Business or Blood (37 page)

Pereira told the Charbonneau Commission that Dupuis wasn't shy about his rough connections. On Dupuis's wall was a photo of union organizer Giovanni Bertolo, the former drug trafficker for Vito's group and the victim of a gangland murder. “He [Dupuis] made it known that the FTQ was his family, but that he had another … the Hells or the Mafia,” Pereira testified.

When Pereira became disenchanted with what he was seeing, he broke into an FTQ accountant's office and scooped up six months' worth of expenses filed by Dupuis. He said he was offered a Mercedes for his silence, but declined.

While Vito was in prison, Desjardins seemed to think he was the boss of FTQ-Construction. Perhaps this is what Desjardins meant when, upon his release from prison, he spoke of becoming a construction entrepreneur. Pereira spoke of meeting Desjardins at a brunch,
with ten goons standing guard at the door. As he recalled before the commission, Desjardins told him: “Listen, Ken, I don't know if you know me, but I did eleven years in jail. I kept my mouth shut, I did my time and that's the way it should be.”

Next, Pereira said, Desjardins addressed the obvious tensions between Pereira and Dupuis, saying that he could get Dupuis removed from his job. Desjardins was intent on ending the union infighting as “we've got more important business to do.”

It was then, Pereira testified, that he felt a jolt of fear and clarity: “At that moment, I discovered that Jocelyn Dupuis, who I thought was the boss, wasn't the boss. Raynald Desjardins was the boss.”

As the Charbonneau testimony ground on, Montreal imposed new ethics codes for city employees. The price of public contracts dipped and new players finally won bids for city work. Still, the construction world hardly seemed a safe place for innocents, and there was talk of intimidation taking the place of bribery.

Certainly, police and government couldn't be trusted to make things right. Confidence in policing dipped on October 5, 2013, with the arrest of Benoit Roberge, a retired Sûreté du Québec biker expert, after investigators learned he was selling highly confidential intelligence to bikers. Roberge wasn't just someone who had handled sensitive witness protection files. He was also married to a top organized crime prosecutor and went to work for Revenu Québec in March 2013. Police offices were scanned for hidden microphones. Computer databases and reports were studied to see who had been reading them. A senior SQ officer even voluntarily took a polygraph test to show that he wasn't an underworld mole.

Good cops fell under suspicion while bad cops remained in the shadows. A veteran Montreal police investigator who specialized in organized crime and who had cultivated a string of informants was quietly transferred away from his organized crime files and computers that could give him access to sensitive cases involving the
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. That officer had been a witness against major crimes investigator Mario Lambert when Lambert was found guilty of funnelling information from police databases to criminals.

If authorities really wanted to stop corruption, they didn't have to study the actions just of Vito and his associates. They would have to take a harder look at themselves.

I
f you must live in exile, there are far worse places than the resorts and warm sands of Acapulco, Mexico. For Moreno Gallo, there was also the comforting presence of many of his contacts in the Canadian mob. Most of the Ontario
camera di controllo
maintained businesses or vacation homes in Acapluco. Despite the resort town's warm charms and familiar faces, though, the millionaire baker still missed Montreal, and talked of plans to move north to rejoin his wife and sons. His desire to return raised eyebrows, as back home men considered disloyal to Vito were falling at a steady pace.

In Mexico, Gallo took frequent trips to the Forza Italia pizzeria in a tourist area near the beach on the Costera Miguel Alemán. The food and the coffee were to the baker's liking, and the owner was a friend. So it wasn't surprising that the exiled Mafioso was there on the evening of Sunday, November 10, 2013, looking casual in white pants and a pink polo shirt with white stripes. Forza Italia is an often-bustling place, although Sunday nights are calmer. No one paid much attention when a thin man in black entered around 9:40 p.m. Perhaps customers and staff thought he was reaching for his wallet when his hand moved towards his waistband.

Gallo sat near the entrance, so it took only a few strides before the thin man was directly behind him. He pumped nine shots from his
nine-millimetre pistol into Gallo's back and head, ignoring the panicked customers and staff. Then the stranger disappeared quietly into the warm evening. There's no doubt that, back in Montreal, Vito was thinking of his father as Gallo lay freshly dead on the floor. It was three years minus a day since Nicolò was shot dead in front of Vito's sister and mother.

Vito's enemies kept dying as the Christmas season of 2013 approached. On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 18, someone took a break from the season's festivities to shoot Roger Valiquette to death beside his black Mercedes SUV, in the parking lot of a St-Hubert restaurant in the Chomedey district of Laval.

He was less than three kilometres from the office of his mortgage brokerage. Despite a criminal record for cocaine trafficking and active mob associations, Valiquette somehow still had a permit from the Office of Consumer Protection to loan money as an “alternative” lender. He also owned ATMs and was involved with Desjardins in the soil decontamination business.

At the time of his murder, Valiquette faced charges for death threats and assault with a firearm. He must have known he was in danger of not living to his trial date. His partner in real estate development was convicted cocaine trafficker Tonino Callocchia, who had survived five bullets in a similar murder attempt in another Laval restaurant parking lot on February 1. Valiquette had also been close to Joe Di Maulo and Moreno Gallo. All three men were enemies of Vito, and all three assassinations remained unsolved.

Just because Vito likely had reason to want Valiquette dead didn't mean that he ordered the hit. Valiquette had plenty of other enemies in the
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. At the time of his murder, he was vying for control of the Rivière des Prairies territory in Montreal, which had previously been controlled by Ponytail De Vito. Remants of Ponytail's old group opposed Valiquette's push into their territory. The surest way to keep him out was to fill him with bullets.

Ponytail's name was back in the news that December, after the
coroner's office finally completed its investigation into his death. That work had been delayed as coroner's office resources had been diverted to the fiery train derailment that took forty-seven lives in Lac-Mégantic in July. Ponytail's autopsy showed that he died from cyanide poisoning. How the lethal drug was smuggled into maximum-security Donnacona Institution remained a mystery, although Ponytail had orchestrated plots to smuggle drugs and cellphones into the Rivière des Prairies detention centre when he was an inmate there. It also wasn't clear if Ponytail's death was a murder or suicide.

It wouldn't have been the first time the mob turned to cyanide. Prolific New Jersey mob hit man Richard (The Iceman) Kuklinski claimed to have taken more than one hundred lives, sometimes with cyanide. Men like Kuklinski knew that the chemical compound quickly dissipated from a body and required an experienced and alert pathologist to detect it. A cup of coffee spiked with cyanide had been used to murder imprisoned financier Michele Sindona in 1986 in Italy. He was believed to be on the verge of exposing government ties to the Mafia and the Masonic Lodge, and exposing details of the murder of bank director Roberto Calvi under a London bridge, at the time he sipped from the fatal cup.

In the fourteen months since his return to Canada, Vito had clearly put revenge ahead of business. One man who met Vito in the Toronto area during the second half of 2013 remarked that he had the bullet eyes of a stone-cold killer. His work was far from over, as at least a half-dozen of his enemies were still believed to be targeted for death. This all-consuming lust for vengeance upset many of Vito's former associates, including influential people in the construction industry. The continuing scrutiny of the Charbonneau Commission meant that the mob had to scramble to regain contacts in industry and government. It was a job Vito could have handled, had he not been preoccupied with bloodletting on an epic scale. The
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had never needed a clear mind for industry more than it did now, but the undisputed CEO of the Canadian underworld was suddenly bad for business.

S
urveillance officers trailed Vito at a discreet distance in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2013. He looked happy and younger than his sixty-seven years as he bounced from bar to restaurant to bar wishing old contacts the best of the season. Perhaps he had some special holiday surprise planned for his mother, wife, children and grandchildren. Maybe he was just happy to be alive.

Vito routinely returned home at 2 a.m. This was just as it had been in his younger days, when he held court in corner tables of the city's best bars and restaurants, accepting drinks as tributes until he was tipsy by the wee hours of the morning. All appeared well through the evening of Saturday, December 21, until Giovanna found him unconscious on the floor of their new home after midnight.

Vito was confused and feverish when rushed by his family to Sacré-Coeur hospital in the Cartierville district suffering from what appeared to be lung complications. It was the same hospital where his father had been treated just a few years ago while a prisoner at the Bordeaux Prison. The hospital was overbooked that night, but Vito was admitted without debate. Despite the hour, friends and family gathered to wish him well and there was a collective sigh of relief with news that Vito's health appeared to be improving. Then, just an hour later, as he lay in bed surrounded by family, Vito's heart stopped for good.

Hospital officials attributed death to natural causes, then refused to elaborate. Reports surfaced that he'd had aggressive lung cancer, most likely brought on by years of smoking, and that he had contracted pneumonia. Stories followed that he'd chosen to delay cancer treatments so that he could spend the holidays with his family.

Such was Vito's world that it was more puzzling that he died of reportedly natural causes than if he had been the victim of an assassin. There had been no rumours or signs of his declining health, as would be expected from cancer. If anything, he appeared robust, closing down restaurants and bars like a man decades younger. He also appeared to have gained weight when he returned from the Dominican Republic a month earlier.

Since Vito hadn't taken out a government health card, it was tough to chart his medical history. He did complain of a lung ailment when he was sentenced in New York back in 2007, but his medical checkup on his way back into Canada in 2012 didn't show any serious medical problems. It wouldn't have been too difficult to slip something into one of his many drinks, like the cyanide that ended Ponytail De Vito's life. But Vito's death would remain a mystery: within hours of his passing, it was announced that there would be no autopsy.

There were no tears in some quarters of southern Ontario. Believing that Vito had a list of at least another half-dozen enemies marked for death, one Woodbridge cannoli maker was said to have donned a bulletproof vest immediately after Vito's release from prison and then started taking extended vacations.

No obituary was written for the website of the Rizzuto-owned Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard, but none was necessary. Hundreds lined up in the cold for his visitation, while others drove directly into the underground parking of the ultra-modern funeral facility. This convenience was appreciated by visitors who preferred to stay away from police and press cameras. Some guests arrived after regular visitation hours.

Greeting them all, and appearing very much the man in charge, was Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito. He had visited Ontario at least a half-dozen times in the months before Vito's death, so he was familiar with many
of the out-of-province guests. Some respected him for his muscle, others for his business sense. Some of the mourners he welcomed arrived in a chartered bus, like the one used for Paolo Cuntrera's wedding anniversary in 2011.

Among those paying their respects was Rock Machine founder Salvatore Cazzetta, who was on parole for a massive cigarette-smuggling operation through the Kahnawake reserve. Cazzetta was now wearing a Hells Angels patch and was considered by many to be the top member of
les Hells
who wasn't behind bars. At fifty-six years of age, he looked every inch the old-school biker, with his mane of grey hair and arms full of tattoos. Also paying their respects were street-gang member Gregory Wooley, representatives from the New York mob and a group of men who arrived in a van with a Mohawk Warriors flag.

Other visitors included members of the old Cotroni family and the Ontario 'Ndrangheta. There was an impressive number of floral bouquets, including at least one bearing the word
Nonno
and another with
Farewell my friend
, but none was larger than the one sent by the Ontario Hells Angels.

The funeral was set for Église Notre-Dâme-de-la-Défense in Little Italy, the same historic church in which Vito's family held ceremonies for Nick Jr. and Nicolò, and which had been the site of so many funerals in the
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before, including for the Violi brothers.

At the church doors, mourners in long black overcoats and furs were asked by security guards if they were friends of the family before they were allowed inside. Vito's ceremony was simple, with an organist, violinist, trumpet player and small operatic choir. Mass was conducted entirely in Italian, but there was no eulogy. Vito didn't feel the need to explain himself in life and no one from his inner circle felt the need to justify him now that he lay at the front of the room in a coffin. When there was doubt about what to say, silence had always remained the best option.