Business or Blood (29 page)

Vito's public profile was still low in the 1970s, when a parade of Montreal underworld figures was called to appear at another series of crime commission hearings. When Paolo Violi refused to testify, he was sentenced to a year in jail for contempt. Violi's status was undermined by revelations that he had lowered his guard and inadvertently allowed undercover police officer Robert Menard to live above his ice cream parlour for years, secretly recording conversations of the mobsters downstairs. That created the opening Nicolò Rizzuto needed to move against him. The world of vice described so well by Brett survived the inquiry, but it did spell the beginning of the end for the Violi brothers. Small wonder that Nicolò had chosen the seventies to take his family to Venezuela, where he was close to his cocaine contacts in the Cuntrera family and far from the guns of his rival Violi and the spotlight of the public inquiry.

Now, as Vito settled back into life in Canada in the fall of 2012, Quebec was awash in fresh stories of corruption. The revelations of a former Montreal chief of police and a series of investigative stories from Radio-Canada's award-winning
Enquête
program set the stage for the public hand-wringing of yet another commission. The City of Montreal was awarding some $1.4 billion in contracts annually, providing plenty of opportunities for graft. Public confidence in the system
was at a nadir. A Montreal
Gazette
reader wrote, with more than a little sarcasm, that perhaps Vito should run for mayor now that he was back in town:

F
ormer Montreal police chief Jacques Duchesneau leaked a secret 2008 transport ministry report to the media, knowing it would change his life forever. The head of a government anti-collusion unit feared authorities wouldn't act on it otherwise. The leaked Transport Canada study concluded this graft was costing taxpayers heavily. The bid rigging and protection money meant that it cost 37 percent more to build a kilometre of road in Quebec as compared with Ontario. The move cost Duchesneau his job but did attract attention. The province was also embarrassed when RCMP sergeant Lorie McDougall testified at a Mafia trial in Italy in 2010 and spoke of payments to the Mafia in the Quebec construction industry. He described how several firms in Quebec paid out a tithe of 5 percent of their contracts to the Mafia, as though it were another layer of government.

When the din of stories on corruption became too loud to ignore, an inquiry was called to expose connections between the mob, politics and business. Appointed to the helm of this latest tour of underworld sludge was Quebec Superior Court justice France Charbonneau, a hard-working, highly competent legal bulldog best known as the Crown prosecutor who put Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher behind bars for murder. His was one of some eighty murder cases she had prosecuted, with sometimes ferocious zeal. She was also
durable. During the eighteen-month Boucher trial, she took only five days off. This time she was given a two-year mandate to expose corruption that had taken generations to put in place.

One might have expected the RCMP to welcome such an inquiry, especially considering the relatively limp results of its multi-million-dollar, four-year Colisée operation against Vito's family. However, when Charbonneau's staff requested voluminous tapes from the RCMP, they were met with a tough, taxpayer-funded fight. Among its many lines of legal reasoning, the RCMP argued that it had gathered some 1.5 million wiretap intercepts and 35,000 hours of video and prepared numerous reports as a
federal
agency, and shouldn't therefore be obliged to comply with a
provincial
inquiry. The commission ultimately won the right to play the intercepts, but only after subpoenaing the police documents and using more taxpayers' money to fight for them in court. Criminals clearly weren't the only ones prone to infighting at the public's expense.

Generations of mobsters had survived similar inquiries, but Vito recognized the danger he faced. The crime commission of the 1970s had helped set the stage for his father's usurping of Violi's place at the top of Montreal's underworld. Now, the public was about to hear and see secret recordings from the old ground zero of Vito's family, the Consenza Social Club. Vito might even be called to testify.

There were limits to the inquiry's scope. It couldn't deal with federal matters and it only reached back fifteen years, meaning it wouldn't look into the Rizzuto family's activities in the 1950s and 1960s. Nicolò had listed his occupation in 1956 as “cement contractor” when buying his fourplex on De Lorimier Avenue. The apparent success of his Grand Royal Asphalt Paving seemed at odds with the much smaller number of government contracts for things like sidewalk and sewer repairs in those years.

Linda Gyulai of the Montreal
Gazette
dug up records that showed Nicolò managed to set up five construction-related companies between 1962 and 1972, often with underworld associates and relatives. In September 1966, Nicolò and his half-brother Liborio Milioto were officials with Franco Electric Inc., even though they had no background
whatsoever in electrics. By 1972, Nicolò was an official with D.M. Transport with his uncle Domenico Manno and Joseph Lo Presti. Manno was also an officer in four of Nicolò's other construction companies. Nicolò's construction activities slowed down but didn't cease in 1972, when he relocated in Venezuela.

With its limits in time and scope, the enormously ambitious Charbonneau Commission wasted no time in getting to the point. Hearings opened with Duchesneau saying as a witness what many suspected: Quebec politics are financed by criminal proceeds. “Dirty money finances elections,” Duchesneau told Charbonneau. “This clandestine empire I'm talking about comprises links between the construction world and the illegal financing of political parties,” he continued. “According to the testimony [we gathered], we have before us a widespread and brazen culture of kickbacks.”

The former police chief described a corrupt system in which political organizers solicited money from engineering firms, who in turn pumped up their invoices and passed the added costs on to the public. As Duscheneau described the scheme, the mob was a silent partner, demanding
pizzo
, or protection money, from a select circle of just over a dozen construction firms.

Among the inquiry's early witnesses was Detective Constable Mike Amato of York Regional Police, whose jurisdiction included Woodbridge, Ontario. In carefully measured comments, the veteran officer told the inquiry that 'Ndrangheta crime families originating in Italy's Calabrian region dominate the Ontario mob landscape, while Quebec has been largely under Sicilian families. He added that, in the Toronto area, the 'Ndrangheta and Sicilian groups seem to coexist more easily, sometimes even helping each other. “Obviously, at times there's conflicts,” Amato said. “There's murder. There's violence. There's bombings.” For the most part, however, Ontario preferred to keep its corruption buttoned down and behind closed doors.

Still, the province had secrets that would have no doubt elicited colourful disgust from the late novelist Martin Brett. In the late 1970s, county court judge Harry Waisberg wrote a Royal Commission report on violence in the province's construction industry. It described the
strafing of a North York construction company office with a machine gun, arson and plenty of bribery. The report also spoke of a meeting between industry executives, some with strong political connections, and an “array of sinister characters,” including Toronto mobster Paul Volpe, who was later murdered and dumped in the trunk of his wife's leased BMW at Toronto International Airport. Waisberg's report inspired a brief flurry of headlines and then it was back to business as usual.

At the Charbonneau inquiry, Amato's comments buttressed those of Italian scholar Valentina Tenti, who earlier told the commission that Mafia organizations around the world have infiltrated legitimate business. The commission heard that Ontario mobsters work as restaurateurs, trucking company executives, construction entrepreneurs, lawyers and accountants, and run banquet halls, nightclubs and garden centres, among other things. “They don't want us to know about their legitimate businesses; they don't want us to know about their wealth; they don't want us to know about interaction in public life,” Amato said. “…  There are persons who are criminals, who are suspects in murders.… They're integrated into the community and most people don't even know who they are.”

They also donate to charity, raise money for political parties and take part in community services. “It legitimizes your own persona,” Amato said. “It legitimizes your criminal past. It's almost like absolving your sins.” Amato balked when asked about Ontario Mafia groups winning government contracts. “That question there is too close to something that we are working on right now,” Amato said. He certainly didn't dismiss the question. It was a well-accepted truism that Mafia figures are only as powerful as their links to so-called respectable society. “If you accept that [the Mafia] exists, you have to accept that public corruption exists,” Amato said.

The commission heard that mobsters had been able to fly under the radar in Ontario because violence is kept to a minimum. “If there is numerous murders, if there's a lot of violence, if there is a lot of bombings, it attracts attention. It attracts attention from politicians, it attracts attention from the community, it attracts attention from the police,”
Amato said. “You cannot build a successful criminal enterprise if you are continually being investigated and monitored by the police. If you stay under the radar, you are going to expand.”

While the Charbonneau Commission was generating daily headlines about corruption, Montreal police quietly moved to stem Vito's influence within their own ranks. In November 2012, just a month after Vito's return, at least two Montreal officers were fired for leaking sensitive information to the Mafia. In the months that followed, leaks of information to Vito's group continued, as there were clearly many moles inside the police force.

Towards the end of 2012, the public learned that the excitement from the witness stand had only just begun. Raynald Desjardins would be compelled to testify at the inquiry, despite his pending murder charges for the Montagna killing. And in a move that promised both headlines and security nightmares, Vito had been subpoenaed to testify. Unless something drastic happened, Vito was going to move from well below radar to the full glare of a public spotlight.

Inquiry lawyers would want to probe him on his deep and central role in construction corruption. It was a complex and deeply entrenched system, which predated Vito, though he protected and refined it. If he took the stand, he would certainly face questions about how he seemed to control family interests, even while in custody. Lawyers would like to know how firm his grip was on a $10-billion union investment fund, but their questions would probe far beyond unions, through bureaucrats to politicians. Vito's hands were everywhere on the wheels of corruption, and all of this would be up for discussion if he took the stand.

Vito himself had other things on his mind—namely revenge—but he could not take the subpoena lightly if he hoped to avoid returning to jail. Paolo Violi's refusal to testify in the 1970s hearings had meant prison, and Vito had already been away from his empire for too long. He would have to say enough to satisfy the bulldog Charbonneau but not so much that his world was overturned. Even for a man with Vito's finesse, it would require the performance of a lifetime. If anyone was nervous about what Vito might say, this was the time to silence him forever.

A
t seventy-nine years of age, Domenico Manno was a well-seasoned Mafia artifact, with a massive skull, the body of a fridge and the pained expression of a constipated elderly bull. Wrinkled and creaking as he was, he was still the younger brother of Zia Libertina and beneath her in the family pecking order. Their Mafioso father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, had been trying to immigrate to Canada for a decade before he finally arrived on September 11, 1964. Don Nino lived in Montreal until his death by natural causes on October 1, 1980, at the age of seventy-six. He was entombed in a mausoleum alongside his wife, Giuseppa Cammalleri Manno, and their daughter Giuseppina Manno, younger sister of Libertina and Domenico Manno.

In the minds of many involved in law enforcement and law-breaking, Domenico Manno would always be connected to the hit that changed the Montreal underworld forever. Manno was present when a call was placed to his brother-in-law Nicolò Rizzuto from Montreal hours before Paolo Violi was killed in a card game in his old ice cream shop. In the telephone message, Nicolò was told, “The hunting has begun.” Hours later, just after Violi's death, Manno was also present in the ice cream shop when another call south was made, saying, “The pig is dead.”

For his role in the Paolo Violi murder, Domenico Manno eventually
pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, along with Agostino Cuntrera and Giovanni Di Mora. The identity of the man who pulled the trigger of the
lupara
was never disclosed, and no one publicly dragged the names of Nicolò or Vito into the proceedings. On the stand, Manno was the very personification of
omertà
. When a prosecutor pressed him about the murder, he replied: “I don't remember.” Pushed further, he said, “I don't remember, I don't remember,” just in case the first lie wasn't enough. All he could remember, he said, was having a cup of coffee and buying cigarettes in the café where Violi was slain, hours before the murder.