Business or Blood (33 page)

By the time of Fernandez's arrival, the old nail factory had been seized by local authorities and transformed into a youth recreation centre for theatrical and musical events. Fernandez's old Toronto associates Michele (Mike, The American) Modica and Andrea Fortunato Carbone had resettled in Bagheria after the California Sandwiches shooting in Toronto. It hadn't taken long for Modica and Carbone to get back into trouble. They were now in jail for Mafia association, after Sicilian police heard they were plotting to murder Pietro Lo Iacono, acting boss of a Bagheria Mafia family. Modica and Carbone were due to be released from prison in April 2014.

On the streets, Fernandez had links with Carbone's brother Giuseppe—known on the streets as Salvatore—as well as Pietro Sorci and Sergio Flamia. His other contacts in Bagheria included former GTA residents Pietro and Salvatore Scaduto, brothers who had worked in Canada for Vito's family. The Scaduto brothers had lived in Canada for a quarter century, moving shortly after Pietro escaped a murder bid in Bagheria in 1990. Their father, Bartolomeo, had been slain in underworld feuding the previous year, and it seemed like a smart time to explore the possibilities of life abroad.

Now, the family ran an excavation business and L'Ultima Fermata (“The Last Stop”) pizzeria at the corner of Via Togliatti and Via Papa Giovanni XXIII. Like Fernandez, they kept in frequent phone contact with a Montreal lawyer connected to Vito. Back in Sicily, they chafed at
even the thought of Modica. Shortly after the California Sandwiches debacle, the Scaduto brothers had been arrested with a large stockpile of weapons. Faced with the prospect of a deportation hearing, they voluntarily left Canada. If not for Modica's arrogance and stupidity, they might all still be in Canada. They had made it to the promised land of nice cars and good money and Modica had got them expelled.

Fernandez sported a sparkling gold Rolex believed to have been given to him by Vito, back when he was known on the streets of Toronto as Johnny Bravo and his benefactor Vito valued business over revenge. The Spaniard opened up a karate dojo that doubled as a dance studio in his new town, but it would soon become clear that his passion remained crime.

A
lmost immediately after his arrival in Sicily, police overheard Fernandez talking about transactions involving “vitamins,” “loaves of bread,” “grandmothers,” “girls,” “illegal immigrants,” “snapshots,” “photos,” “kimonos” and “things.” All the references really meant OxyContin, or oxycodone, known on the streets as OC, Oxy and hillbilly heroin. Addicts crush it into a powder, then inject or snort it for a morphine-like buzz. In an effort to curb its sale on the black market, it was banned for sale in Canada in early 2012, but that only drove up the price of tablets to one hundred dollars on the streets. For drug traffickers with connections to unwitting or unscrupulous doctors, the ban was a godsend.

Police wiretaps recorded Fernandez talking to a Toronto man named Danny, who remained a close associate. Danny was someone you might want beside you in a dark alley, but you would never invite him to sit at the big table. He was the sort of cement head who would be sent into a business and wouldn't bother to cover his face when punching out the owner. He was capable of home invasions, extortion and even murder, and if he was nabbed, he would keep his mouth shut and do his prison time like an old-school criminal. Once, he enlisted a guard to help out with his drug ring when he was serving time. He was just Fernandez's type of guy.

In the fictional
Godfather
, the Bagheria mob boss owns local politicians. The reality wasn't any prettier. Police listening in to the mobsters' phones also heard how a regional mayor asked the Mafia for fifty votes. On October 17, 2012, they heard another politician paying three thousand euros to buy a package of votes in Bagheria, much like one might buy a herd of sheep.

Tapes also recorded talk of how Fernandez met with a Hamilton, Ontario, friend after the latter arrived in Sicily on October 27, 2012. He brought money with him for Fernandez, who had been buying bars and pizzerias around Bagheria. Each transfer from Canada totalled €999 to avoid anti–money laundering controls.

On October 31, at 8:36 a.m., Fernandez talked with his friend about contacting a doctor who could supply the pills. They also wanted the doctor to help them find an elderly patient to move the drugs to Canada. “Most older people, people over sixty years or so, no one looks at them,” the friend explained.

A bug in Fernandez's BMW X5 SUV caught them on November 29 talking about Lorenzo Carbone going to Toronto for a week. Fernandez wanted to know if there had been checks at the Toronto airport about “things” on his possession. Carbone replied that it had been very superficial, with most of the questioning about whether he was transporting Parmesan cheese.

Fernandez considered sending the next shipment of oxycodone to Canada through the mail. “I do not see why not … because the vitamins, do not smell or anything like that.”

On December 5, the second shipment of oxycodone from Italy to Canada was sent by courier post to Hamilton Mountain. The plan was simple and successful. On December 7, his friend Carbone bubbled over with the thought of getting fabulously rich. “I have always money, money is always.”

Fernandez preached caution, warning his associates to be careful of walking under video cameras. In Palermo and Bagheria, sometimes the walls literally have electronic eyes and ears. Despite his words of caution, Fernandez was feeling positive. A Sicilian contact told him he could get him a batch of oxycodone within two weeks, using his
medical contacts. When Fernandez said he had a problem getting money from Canada, the contact suggested he pay him with narcotics.

Then the contact bragged that he had a godson in common with fugitive Trapani province boss Matteo (Diabolik) Messina Denaro of the Corleone Mafia. Messina Denaro was considered a new Cosa Nostra leader after Provenzano's arrest on April 11, 2006, and
L'Espresso
magazine featured him on the cover with the headline HERE IS THE NEW BOSS OF THE MAFIA.

“Thirty-five years in hiding here in Sicily,” the contact said of Denaro, with a touch of awe.

Fernandez was intrigued by talk that Messina Denaro was considered more powerful than even Salvatore (Totò, The Beast) Riina, Sicily's top Mafia boss in the 1980s.

“Say if it's true or not. Is he bigger than Riina?” Fernandez asked. “Bigger than him?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck!”

Between January 10 and January 19, 2013, Fernandez talked many times by phone with two Toronto-area men. One of them owned the King City compound where Vito often stayed when he was in the GTA. They were both harsh critics of how Fernandez's man in Toronto, Danny, was acting, showing a disregard for the “old guard” of the Rizzuto organization there.

On March 25, a Canadian associate named David had arrived in Sicily, and he and Fernandez were almost immediately talking about smuggling weapons into Canada. That day, the conversation shifted to what would happen if anyone took action against Danny. “I will return there in a second if something happens to Danny,” said Fernandez. “They all will be killed in the same day.”

On March 26, Fernandez's voice was recorded talking with David. He said he was keeping an equal distance from both sides in the ongoing Canadian Mafia war. “I am good friends with Vito but also good friends with Raynald Desjardins,” he said. Then he added that he was made a member of the Mafia with Desjardins during a ceremony presided over by Vito Rizzuto. Fernandez's tone was clearly
aggressive. He demanded in English that his associate know that he wasn't a second-class mobster, just because he was a Spaniard who had lived in Canada.

He made his comments on a winding street, forgetting his own caution about the dangers of omnipresent police cameras and bugs as he announced that Vito Rizzuto “makes the fucking rules.” He proudly announced that this meant he and Desjardins had been promoted to a status where they could sit as equals with fellow “men of honour.”

“Vito ‘made' me and my
compare
, Raynald,” Fernandez said.

It was a breathtaking statement. The Spaniard's respect for Vito was obvious, but he had just said something that could cost him his life, should word ever get back to Vito. He had called Desjardins
compare
, a term far closer than “friend” in local parlance. He had also unknowingly said it on a police surveillance camera, in the midst of a war between Rizzuto and Desjardins.

His boast stunned his companion, who replied, “You're not Italian.”

“No, no. Me and my
compare
.” Then Fernandez restated that he and Desjardins were “made” men. Then he said the word again.

Did he not think that such words travelled?

For all his brashness with underlings and people on his level, Fernandez remained a suck-up when it came to bosses. When first trying to work into the
milieu
, he had courted the goodwill of Raynald Desjardins. When Desjardins brought him into Vito's elevated circle, Fernandez sucked up to him with equal enthusiasm. Now that Desjardins and Vito were deadly enemies, it was tough to see exactly which side Fernandez supported, since he appeared to have ties to them both. Fernandez did stay in touch regularly by phone with the Rizzutos' Montreal lawyer, who was also speaking with the Scadutos. It was as if Fernandez somehow refused to recognize the intensity of emotions involved in the war under way in Canada, as he traded on the names of both Desjardins and Vito.

As he and David wound down the ancient street, Fernandez also seemed to be disclosing family secrets. To be officially inducted into the Mafia, there is a ceremony, called
pungiutu
, which translates to “pinch
and make blood,” performed by a boss. It involves burning the photo of a saint while pricking then squeezing the inductee's trigger finger. He (all members are male) is then required to say, “I will burn in hell if I betray the organization.”

It was possible Fernandez was telling the truth, and that Vito's Canadian organization was unique in inducting non-Italian members. That would be a first, but Vito was capable of breaking ground and certainly didn't lack for confidence. If so, it said a lot about life in the
milieu
that the first non-Italian inducted into the Mafia was now Vito's mortal enemy. It was also highly possible that Fernandez was lying. He was boasting to someone who was not a Mafioso. There are few real rules in the Mafia, but those that do exist tend to be hard and fast. Among the most strictly enforced of them is that you can lie to anyone but another member, and David wasn't a member.

Fernandez stressed again that he was attempting to remain neutral in the midst of the Canadian hostilities. “There is a small war over there and I am stuck in the middle between those people.… It's a war between two of my best friends, my
compare
Raynald and my other friend Vito.” If Fernandez believed the hostilities were a spat that would pass in time, he couldn't have made a worse misjudgment of Vito's fury.

Then Fernandez told his guest that he wanted his Toronto friend Danny inducted into the Mafia too. There was a casualness to the comment, as if it was nothing more than joining a gym. “I want to make Danny a made man and I know that I can do it with some boss over there. We need a boss to do that.… If Danny would have come here, I could have asked Sergio [Flamia] to make him a made man right away.”

That same day, the bug in Fernandez's car picked up the two men talking about moving guns between Italy and Canada. The conversation shifted to how a silencer for one of their guns had somehow been lost. Fernandez was upset because it was a quality item.

“These are fucking deadly, do not feel a dick,” he said, simulating the soft sound of two shots fired with the muffler.

Then Fernandez described the pains he took when sending such items to Canada.

“It is difficult to send to you; you can also send in a package.… In
a bundle, you put it in a bottle of shampoo, a big bottle with carbon paper, they cannot see through it.”

On March 28, Fernandez's strength in Bagheria was boosted further with the arrival of his long-time associate, a Portuguese national named Fernando Pimentel. The thirty-five-year-old was Modica's and Fernandez's type: someone not afraid to do a home invasion and crush a face. He had a UFC look to him, with short hair, big buff muscles, a tattoo the length of his right forearm and a watch the size of Fernandez's Rolex. It was an international tough guy look that played just as well on patios in Mississauga or Madrid.

Pimentel had committed many crimes in Canada before he was deported for drug trafficking. From Portugal, he moved to Bagheria and lived there between 2006 and mid-2008 as a guest of sorts of Michele Modica. He had been arrested in the Azores for robbery and kidnapping in August 2009, and served three years in Portuguese prisons. He didn't plan to stay in Sicily too long this visit, as he had a return ticket to Portugal for April 18.

His time behind bars apparently hadn't made Pimentel any milder. He immediately jumped into a conversation with Fernandez on March 28 about beating up people in Sicily for associates.

“Brother, I had to beat people to make money!” he announced.

“This is a shit,” Fernandez said.

The Canadians were showing up at a time when the old underworld of Bagheria was in a dangerous state of flux. A police wiretap at the time picked up Flamia talking to a friend named Enzo of how he was tired of the current state of affairs and needed change. “I'm tired, Enzo, to see these twisted things.”

Enzo appeared to be pushing Flamia to distance himself more from the current leadership as he said: “I think you were wrong to sit down again at the table.”

On March 29, Fernandez and Pimentel were cutting through Bagheria's traffic in Fernandez's BMW when a familiar location brought back memories.