hawaiian shirt, even as he checked the scribe's wallet for hidden recording devices. The journalist began asking questions about the Mafia's interests in casino gambling, which wasn't totally speculative since Di Maulo and his older brother Vincenzo (Jimmy) both had extensive interests in the gambling machine industry.

It was doubtful anyone knew more about what was going on in the
milieu
than Smiling Joe, whose roots ran deep and also wide. The Di Maulos and the Cotronis had been neighbours on downtown Saint-Timothée Street long before gentrification (or lawns) arrived in the neighbourhood. In a moderately upward move, the families departed
together for Rosemont. Joe Di Maulo rose high enough in the old Cotroni organization that he was chosen to travel with Paolo Violi in November 1973 to a New York City Bonanno family meeting for a leadership vote. That New York meeting came a year after Nicolò had fled to Venezuela, to escape Violi's gunmen.

Also in the early 1970s, Joe's older brother Vincenzo (Jimmy) began a life term for murder while Joe was acquitted of a triple murder in his Casa Loma nightclub on Sainte-Catherine Street downtown. Joe's conviction was overturned when a key witness dramatically changed her testimony in a related trial. Whatever the truth of the three killings, they certainly added to Joe Di Maulo's aura, although he remained an affable, chatty man, cultivating friendships with lawyers, politicians, businessmen, judges, artists—as well as Sicilian and Calabrian mobsters, the thugs of the Québécois Dubois family and assorted others in the underworld, including Lebanese drug smugglers. This combination of knowledge, contacts and charm put him in a prime position to mediate disputes as well as reap profits.

Sitting in his Montreal café, Di Maulo glibly announced to the visiting Toronto reporter that the best way to keep any new casinos clean was to let the Mafia run them. “That would be the best thing,” Di Maulo said with a broad smile. A robust young man who looked like a slightly spruced-up biker, with a sweeping moustache, a black T-shirt and a pager, smiled too, as if on cue. “There would be no prostitutes, no pickpockets,” Di Maulo continued, like a nightclub comedian. He laughed heartily at his own joke and the notion of being put in charge of keeping crime out of casinos. The husky young man in the black T-shirt laughed some more too.

A few minutes later, Di Maulo frowned deeply when reminded of recent clouds of controversy over the casino gambling industry in general and himself in particular. His sidekick picked up on the shift in mood and glowered. A month before, Richard McGinnis, head of the Montreal police organized crime squad, had warned the Quebec National Assembly about the dangers of mobsters in the video poker business and cautioned that casino gambling could only heighten the criminals' wealth. McGinnis claimed video poker machines were
already the second-highest money-maker for the Montreal mob, behind only the drug trade.

Di Maulo barked out, “Bullshit!” to the reporter, dismissing reports he had approached the Quebec government about getting involved in incoming casinos. Despite the harsh language, he still appeared entertained as the line of questioning continued, as though he were untouchable. When he talked about negative reports linking his name to illicit gambling, he had the dismissive air of a much-maligned celebrity. In fact, he was proud of helping out some of the province's entertainers in the early stages of their careers, providing a nightclub stage on which they could cut their teeth. He was a patron of the arts, of sorts. He was also extremely proud of the fact that he had never been linked to drug trafficking. “It's strictly propaganda,” Di Maulo said to the reporter. “They're using our name to get publicity.” He declined to say who “they” were or why “they” wanted publicity. He smiled and added, presumably suggesting a law-enforcement tendency towards corruption, “Ninety percent of the machines are owned by police.”

During the chat in his café, Di Maulo appeared to be the very essence of self-control and good spirits. Between conversations in French on his ever-present cellphone (one is even visible in his daughter Mylena's wedding pictures), he dismissed further questions about connections between organized crime and casino gambling. Then he muttered something about ten million dollars. Pressed to expand, he frowned and declined. As serious questions subsided, he ridiculed the idea that Ontario planned non-smoking casinos. “Why don't they turn the country into churches?” he laughed. The husky man in the black T-shirt chortled also.

There were few serious challengers to the Rizzutos as the crime family cruised through the early 1990s. It was easy for everyone to exude goodwill when they were all pulling in good money, so long as they could stay out of prison. His casual air at his café notwithstanding, Joe Di Maulo was an active man at the time. He was part of a Mafia group that tried in 1993 to get a $450-million commission to help liquidate three billion dollars' worth of gold stashed in banks in Hong Kong and Zurich that had been stolen by former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his men.

Smiling Joe was charged in August 1995 with offering an RCMP officer $100,000 to destroy evidence against his older brother Vincenzo, after Vincenzo was charged in one of the largest money-laundering sting operations ever conducted in Canada. Also charged in that case was Vito's childhood friend from the old Villeray district, Valentino Morielli. The case against Joe Di Maulo was eventually dropped, although Morielli went to prison for a related drug charge and Vincenzo wouldn't see parole until the new century.

Smiling Joe Di Maulo was embedded in the underworld by marriage as well as his own criminal activity. His wife was Raynald Desjardins's sister and his daughter married Francesco Cotroni, the son of Frank (The Big Guy) Cotroni, not long after Francesco was released from prison after serving three years for his role in a contract killing. The Di Maulo–Cotroni nuptials were called “the marriage of the year in the Montreal
milieu
” by respected
Journal de Montréal
crime writer Michel Auger and further cemented Di Maulo's already formidable contacts.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that Vito, Desjardins and Smiling Joe Di Maulo really were untouchable. Desjardins and Smiling Joe had risen so high by this time that it was easy to forget they had both once been waiters. Desjardins's name—and Vito's—kept coming up in massive drug investigations, but charges never stuck. Smiling Joe preferred to stay away from the drug trade, finding other areas in which to prosper. Then, in 1994, came Desjardins's arrest for cocaine smuggling. In that scheme he worked with the Hells Angels, and he oversaw at least eighteen other plots in an attempt to import seven hundred kilograms of cocaine. Vito's shadow hung over the whole effort, but he was not charged. Desjardins proved unmanageable when finally in custody. A parole report later noted: “While at Parthenais, you were found in possession of two blades and you also assaulted another inmate in the face and injured his eye.” Worse yet, he tried to get two prisoners to murder another offender.

Desjardins could have done considerable damage to Di Maulo and Vito if he had been a weaker, chattier man. Even after he was sentenced to a fifteen-year term, Desjardins remained solid. Ratting out Vito or Joe Di Maulo would have bought him preferred treatment with prosecutors, but Desjardins didn't
give up the names of his associates. Desjardins quickly established himself as a feared man inside Leclerc medium-security institution in Laval. Guards felt he was trying to run Range 4AB. Known by fellow inmates as “the Millionaire,” he managed to get a jogging track repaired at his own expense and somehow secured a truck filled with three thousand dollars' worth of seafood. It was “a spectacular way to show your strength and power within the institution,” the parole board said in a ruling, commenting on the exercise facility. He also managed to gain control of prison refrigerators and telephones and secure a computer for his cell. He and his cellblock cronies made daily calls to conduct business, even though that was obviously against prison policy.

By the end of 1995, Desjardins's conduct was deemed so bad that he was transferred to maximum-security Donnacona Institution, about forty kilometres west of Quebec City, because of concerns for the safety of staff and inmates. Generally, prisoners are transferred from medium- to less restrictive minimum-security facilities, but Desjardins proved to be a dangerous exception. The parole board later claimed the move was necessary because of his extremely aggressive behaviour, which included his role at the centre of a war between two prison clans.

“These concerns included information from reliable sources relating to your need to control and intimidate; your links to the Hell's [
sic
] Angels and involvement in the Italian Mafia; and the ‘contracts' you put out on inmates and staff, including an alleged contract to murder inmate (name withheld) and one to poison inmate (name withheld). The Board of Investigation on the (name withheld) incident indicated that a ‘war' existed between you and (name withheld) and that you put a ‘murder contract' on him.” Exactly why he acted so aggressively was anyone's guess, as he refused examination by psychologists or psychiatrists.

Faced with a criminal record that stretched back to 1971, authorities denied Desjardins day parole on October 31, 2000. “After reviewing all of the information, the members found that the attitudes and values that led you to this lifestyle in the first place had not changed,” the parole board ruled. “They found no indication of real remorse.” On
August 29, 2002, the parole board again turned him down for day parole, rejecting any likelihood that he would steer clear of the life he'd left behind. “In the years immediately before your arrest, you led a life full of advantages: a luxurious residence, pleasure boats, a fleet of luxury cars, vacations, evenings out,” the board ruled. It concluded that he would likely resort to violence if he left prison.

Desjardins was finally freed on statutory release on June 2, 2004. By this time, he had drifted away from Vito. It also seemed doubtful that Desjardins would be hooking up publicly with his old chum and accomplice Vincenzo (Jimmy) Di Maulo, who was freed on day parole in 2004 after serving nearly a decade for his money-laundering conviction. Jimmy's parole conditions were tight, barring him from associating with people “related to the drug milieu and/or organized crime, including your brother Joe Di Maulo, who is known as an influential member of the Montreal Mafia.”

Upon his release from prison, when Desjardins grandly announced that he was going to become a “construction entrepreneur,” plenty of skeptics in Quebec didn't think a move into the construction industry was synonymous with going straight. If anything, it was a freeway into the province's heartland of corruption.

L
orenzo (Larry) Lo Presti grew up on Mafia Row, a few mansions down Antoine-Berthelet Avenue from Vito's home. His aunt was married to Vito's uncle, Domenico Manno, one of the tight circle of Rizzuto men involved in the Paolo Violi murder. Larry's high school was Father McDonald Comprehensive, which Vito's daughter, Bettina, also attended. There, Lorenzo talked like someone who wanted nothing other than to be a Mafioso, and he travelled with a muscular black youth who later became his bodyguard. In his high school yearbook, he declared “money is everything” as his motto and listed his ambition as “to be like my father.”

For many high school boys, the ambition of carrying on the family business would have been seen as mundane or perhaps sweet. For Larry, carrying on the family tradition was more complicated and dangerous. His father, Giuseppe (Joe) Lo Presti, was a partner with Nicolò Rizzuto in D.M. Transport, which was registered in 1972. The senior Lo Presti was also a suspect in the Paolo Violi murder back in 1978, although nothing was ever proven. Joe Lo Presti certainly was considered a man of some influence in the
milieu
, even though he deliberately went out of his way to keep a low profile, with muted suits and a soft monotone in conversation. Living in such grand accommodations, he also clearly had a lot of money for someone who was not in town much
to tend to his construction or trucking businesses. In reality, Joe Lo Presti was the Montreal mob's ambassador to the New York Bonanno family, and spent a good deal of his time south of the border brokering international drug deals.