The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  By September 1972, Natale Evola had got his New York house in order sufficiently to send representatives north to listen to what Violi and Nick had to say about their quarrel. Evola chose Michael “Mikey Z” Zaffarano, a tall, heavy-set man, to kick off New York’s arbitration efforts. Zaffarano was a senior mobster with a long history of dealing with disputes and internal mob hostilities. He’d had a front-row seat in a similarly acrimonious split in New York in the 1960s, during the ouster of Joseph Bonanno. Zaffarano survived that period of instability and indeed thrived, becoming a major earner for the family when he led the mob into the pornography business, first dominating distribution of “stag” films and directing the nationwide chain of Pussycat Cinema adult theaters. When porn went mainstream, with such films as Debbie Does Dallas and Deep Throat, he made a killing. (It also later killed him: on Valentine’s Day, 1980, the FBI crashed into his New York office to arrest him on federal obscenity and racketeering charges; Zaffarano died of a heart attack, clutching a raunchy reel of film that agents believe he was trying to destroy.)

  Despite Zaffarano’s keen interest in pornography, Violi was more comfortable dealing with him than he was with Leonardo Caruana. Like Philip Rastelli, Zaffarano likely felt a modest personal debt to both Cotroni and Violi; the two Montrealers had gone to considerable trouble to hide Zaffarano’s brother-in-law, Joseph Asaro, when he was on the lam for 13 years from American police. Asaro, a Bonanno soldier and a second-generation mobster (his father worked under Al Capone, Chicago’s legendary mob boss), was hidden by Cotroni for years. He earned his keep by working in Cotroni-controlled nightclubs in Montreal. On June 21, 1966, his impressive run ended when police burst into a home in Repentigny, Quebec, and found Asaro sitting with Vic and Frank Cotroni. The location of the arrest was embarrassing for Vic Cotroni, as it was the home of his mistress. He offered police a $25,000 bribe to arrest him somewhere else to keep his presence secret from his wife. The offer was doubled when it was refused. Cotroni was then charged with bribery.

  In Zaffarano, Violi felt he had regained the upper hand he’d lost when Settecasi chose Leonardo Caruana as his advisor. Zaffarano was but one of the New Yorkers weighing in on the matter. Over months, Nicolino Alfano, who was the Bonannos’ consigliere, Nicholas “Nicky Glasses” Marangello, who would later become a Bonanno underboss, Nick Buttafuoco and Joseph Buccellato would each come to Montreal to try their hand at mediation. Violi used each meeting to press his two related requests—not only did he want Nick Rizzuto sanctioned for challenging his leadership, he wanted permission from New York to induct more members into the organization.

  “Look, we need a couple [more] picciotti,” he told Zaffarano during an early visit, using the old Calabrian term for what the Americans called soldiers. It appears Violi wanted to bolster his ranks in the brewing feud with Nick. Violi was growing frustrated. As other conversations revealed, he thought the Rizzuto side was being unfairly inflated with new, mobbed-up immigrants from Sicily who did not seem overly concerned about their status with Violi.

  “Paolo, we can’t do nothing for the time being. Make do with what you got for right now, later we’ll talk about it again,” was Zaffarano’s reply. Violi next moved on to his more immediate concern, his troubles with Nick.

  “He goes from one thing to the other—here and there—and says nothing to nobody. He does things and nobody knows nothing,” Violi complained of his rival.

  “If things are really like that, everyone’s safety, even ours …” came Zaffarano’s unfinished reply, likely accompanied by a concerned shrug. “So, if he’s pigheaded, he don’t wanna change, okay, when the others get here, Angelo and Nicolino, they’re going to talk to Vincent [Cotroni] and all of you and discuss all your problems. Say exactly what’s going on,” Zaffarano said, arranging yet another round of diplomacy. Violi was then told the best news he had heard yet in his efforts to bring the Rizzutos to heel: Zaffarano told him to tell the Rizzutos that New York was now on the case. He carefully outlined the message to be passed directly to Nick. Violi was to tell him: “We [Violi and Cotroni] got nothing more to do with you, go to New York. We got no time for you here. Go explain yourself to them.” Violi was ecstatic. It was a message he would deliver with relish and relief.

  Not long after one of the meetings with the American visitors, Violi updated Cotroni on changes in the gangland landscape of New York. “Joe [Evola’s nickname], he’s the capo [boss], Mike [Rastelli’s Montreal nickname] is the sotto capo [underboss],” Violi said, using the more traditional forms of address that had long been anglicized by most other North American gangsters.

  “Who’s the counselor?” Cotroni asked.

  “Don Nicolino,” said Violi, referring to Nicolino Alfano. “He don’t like it too much, ’cause he’s old and he’s gotta travel all over … Counselor’s a big job,” Violi said, recounting the chatter from the Americans. “He told me, when [Nick Rizzuto] comes [to New York], those guys would talk to him.” said Violi.

  The New Yorkers had regaled Violi and Cotroni with tales from the streets of Brooklyn, and the Sicilian visitors had updated the Canadians on significant comings and goings among the island’s Men of Honor. These talks were conducted in utmost privacy and were to be held within the strictest bonds of secrecy. Unknowingly, however, it all went far beyond the ear of Paolo Violi. The Montreal meetings with the American and Sicilian mobsters had serious ramifications for the future of Violi, his organization and many of the men he had met during his diplomatic entreaties.

  Unbeknownst to anyone but a tightly controlled group of investigators and top police brass, Montreal police had pulled off a considerable investigative coup. Robert Menard, an undercover Montreal police officer, had posed as a young electrician looking for an apartment to rent and managed to cut a deal with Violi to move into a room directly above the Reggio Bar. Once installed in his new home, Menard and his surveillance and technical team began to wire the downstairs bar for sound. Violi’s inner sanctum had been penetrated. With secret electronic bugs now picking up conversations inside, and their agent, Menard, maintaining his nerve-racking double life upstairs, Canadian police suddenly had a front-row seat watching the mob action not only in Canada but in New York and Sicily. For six years, Menard persevered in his daring charade, living among the violent mobsters. All of the whispered conversations, explosive outbursts and secret negotiations were being absorbed by Canadian investigators, who were forwarding the salient information to the FBI and Italian authorities. The tapes would soon come to wide, and embarrassing, attention in Canada.

  On September 15, 1972, Cotroni and Violi laid out their final positions with the New York mobsters. Cotroni defended his right to punish Nick Rizzuto. If he could not kill him because of outside sensibilities, he still had some power to act.

  “Me, I’m capo decina,” Cotroni said, asserting his preeminence within the Montreal organization. “I got the right to expel.”

  MONTREAL, SEPTEMBER 1972

  Friday, September 22, 1972, was a day of tremendous distraction across Canada. The nation’s much-loved hockey team took to the ice that afternoon in Moscow for a pitched battle with the Soviet team; it was the first of the historic eight-game Cold War series to be played in Russia and Canada’s pride was being battered by an unexpectedly strong opponent.

  As the nation was glued to televisions and radios for Game 5 of the series—at first loudly ecstatic at Canada’s early 3-0 lead and then deeply distraught as the Soviets rallied to a 5-4 win—mobsters in Montreal had other things on their minds. Domenico Arcuri was driving to Montreal’s Dorval airport to meet a plane arriving from New York, according to police surveillance reports. At the airport, Arcuri greeted Nicolino Alfano and Nick Buttafuoco, two-thirds of an important delegation from the New York Bonanno leadership. The greeting was eased by the apparent kinship between the Arcuris and the Alfanos.

  The Arcuri family held a strategic position in underworld affairs; three closely related Arcuri men, all born in the Sixth
Family’s spawning ground of Cattolica Eraclea, had moved to North America and settled in three heroin transit hotspots; all maintained close ties to the Sixth Family. Domenico Arcuri, born in 1933, settled in Montreal and was considered by police to be a close friend of the Rizzutos. Police believe Domenico married a niece of Nicolino Alfano and they identified him as a guest, alongside Vito Rizzuto, at an important Mafia wedding in New York in 1980. Another Arcuri relative, Giacinto Arcuri, born in 1930, immigrated to Toronto alongside Leonardo Cammalleri, Vito’s father-in-law, after both men were named by Italian police in the shocking slaying of the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, police intelligence files and Italian court records note. Police say Domenico and Giacinto are brothers but a source close to the family insists they are, in fact, first cousins. In Canada, Giacinto remained close to Sicilian mafiosi associated with the Sixth Family, including Vito and the Cammalleri clan in Toronto. When Gerlando “George From Canada” Sciascia, the Montreal Mafia’s representative in New York, visited Canada, he sometimes stayed with Giacinto. The third man, said by police to be a cousin of the other two, Giuseppe Arcuri, also born in 1930, arrived in New York and was closely aligned with both the Bonannos and the Sixth Family as a partner with Sciascia in a Long Island pizza outlet. Giuseppe would later post bail for Sciascia when he and Joe LoPresti, another of the Sixth Family’s key men, were arrested for heroin trafficking.

  Giuseppe Arcuri would go on to be identified as a Bonanno soldier and, when he died in New York in June, 2001, FBI agents watched more than a dozen Bonanno members, including at least five captains, pay their respects at his wake. These many links with New York were likely the reason Domenico Arcuri was the one asked to pick the New Yorkers up and why the Americans felt at ease staying in his home during this time of trouble. Arcuri’s link to the Sixth Family likely, however, made Violi nervous.

  The following day, as the nation chewed itself up over the third-period collapse of its hockey heroes, Alfano and Zaffarano, the other member of the New York delegation who arrived separately in Montreal, sat together in Violi’s Reggio Bar, quietly discussing how they would proceed at the “hearing.” Later that day, Alfano and Zaffarano traveled back to Arcuri’s house to host the long anticipated sit-down with Nick Rizzuto, Paolo Violi and Vic Cotroni. The Calabrians pushed for Nick’s expulsion from the Montreal decina. Nick resisted. The New Yorkers slept on it before visiting Violi at his home on Sunday to deliver their verdict: Nick could not be expelled. He was, however, to be more forthcoming to the bosses about his business, particularly with others outside their organization. The Bonanno delegation then returned to New York.

  If there was anger or disappointment with the ruling by either Rizzuto or Violi, they showed little of it. As well-raised and well-schooled mafiosi, they knew decisions at sit-downs were rarely negotiable until circumstances fundamentally changed. Both men likely planned for the day the decision could be revisited but accepted it at the time in accordance with the old codes they lived under. On the morning of September 26, 1972, just two days after the decision came down from New York, Nick and Violi chatted in the Reggio Bar, with music playing softly in the background, both amicable, both getting down to business and both ignoring their festering dispute. There had been a shooting that almost hit one of their mob colleagues and the Montreal decina needed to know who was behind it before they retaliated.

  “These young guys are our responsibility,” said Violi.

  “These people must be found and I do not think that they are guys from the other world,” said Nick. “I think we can come to an agreement.”

  “But I don’t think that they can fuck us,” said Violi. Business was business. Even when you hate the man you’re doing it with.

  Despite that restrained show of unity, Nick, a deeply suspicious Sicilian, was not happy deferring to Violi. He did not trust that Violi would adopt a live-and-let-live philosophy. And such a definitive expression of dislike from Vic Cotroni, about wishing to expel him, clearly carried weight, even with Nick Rizzuto. Nick decided to move to a safer location. If he could not move about as he liked in Montreal, he would go elsewhere.

  The hasty exit, however, was not an admission of defeat. It was not even a full retreat. While portrayed at the time, both on the streets and in police intelligence files, as a clear, if temporary, victory for Violi, hindsight suggests that Nick’s relocation was also a well-timed opportunity to build another important Sixth Family drug outpost. This base was in neither Italy nor North America but rather in a country that seems to have been carefully chosen for its geographic location. Despite the pleasingly warm weather in the region, it was the accommodating political climate that was the more important draw.

  CHAPTER 10

  CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1973

  Whatever pangs of homesickness Nick Rizzuto might have felt for the city he fled and the family he left behind, he nonetheless found a comfortable and accommodating place to resettle. Slightly more than twice the size of California, Venezuela is a beautiful and vibrant country on the northern coast of South America with hot and humid weather that might well have reminded Nick of his Sicilian homeland. It offered something else, as well.

  In Venezuela, the expatriate Mafia was gathering.

  The people of Venezuela have lamented the “problem of geography” that has brought the narco-mafiosi into their midst. What is seen as a “problem” for those interested in a healthy community and good governance is, of course, the very reason the drug lords so love the country. Venezuela is positioned between Colombia—the world’s largest producer of cocaine, with which it shares a rugged, difficult-to-monitor, 1,274-mile-long land border—and the United States—the world’s largest cocaine market, just a short voyage away, across busy shipping lanes and seas dotted with small islands, several of which are under only nominal international oversight. As such, Venezuela is a natural transit point linking North and South America. But geography alone is not to blame for Venezuela’s dubious distinction as a haven for drug barons. It has another key attribute.

  “It’s a very corrupt country,” said Oreste Pagano, a significant cocaine trafficker, member of the Camorra and an associate of the Sixth Family in large-scale drug deals. Before his arrest in 1998, Pagano divided his time between South America, Mexico and Miami, with periodic visits to Montreal, from where most of his business would come.

  “Money will buy you everything, and without money you can have nothing,” Pagano said of Venezuela. This was a subject he knew something about. Pagano owned 1,544 square miles of mineral-rich land in the interior of Venezuela, near Bolivar City, which is close to the border with Brazil. The land came to him complete with titanium, gold and diamond mines, and even an indigenous village. Pagano knew well the connections that the Caruana-Cuntrera and Rizzuto organizations had built and maintained in that country and the protection those connections brought.

  Venezuela had by the early 1970s become a drug trafficker’s paradise. All the main players of the expatriate Mafia seemed to have a presence there, some hiding from Italian justice, others because they had abandoned Sicily, with its constant waves of violence. Starting in the late 1950s—shortly after the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes meetings—and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s, members of the Sixth Family and its associated clans left Sicily to land comfortably elsewhere. While the Rizzutos settled in Montreal, others headed for Brazil and Venezuela, forming an expatriate Mafia. These were decidedly genuine Sicilian Mafia clans no longer based in Sicily—Men of Honor who surrendered geography in exchange for profit.

  Wherever they landed, they quickly made a place for themselves in the underworld, zeroing in on whatever that location could offer in the orderly transit of drugs. They chose their destinations with care and foresight. Since America was their primary market, Montreal was a crucial transit point to the north and Venezuela an impeccable outpost to the south. Canada meant control over the smuggling routes into the United States, and Venezuela was about product acquisition and transit. Plus,
a safe place to live. Sometimes moving rapidly and forcefully, at other times creeping along—like rust—the expatriate Mafia clans have over the past half-century created several valuable criminal satellites that have consolidated their dominance over the drug franchise. After leaving Sicily, these foreign outposts were often disposable, with the clans taking on a nomadic existence, ready to move at a moment’s notice. While many of the outposts would later crumble, Montreal has retained its value and standing with the Sixth Family—and the Sixth Family has remained true to Montreal.

  In Venezuela, three brothers—Pasquale, Gaspare and Paolo Cuntrera—established a strong base. The Cuntrera clan were from Siculiana, part of the Manno Mafia triangle in Agrigento, and they were the leading edge of a single Mafia organization known as the Caruana- Cuntrera. They had spent time in Montreal after leaving Sicily and were friends, allies, partners and, in some cases of cross-marriage, family of the Rizzutos and other members of the Sixth Family. And so, when Nick Rizzuto joined the Cuntreras in Venezuela, the mutual trust and intimacy had long been established. They joined once again in business enterprises, both drug-related and seemingly legitimate. Nick was soon at the helm of several businesses, establishing companies that dealt in powdered milk, cheese, chicken production and furniture manufacturing, his wife later told authorities. With the Cuntreras, he opened a nightclub that suggests they retained a sense of humor about their chosen profession: they called it Il Padrone, Italian for “the boss.”