by Lamothe, Lee
It was a decidedly inauspicious start for the future head of the Sixth Family.
By the time young Vito was playing with matches, his father, Nick, had built a formidable criminal coterie in Montreal. He had a loyal core that, although officially pledged to protect and contribute to the Bonanno organization, maintained a distinct loyalty to their own flesh and blood. Along with marriage vows and blood ties, the growth of the Rizzuto clan into the organization that is the Sixth Family can most suitably be described in business terms, in that they doggedly adhered to a winning strategy of carefully selected mergers and acquisitions. As with most aggressive corporations, what they sought first was a mutually agreeable assimilation of a smaller corporate entity that allowed for profit for all parties. If that failed, a hostile takeover was almost inevitable.
The first significant merger in Canada for the Rizzutos came in the 1960s when Nick forged a bond with the Caruana-Cuntrera family, a clan from the Sicilian town of Siculiana, just a winding 10-mile drive from Cattolica Eraclea. For decades, back in the Mafia triangle of Agrigento, the clans had been friendly, interrelated, and occasionally comrades-in-arms. When Nick’s father first arrived in the New World in 1925, he arrived with two men from Cattolica Eraclea and three men from Siculiana; most, if not all, of the men were related in some way. One, Vincenzo Marino, was married to a Caruana, and another, Giuseppe Sciortino, was related to Calogero Renda, who in turn was related to Nick. In Canada, these bonds were strengthened. Fusing the Rizzutos with the Caruana-Cuntreras was a strategic alliance of immense value to both parties, who were keenly interested in the same sorts of commodities. The merger gave Nick a significant boost, increasing his international presence and his access to drugs and money-laundering services. The Caruana and Cuntrera families, who formed a single criminal organization, also had considerable influence within the Sicilian faction in Montreal. On the flip side, having the Rizzutos as partners offered the Caruanas a form of physical protection and a far more robust presence on the streets of Montreal as they concentrated on matters abroad. While the Caruanas boosted the Rizzutos’ contacts in Europe and South America, the Rizzutos gave the Caruanas direct contact with New York.
“When the Caruanas and Cuntreras moved to Montreal in the mid- 1960s, they became affiliated with Nicolò Rizzuto and his son Vito Rizzuto. They began to work together in drug trafficking activities,” an FBI report says.
The internal structure of the Sixth Family—by itself—was starting to mimic the vast transatlantic structure that had taken more than two dozen mafiosi from two countries four days of heated discussions at the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes to achieve. Next came another merger and acquisition of a distinctly non-hostile nature.
MONTREAL AND TORONTO, NOVEMBER 1966
Late in the day on November 28, 1966, two Montreal police constables asked three men who were sitting in a car parked on a side street to slowly get out of their vehicle. The officers’ concern was palpable, as the men, despite their neat short hair, suit jackets and expensive clothing, still looked like tough customers and, far more alarming, three .32-caliber handguns were clearly visible on the car seats. The men were arrested and additional police officers soon arrived, as did a second car full of civilians who were likewise asked to get out of their vehicle. When a starter pistol was found under the seat of their car, the four new arrivals were also arrested.
At a Montreal police station, the seven men stood about impatiently, smoking cigars and asking that the proceedings be moved along more quickly. Police were taking their time, however, because of the unusual cast of characters before them and the many questions they had for them. Most of the officers were personally familiar with only one man in the group: Luigi Greco, whom they knew as a local hoodlum whose fortunes in the underworld had been soaring of late. The remaining men were all American. Wearing a casual and slightly wrinkled dress shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and black pants, Bill Bonanno towered over Greco. With them were Vito DeFillipo and his son, Patrick DeFillipo. Patrick, who became known to fellow gangsters as “Patty from the Bronx,” would go on, more than 30 years later, to orchestrate the execution of one of the key members of the Sixth Family, a rare attack on the clan. Peter Magaddino, of Brooklyn, Joe Bonanno’s cousin and close ally, was also identified by police. He wore a suit almost identical to Patty DeFillipo’s but filled it out considerably more, in all the wrong places. Also identified by police were Carlo “Buddy” Simaro, of New Jersey, and Peter Notaro, of New York, both Bonanno bodyguards. (Notaro later joined Joe Bonanno when he was deposed and went into exile in Arizona.) Bill Bonanno recently said he came to Canada with the soldiers who remained closest to his father, Joseph, during an acrimonious split within the organization in New York.
“They were loyal to us. Patty was there with his father, Vito DeFillipo. Vito DeFillipo was one of our closest confidants. He was very loyal to us,” said Bonanno.
Had the approach by the constables been accidental, the officers would likely have been stunned to find Bill Bonanno and his cronies in Montreal. It was, however, part of an extensive police surveillance operation. Throughout the day, investigators had secretly watched as the men met with Vic Cotroni, Paolo Violi, who was Cotroni’s favored young gangster in Montreal, and Giacomo Luppino. Luppino was an old boss of the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia organization originally formed in Calabria, the southern part of mainland Italy, who had moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and had recently become Violi’s father-in-law. Police had seen Bill Bonanno, with Notaro and Cotroni, in a shopping plaza making dozens of telephone calls, one after another, from a public pay phone. In police custody, however, they were far less talkative. Grilled by detectives about drugs and illegal immigrant smuggling, gambling and extortion, the mobsters feigned ignorance of it all. They had only come to Canada, they insisted, to attend a wedding.
In a way, they were not lying. It was a wedding that had drawn them across the border and it was their own paranoia and precarious situation in New York that had prompted the Bonanno men to so heavily arm themselves. But in the world of the Mafia, social engagements and criminal business blur into one impenetrable mix.
Two days earlier, on November 26, 1966, a half-day’s drive to the west of Montreal, Vito Rizzuto was married in an elegant ceremony in Toronto. It was part of a thoughtful reorganization of Vito’s life that suggests he was starting to take his role in the Sixth Family more seriously. This was two years before his botched arson at the barbershop but two months after he obtained his Canadian citizenship; on September 27, 1966, he had been granted government certificate #947663, allowing him all the considerable privileges of citizenship in his adopted homeland.
In accordance with Sicilian tradition, the groom, his family, friends and supporters traveled to the hometown of his bride and her family, in this case Toronto, for the wedding ceremony and reception. Those friends and supporters apparently included the six-man Bonanno contingent from New York.
The day before leaving for Toronto for their wedding, however, Vito and his bride-to-be signed a prenuptial marriage contract in Quebec, witnessed and notarized by Gaétan Reid, stipulating that each spouse remains the exclusive owner of his or her property, administers that property alone and assumes responsibility for their own debts. Should their marriage fail, each retains their own property, providing they can prove ownership, the contract states.
Vito’s bride was Giovanna Cammalleri, his first cousin once removed, on his mother’s side. The Cammalleri family had made their home in Toronto after leaving Cattolica Eraclea. The Cammalleri family, like Vito’s, has a long history of outlaw behavior and Mafia involvement, police say. Officers have tracked at least two generations of Cammalleri family members. Along with others, they formed what police dubbed the “Toronto Sicilian Group,” a Mafia organization suspected by police of running illegal gambling, extortion and drugs. One RCMP report notes the group’s ties in New York, Detroit and Montreal.
The newlyweds were young. Vito, who had grown into a tall, lank
y man just shy of 6-foot-1 with brown eyes and hair so dark it appeared to be black, was 20; Giovanna, who was four inches shorter than Vito and slim, with chestnut hair, was just 18.
Organized-crime investigators often refer to Vito’s nuptials as a “marriage of convenience,” suggesting the sanctity of his vows and love for his bride are secondary to his family’s larger interests. But who is to say it was not both love and good sense? Certainly, photographs of the couple show them engaging each other and seemingly happy in each other’s company. Nonetheless, good sense it was, since it built an important bridge between the Cammalleri’s Toronto base and the Rizzutos in Montreal. The two most populous cities in Canada were crucial hubs for the country’s economic activities and its illicit enterprises. What is more, Vito’s wife was a bright and lively woman with a good head for numbers and finance, who was often ready with investment advice for both sides of her family.
One facet of Vito’s wedding that was almost pure diplomacy, however, was the selection of the men he asked to stand with him on this important day. There was Frank Dasti, then 52, one of the most respected figures in Montreal’s underworld. He was one of its oldest active members, but was far from preparing for retirement. (A few years after Vito’s wedding, Dasti would step up his efforts to move narcotics through Canada into the United States, only to be caught in 1973 and sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. prison. He has since died.) Also standing up for Vito was Angelo Sauro, 30 at the time, a Montrealer whose lengthy criminal record was peppered with minor convictions through every decade, from the 1950s to his most recent in late 2002. Orlando Veri, a friend of Vito’s, was the youngest, at 23, and the least involved in criminal activities, although he, too, would later be convicted for a drug conspiracy. Most strikingly, Paolo Violi, then 34 and a Calabrian mobster being groomed for Mafia success by Vic Cotroni, was also included in the wedding party, according to a Montreal police report.
That Vito would invite Violi to assist in his wedding is a clear sign that, although there were tensions between the Cotroni-Violi faction and the Greco-Rizzuto faction, the relationships had not yet so seriously deteriorated that they could not at least pretend to be civil and respectful to each other. However, the fact that Bill Bonanno would meet separately with both Montreal factions during his visit suggests the Montreal mobsters were not exactly a model of solidarity. Such suppressed feelings of distrust would hardly have been noticed by Bonanno, for he was in the midst of the “Banana Wars,” a far more open dispute that had officially split his father’s family in two. While Bonanno factions were shooting it out on the streets of New York, the more intimate interactions between the Bonanno loyalists and both the Sicilian and Calabrian sides of the Montreal group suggested that Joseph Bonanno retained the support of his Canadian wing, the outpost he had created, while most of his New York family thundered away from him. Bill Bonanno does not dispute he may have been at Vito’s wedding on his ill-fated trip north.
“It could have been,” he said. “But that’s not why we came up. It was about what was happening in New York. New York was in turmoil in my world. We needed to meet with our friends and allies in Canada.”
The “Banana Wars” almost had seismic consequences for the Mafia in Canada. During a conversation on June 10, 1965, Simone “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante, the boss of a small New Jersey Mafia family, was discussing the problems in the Bonanno organization with Joseph “Joe Bayonne” Zicarelli, a Bonanno captain who lived in New Jersey. DeCavalcante had been acting as something of a go-between for Bonanno loyalists and the Mafia’s Commission. He confided to Zicarelli that Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambino Family at the time, had told him of the problems the Commission had with Joe Bonanno. Recording the chat at the boss’s plumbing business was a secret FBI listening device known as microphone NK 2461-C. After ousting Joe Bonanno as the boss of the family and replacing him with Gaspar DiGregorio, Gambino said the Commission almost went further. One form of punishment the Commission considered, DeCavalcante revealed, was redistributing Bonanno’s territory.
“You know, they were gonna give the guys in Canada away to Buffalo,” DeCavalcante said, referring to a proposed transfer of the Bonanno’s Montreal group to Buffalo’s Magaddino Family. Had the plan gone forward, it would have had far deeper ramifications for organized crime in North America than anyone, except perhaps for the mischievous Stefano Magaddino, probably realized. It would have put the important drug hub of Montreal under the control of Magaddino, who already held sway over Southern Ontario, including Toronto. Had Montreal and Toronto been joined into a single mob territory so early in the game, it could well have made Magaddino’s boss in Canada, Johnny “Pops” Papalia, one of the richest and most important gangsters on the continent. In the end, Montreal remained Bonanno territory, but Joe Bonanno would lose his struggle to retain control of the Mafia organization that bears his name to this day. He left New York and retired to Tucson, Arizona, where he died of heart failure in 2002 at the age of 97. Almost to his end, the exiled boss kept his ties to his Canadian mob friends. Late in his life, FBI agents tracked him to hundreds of telephone calls made from public pay phones in Tucson into the Montreal area code.
Not many Mafia bosses embroiled in such harsh disputes get the luxury of a long life and non-violent death. By contrast, the cordiality between Vito Rizzuto and Paolo Violi at Vito’s wedding would acutely wane and their dispute would not have such an idyllic ending.
CHAPTER 7
MONTREAL, 1969
Mauro Marchettini was an Italian immigrant who brought with him to Canada modest entrepreneurial dreams. He put his plans into action in 1969 when he opened a small pool hall in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighborhood. He signed the papers to take control of a vacant storefront location on Jean-Talon Street East, just east of Lacordaire Street, and sank his life savings into buying the needed equipment and redecorating the small facility. What he failed to account for in his business plan, however, was that his pool hall was a mere 400 feet away from the Reggio Bar at 5880 Jean-Talon East, an address known to many in Montreal as the headquarters for Paolo Violi, who had become the right-hand man of the city’s Mafia boss, Vic Cotroni.
For Marchettini, it was a disastrous oversight. Emissaries sent by Violi soon paid him a visit.
“I was told I could open a business of this kind but not on Lacordaire Street, not on Jean-Talon Street, east of Lacordaire,” Marchettini said. He was told that if he chose another spot, Violi would help him to secure it. However, Marchettini seemed set on his little spot on Jean-Talon. The nature of the entreaties then changed. Violi sent his younger brother, Francesco, to take Marchettini for a ride, during which the businessman was savagely beaten with an oddly memorable weapon, a four-foot-long wooden paddle most restaurateurs use only to make ice cream. With his body bruised and battered, a tooth snapped in two and both eyes blackened, Marchettini finally understood; he could not maintain his pool hall in Violi’s neighborhood without Violi’s permission.
It was a sad scene, variations of which were repeated for decades throughout Montreal’s Italian community. Small businessmen and independent contractors, typically Italian, were bullied and beaten by Violi and his henchmen. The battered pool hall owner was one of hundreds who had learned first-hand the efficiency, reach and persuasive power of Paolo Violi over portions of Saint-Léonard, an area he controlled with uncommon thoroughness and viciousness.
For several years, Violi had held a favored status in the Montreal mob, one bestowed upon him by Cotroni, who had, over the years, moved to the pinnacle of the city’s underworld, while Luigi Greco, his Sicilian counterpart, had slipped into a secondary position, something akin to underboss, while he concentrated on heroin deals. With Cotroni’s considerable backing, Violi’s standing in Montreal continued to rise to the point where, in 1975, an underworld figure who was compelled to give testimony before a government commission spoke of Violi’s position with shocking clarity.
“My Lord, his name, it’s like a god
… everyone is afraid of him. Violi, he’s not one man—he’s a thousand men,” he said.
Not everyone in Montreal would capitulate so easily to Violi’s will. One man in particular did not recognize his authority, succumb to the fear of Violi’s name nor bow to the power of his “thousand men.”
Nick Rizzuto, the Sixth Family patriarch, would never accept Violi’s position of supremacy. If Violi was “like a god,” then Nick Rizzuto was a heretic. Their distrust and dislike of each other caused alarm from the moment Cotroni signaled that Violi was his right-hand man—even when Luigi Greco was still there to maintain some semblance of a Sicilian-Calabrian balance. While problems between Cotroni and Greco were noticeable to all who looked for such things, Greco, at least, was still willing to go along with the game. He was so thoroughly acclimatized to the American way of doing things that he had little stomach for an out-and-out fight with the boss. He bowed low to New York, to the Bonannos and, when it was required, to Cotroni. Any direct showdown would have to come from someone who had not been a party to the pax Mafia created by Carmine Galante and Joe Bonanno. That accord finally crumbled, but not through gunfire. It was broken by a chemical fire.
