Business or Blood (34 page)

“This is where I fucking killed that person,” Pimentel said, out of the blue.

“Huh?” Fernandez replied.

“This is where I killed him, killed … I have beaten, I ripped the ear …”

They also talked in the car of the tragedy at California Sandwiches. Pimentel found humour in the bloodshed as he talked about Andrea Carbone, who was supposed to be a bodyguard for Modica that day. “He was shaking in his boots when those guys went at him … down there [at] California Sandwiches,” Pimentel said. “…  He had the thing [pistol], and don't even shoot back.”

“I know, bro,” Fernandez replied.

“So,
pfff
,” Pimentel continued, mimicking a spitting noise. “Buddy M. [Michele Modica] had to fucking grab the thing and, you know …”

“Yeah,” Fernandez said.

“Come on,” Pimentel continued. “You have a thing and you are fucking scared to use it? Stay home next time! Don't come down like you are a hero.… Rather carry your water gun.”

Pimentel had been close to Modica back then, and Italian authorities suspected he had been part of the unresolved hit on Peter Lo Jacono, the important man of honour whom Modica had plotted to kill back in 2008 in Sicily. Few things make mobsters more edgy than an unresolved murder. On March 31, the police bug in Fernandez's BMW picked up a cryptic conversation about what sounded suspiciously like another murder plot.

“So, what you do not understand … he told me that he had … said to M&M [Michele Modica] to do the …” At that point, Pimentel dropped his voice so that it was unintelligible.

Pimentel noted that they had spoken with the other man behind the plot recently.

“Yeah, what we met the other day,” Pimentel said.

“Who?” replied Fernandez. “Not with me, as I know, he was the one that [inaudible] this is what … and was the other man in jail.”

Bagheria was now flush with former Canadian residents. The Scaduto brothers had been back in Sicily since 2004, and where they stood in the
current tensions wasn't clear. Since returning to Sicily, the Scaduto brothers had pushed to reassert their family's power, while staying in touch with Vito's lawyer. The brothers' ambitions also butted up against those of Fernandez's new associate, Sergio Flamia. The Canadians had the always tense city feeling ready to explode. The
carabinieri
pondered moving in and making arrests early on the drug charges. Otherwise, they could be sure they'd soon be investigating yet another murder.

V
ito's long-time associate Pietro Scaduto had an appointment to meet with Fernandez and Pimentel on April 9, 2013, at the Bar Diva outside Palermo. It was a busy, modern stop just off the highway, where they shouldn't stand out on a Saturday evening. They weren't going to be there long anyway. The topic was to be marijuana seeds and cultivation, and it wasn't hard to get Fernandez to the table. “If there was money to be made, Ramon was the right person to deal with,” Carbone recalled later. “He liked money.”

Ever since he had inquired about the price of
fumo
in the university town of Perugia, Fernandez had sniffed an opportunity in local marijuana cultivation. He first needed a secure location for production and some seeds, and Scaduto had said he could help. As Fernandez prepared for the meeting, he went to great pains to be discreet. He drove a rented compact Renault Clio hatchback rather than his more eye-catching SUV.

Moments after they met in the Bar Diva at 7:15 p.m., Fernandez, Pimentel and Pietro Scaduto were together in the little Clio, heading for a house under construction in Contrada Incorvino in a rural area of Bagheria. It belonged to Giuseppe Carbone, and Giuseppe had stolen a key. It wasn't occupied yet and was surrounded by a fence, so they would have security and privacy. They passed through the gate of the house at 7:30 p.m.

Giuseppe (Salvatore) Carbone was waiting in the house with a loaded .765 pistol. Hiding in a large doghouse inside the grounds was Pietro Scaduto's brother Salvatore. His gun that evening was a dependable .38 revolver.

None of the men in the Clio carried weapons. Salvatore Scaduto had stashed a Spanish nine-millimetre pistol by a pillar on the gate. The plan was for Pietro Scaduto to exit the car to close the gate behind them, and for him to pick up the gun and start shooting. That was the cue for the others to come out firing.

The two targets didn't notice as Pietro Scaduto picked up the hidden gun and approached the car. Pimentel, oblivious to the danger, swung the Clio around so that he could make an easy exit after the meeting. “Ramon realized what was happening and he exited from the car and ran to open the gate,” Carbone later said.

Pimentel realized he had seconds to act or his life would be over. He tried to accelerate towards the gate and accidentally hit Fernandez and then caught Pietro Scaduto, knocking him to the ground and injuring his shoulder.

Pietro Scaduto came up firing. “At that moment, Pietro and I, we started shooting,” Giuseppe Carbone later said. “One shot after another. We shot at least thirty times.” They fired so many times that Carbone had to reload his pistol, and then they fired some more on the unarmed men.

Pimentel was half in and half out of the Clio when the shooting finally stopped. Fernandez lay on the ground inside the compound. During a lull in the shooting, he had enough breath left to ask his killers a question.

“He looked at Pietro and asked, ‘P., why?' ” Carbone recalled. “And then he turned his face at me and said, ‘Why, Sal?' ” There wasn't much point explaining to Fernandez that there was no room for neutrals in Vito's war and no place to hide. “At that point, Pietro took my gun and shot him in the head. But Ramon was still alive. We just carried him in the trunk of the car and we gave him another shot in the head.”

It was dark as Carbone drove the Clio, with the bodies crammed inside, to an old illegal dump in Contrada Fiorilli, a rural area between
Altavilla Milicia and Casteldaccia, overgrown with chest-high weeds and grass. Pietro followed on Carbone's Vespa scooter while Salvatore returned home in his Fiat Panda. The Panda had been a modest-enough vehicle when it was new, and that was more than a decade ago. Killers for the Sicilian mob often earned less than plumbers, and their scruffy vehicles reflected this.

Carbone heard a cellphone going off in the back of the Clio, where the bodies lay. He heard the sound at 8:46 p.m. and again at 9:44 p.m. and yet again after he pulled to a halt, and Pietro Scaduto arrived on the Vespa. The caller was Fernandez's girlfriend, Giovanna Landolsi, but none of the killers knew that at the time. Her calls went unanswered.

Pietro Scaduto's arm was hurting and his patience was gone. He smashed the phone and the buzzing finally stopped.

On April 19, Giuseppe (Salvatore) Carbone discussed selling Fernandez's Rolex with a jeweller on Via Paolo Emiliani Giudici in Palermo.

“I found a buyer for €3,500,” the jeweller said.

“Ask if he can give 4,000,” Carbone replied.

Later that day, Pietro Scaduto advised him against the sale: “Don't do anything. I have a potential buyer who can give us more money.”

The next day, Carbone returned to the jeweller and retrieved the timepiece. After leaving the shop, he was stopped by the
carabinieri
in a routine check. When Carbone was unable to satisfactorily explain how he came into possession of the watch, a police officer seized it, but Carbone wasn't arrested.

Later that day, Carbone went back to the jeweller and told of his encounter with the
carabinieri
.

“Don't worry, I will say … if they ask me, that you asked me only to clean the Rolex, not to sell it.”

Italian authorities decided it was time to move in. Charges were drafted against Fernandez for transporting oxycodone from Italy to Canada from August 2012 to the present. Other charges were drawn up for smuggling a kilo of heroin into Perugia and for illegally possessing a gun and two silencers.

There was a blitz of twenty-one arrests, but when
carabinieri
moved to serve the warrants on Fernandez and Pimentel, the former Toronto-area residents could not be found. The last record of a signal from Fernandez's BlackBerry was on the night of April 9, near the home of Carbone's cousin. “The current unavailability could be a result of a hasty escape,” an Italian police document concluded. “We cannot exclude, however, that he may have been the victim of a double murder.”

By the time of his latest arrest, Giuseppe Carbone was forty-three years old and had been in and out of prison since he was nineteen. He had grown weary of the grubby reality of Mafia life, in which he was on call 24/7 to murder associates without question. Maybe he found something particularly soul-destroying about peddling the Rolex he'd stripped from the wrist of a dead man who had once trusted him. Perhaps he also realized that someday he could become a target himself.

Whatever the reason, almost immediately after he was taken into custody, Carbone told authorities he wanted to talk. There were no tears on May 8 when he sat down to give a statement to two magistrates and four
carabinieri
. “For so many years I was a fugitive in America and I don't have any intention to hide anymore or to pay for things I haven't committed,” Carbone told them. “I knew the risk was as soon as I leave jail I would be killed, so I want to collaborate.”

Exactly why Fernandez and Pimentel were targeted for murder wasn't totally clear to him, and it wasn't his business to ask. That didn't stop him from wondering: “Most likely it was because Fernandez took the side of a Rizzuto enemy, a former right-hand man.”

Fernandez knew much about Vito, but failed to appreciate the recent and fundamental change in him. Vito's priority now was revenge, and only revenge. There was no Plan B. Business just didn't matter. Fernandez's view of the world was the polar opposite: business was everything. “Ramon was one where, when he saw money, he really jumped on,” Carbone said. “He didn't care about this Mafia or that Mafia. He knocked on all doors. He tried to be friendly with anyone. He didn't understand our mentality here.… [You] cannot be friendly with everyone.”

Carbone said that Pietro Scaduto had made a similar comment after speaking with the Canadian lawyer who was in frequent contact with Scaduto and Fernandez. The lawyer had been sending money to Fernandez on a regular basis and Carbone noted that the investments directed by the Canadian lawyer were bound to change the balance of Mafia power in Bagheria. “Pietro Scaduto told me, ‘I called there and this guy told me what to do.' He always told me that Ramon ‘attended too many churches.' ”

For all his brashness, Fernandez didn't realize that in Sicily a few genuine friends counted for more than several loose associates. He also didn't comprehend how there are times when blood takes absolute precedence over business. “He did not have his own church. Instead, he was like a priest that entered all churches.… I know that in Canada now there is a war. A Mafia war. Vito Rizzuto is involved on one side. On the other side, there is a
compare
of Ramon.… Ramon was saying he was friendly with both of them. So he was trying to keep his foot in two shoes [
tenere il piede in due scarpe
].”

Carbone spoke from the vantage point of a weary mob journeyman who had always just done his job. There would be no extra pay for taking part in the murders, and no promotion within the group was offered or expected. It was simply an unpleasant part of his duties, like how a farmhand knows he is supposed to muck out a stable or slaughter a chicken or a hog. “I had a good relationship with Fernandez.”

Carbone had spent his entire adult life in the Mafia, although he had never been formally inducted. Old ceremonies and mystique didn't seem to matter much in Carbone's world. “No, no, we don't use those things anymore,” Carbone said. “I've never been
pungiutu
. I never had a ceremony with anyone. We made all kinds of feasts where we had to eat with each other. But not
pungiutu
. Not those type of things.”

Carbone said that, at first, the Scaduto brothers were guarded in what they said to him about Fernandez. “They were not telling me things because they were afraid I would tell things to Fernandez.” Finally, they asked him, “You are with him or with us?”

“I'm not with anyone,” Carbone replied. “What do we have to do?”

Carbone said that Pietro Scaduto then replied: “You have to arrange a place and we will tell you what to do after.”

Carbone settled on his cousin's property. Since it was under construction, no one would be there at night. His cousin wasn't part of the plot: “He doesn't know anything because I stole the key.”

Fernandez had earlier confided to Carbone that there had been tensions between himself and Pietro Scaduto when they travelled the previous year in Panama, Ecuador and Peru. Fernandez was a vain man and he cringed at the thought of being seen in public with Scaduto, although he didn't expand on why his companion embarrassed him so. “Ramon liked to talk. [He said,] ‘I took a piece of shit there with me and he … embarrassed me.' ”

That trip was a bust, and not just for the lingering ill feelings it created between Fernandez and Pietro Scaduto. The narcotics they sought were already sold by the time they arrived. Fernandez had hoped to get the cocaine into Palermo, where prices were premium, but now he had no product to sell.

Carbone heard from Scaduto that he was concerned the Spaniard Fernandez and the group collecting around him were growing in power. “The Scadutos were a little bit concerned that they were becoming stronger as a group and they could pull together against them.”

The orders to kill Fernandez and Pimentel came from Canada in late March, Carbone said. “We planned to kill them ten days earlier,” but Fernandez was constantly calling and texting Pietro Scaduto on his BlackBerry. Scaduto worried that it would be a red flag for investigators when they checked through Fernandez's cell records and saw that they had so recently been in such constant contact. Better to let the calls cool down a little before they made their move.