Business or Blood (35 page)

Fernandez had a pass code on his smart phone, which he frequently changed. But for all Fernandez's underworld experience, there remained a naïveté about him. During his frequent meetings with the Scaduto brothers, he appeared to have no clue that he and his group members were targeted for death. Carbone explained that the Scaduto brothers also intended to kill Sergio Flamia, and after that to eliminate Modica when he was released from prison in April 2014. Flamia was expected
to be an easy target. He recalled Pietro Scaduto saying words to the effect of: “We can kill him [Flamia] in the middle of the street.”

Modica was a particularly dangerous target: “If Pietro Scaduto didn't kill Modica, it was because of my brother. He always said, ‘No, Michele Modica always was sleeping with a gun under his pillow.' Scaduto was a bit scared. [He said,] ‘Let's kill him, because this guy will eventually kill us.' ”

Carbone told the magistrates and the
carabinieri
that his memories of the Fernandez and Pimentel murders and the subsequent cleanup were vivid. It was so easy to do and yet so haunting. “They did not have weapons. Not at home nor when we killed them. Otherwise they would have killed us. Shot back. But they didn't suspect anything.

“It was dark,” Carbone continued. “We arrived at the dump and we burned the bodies with naphtha along with some tires.” The plan was to make them victims of
lupara bianca
, bodies that were never found. “The day after, we returned with Salvatore [Scaduto] and we covered the bodies with Eternit [a fibre cement]. The car of Fernandez and Pimentel, we left at the Bolonegnetta dump close to a river, where we put it on fire.” Carbone wore coveralls for the grim work. When it was completed, they were splattered in blood.

He also went through Fernandez's home to remove any trace of their relationship. He scooped up photos of the killers with Fernandez in Peru with Vito Rizzuto's drug contacts. Aside from the pictures, there was little worth taking. “No money, no guns, no passports. I didn't find any of those things.”

Carbone knew the victims were not innocents, but he still couldn't shake his memory of Fernandez's face as he uttered his final words. “ ‘Why? Why?' I can't forget those words. They're still in my head.
Mamma mia
, I can't forget those words.”

At the end of his ninety-three-minute statement, Carbone directed paramilitary officers through the tall weeds of the dump. There they found the charred bodies of Fernandez and Pimentel, riddled with some thirty bullets, just as Carbone had said.

When authorities told Pietro Scaduto of Carbone's confession, he dismissed it as the lies of a bitter man. He said that their relationship
had become unpleasant when they were involved in cattle breeding together. “There were always fights for financial reasons related to our breeding business.”

Scaduto also dismissed the idea that Fernandez was anything but a friend. “When I was in jail in Canada, he helped me a lot and I did the same for him when he moved to Sicily. Only for friendship. Nothing else.”

Perhaps Carbone had grown weary of mob life because he could never really tell his friends from his enemies. Certainly, Scaduto's words called to mind an old underworld saying:
You never worry about your enemies. It's your friends that bury you
.

I
n May 2013, Vito's former soldier Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito was in the early days of an eleven-year, seven-month sentence for conspiracy to import drugs and gangsterism when he testified at the trial of his wife, Adèle Sorella. She had been charged with the murders of their daughters, Sabrina and Amanda. There the gangster spoke of guilt and loss.

“I blame myself, I guess—yes,” Ponytail testified. “Maybe I could have been there. I could have done something, like a father should.”

He knew that Adèle was distraught over his lengthy absence while he was on the run from police. He had left the girls at home in her care. He had done the only thing that seemed to make sense, and still his world had exploded.

“How did you learn about the deaths of your daughters?” a prosecutor asked.

“Like everyone else, through the news,” De Vito said.

“Did you attend the funeral?”

“No. I was on the run.”

A pathologist told court the sisters may have been killed “gradually, slowly, gently” in the airtight hyperbaric chamber Ponytail had purchased to treat Sabrina's juvenile arthritis. In the end, his wife was convicted, and Ponytail's entire family was either dead or behind bars.

At the time of his testimony, Ponytail had been trying to get transferred from a protective unit to the general population at Donnacona, despite word that there was a contract out on his life. He was finally granted his request after calling upon his lawyer. A month after Adèle was found guilty, early in the morning of Sunday, July 7, guards were unable to revive De Vito when they found him unconscious in his cell. There was nothing around his neck and no marks on his body. He had been in good shape, as one might expect of someone who had burned off stress in a gym. Prison staff would have to wait for an autopsy to know what had happened.

Joseph (Big Joey) Massino appeared before U.S. district court judge Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 8, 2013, to say that he was sorry. That was the same judge who had sentenced Vito to his time in the Florence prison and the same judge who had once been the target of a Bonanno family murder plot.

“Every night I pray for forgiveness for all the people I hurt, especially the victims' families,” Big Joey said.

That would take considerable praying, since Big Joey was serving two life sentences for seven murder convictions and was also facing an outstanding murder charge, which took place after the federal death penalty had been reinstated. Perhaps Big Joey was particularly sorry now that a trip to death row was a possibility. Whatever the case, as he stood before the judge in his two-toned sweatsuit, the highest-ranking rat in the history of the North American underworld apologized.

The judge said he had no illusions about Massino's reasons for co-operating. That said, there was no questioning the results. “Quite simply, Mr. Massino may be the most important co-operator in the modern history of law enforcement efforts to prosecute the American Mafia,” the judge stated. “He has provided information about the highest levels of the Mafia, including testifying in open court, assisting dozens of investigations and helping lead to numerous additional arrests and convictions.” Then the judge commuted his two life sentences to time served and allowed the man who ratted on Vito to
disappear deep into a witness protection program, under a new name. The only proviso was that Big Joey was obliged to help prosecutors if they needed him in future cases. Vito already faced parole conditions should he return to the United States. Big Joey's ongoing relationship with American authorities was one more reason for Vito to stay out of the country.

With renewed confidence, Vito appeared in Saint-Léonard that summer, shaking the hands of old acquaintances and friends. There was a report of him dining in a downtown restaurant, and he was also seen teeing up on Montreal-area fairways. It was just eight months since he arrived back in Canada, after eight years in custody. The war for Montreal appeared to be almost won, just in time for golf season.

La Presse
reported that there was some understandable unease at his old Blainvillier Golf Club, which billed itself as “a place of peace and tranquility.” Vito still had a membership, a carry-over from when he played there in the 1990s. Since his return, he had played at least four times, including once in a foursome with Stefano Sollecito, son of lieutenant Rocco Sollecito. Vito had the reputation of being a good golf companion, and sometimes even a humorous one and a gentleman. Still, it was hard not to think of Smiling Joe Di Maulo. He had been a member there too and lived beside the course, until he was shot dead on his driveway.

As Vito took some time to savour his victories on the fairways, he knew he couldn't afford to get sloppy. He likely knew also that Salvatore (Sam) Calautti was one of five hundred guests attending a stag for a bookie at the Terrace Banquet Centre in Vaughan, Ontario, on the night of July 11. Stags are a chance for mobsters and folks from regular society, sometimes including politicians, to bump up against each other, double kiss each other on the cheek, and eat and drink. They're an opportunity to renew things with old friends and acquaintances, sometimes to betray them with false smiles and complimentary drinks. It was at such a function that Fernandez had posed triumphantly for photos with Vito, in happier times, before Vito turned assassins on him.

As usual, Calautti didn't travel alone when he went to the bookie's stag. He rode in his black BMW X6 with his long-time associate, James Tusek. At the age of thirty-five, Tusek had a violent reputation that included turning a baseball bat on one unfortunate soul. He had also been acquitted in the same marijuana grow-op as Calautti's friend Nick Cortese.

By the night of the stag, Calautti remained a suspect in five unsolved murders, including that of Nicolò Rizzuto. He must have trusted whoever walked up to him in the parking lot, within eyesight of the York Regional Police 4 District Headquarters, as the party wound down around one in the morning. The killer got up close before the gun came out and he opened fire, killing both men. “It's hard to think someone snuck up on him,” a police officer familiar with Calautti said. “Sam was the type of guy who always carried a gun.” Although there were still a hundred men at the stag, it took them some fifteen minutes to call 911, and by then the killer or killers were long gone. It was the mob's version of a public execution in the town square: a blunt assertion of its version of state power.

There was a time when GTA mob send-offs were impossible to miss, but on the morning of July 17 it would have been easy to drive past St. Margaret Mary Church on Islington Avenue and not take a second glance at the funeral of Salvatore Calautti. The modest turnout of 150 mourners certainly didn't compare to the January 1980 funeral of Michele (Mike) Racco, which snarled traffic along Toronto's St. Clair Avenue West for three kilometres after the elderly Mafioso died of cancer. Of course, Racco was a boss. Calautti was a murdered soldier whose killers were probably fixing on their next target.

Coincidentally, one of the grandest GTA underworld funerals in recent years was for a man that Calautti had killed: Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto. His mourners were defiant and appeared ready for a fight, if they could figure out whom to fight. The Discount Casket Guy was escorted to his final resting place by an estimated four dozen bikers on Harleys from the Para-Dice Riders, Vagabonds and Last Chance motorcycle clubs. There were no outlaw bikers in club colours at Calautti's low-key funeral, just a few scruffy men with tattoos. Only
one truck was needed to take his wreaths away, and it wasn't totally full.

“They all stayed away because they don't want to be associated with him,” said the police officer who knew Calautti. The funeral did draw waiters and banquet hall owners, which made sense, as Calautti ran an Italian restaurant. They got to hear that he wasn't all bad. Who is? His daughters got a chance to tell the assembled that he loved them and they loved him. Others privately said he was a stand-up guy, who once served jail time for a non-fatal shooting committed by a member of his crew. There was also talk that Calautti bragged about taking part in the Nicolò murder. Indiscreet bragging about Vito's family had cost Fernandez his life. As the mob hit man he was, Calautti ought to have known better.

Calautti's mourners included a GTA man who ran baccarat games for a local leader of the 'Ndrangheta. Almost all of Calautti's mourners were of Calabrian descent, and several were from the Niagara Region. That made sense too, since Calautti was a frequent patron of Casino Niagara. Pallbearers included long-time friend Kristopher Della-Pia, who appeared far less bulked up than back in 2001, when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic a controlled substance. That was when he was part of a gang that included former Toronto police detective constable Darin Cooper, who used his official police badge, revolver and body armour to rip off drug dealers. When the gang was busted, Cooper, a former steroid addict, was sentenced in 2001 to nine and a half years in prison, while Della-Pia received a four-year term.

Although Calautti worked for three of the GTA's seven 'Ndrangheta families, none of the heads of those families attended his funeral. One was on lifetime parole for murder, with parole conditions that barred him from associating with criminals. Another was an Italian-born man suspected in the murders of two of his brothers-in-law in Italy. One theory held that Calautti was set up for murder by local 'Ndrangheta members as a peace offering to Vito. Alternatively, it was a blunt message to whoever dispatched him to kill Vito's father.

It was easy to think that the next person murdered in the Toronto underworld would be well known. A week after Calautti's murder,
there were likely plenty of sweaty palms at a stag in the GTA for a Rizzuto in-law. As on Calautti's fateful night, there were Calabrian and Sicilian underworld guests. If Vito's enemies were plotting revenge, the stag would be a good time to strike. The evening passed peacefully, however. One of Vito's money managers and a senior member of the Commisso crime family had chosen not to attend. The money man had crossed over to the 'Ndrangheta side when Vito was in prison, while the senior Commisso was friendly with the Desjardins faction in Montreal. Not long ago, abandoning Vito seemed like a prudent choice for men focused on money and power. Now, it was a good way to get killed.

O
n July 1, 2013, Vito Rizzuto took possession of a home in the upscale Sainte-Dorothée district of western Laval, across the Rivière des Prairies from Montreal and, not surprisingly, close to a number of golf clubs. The cut-stone, executive-style residence wasn't really a step up from the old one on Antoine-Berthelet, but it was a move away from the street with so many sad memories and the unfortunate nickname Mafia Row.