Also walking free that summer was Desjardins’s old associate Salvatore Cazzetta, one of the few outlaw bikers without a nickname. Cazzetta was a founder of the Rock Machine Motorcycle Club, along with his younger brother Giovanni. Even with his greying ponytail and ZZ Top–style goatee, Salvatore Cazzetta had a keen business sense and natural leadership ability. He also had very few enemies for an outlaw biker leader, especially one whose club had waged a bloody, prolonged war with the Hells Angels in the late 1990s and early 2000s for control of the downtown Montreal cocaine trade. He had spent most of the war behind bars in Florida, meaning he hadn’t been trying to kill Hells Angels and Hells Angels hadn’t been trying to kill him.
Cazzetta had been close to Quebec Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher in the early 1980s. Back then, both were members of the SS, a small outlaw biker gang that cast a big shadow in the east end of the island of Montreal. Boucher moved on to the Hells Angels, and les Hells would have been happy to give Cazzetta one of their winged skull “death head” patches as well, but he declined. Cazzetta may have been dissuaded by a dispute between the Lennoxville and Laval charters of the club. The Lennoxville Angels suspected the Laval bikers of partying hard with drugs that were meant for sale. So Lennoxville invited members of Laval to a party—and then beat them to death with ball-peen hammers. Two months later, the decomposing bodies of five Laval Angels surfaced in the St. Lawrence River, wrapped in sleeping bags. Cazzetta reportedly considered the slaughter of fellow members to be an unforgivable breach of the biker code of brotherhood. To his mind, biker brotherhood was a forever thing, and his Rock Machine wore rings bearing their motto, À La Vie À La Mort, roughly translating to, “As We Live, So We Shall Die.”
As Cazzetta returned to the milieu, Boucher—who had never lost his respect for Cazzetta—was gone and Vito was leaving. Cazzetta had a lot in common with Vito. He had strength, charisma and contacts. He had the diplomatic skills to find consensus between groups that gladly killed over trivial differences. And most of all, Cazzetta thought big when it came to money-making.
The bust that kept him out of the Quebec biker wars in the nineties stemmed from his role in a ring that tried to import 4,900 kilograms of cocaine into Canada through the States at a rate of 998 kilograms a month. A member of Cazzetta’s ring turned police agent and introduced the biker to an undercover drug enforcement officer in Florida, who posed as an intermediary for Colombian cocaine traffickers. The undercover officer arranged to show Cazzetta and his confederates 1,000 kilos of cocaine, which he offered for $10,000 per kilo. Even on Florida’s drug-washed streets, that was a first. Never before had so much cocaine been shown to suspects in a sting. Such a tactic would have been considered entrapment, and illegal, in Canada.
When the arrest warrants were drawn up, Cazzetta was nowhere to be found. He remained that way for fourteen months, before police finally caught up with him in May 1994 at a pit-bull farm in Fort Erie, Ontario, along the American border near Buffalo. Police actually had him in their grasp a month earlier, when he was pulled over in the Niagara Region for suspected drunk driving. It wasn’t until police later checked his fingerprints that they realized who had just slipped through their grasp.
Cazzetta was transferred back to Quebec from Florida in 2002. When he was deposited at Archambault penitentiary, he quickly got involved in the drug trade, although, to his credit, he didn’t use intimidation or threats. His prison file stated that he wasn’t a particularly impulsive or aggressive person, but displayed anti-social traits such as narcissism and passive-aggression. In a description that could apply equally to many of us, his prison file also said he valued personal gratification over the greater social good. All of this made him a strong candidate to reoffend.
In June 2004, Cazzetta was up for automatic release from prison. It must have felt good, since Florida authorities had sought a life term for him less than a decade before. On his way out the door, he told the parole board that he wasn’t a violent man and that his Rock Machine wasn’t intended to be a criminal organization, but simply a group of entrepreneurs who sold clothing and biker accessories in boutiques. He vaguely told the board that he now intended to go into business, and blamed his involvement in the drug trade on his own personal chemical problems, when he took “a little of everything and alcohol.… I wanted to get rich quick. That’s what got me into trouble.”
In June 2005, another of Desjardins’s associates was released from prison after a decade behind bars for his own cocaine-smuggling plot. That month, Desjardins attended a party at the Jaguar bar for Giovanni (Johnny) Bertolo. Like Cazzetta, he had proven solid in the face of serious prison time. Before his cocaine bust, Bertolo had worked with Desjardins’s brother Jacques as a loan shark, putting out money on the street with 10 percent weekly interest to struggling business people and degenerate gamblers. He didn’t soften after he was the target of a murder plot in the 1990s, and his would-be killer was arrested before he could do the job. When Bertolo felt the cold steel of handcuffs on his wrists two days before Christmas 1992—busted for a scheme to import fifty-eight kilograms of cocaine—he could have pointed a finger at men whom police would much rather have had in their net: Raynald Desjardins and other higher-ups in the Rizzuto food chain, Vito included. Instead, Bertolo quietly took the fall, as a solid guy does.
Upon his release, Bertolo was shocked to learn that his old drug turf was gone. Frank Arcadi had handed it over to someone else in Vito’s organization. That was understandable. Business had to continue. Addicts want their drugs. Mobsters want their profits. What shocked Bertolo was the news that he wouldn’t be getting it back. So much for loyalty. So much for keeping his mouth shut and protecting Vito. Compounding the insult, Arcadi made no accommodation to give him something else in return. No one said life in the underworld was fair, but sometimes it sucked more than others.
Bertolo’s criminal record didn’t stop him from finding work as a union representative for a district council within the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ). A cynic might quip that the nasty criminal record looked good on his curriculum vitae in the building trades. (Quebec is hardly a distinct society in terms of corruption, though it might be unique in Canada in its willingness to expose corruption and use anti-gang legislation to fight it.) Bertolo’s new job involved dropping in on construction sites to make sure collective agreements were being respected. By all reports, he was good at the job and put in long hours. Still, the feeling that he had been cheated festered inside him, and soon there was word that Bertolo was moon-lighting by moving drugs on his old turf, in defiance of Arcadi.
On August 11, 2006, Bertolo was leaving a gym on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard East in Rivière des Prairies. The forty-six-year-old had plans to fly to Italy with his son later that day. Before he could step into his black BMW X5 SUV, a hail of bullets ended his life. The hit was clearly a professional job, carried out by three men who fled in a stolen Mazda Protegé. It was abandoned on Marc-Aurèle-Fortin Boulevard, torched in typical Montreal gangland style.
There was some talk that Bertolo’s murder had been ordered by Vito’s group but carried out by Colombians. It did have a certain Colombian signature, with a spray of bullets to the legs followed by fatal shots in the chest and throat. The Colombians were freer with their lead distribution than old-school Montreal mobsters, who often did their deadly jobs with three shots or fewer. Shortly after Bertolo’s death, a representative of the New York Bonanno family arrived in Montreal. Whatever that meant, it was hard not to see the hand of Vito’s organization in Bertolo’s hit, as the body wasn’t handled by the Complexe Funéraire Loreto funeral home, as befitted a good soldier for the family.
News of the murder enraged Desjardins, who considered Bertolo a personal friend. It was also an ear-popping wake-up call. If this was the treatment a once-solid soldier could expect from Vito’s group, what sort of man wouldn’t fight back?
CHAPTER 9
Unravelling
; Vito had been in custody awaiting extradition for only a few months when things started to go horribly wrong in Toronto. As if being locked up in a Montreal jail wasn’t trouble enough, he was about to endure more grief, and much of it would arrive through the misbehaviour of Sicilian mobster Michele (The American) Modica and Toronto restaurateur Salvatore (Sam) Calautti.
Wherever he landed, Modica proved to be a big money-earner and a consummate management challenge. In the 1980s, he worked for the Gambino family while living illegally in the USA, until he was pinched for drug trafficking. He faced deportation in 2000 after his prison stint and the Gambinos tried hard to find a way to keep him in their ranks. Some men can quietly hide, but Modica was too loud, well known and abrasive to fade into the background. So the Gambinos worked out an arrangement with the Sicilian mob in Toronto and Modica headed north, where he would live for a year under the names Carlo Martoni and Antonio Reta. Vito’s associate, blue-eyed Peter Scarcella of York Region, just north of Toronto, took him under his wing and floated him $300,000. The idea was for Modica to put the money out on the street for loans, and things would have gone swimmingly had Modica simply stuck to the plan. Instead of pumping his grubstake into loansharking, which promised a stable monthly return of $30,000, Modica invested in the drug trade, with potentially much higher rewards but equally higher risks.
Eventually Modica had screwed over Scarcella and most of his other Canadian hosts, as was his way. Bit by bit, he muscled his way into debt collection, drug trafficking and running illegal gambling machines, and seemed to think it was his birthright to rip off and even slap some small-time local mobsters.
Understandably, few tears were shed across the GTA underworld when Modica’s Canadian adventure went sour. On June 19, 2001, police charged him with possession of stolen property. He volunteered to go back to Italy at his own expense in return for a stay in proceedings of the outstanding charges.
To all concerned, Modica’s compromise seemed too good to be true. It was. In April 2003, he snuck back into Canada using a forged passport and quickly re-established himself with Michael Marrese, a round-faced, avuncular-looking man who specialized in stealing people’s homes through mortgage fraud. Modica also felt a bond with Sam Calautti, and the feeling was mutual. Calautti had a split personality of sorts. Diners at his Italian restaurant on Dufferin Street in west-end Toronto would have been shaken to learn that the same soft-spoken man who gloried in serving them such tasty comfort food was also a hit man who revelled in inflicting extreme pain on the streets.
Calautti’s big weakness was gambling, and whatever he won, he quickly lost. Some of his bigger losses came online through Platinum SportsBook, a Canadian-run, multi-million-dollar sports betting enterprise that linked Vito’s group, York Region mobsters, independent criminals and some London, Ontario, Hells Angels. Platinum SB had an offshore server in Costa Rica, but local thugs collected its debts. Often, it was other thugs who were running into debt problems. In fact, Calautti owed Platinum about $200,000. He dealt with it like his friend Modica would: Calautti told his creditors to go fuck themselves.
Calautti sat beneath Modica in the mob pecking order, meaning that Modica bore ultimate responsibility for the lesser’s conduct and debts. It wasn’t just that Calautti was taking Platinum SB’s money; his refusal to pay up was making all the organizations involved in running it, and Vito himself, look as if they couldn’t handle him. If Calautti wasn’t made to pay up, others could be expected to shrug off their debts too. A string of meetings followed, in which senior mobsters resembled harried schoolteachers trying to decide what to do with a particularly troublesome student. Gambinos from New York City came up to York Region for some of the meetings, including one on April 9, 2004, that drew some thirty men to the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Woodbridge. Modica arrived with two mobsters from New York and another from Ottawa. He proposed at the meeting that Calautti just pay the principal on the gambling debt and not the interest. But Calautti argued that he had already covered this and refused to pay anything more. Suspicions emerged in the room that Calautti was telling the truth, and that in fact Modica had taken Calautti’s money and pumped it into a drug deal, screwing over both Calautti and his creditors.
The mob diplomats made every effort to reason with Modica, but in the end it was futile. Scarcella, who had been asked to loan out even more since the original $300,000, stepped away from the man he had once hosted and sponsored. Marrese’s driver, Raffaele Delle Donne, later said he heard about what had gone on from attendees at the hotel summit: “Scarcella [was not] told the whole truth … and Mike Modica asked Scarcella to help him out … and at that point Scarcella is saying at the hotel that he washed his hands … basically that he wanted nothing to do with Mike Modica.” According to Delle Donne, “Uh, after the meeting was over, this is what … I didn’t see it but I heard that uh, [Platinum official] Mark [Peretz] … and uh, his bodyguard [Paris Christoforou of the Hells Angels] I guess … kicked [Modica] in the face and put a … gun in his mouth.” Delle Donne said that Modica responded with threats of killing Scarcella, Peretz, Christoforou and others in their circle, with the ungodly phrase “clean house.”
Later that month, Modica was out looking for an evening snack and stopped in at a shop called California Sandwiches in north Toronto. With him were Michael Marrese and Sicilian bodyguards Andrea Fortunato Carbone and Pietro Scaduto. These guys were serious protection befitting a tense time. Carbone was eluding Italian charges for shooting a police officer in Sicily, while Scaduto was the son of a murdered mob boss whose name still carried weight in Bagheria, nineteen kilometres outside Palermo.
A van cruised by the sandwich shop and three dozen bullets were fired inside. Modica, Carbone and Scaduto each drew nine-millimetre handguns but fled out the restaurant’s back door without firing a shot in return. When the shooting stopped, Louise Russo, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, lay on the floor paralyzed.
Up to that point in Toronto, the Mafia had thrived in large measure because it didn’t draw attention. Great pains had been taken to avoid blood on the streets, as this invariably brought headlines and pressure on police and authorities to crack down on crime groups. Far better to allow politicians to pretend the Mafia didn’t exist.
At the time of the California Sandwiches shooting, the Ontario Hells Angels had also been making a massive effort to distance themselves from the bloody, warlike image of their Quebec brothers. They had even taken out a billboard overlooking Toronto’s heavily travelled Don Valley Parkway, likening themselves to war veterans and guardians of liberty. All of that public relations work was ruined in a matter of seconds with a hail of thirty bullets.
Modica knew his would-be killers wouldn’t stop at a single botched attempt. When strangers approached him near Queens Quay at the Toronto lakeshore, he dropped to the sidewalk and clutched his chest. When they told Modica that he was under arrest and not about to be murdered, his apparent heart problems abated and he got up on his feet.
On May 21, 2004, Modica was deported once again to Italy. Distance didn’t cool his fury or his lust for revenge on Scarcella, his one-time sponsor. For all his own lying and cheating, Modica believed that he was the victim. Delle Donne later told police that he’d heard Modica wanted revenge on Scarcella, Peretz and Calautti. One plan was to kill Scarcella, an avid soccer fan, when he attended the Euro 2004 soccer championships in Portugal. It didn’t jell, but there would be other chances. In Modica’s world, a vendetta need not be rushed.
It came as no surprise that such spasms of underworld tension increased when Vito went behind bars. This situation called to mind comments made decades earlier by Palmina Puliafito, sister of mobster brothers Vic (The Egg), Frank (The Big Guy) and Giuseppe (Pep) Cotroni, to journalist Joe Marrazzo on the May 4, 1980, edition of Italian national television’s Dossier program. She spoke proudly of relative peace when Vic the Egg was on the streets. “When my brother was in jail, someone was shot here every day,” the Egg’s sister said. �
�My brother was not here and they all felt they were the boss. When he’s around, he always puts peace ahead.”
Her words had a prophetic ring midway through 2005, as Vito’s world felt ready to explode. Mobsters from Granby, Quebec, a small city east of Montreal, felt ripped off by Vito’s group after an $11-million marijuana-smuggling operation was derailed. At the centre of the hostilities was an enigmatic strip club operator named Sergio (Grizzly, Big Guy) Piccirilli. Once a gunsmith in the Canadian Forces, he had returned to Saint-Léonard to work as a driver and muscle in the Rizzuto group. There was a story that he had fallen afoul of some of Vito’s people when he refused to kill a woman and a child over a drug debt, and that he then shifted over to the Granby mob. Grizzly Piccirilli was neither a biker nor a Mafioso, but he did have connections in both camps, including Salvatore Cazzetta and relatives of Paolo Violi in Hamilton.
Some of Piccirilli’s influence came from his girlfriend. Her name was Sharon Simon, but the press loved to call her “the Queen of Kanesatake” or “Smuggling Queen-pin”—she’d been previously convicted for cannabis production and smuggling tobacco and cigars, among other things—and she was the focus of a massive police operation named, in her honour, Project Cleopatra. Simon lived in a luxury home/bunker with a three-car garage on Simon Street in the Kanesatake Mohawk community fifty kilometres west of Montreal. Neighbours sometimes heard popping sounds from her backyard, as the Queen-pin undertook target practice on tin cans with an AK-47 assault rifle.
In a male-dominated milieu, Simon’s connections were formidable, including links to the Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières Hells Angels and former members of the Magog municipal police. In the world of marijuana trafficking, she was a bulk distributor, moving some forty-five kilograms of Quebec-grown marijuana to the United States per week, mostly by truck at crossings between Coaticook, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and Cornwall, Ontario. When Piccirilli told her he’d heard that Vito’s group had a contract out on him, she grabbed him an AK-47 out of her car.
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