Business or Blood (3 page)

Vito Rizzuto was made to order for his role as a paragon of Mafia values. In a time of financial globalization, he personified the character of the global criminal, possessing an innate understanding of the nexus between the underworld and the world of state and mainstream economic power. He had only completed the ninth grade when he left school to work for his father, but Vito carried himself like an Ivy League–schooled CEO (although his expensive tailored suits were sometimes a little shinier than might be found on Toronto's Bay Street). He could be polite and affable and speak knowledgeably and calmly about law, business or politics, in English, Italian, Spanish and French. This impressive ability to communicate helps explain why his story is at the heart of Mafia expansion at the turn of this century.

Vito's preferred out-of-office activity was golf, the international pastime of business. Mafiosi like Vito may be specialists in violence, but
they are also experts in social and economic relationships. There's a joke that when the economy got tough for Vito and his father, they laid off judges, politicians and CEOs. He enjoyed reading about great civilizations such as ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Of particular interest was the life of Julius Caesar, who, like Vito, was born into power, expanded his territory beyond the shores of his homeland, and endured a time of exile, banishment and, ultimately, betrayal. When Caesar was gone, the republic collapsed. Well steeped in the lessons of history, Vito had no plans to step aside or let his rivals sink a dagger into his back.

As we worked on this book, Quebec's Charbonneau Commission into corruption within that province's construction industry was diving deep into the industry's particularly murky waters, underscoring in daily headlines how Mafia violence is inextricably linked to political and economic interests. We were nearly finished writing when Vito Rizzuto died in circumstances that were never made clear. Many people predicted his death, of course, but few thought it would be the result of natural causes, as was quickly and widely accepted by authorities and the press.

News of Vito's sudden passing brought relief in some powerful circles, criminal and otherwise. By the time of his death, he had actually become bad for business. Revenge was more important to him than making money, and every day brought news of fresh bloodletting among men known to be his enemies. Exactly what killed Vito himself will most likely remain a mystery, but even in his absence the Mafia tradition he embodied will thrive and evolve—growth that Vito's last war may have ensured will continue for another generation to come.

V
ito Rizzuto was agonizingly far from his Montreal home when he learned of the murder. Violent death was a fact of life in his world, no more out of place than the slaughter of chickens and cattle on a farm. Murder had been necessary for Vito's family to rise to power in Montreal's underworld, and murder helped them expand that power and make money beyond his ancestors' wildest dreams. And murder—three, in fact, that Vito had a hand in twenty-eight years earlier—explained why he was stuck in a prison cell in the dusty former cowboy boom town of Florence, Colorado, about an hour and a half south of Denver. That said, no murder that the mobster had ordered, witnessed or committed in his sixty-three years of life readied him for what the prison chaplain had come to tell him: this time, the bullet-scarred corpse was that of his own eldest child, Nick Rizzuto Jr.

A prison guard that day—three days after Christmas 2009—witnessed something that people who knew Vito well could not imagine: the face of Canada's top Mafia don contorted with pain and shock. Life as a perpetrator didn't mean Vito knew how to assume the role of a victim. Blindsided by the news, he didn't cry. No one ever talked of Vito crying. But Vito was stunned and hurt and desperately needed to plan his next move. Vito always had a next move.

First, he should go to the funeral. That meant he needed to approach authorities—the same people he had spent his life deceiving—and ask for permission to leave the prison and cross the border. The prospect of asking anyone's permission for anything served as another reminder of how far he had fallen.

If permission were granted, Vito would have to travel with guards and he would most likely be handcuffed. Maybe he would be required to wear a bulletproof vest, too, like he had worn during his extradition to the United States. He would also have to pay his own travel costs, but that was no problem. Vito could afford to buy a fleet of jet craft and hire an army of guards.

In the days following the news, Vito phoned his wife, Giovanna, every chance he could. Many times, Vito had come home in the early hours of the morning smelling of wine and the perfume of a mistress, but there was never talk of their marriage ending. They had been man and wife for forty-three years, and Nick Jr. had shared in that life together for forty-two of them. Giovanna knew life was often hard, even for the powerful; she was the daughter of Leonardo Cammalleri, himself a Mafia killer who emigrated from the Sicilian province of Agrigento to Canada, in part to evade murder charges. But with Vito behind bars, Giovanna needed sedatives to sleep at night. And now things had got worse, as she undertook the worst task a mother can imagine: preparing the funeral of her child.

Vito also spoke with his mother, Libertina, whom some thought was the true guiding force in the family. In times of enormous stress and emotion, Zia (Aunt) Libertina betrayed the emotion of a sphinx. Vito's father, Nicolò (Zio Cola, “Uncle Nick”) Rizzuto Sr., had moved up considerably in their world when he gained her hand in marriage over sixty years earlier. In fact, former Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta suspected that Nicolò was admitted to the Mafia out of respect for Libertina's father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, one of those old Sicilian Mafia dons who managed to appeared all-powerful and yet humble at the same time.

Zia Libertina's name translated roughly to “Liberty,” and she certainly felt free to speak her mind. She and Nicolò raised Vito to be mindful that he was their only son and carried their expectations upon
him, wherever he went and as long as he lived. Vito grew up in a culture where a dutiful son takes every action to salve his mother's pain, even if it means breaking the most serious laws in the Criminal Code. In Vito's birthplace of Sicily, men might be the ones with their fingers on the triggers, but often it was the women who dictated the rhythms of a war, calling out for revenge for the deaths of their boys, husbands, fathers and brothers. There is no greater blow to a mob boss's dignity than to sit at dinner and hear the family matriarch moan, “Noi mangiamo al tavolo e mio figlio mangia terra” (“We eat at the table and my son eats the earth”).

Vito also spoke repeatedly on the prison phone with his sister, Maria, and his two surviving children, both of whom worked as lawyers. Vito told each of them that he wanted to convince the warden to let him attend Nick Jr.'s funeral. They all came back strongly against this. It would be undignified, even dangerous. His presence would attract more media coverage. He would have to wear handcuffs. “There will be a guard with you.”

Helplessness was a fresh emotion for Vito. Although for decades he had been on the radar of more police projects than anyone could remember, this was his first prison stint. Vito was generally the one causing the tears and the funerals, and his underlings were the ones who got locked up. Just a few years before, the only thing in Montreal it seemed he didn't control was the city's nasty winters, and he routinely fled those for warm Caribbean climes, where he mingled business with pleasure on manicured golf courses with city bureaucrats, union and business bosses, Hells Angels and other Mafiosi. Vito was gliding through life at the top of a multi-million-dollar international empire of large-scale construction fraud, drug trafficking, extortion, bribery, stock manipulation, loansharking and money laundering.

For all of Vito's life, the ways of the underworld had been the natural order of things for him, with its cycles of murder and revenge. There had never been room for pacifists at the top level of the underworld, and no one doubted that Vito intended to please his mother and return to the upper echelon of what Montrealers called the
milieu
. Had he been free, an attack on Nick Jr. would have been unthinkable.

Vito's father was a product of west Sicily, but he was himself a Canadian hybrid. A large part of his skill was the ability to pull together disparate North American groups who otherwise might have ignored or plotted against each other, such as rival Haitian street gangs, Hispanic cocaine traffickers, Montreal's Irish West End Gang, rival bikers in the Hells Angels and Rock Machine, and factions from the Sicilian Mafia, Calabrian-based 'Ndrangheta and American La Cosa Nostra. What Vito created was something wholly modern and New World and businesslike: a consortium. Under his leadership these criminal factions could pursue shared business interests, with Vito convincing them that there was enough cake for everyone to eat.

Just a few weeks before his January 2004 arrest, Vito had described his role in this
milieu
of multicultural criminals to Michel Auger, Quebec's best-known crime reporter: “I'm a mediator. People come to me to solve disputes because they believe in me. They have respect in me.” That description was wholly true, although deliberately lacking in details. Vito preferred to speak with his intense brown eyes, expressive face and loaded body language. His very few words, such as what he uttered to Auger, were as accurate as a bullet from one of his hit men. Preferring to see himself as a gentleman and a man of destiny, he didn't need to raise his voice or lose his temper to make life-altering—or -ending—decisions. His demeanour was that of someone born into royalty, playing out a role that had been determined long before his conception. It was as though he were from the House of Rizzuto, not the Rizzuto crime family. And if survival for himself and his house meant killing others, then that was his destiny too.

Vito's conversation with Auger took place in a hallway of a Montreal courtroom, not long after a Canadian government lawyer described him as “the godfather of the Italian Mafia in Montreal” in a court document. Vito scoffed at such a pronouncement, telling Paul Cherry of the Montreal
Gazette
that he played a more folksy role: “I'm the jack of all trades.”

Whatever his title, it had been an honour in the
milieu
to kill for Vito. The ultimate honour, however, was to share a round of golf with him at top country clubs in Montreal, Toronto and the Caribbean. Inside the
prison doors at Florence, however, confined to a cell the size of one of his old walk-in closets, Vito was just US Federal Inmate 04307-748, stripped of all his personal possessions save his wedding ring. Visits were restricted to office hours between Monday and Friday, but it didn't matter much: so far from Montreal, no one was coming to see him.

The power Vito had wielded in Montreal meant virtually nothing to his fellow prisoners. Other inmates in Florence had included American domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, before his execution by lethal injection, and numerous 9/11 al Qaeda terrorists, as well as a nasty grab bag of white supremacists and Mexican-American gangs, such as the Nuestra Familia street gang. McVeigh and some of the prisoners within the concrete and steel walls of the neighbouring supermax facility were guilty of attempts to change American history in a profoundly bad way. For all the blood on his hands, Vito had taken pains to confine his violence to the underworld. When one gangster pulled the trigger on another in Vito's
milieu
, police routinely joked it was urban renewal or the street equivalent of a self-cleaning oven.

If some of Vito's fellow prisoners knew anything about him, they had most likely heard that he was a triggerman back in 1981 in the Brooklyn murders of three upstart captains of the Bonanno crime family. That event was hard to ignore, since it had been re-enacted, with dramatic embellishments, in
Donnie Brasco
, the blockbuster 1997 movie starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.

Other inmates in Florence certainly would have paid more attention to Vito had they known of his lynchpin role in the importation of narcotics into North America. Getting close to Vito meant the opportunity to quickly become a millionaire. The Port of Montreal is one of a few vital entry points for drugs bound for the United States, and Vito had more control over it than anyone else. Once the drugs reached Montreal, Vito's people had to worry about little more than speed limits as they drove the narcotics through back roads and into New York City, the world's top market for cocaine.

Another key entry point for American-bound drugs is the border at Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Vito's rivals in the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta worked with Mexican
cartels to control Juárez, considered one of the world's most dangerous cities. El Paso sits on Highway 10, which connects the desert city directly to the continent's major drug markets. Most enticing are the profits awaiting in New York City, just 3,315 kilometres (2,060 miles) of open road ahead. Despite the southern competition for Vito, leaders at both ends of the continent were still growing rich.

But none of the old competition mattered after Vito got the news about his son. Aside from trying to arrange his trip to the funeral, there was little Vito could do. How could he soothe his family from so far away? And how could his family comfort him? He lusted for revenge, but he didn't even know whom to blame. Was his family under attack from outlaw bikers, the Irish or Italian Mafias, Haitian street gangs, francophone criminals or some combination of the above?

For the time being, all Vito could do was grieve alone in his cell, rising before 6 a.m. for breakfast, building wooden office chairs for $1.10 per hour and plotting against an invisible enemy.