Business or Blood

by Peter Edwards

  Cortese lasted one night in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison, where prisoners had treated Nicolò with such respect just a short time before. Cortese then pleaded with corrections staff to be transferred. Fast. There were a number of Rizzuto men from the Colisée roundup on the same cellblock range and he wanted to be at a safe distance from them. He was quickly dispatched to safer quarters.

  In the hours before Nicolò’s funeral, someone left a black box with a white cross taped on it on the steps of Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church. Fearing explosives or body parts from the missing consigliere Paolo Renda, police evacuated the area and summoned bomb disposal experts. Police were relieved to find only a note inside, a cryptic message written in Italian that seemed to allude to the funerals of the Violi brothers three decades earlier at the same holy spot in Little Italy, with words to the effect of: “Let’s stop this church being the church of the Mafia and start it being the church of everyone.” To someone with a Mafia frame of mind, it was easy to see the odd message as meaning: “You’ve suffered the way we suffered. Let’s put an end to this sad story.” Or maybe it was just a member of the public, tired of his place of worship becoming widely known as the church of the Mafia.

  Inside, Nicolò’s funeral was much like that of Nick Jr. less than a year before in the same church. Powerfully built men wearing earpieces and black leather gloves scanned the entrances to make sure no gawkers or enemies tried to enter. Four guards inside the church carefully eyed attendees. Not all of the eight hundred seats in the church were filled, and there were notably no representatives of the Bonanno crime family.

  The ceremony was a simple one, in Italian, with no members of the Rizzuto family rising to say a word. There were no personal comments from anyone about the deceased, although the priest did thank those who sent their condolences but did not attend. White roses adorned the altar, with other white flowers on the golden casket. The only ostentation was in the form of some two hundred wreaths, arranged from floor to ceiling. A soaring rendition of “Ave Maria” filled the church. A choir sang hymns in Latin. A single trumpet sounded a tribute. Selections played on the organ, strings and brass ranged from melancholy to uplifting. Finally, the godfather was carried from the church under the eyes of mourners in sunglasses and dozens of police and media. His casket was escorted to St. Francis of Assisi cemetery by limousines carrying stacks of floral tributes, including at least one from a real estate developer.

  Libertina looked stoic. Often, mobsters have lovers on the side to help them cope with the stress of their work and the constraints of arranged marriages, but that had not been the case with her devoted Nicolò. Libertina’s composure was all the more remarkable in that she was grieving once again without Vito there to comfort her. She knew well how life so often ended in their world, which meant her only son could be next.

  Nicolò abhorred sloppiness, and he would have been impressed by the undertaker’s job, which had rendered even his wounded neck suitable for an open casket. He would also have appreciated how his family now guarded Mafia Row with private security firms, which used trained bodyguards and discreet auto patrols. Most of the people flooding to the cul-de-sac were gawkers, but the security men took down all their licence numbers anyway. It all seemed too little, too late, but it had to be done.

  No one from Vito’s group did a thing to avenge the latest bloodletting. His men were all either in prison or ineffectual or they had defected to the other side. Whatever their reasons, their inaction compounded the insult.

  While the elder Rizzuto was meeting his fate, Antonio Coluccio quietly slipped back into North America from the United Kingdom with his bodyguard/driver. In November, he arrived in New York City, then travelled to Niagara Falls, NY. His visitors there included an Ontario man specializing in high-level money management who had been close to Vito.

  Early in January 2011, vandals firebombed the Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard. They did little actual damage, but attacking the Rizzuto-owned business was a powerful public statement nonetheless. It was open season on Vito’s family.

  Just a few months later, Big Joey Massino made history by becoming the highest-level rat in the history of La Cosa Nostra when he testified against his successor, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano. In the course of his testimony, Big Joey calmly explained how he hadn’t really wanted to kill Vito’s friend and associate George (George from Canada) Sciascia back in 1999, after the Montrealer broke mob protocol and criticized a Gambino family member. Big Joey made it sound as though he was just a worker doing his job. “As much as I didn’t want to kill him, I had to kill him.” News of this latest Bonanno defection brought a screaming headline in the New York Post: NOMERTA! MAFIA BOSS A SQUEALER. The April 13, 2011, story began: “There isn’t a hunk of cheese big enough for this rat.” If anything, it was confirmation that Vito—despite his family’s desperate need for friends—had been right in his decision to pull away from the Bonannos.

  On March 31, 2011, police found the body of Antonio Di Salvo in his home on Perras Boulevard in Rivière des Prairies. The forty-four-year-old had been a low-profile member in the Rizzuto group, with ties to Francesco Del Balso and Compare Frank Arcadi. The assassination occasioned no real surprise, despite Di salvo’s peripheral association. How could anyone be shocked by a murder after Nicolò was gunned down in his own house, at the feet of his wife and daughter no less? This was a fight to the death, but it was still impossible to identify all of Vito’s enemies. The family’s attackers remained in the shadows, and some still posed as friends.

  CHAPTER 24

  Tale of betrayal

  February 11, 2011, was shaping up to be a busy day. Toronto and York Regional police intelligence officers, part of the anti–organized crime Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, had plans to stake out the funeral visitation for Cosimo Stalteri, the grand old man of the Ontario ’Ndrangheta. He had just died in hospital at age eighty-six. An original member of the Toronto camera di controllo, Stalteri had recently been promoted from the rank of santista—the shadowy organization’s equivalent of a senior lobbyist with senior mainstream people such as bankers and politicians—to vangelista—the ’Ndrangheta version of a respected senior statesman. It was a safe assumption that Stalteri was never in the pro-Vito camp, as he was Calabrian, from Toronto and on good terms with some of Vito’s die-hard enemies. At the absolute minimum, Stalteri was a neutral in the hostilities that were surgically disassembling Vito’s empire.

  Also scheduled for that Friday was surveillance of the fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations of Paolo Cuntrera at Hazelton Manor in Vaughan. On the surface, Cuntrera would appear to be on Vito’s side in the current tensions, as he and his brothers Pasquale and Gaspare were cousins of Vito’s recently murdered ally Agostino Cuntrera of Montreal. Paolo and his siblings had garnered considerable interest from Italian authorities for decades. Pasquale Cuntrera was considered a kingpin of a network that—the late Italian judge Giovanni Falcone estimated—had washed $77 billion in drug money in Canada, England and five other countries. The 1992 murder of Falcone, and that of his fellow judge Paolo Borsellino only months earlier, created pressure for Venezuelan authorities to finally extradite the three brothers (the fourth, Liborio, moved to England in 1975 and died there of natural causes in 1982).

  Once back in Italy, Pasquale was convicted on charges of running a drug ring between Italy, Canada and Venezuela. In 1998, the sixty-three-year-old somehow managed to escape custody, even though he now appeared to be confined to a wheelchair. A week later, Pasquale was rearrested in Spain while strolling down a beach with his wife, the wheelchair nowhere in sight. As he went back to prison, his brothers Paolo and Gaspare settled in the Toronto area after their Italian legal difficulties had run their course. Both men were Canadian citizens and the move was entirely legal, although police maintained an interest in them.

  Stalteri’s funeral visitation came first on the agenda for the surveillance officers. They noted that attendance was solid,
as might be expected for a man who was feared, respected and liked for decades. Back in his hometown of Siderno in the Italian province of Reggio Calabria, Stalteri had convictions for assault causing bodily harm, theft and carrying an unregistered revolver, but he received an amnesty from Italian authorities before he immigrated to Canada in 1952. He had no further criminal record in Canada, despite appearing in numerous police reports for his ’Ndrangheta associations.

  In 1962, Stalteri was appointed to the camera di controllo in Toronto by Giacomo Luppino of Hamilton, Paolo Violi’s father-in-law. Also in that governing body were Michele (Mike the Baker) Racco, Vincenzo (Jimmy) Deleo, Rocco Zito, Salvatore Triumbari and Filippo Vendemini. It was a tough group for a tough environment: Triumbari was murdered in 1967 and Vendemini slain in 1969, and neither murder was ever solved. They also didn’t take opposition lightly. Zito was later convicted of beating a man to death with a liquor bottle during the Christmas season. Stalteri returned to Italy in 1973 for a visit and killed a street vendor in an argument over a toy. Italian authorities sought his extradition over the murder, then let the warrant expire when they falsely determined that he had died. He was also believed by police to be involved in alien smuggling and heroin trafficking in Toronto, although neither suspicion was ever proven.

  What the surveillance officers saw immediately after the funeral visitation might have shocked even Vito. Stalteri’s mourners climbed onto a chartered bus and rode off to the anniversary reception for the Cuntreras.

  How could this be possible? Weren’t they mortal, blood enemies?

  And yet it was clearly happening. Members of both the Sicilian and Calabrian factions of Canadian organized crime, including representatives from Hamilton, York Region, Ottawa, Montreal and Sherbrooke, Quebec, were breaking bread together as if they were on some mob version of homecoming week.

  Among the three hundred guests were several members of the Commisso crime family. It was no secret that they didn’t mix well with Vito, but that wasn’t the thing that would have shocked him most about the gathering. One of the welcomed guests at the Sicilian celebration was Salvatore (Sam) Calautti, the hard-core ’Ndrangheta hit man who was the suspected killer of Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto and a prime suspect in four other unsolved mob murders—one of which was the slaying of Vito’s father.

  The fact that the Sicilians could entertain a Calabrian hit man who was believed to have killed their most esteemed member was breathtaking. That they could sit down and socialize also with Calautti’s bosses and confederates suggested a fundamental change in the underworld. Blood ties didn’t seem to matter any longer.

  It was unthinkable, but it was happening right in front of the intelligence officers. What police witnessed was bonding between the Ontario Sicilians and the ’Ndrangheta, less than seven months after the murders of Agostino Cuntrera and his bodyguard in Montreal, and two months after the murder of Nicolò. It had been widely assumed that the Sicilian and Calabrians mobsters were at war in Montreal, but that was clearly not the case in Toronto.

  There had never been impenetrable divisions between the ’Ndrangheta and the Sicilian Mafia, nor its American cousin, La Cosa Nostra, especially when the Cuntrera–Caruana family was involved. The flow of money has a way of washing away even the most rigid barriers. Criminals who weren’t touched personally by vendettas remained open for a deal. Business was business when blood didn’t cry out for revenge.

  If the men at the anniversary party could form a working relationship with the Desjardins–Mirarchi group, they would have a death grip on the Port of Montreal. In a new power alliance between them, the Coluccio–Aquino Calabrian ’Ndrangheta faction and the Caruana–Cuntrera Sicilian Mafia group, Vito would be the odd man out.

  CHAPTER 25

  Outlaw in-laws

  Joe Di Maulo was an easy guy to like, which explained why he and Vito had often golfed together and shared tables at downtown nightclubs. Smiling Joe had a quick sense of humour, liked to banter and carried himself with natural confidence. His roots ran deep, to the old Cotroni crime family, who predated the Rizzuto group in Montreal. When strangers approached—like the summer day in 1993 when a Toronto Star reporter arrived unannounced at his café—he was apt to be more amused than perturbed. That day, at his business in the Métropolitain Est–Viau Sud area of Saint-Léonard, kitty-corner to his nightclub, he smiled broadly and kept his bodyguards at bay. Di Maulo looked cool and casual in an understated silk Hawaiian shirt, even as he checked the scribe’s wallet for hidden recording devices. The journalist began asking questions about the Mafia’s interests in casino gambling, which wasn’t totally speculative since Di Maulo and his older brother Vincenzo (Jimmy) both had extensive interests in the gambling machine industry.

  It was doubtful anyone knew more about what was going on in the milieu than Smiling Joe, whose roots ran deep and also wide. The Di Maulos and the Cotronis had been neighbours on downtown Saint-Timothée Street long before gentrification (or lawns) arrived in the neighbourhood. In a moderately upward move, the families departed together for Rosemont. Joe Di Maulo rose high enough in the old Cotroni organization that he was chosen to travel with Paolo Violi in November 1973 to a New York City Bonanno family meeting for a leadership vote. That New York meeting came a year after Nicolò had fled to Venezuela, to escape Violi’s gunmen.

  Also in the early 1970s, Joe’s older brother Vincenzo (Jimmy) began a life term for murder while Joe was acquitted of a triple murder in his Casa Loma nightclub on Sainte-Catherine Street downtown. Joe’s conviction was overturned when a key witness dramatically changed her testimony in a related trial. Whatever the truth of the three killings, they certainly added to Joe Di Maulo’s aura, although he remained an affable, chatty man, cultivating friendships with lawyers, politicians, businessmen, judges, artists—as well as Sicilian and Calabrian mobsters, the thugs of the Québécois Dubois family and assorted others in the underworld, including Lebanese drug smugglers. This combination of knowledge, contacts and charm put him in a prime position to mediate disputes as well as reap profits.

  Sitting in his Montreal café, Di Maulo glibly announced to the visiting Toronto reporter that the best way to keep any new casinos clean was to let the Mafia run them. “That would be the best thing,” Di Maulo said with a broad smile. A robust young man who looked like a slightly spruced-up biker, with a sweeping moustache, a black T-shirt and a pager, smiled too, as if on cue. “There would be no prostitutes, no pickpockets,” Di Maulo continued, like a nightclub comedian. He laughed heartily at his own joke and the notion of being put in charge of keeping crime out of casinos. The husky young man in the black T-shirt laughed some more too.

  A few minutes later, Di Maulo frowned deeply when reminded of recent clouds of controversy over the casino gambling industry in general and himself in particular. His sidekick picked up on the shift in mood and glowered. A month before, Richard McGinnis, head of the Montreal police organized crime squad, had warned the Quebec National Assembly about the dangers of mobsters in the video poker business and cautioned that casino gambling could only heighten the criminals’ wealth. McGinnis claimed video poker machines were already the second-highest money-maker for the Montreal mob, behind only the drug trade.

  Di Maulo barked out, “Bullshit!” to the reporter, dismissing reports he had approached the Quebec government about getting involved in incoming casinos. Despite the harsh language, he still appeared entertained as the line of questioning continued, as though he were untouchable. When he talked about negative reports linking his name to illicit gambling, he had the dismissive air of a much-maligned celebrity. In fact, he was proud of helping out some of the province’s entertainers in the early stages of their careers, providing a nightclub stage on which they could cut their teeth. He was a patron of the arts, of sorts. He was also extremely proud of the fact that he had never been linked to drug trafficking. “It’s strictly propaganda,” Di Maulo said to the reporter. “They’re using our name to get publicity.” He declined to
say who “they” were or why “they” wanted publicity. He smiled and added, presumably suggesting a law-enforcement tendency towards corruption, “Ninety percent of the machines are owned by police.”

  During the chat in his café, Di Maulo appeared to be the very essence of self-control and good spirits. Between conversations in French on his ever-present cellphone (one is even visible in his daughter Mylena’s wedding pictures), he dismissed further questions about connections between organized crime and casino gambling. Then he muttered something about ten million dollars. Pressed to expand, he frowned and declined. As serious questions subsided, he ridiculed the idea that Ontario planned non-smoking casinos. “Why don’t they turn the country into churches?” he laughed. The husky man in the black T-shirt chortled also.

  There were few serious challengers to the Rizzutos as the crime family cruised through the early 1990s. It was easy for everyone to exude goodwill when they were all pulling in good money, so long as they could stay out of prison. His casual air at his café notwithstanding, Joe Di Maulo was an active man at the time. He was part of a Mafia group that tried in 1993 to get a $450-million commission to help liquidate three billion dollars’ worth of gold stashed in banks in Hong Kong and Zurich that had been stolen by former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his men.

  Smiling Joe was charged in August 1995 with offering an RCMP officer $100,000 to destroy evidence against his older brother Vincenzo, after Vincenzo was charged in one of the largest money-laundering sting operations ever conducted in Canada. Also charged in that case was Vito’s childhood friend from the old Villeray district, Valentino Morielli. The case against Joe Di Maulo was eventually dropped, although Morielli went to prison for a related drug charge and Vincenzo wouldn’t see parole until the new century.