Business or Blood (8 page)

“Is there any way of tracking, or knowing what happened?” the investor asks Rizzuto. “It's the briefcase inside it. It's killing me.”

Vito immediately phones Frank Arcadi.

“They stole a friend of mine's truck—a Jewish guy,” Vito tells his street boss. “See what you can do to find this truck. He is not interested in the truck; the bag is what interests him.”

The Cadillac was located before noon of that day and the thief was given $3,500 for his co-operation. Who was Vito to punish someone for committing a crime? The vehicle, with the briefcase intact, was returned promptly to the investor. The thief had an easy sale, albeit at a low price, and a grateful, powerful contact, while the investor was duly impressed.

For his efforts as a silent, controlling partner of the condo development, Vito charged 6 percent of monies paid in deals he negotiated. He was also allowed to buy five units there for a combined total of one dollar. Those condos, which had cost just twenty cents each, were then sold for $1.7 million. After taxes, Vito netted $1.6 million, a tidy profit even by his standards.

The condo project wasn't the only time Magi talked business with Vito. RCMP bugs at the Consenza Social Club picked up a call between Vito and Magi in August 2003. They are discussing a deal for
a patch of land at Décarie Boulevard and Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Luc. Magi tells Vito that he is standing with a Montreal city councillor and then tells the councillor that he is on the phone with “my partner Mike Sully.”

Magi refers to the municipal politician, telling Vito: “He'll help us with his support, what he can do is he's gonna help us get the zoning.”

“Yeah,” Vito replies.

“Okay,” Magi continues. “I just want to give you, to give you an update, what's going on and, you know, I told him we have the money ready to close, we just don't wanna close and get stuck with the piece of land, you know.”

At this point, Vito closes things down, switching to Italian. Even with the bogus name “Mike Sully,” he knows it's foolish to be speaking so openly. “Yeah,” Vito says. “Ma questo no lo devi dire più al telefono, Tony,” which translates to, “But this, you can't say it anymore on the phone, Tony.”

The Montreal newspaper
La Presse
reported that Nick Jr. was “placed” in various construction projects to monitor their progress for his father. The condo development was one of them. However, Magi once told the Montreal
Gazette
that the name Rizzuto had actually worked against Nick Jr. as Vito's eldest son tried to make his way in the development world.

“We had bought a piece of land together which we are developing,” Magi told the newspaper. “He's studied law and he's a smart kid. He's smart in real estate. The poor guy. He tries to do something in his life and, because of his family's past history, every time he turns around, he gets hit with something.”

Whatever law Nick Jr. had studied was outside of law school. Magi's remarks seemed more than a little disingenuous, considering the mob's python-like grip on construction projects in Montreal. It was a bit like saying that being a member of the Rothschild family hindered a man in the world of nineteenth-century European banking.

Whatever the case, Magi had troubles of his own. The year before Nick Jr.'s murder, he had barely escaped an attempt on his life by a gunman who opened fire on his Range Rover at a red light. The
shooting left him in a coma and it was six months before he could leave the hospital. After that, he travelled with a bodyguard in an armour-plated car.

If the condo development didn't hold the secret to Nick Jr.'s murder, perhaps the answer lay in recent firebombings of a dozen north and east Montreal Italian-run cafés and bars. With Vito in prison, café owners no longer knew who was receiving their extortion money. In 2008 and 2009, black street gangs from the east end of Montreal flexed their muscles and pushed into territories usually controlled by the Rizzutos, along Saint-Laurent Boulevard and in Rivière des Prairies. Throughout the course of 2008, someone lobbed Molotov cocktails into twenty-four Italian bars and cafés, and the number rose to twenty-eight in 2009. Not so long before, Vito and the street gangs had got along so well that there was only one protection payment necessary for café owners.

With Vito gone, that co-operation had been replaced by confusion and hatred. One member of Vito's group reportedly referred to the black gang members as “animals and monkeys that grow like mushrooms.” Frank Arcadi had particularly venomous relations with them. Arcadi was so crude and thoughtless, many believed the rumours that he couldn't read or write.

Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano was one exception in Vito's group. The gangster—who took his nickname from a prematurely white swath of hair on his head—had enjoyed a positive relationship with the Syndicate, a largely Haitian street gang run by Gregory Wooley, who also guided the Rockers, a Hells Angels support club. Giordano was a fit man with a tough reputation. That reputation was forever linked to an incident in a Saint-Laurent Boulevard bar, when a heroin dealer disrespected him. Skunk opened fire on the man's groin and left him so terrified he didn't co-operate with police or seek revenge. On another occasion, in a Peel Street restaurant, Giordano was so offended by a man—a man with links to the Hells Angels, no less—that he went outside and pumped a bullet into the man's Porsche. The man was likely relieved that Skunk didn't blast him in the groin too.

In a January 1, 2005, conversation intercepted by police, Skunk Giordano was overheard bragging to Arcadi and rising mob soldier
Domenico Macri about the rush he got administering a sound beating on an unidentified man: “We gave it good.… And boom, boom, boom. I made his face like this and he couldn't even stay in the bar. We cleaned up his face and brought him in his car.… Then he called and he says give me two weeks and I'll give you the money.” Unfortunately for Vito's crime family, Skunk Giordano was out of commission for the foreseeable future, after being pinched in November 2006 for Colisée-related charges.

At the time of Nick Jr.'s murder, almost all of the remaining leadership of the family was behind bars because of the RCMP bugs and tiny cameras hidden in the walls of the Consenza Social Club during Project Colisée. While Vito's Mafia group remained atop the national crime pyramid, those bugs had it sitting upon a dangerously teetering perch. Street gangs had more members than any other class of criminal organization in Quebec, including bikers and the mob. Where street gangs in other provinces were often made up of listless kids with guns and lousy aim, in Montreal the gangs included members in their forties and fifties. The gangs also had far less structure than the bikers or the Mafia, who met regularly and had clear-cut divisions of power. To understand the gangs, you had to understand the idiosyncrasies of key personalities, and toss aside any notion of predictability.

In the absence of Arcadi and Giordano, there was talk that the Mafia offered to share turf with the Bloods street gang but that the Bloods balked. The unprecedented attacks on the north Montreal cafés escalated. Unless something happened soon to stem the tide of disrespect, it was easy to wonder how long it would be until the city's Mafiosi were reduced to glorified street-gang members themselves.

A
midst all the chaos and killing in Vito's world, street-gang boss Ducarme Joseph set out to sell some high-end women's clothing. He owned a boutique at 240 Saint-Jacques Street in Old Montreal called Flawnego, short for “Flawlessness Never Goes.” The pillars of century-old banks around Flawnego called to mind the classical architecture of ancient Greece. Less than five minutes up Saint-Jacques was the Palais de Justice courthouse, another classically inspired place all too familiar to Joseph, who was out on $50,000 bail for assault charges related to a beating at the Buona Notte nightclub on Saint-Laurent Boulevard and for possessing a firearm silencer.

Joseph had come a long way to the world of haute couture since the mid-1980s, when he first appeared on the police radar, and the path to the Flawnego was rumoured to include the murder of Nick Rizzuto Jr. Joseph and Guyanese newcomer Richard Ogilvie (Ritchie Rich) Goodridge had co-founded a street gang called the 67's, named for the bus route in their Saint-Michel neighbourhood. The 67's fell upon internal strife, marked by murder attempts, and somewhere along the line Goodridge and Joseph morphed into businessmen and mortal enemies.

Two decades later, Goodridge and his Blue/Crips street-gang members sometimes sported silver chains with a six-pointed Star of David. There was no great symbolism to the star; it just looked cool. For his
part, Joseph wore a T-shirt with a one percent symbol to show his connection to the Hells Angels' Montreal Nomads chapter. The Hells Angels didn't allow black members, but there were no such restrictions for its support clubs such as the Rockers or the Scorpions. The fact that Goodridge and Greg Wooley could belong to both the Rockers and a black street gang at the same time just showed how much more complicated things were becoming in the organized crime world.

Goodridge wasn't a huge man, at 175 pounds and standing five foot ten, but he was solid as a linebacker and someone to be taken seriously as he cruised about in his Hummer H2, Range Rover or Mercedes sedan. His clout extended into Ontario, both to the streets of Toronto and to the well-travelled drug-smuggling channel of the Akwesasne reserve on the St. Lawrence River, where Goodridge successfully collected gambling debts. He had been the target of an attempted hit in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough shortly after noon on November 10, 2004, when a black Maxima pulled up beside his silver Mercedes and someone inside opened fire, tearing off part of Goodridge's finger. Asked by police what had just happened, he dismissed the shootout as a random attack by a stranger who coveted his jewellery.

Life wasn't any calmer for Goodridge's friends. On March 10, 2005, Rizzuto family enforcer Mike (Big Mike) Lapolla dropped by the Moomba Supper Club in Laval's Chomedey district, a Latin nightspot that prided itself on “sober and chic décor, voluptuous forms and pure lines” and “a zen environment without pretension.” Also there after midnight for some zen-inspired socializing was Goodridge's associate Thierry Beaubrun of the 67's.

There had been tensions between Lapolla and Beaubrun a few nights earlier at another club, and both men carried tough reputations and serious firepower. Lapolla ran a transport company from his home, but his real money came from the Rizzutos. He had been convicted of cocaine trafficking and was considered muscle for the mob family. Beaubrun, a regular at downtown clubs and strip bars, was facing armed robbery and assault charges.

It was about two-thirty in the morning when the shooting started. Big Mike fell bleeding on the dance floor as Beaubrun and some two
hundred patrons rushed to safety. In the stampede, someone in the parking lot opened fire on Beaubrun, making him the night's second fatality.

The next day, hidden police microphones at the Consenza caught Rizzuto family bosses trying to divine what had happened. Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito hoped the violence was an isolated incident. His son, Giuseppe (Joe), wasn't so optimistic, saying the black street-gang members were “not people you can sit down and reason with … they are animals.”

Skunk Giordano, who had been present at the Moomba the night of the shootings, told the Consenza crowd that Big Mike “had no chance.” Paolo Renda cautioned Giordano to be careful of overdrinking and to avoid shootouts that might “attract attention.” It was clear that things would get worse before they got any better. “There will be blood,” Giuseppe Sollecito said (two years before the Paul Thomas Anderson movie
There Will Be Blood
, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, made the expression a part of popular culture).

Attacks on the Rizzutos' crime family escalated. On May 25, 2005, luxury car dealer Frank Martorana was dragged from a Saint-Léonard barbershop on Jean-Talon Street East in broad daylight by four men, pistol-whipped and forced into a sport-utility vehicle. The barbershop was a place where Martorana should have felt secure, as it was just a few minutes' drive from the Consenza Social Club. Martorana was clearly a Rizzuto man, although not a high-ranking one. He had once pleaded guilty to taking part in a luxury auto theft ring that lifted high-end cars in Montreal, and his record included convictions for rolling back the odometers of used cars for sale. His tastes for the finer things in criminal life also ran to art, and he had another criminal conviction for taking part in the theft of fifteen paintings from a Montreal art gallery.

It wasn't the first time someone had targeted the car salesman to make a point with the Rizzutos. In July 2001, Vito's former drug-smuggling partner Christian Deschênes and an accomplice were arrested by police as they approached the Consenza Social Club, attempting to collect what Deschênes felt was a $2-million debt owed to him by
Martorana and Arcadi. Deschênes had learned to weld in prison, and police later learned that he'd put those skills to use constructing zoo-like cages for the two Rizzuto associates. Secretly recorded conversations revealed that Deschênes was even willing to escalate the violence to Vito: “You know, I'm telling you this, you know, even Vito, he could get involved in this.” All of this was well known in the
milieu
, and so an attack on Martorana was a symbolic attack on Vito himself.

When Martorana reappeared six days after his May 2005 kidnapping, he had nothing to say to police, beyond declaring himself safe and sound. Vito's people would take care of things on their own, without police interference, but it wasn't going to be easy.

The two masked gunmen would have walked past the stylized red LOVE sculpture in front of the neighbouring L'Hôtel around 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, March 18, 2010. The sound of ever-present construction workers creating new condo units on the grand old street may have briefly disguised the noise of the fifty bullets they sprayed into Flawnego, but afternoon shoppers and tourists were quickly sprinting for cover. Falling dead amidst the designer dresses were 27-year-old Peter Christopoulos, one of Ducarme Joseph's many bodyguards, and sixty-year-old store manager Jean Gaston, Ducarme's uncle. One of Joseph's friends and an electrician's apprentice survived, despite injuries. In the confusion, Joseph escaped out the back door. The attack marked at least the fourth time he had escaped a murder attempt.