Business or Blood (26 page)

In March 2012, a
New York Post
story suggested Vito was slipping emotionally. The article quoted an unnamed source from the Florence, Colorado, prison as reporting that Vito said: “I do not just want to be the godfather of Canada. I want to be the godfather of the world.” The report also quoted unnamed American police sources as saying they believed the hit on Sal Montagna was ordered by Vito. The first statement about Vito was questionable. The second one was clearly wrong, but the fact that it was believed was a tribute to Vito's former stature. It was also an accepted truth that Vito would have to return to Montreal once he was released in early October 2012. Vito was a proud man, and to avoid the city after the murders of his son and father would be a public admission of defeat.

Gallo's decision to flee Montreal seemed wise, as bodies kept falling in his old
milieu
and paranoia was the new norm. Closure Colapelle chose to stay. Around 6 p.m. on March 1, 2012, a bullet caught Desjardins's spy as he sat in his SUV outside a pub in a Saint-Léonard strip mall near the intersection of Langelier and Lavoisier boulevards. Closure had always felt that killers would come after him, if they couldn't get to Desjardins and Mirarchi. The dead spy had been right.

Giuseppe (Joe) Renda feared he was possibly next in line for a hit man's bullet. A decade ago, he had been one of Vito's point men in Ontario. Then it had seemed a safe bet to hitch his saddle to Montagna, but those days too were long gone, and now it was time to duck and look for cover. The murder of Larry Lo Presti had shaken him. Then there was the attempted murder of Tony Suzuki and a visit by police saying his life was in danger. Still, he had to make a living. He presented himself like a rich man but had a crushing mortgage on a luxurious stone home on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in Westmount and outstanding utility bills and taxes to the tune of almost $600,000.

On May 4, 2012, he reportedly had a business meeting with someone from the old Agostino Cuntrera camp. At ten-thirty that morning, he said goodbye to his wife Benedetta (Betty) and walked out the door. Betty notified police when he didn't return by suppertime. His car was
later discovered on Saint-Urbain Street in Little Italy. Forensic testing yielded nothing. Six days after he went missing, police searched a building under renovation on Jeanne-Mance. Again they didn't find a thing. The fifty-three-year-old left no clues behind, just a massive debt. His home was sold for $1.15 million and his widow declared bankruptcy, sold her Mercedes and moved into a condo with relatives. Her husband had been known as a discreet man. Now she and police believed he was the victim of an equally discreet abductor.

The remains of Vito's side took a hit in July 2012 when Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito was arrested on a parole violation, after he was spotted in a Laval bar with men who had criminal records. He had been free for a year and was due for full, unconditional release in October, less than two weeks after Vito was due back in Canada on parole. By then he wouldn't have to report to parole officers at all, but now he'd spend the time until his statutory release back in prison.

Sollecito's rearrest came a week after his son Giuseppe (Joe) Sollecito was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $200,000 for keeping the Rizzuto family gambling house on Jean-Talon East, along with Nick Jr. Joe Sollecito also ran a thrift store and pizzeria in Florida. Nicola Di Marco had already been hit with a $50,000 fine and an eighteen-month jail term in the case. Another co-accused was Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, but he had met his fate before the case got to court.

There weren't huge headlines when, on Sunday, July 16, 2012, sixty-year-old Walter Ricardo Gutierrez was killed in a hail of gunshots while walking towards his west-end home. There were nods that Gutierrez had been involved in the mid-1990s with Vito's group in money laundering, along with lawyers Joseph Lagana, Richard Judd and Vincenzo Vecchio. Back then, Vito was always reported in the press as too elusive for police ever to capture. More recently, the Montreal
Gazette
had taken to referring to his family with the phrase “once-powerful.”

Still, Vito's group seemed to have bite. His name was whispered after street gang leader Chénier Dupuy was shot dead that August as he sat in an SUV outside a restaurant. Hours later, assassins ended the life of Dupuy's friend Lamartine Sévère Paul outside his apartment building in Laval.

There was talk that Dupuy had recently attended a meeting of street gang leaders in Sainte-Adèle, where he refused to join a new street-gang alliance run by black biker Gregory Wooley, who was close to Vito. There also was talk that an intergenerational war was tearing apart the Reds street gang, also known as the Bo Gars (Cute Guys). While older members had an association with Vito, younger ones were hungry and frustrated at being left little more than crumbs.

The same week as the murders of Dupuy and Paul, Riccardo Ruffullo, a man with Mafia links, was slain in his Côte-des-Neiges penthouse condominium. Not surprisingly, the mood in the
milieu
was one of hyper-alertness and caution. Vito was coming home soon and people would be called to account for their actions, or lack of action, while he was gone. Maria Mourani, author of two books on street gangs and a Bloc Québécois member of Parliament, told the Montreal
Gazette
that others in the underworld were equally stressed: “One of my sources said there are people sleeping in hotel rooms under false names.”

When it might be safe to return home was anyone's guess, but for those who'd laid claim to a piece of Rizzuto turf in Vito's absence, things were about to get a whole lot worse before they got better.

T
here is a monument in a small square in Cattolica Eraclea to honour Giuseppe Spagnolo, the town's first democratically elected mayor. It reads simply,
Giuseppe Spagnolo, sindaco, leader politico, ucciso dalla mafia
, for the union leader and politician, assassinated by the Mafia in 1955. It was Spagnolo's son Liborio who would later recall Nicolò Rizzuto as a confident young
campiere
, charming and tough, preferring words to violence. One of Giuseppe Spagnolo's killers was hidden by a local priest before fleeing to York Region, and convicted
in absentia
of the murder after he was on Canadian soil. He was Leonardo Cammalleri, a member of the
cosca
, or crime group, of Mafia boss Antonino (Don Nino) Manno. The convicted killer Cammalleri was also the father-in-law of Nicolò Rizzuto 's son, Vito. In the Mafia, such stories wither and drop from view, but they seldom really end. They just wind into other narratives.

Italian authorities never pressed for Cammalleri's extradition and Canadian authorities showed no interest in pushing the case further, despite emotional entreaties from Spagnolo's daughter, who also settled in the Toronto area. On November 26, 1966, Cammalleri was concerned enough about the possibility of his arrest that he stayed outside a Toronto church in his car while Vito married his daughter
Giovanna. Among those who made the trip from Montreal for the wedding that day was rising mobster Paolo Violi.

Meanwhile, Rosario Gurreri, one of the witnesses who helped Sicilian police with their investigation, moved to Montreal, where he opened a small restaurant in the city's Plateau neighbourhood. That was where his body was found on March 5, 1972, hacked a dozen times with a hatchet. As a final insult, a knife was stuck deep in his heart. No one was ever arrested for that crime either.

Technically still wanted for the Giuseppe Spagnolo murder back in 1955, Leonardo Cammalleri drew his final breath in late September 2012 at age ninety-two in his north Montreal home. Vito was due to be released from prison on October 6, so it was only natural to wonder if he would attend his father-in-law's funeral. It was still up in the air whether Cammalleri would be buried in York Region, where he lived much of his life, or in Montreal, where he spent his final years. The website of Complexe Funéraire Loreto contained no announcement. Wherever the funeral was to be held, it seemed imperative that Vito serve notice that he was not afraid to appear in plain sight of his enemies. Attendance at the funeral and visitation would also give him a chance to see who had the nerve to support him publicly and who would reveal where they stood by their absence.

With only last-minute notice, Cammalleri's funeral rites were performed on the morning of Friday, October 5, at almost the same moment that the Colorado prison doors finally opened for Vito. His release date had been moved up a day, with no explanation. The timing of the funeral averted the media circus that would certainly have accompanied Vito's attendance. Leonardo Cammalleri had largely managed to avoid the media and police in life, and now he had done so in death.

Shortly before midnight, Vito Rizzuto stepped off a direct commercial flight to Toronto, amidst speculation that he planned to settle there. His five-bedroom home in the Ahuntsic–Cartierville region of Montreal was up for sale. It was certainly an appealing property. The stone-faced house had only one owner and the 1,300-square-metre lot backed onto green space, albeit the same wooded area that had
provided cover for the sniper who killed Vito's father. Cabinets in the kitchen were mahogany, all of the bedrooms had bidet-equipped ensuites, and the granite and stairway in the front entranceway were worthy of a
Gone with the Wind
remake. Press accounts of the mob war certainly didn't help the real estate agent trying to move the mansion, nor did the media's affection for the nickname Mafia Row. The asking price had dropped from almost $2 million to $1.5 million, showing the seller was clearly motivated. It went without saying why Vito didn't want to resume his life there.

If Vito chose to move to the Toronto area, he would have to do so without the muscle of Juan Ramon Paz (Johnny Bravo) Fernandez. Vito's lieutenant had been deported to his native Spain for a third time months before, after being paroled for plotting the murder of former pro football player and Panepinto crew member Constantin (Big Gus) Alevizos, as well as conspiring to import a tonne of cocaine. Big Gus survived the initial murder attempt that put Fernandez in prison. He was finally slain in January 2008 while walking across the parking lot of a Brampton halfway house. His enemy Fernandez had a rocksolid alibi: he was in prison at the time.

No one doubted that Fernandez was capable of murder. A parole board panel wrote to him in May 2011: “Several correctional officers witnessed death threats you made to another guard who was attempting to search you. During this incident, you seemed to flaunt your well-established ties to traditional organized crime in an effort to further intimidate the guard; this implies you remain connected to the same criminal lifestyle that enabled your considerable drug dealing activities.”

The letter also cast suspicion on his connection to a lawyer who routinely visited organized criminals like Fernandez in prison. “Your ongoing visits from a lawyer who has worked for persons identified as being part of organized crime further reinforces your continuing involvement with this criminal subculture,” the letter states. The parole review board lamented his “considerable lack of progress” on rehabilitation while behind bars. “Your lack of treatment in this regard is especially relevant in the context of your involvement in an inherently violent drug subculture.”

The letter added that Fernandez would be a better than average bet to reoffend quickly when finally released: “A statistical risk evaluation places you in a group of offenders where 60 per cent will commit an indictable offence within three years of release. This predictor is concerning in light of your significant criminal history, which includes a variety of serious drug offences and violent crimes.”

Vito was himself now legally free to fly anywhere in the world without restrictions, save the USA, where he would be on probation for three years, and Italy, where he was facing massive money laundering charges. The latter were a nod to Vito's considerable reach. Italian authorities claimed that, while awaiting extradition in the regional prison reception centre in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, a forty-five-minute drive north of Montreal in an area replete with maple sugar shacks and petting zoos, Vito somehow helped direct a massive fraud that led to a series of arrests across Italy and France in 2007. Police moved against twenty-two companies and arrested nineteen people, while freezing nearly $700 million in assets. Part of the evidence was wiretap recordings of Vito talking to another suspect in Europe. How Vito managed that was hard to fathom, since it goes without saying that inmates aren't supposed to be placing overseas calls to plot crimes. The calls from custody notwithstanding, the fraud itself was a particularly audacious one: mobsters were trying to scam their way into a six-billion-dollar contract to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina between the Italian mainland and Sicily. The scheme represented what was possible when criminals worked together, as it involved both the Sicilian Mafia and the 'Ndrangheta on the southern mainland.

Italian investigators were determined that Vito Rizzuto was somehow the puppet master of the whole operation. “We believe that even from jail they are able to control the organization,” Silvia Franzè, an investigator with the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, told the press in Rome. For the Italian media, Vito Rizzuto gained a new title: “Godfather of the Bridge.”

Vito certainly had the money to retire somewhere warm where he could indulge his passion for golf year-round. His enormous wealth and ability to speak four languages gave him plenty of options. He had
always liked the Dominican Republic, and his friends in the Quebec Hells Angels had recently set up a charter there. Perhaps Vito would float between Montreal and York Region. Wherever he travelled, it would be with the realization that he would never again share a smile or a word with his father or his eldest son. No amount of money or wine or female companionship was going to change that. All he could hope for was the dull satisfaction of revenge. Perhaps that would also give his mother some cold comfort.