The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  To investigators in Cornwall deeply embroiled in the Travelodge drug probe, which was given the codename Project Office, Girolamo Sciortino became an important part of their investigation, although his specific role was still a mystery.

  On July 18, 1995, Sciortino called Sicurella at his Cornwall hotel, asking, in code, for an update on the planned shipment of cocaine. Sicurella said he was working on it. Three days later, Sciortino phoned again, complaining that Sicurella was not returning his calls. The Cornwall hotel owner said there had been a number of “fuck-ups,” but that Sciortino need not worry. A week later at the Miss Cornwall Restaurant, down the road from the Travelodge, Sicurella received news that the cocaine shipment was finally ready for pickup. His courier arranged to borrow the vehicle of a reserve resident, promising there would be $500 in the glove box when it was returned. The next morning, the courier headed to New York City. Clearly learning from his mistake on the Texas run, this time he brought his wife with him to share the driving. Even so, the drive was a frantic one. His deadline for the pickup in New York was noon and yet he had not crossed into the United States until 9:57 that morning, at the start of a nearly seven-hour drive. Clearly, he was going to miss his pickup time by a wide margin. Repeated calls begging for more time, placed to a pay phone on the sidewalk outside Flushing Auto Salvage, almost in the shadow of New York’s famed Shea Stadium, were made during the drive.

  “Time is the number one thing,” said the voice on the New York end. Once in Queens, the courier was given the keys to a gray Mercury Cougar. Behind the back seats, he was told, 30 kilograms of cocaine had been hidden. This was high-tech subterfuge: the secret compartment was hydraulically operated and could only be activated by tuning the car’s radio to a specific radio station’s frequency. The courier and his wife climbed into the Cougar. After an overnight stay, they drove it north, arriving at a house on the American side of the Akwesasne reserve where the cocaine was removed from the Cougar. The courier counted 27 one-kilo packages as he placed them in a cardboard box inside a garage. A little after 7:30 that evening, the cocaine was driven to the St. Lawrence River, loaded onto a boat that took it across to the Canadian side of the reserve, and packed into a waiting pickup truck.

  The truck then headed into Montreal, an easy 90-minute drive. The driver had noticed a police tail, however, and from Highway 40 made a sudden exit onto St. Laurent Boulevard, disappearing into city traffic. Eventually, police say, the drugs were delivered to Sciortino in Montreal.

  Now it was Sciortino’s turn to be on the receiving end of haranguing phone calls. He appeared to be having trouble pulling together the final payment, or was purposely reluctant to do so. In a sudden reversal of roles, Sicurella phoned Sciortino, whom he called “George,” at his Montreal sandwich shop, asking about the money.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sciortino told him. But others did. Sicurella’s courier was taking calls from the suppliers, asking when he was returning their Cougar and the rest of the money. The suppliers were told they “could not dance,” suggesting they were under police surveillance. By July 30, their Miami supplier had lost patience and said he was on his way to Cornwall to collect his car and cash. Under pressure, Sicurella told the suppliers they were all in danger of arrest.

  “If he comes here, he’d better be prepared to go in for a long time,” Sicurella said, referring to prison. “You guys are gonna make me do something; the mistake of my life.”

  On July 31, at 10:09 a.m., Sicurella said he was leaving for Montreal to settle the “documents,” a common code word for money. Police immediately placed his hotel under surveillance. The RCMP had lost the drugs and were determined not to lose the money as well. An hour later, Sicurella’s wife called him from the hotel and asked how his trip was going. Shocked officers realized he had somehow slipped past them. Desperate to find him, officers called Sicurella’s pager and punched in his home telephone as the callback number, hoping the telephone’s call display would tip them to where Sicurella was. When Sicurella returned the call nine minutes later, however, it came back as an unpublished number. It took two hours for the RCMP to get the information from Bell Canada that the call had been placed from Montreal’s Bar Le Corner on Bernard Street. At 4:36 p.m., surveillance officers found Sicurella and watched him throughout the night—during which he met twice with Sciortino—and the next day, when Sciortino and Sicurella met briefly in a Burger King parking lot. Taking no chances after so many slip-ups and scares, an air surveillance team in a helicopter tracked Sicurella’s car as it wove through the city’s busy streets.

  Shortly before 5:00 p.m. on August 1, Sicurella and Sciortino met again, parking their cars close together near Sciortino’s Beaubien neighborhood home. Sciortino pulled a white shopping bag out of his trunk and handed it to Sicurella, who then placed it on the passenger side of his car before quickly driving off. At 5:07 p.m., police moved in and arrested Sicurella. Inside the shopping bag they found $200,000 in $50 and $100 bank notes, neatly bundled with rubber bands. One of the $100 bills was counterfeit. The next day, an arrest warrant was issued for Sciortino and others. Sciortino turned himself into the RCMP at their Cornwall detachment on August 22, where he was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine.

  Making matters worse for the traffickers, the drug courier who had stumbled with the Gran Fury—setting the entire investigation in motion—agreed to become a government witness and was cooperating with authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence for himself and charges being dropped against his wife. It was a rare display of government cooperation by someone who had worked with the Sixth Family. Most of the conspirators pleaded guilty.

  Named as the ringleaders, Girolamo Sciortino and Joe Sicurella faced serious drug charges in Canada and the United States, leading to an unusual joint prosecution. They pleaded guilty, three months apart, in both countries and were handed 12½ years in Canada and 10 years in the United States for the cocaine conspiracy. The men were then whisked back to Canada, where they were allowed to serve their sentences. For Sicurella, it was a particularly advantageous move. As a first-time federal offender charged with drug trafficking, which the National Parole Board does not consider a crime of violence, he was eligible for accelerated parole. In 2001, he was granted day parole, and full parole in 2003. Sciortino, however, did not fare as well. In 2002, three years after his imprisonment, he was convicted for drug trafficking yet again and sentenced to an additional 32 months. When he applied for parole in February 2007, the parole board was unimpressed.

  “According to information supplied by police, you were far more involved in drug trafficking than you led people to believe,” the parole board told Sciortino. “You are affiliated as a member of the Montreal Mafia,” the board said, also noting Sciortino’s denials: “You insist that your crimes had nothing to do with the clan,” the record says.

  “The interveners believe that you chose crime in full knowledge and out of contempt for legal and social norms—all this under the guise of your pro-social values and legal activities as a restaurateur over the years,” the board said. “Your turning to illicit activities was a life choice, taken in the course of business dealings where you did a cost-benefit analysis before committing yourself unconditionally.”

  In the end, Richard Southwick, the U.S. prosecutor, marvels at the large case and how it all spun out from the traffic stop of the cabbie. If they had hired a second courier to share the driving back from Texas, it could have ended differently, he said.

  “If they hadn’t been so darned cheap, they probably would not have gotten caught.”

  CHAPTER 27

  MONTREAL, DECEMBER 1993

  It is always cold in Canada at Christmas. Just as it also has sunny, warm summers, winters across most of the country are typically long and icy, an event celebrated by some with winter festivals and outdoor ice skating. For Oreste Pagano, who was acutely acclimatized to the south—having been born in the city of Naples, in southern Italy, and residing for years in swe
aty South American cities and then in Miami—it was bone-numbing weather that greeted him on this visit to Montreal. This trip, his first to Canada, stretched from Christmas 1993 into the New Year. Although snow was all around him, it was a very different sort of white powder that was on Pagano’s agenda in Montreal. Like Vito Rizzuto and Alfonso Caruana, Pagano was a busy man and, for Pagano, “business” seemed to always mean arranging cocaine shipments of the highest order. Bullish and almost bald, Pagano was a member of the Camorra, the Mafia of Naples. He had been introduced to Alfonso Caruana in 1991, while they both enjoyed Venezuela’s tourist mecca of Margarita Island, a place where the Rizzutos have also repeatedly visited in recent years for meetings and travel aboard someone else’s private jet.

  Pagano had fled to South America from the authorities in Italy and, after hooking up with Alfonso, was shopping for 400-kilo loads, or more, of cocaine secured from Colombian cartel contacts made during his year of living in Bogotá. It became a frequent and profitable relationship for both Pagano and the Caruanas and, in return, Pagano was drawn close into the bosom of the Sixth Family.

  On this Christmas, Pagano came to Montreal seeking answers from Alfonso Caruana. He wanted to know when he could expect to receive the substantial sum of money owed to him and his Colombian cartel suppliers for arranging a staggeringly huge cocaine shipment from Venezuela to Italy, a 5,466-kilo load. Despite the unsavory nature of their dealings, Pagano did not ignore the spirit of the season and brought with him a gold watch as a Christmas present for Alfonso. Alfonso had a gift, of sorts, for Pagano, as well. The two men had taken rooms at the same Montreal hotel and, on one of the seemingly unending chilly days, Alfonso announced to him that they were having dinner that evening with a compare, Pagano said. Compare is an Italian word that can mean “Godfather” or “kinsman.” Whatever meaning Alfonso was attaching to the word, he made it clear to Pagano that they were going to be meeting a person of importance.

  At about seven o’clock, Vito Rizzuto arrived at their hotel.

  “This gentleman arrived, a very tall gentleman with a distinguished appearance,” Pagano said of his first impressions of Vito. “He picked us up with his car and all three of us went out to dinner.”

  The world of Pagano and Alfonso was an extremely secretive one. Neither spoke carelessly of the other’s business. Of all their secrets, their extensive drug-trafficking activity was their most sacred and closely guarded. So when, at dinner, Pagano realized that Vito seemed to know all about what he had been up to, it was an important signal.

  “When Alfonso brought me to Vito Rizzuto and I had come to learn that Vito Rizzuto knows already what Alfonso and I were doing, I understood that Vito Rizzuto was the head of the Mafia, who is above Alfonso,” Pagano said. “Because, otherwise, why would Alfonso have to tell him what we were doing?” As such, any business ventures that might be suggested by Vito would seem, to Pagano, to be promising propositions indeed. When Pagano later discreetly checked Vito out, he found Vito’s reputation impeccable.

  “From what I know, he is head of the Mafia, leader of the Italian Mafia that is here in Canada,” Pagano said. “Alfonso told me.” No matter what authority, power, connections or wealth the Caruana-Cuntrera family carried around the world, in Canada, they could not exceed the authority of Vito Rizzuto, as the head of the Sixth Family, Pagano added. “After the Rizzutos, it is the Caruana family that counts the most, that has more of a voice in any discussion. The number of Alfonso’s family is number two.” Pagano approached other references, all easily vouching for Vito. “Besides Alfonso, other people had told me, who knew me, and told me that he was the Mafia leader of everything.”

  The dinner conversation that evening between Vito, Alfonso and Pagano was not just small talk.

  “We spoke in terms of business,” Pagano said. They started cooking up a new way to get cocaine shipped into North America and Vito also offered Pagano a portion of a large hashish load, Pagano alleged: “I also spoke with Vito … about a drug trafficking deal that we were going to do together.”

  The plan seemed simple enough by drug trafficking standards, Pagano recalled. Vito had a contact with a Canadian industrialist who owned a mining operation in Venezuela. Several times a year, the company shipped the extracted minerals to Canada, where they were processed. In the shipments, cocaine could easily be hidden for a secret journey into Canada, Pagano was told. The regular shipments from a large, legitimate company meant the chances of it being targeted for interception were minimal.

  “Vito Rizzuto sent me to speak to [his contact]. He lived in Venezuela and he had a mine in Venezuela but he was Canadian,” Pagano said. “He told me to send this 100 kilos to this person from the city of Bolivar and said that we could begin to do some work with them. I went to the city of Bolivar personally and gave him 100 kilos of coke.” The delivery took place some months later when Pagano had a lull in his business with the Caruanas after a shipment had been seized in Miami.

  “I had sent 100 kilos in October of ’94 in Venezuela. The person that I had to send it to, the person I was told to send it to, this person had said that the merchandise should arrive in Canada by Christmas,” Pagano said. “I had spoken with Vito Rizzuto, telling him that I was sending him the hundred kilos.” So, again around Christmastime, a year after his first visit to Montreal when he said he had met Vito for dinner, Pagano flew to Canada to see how their venture had worked out. This time, the mood of the men in Canada matched the chill in the air. The news from Venezuela was not good.

  PUERTO CABELLO, VENEZUELA, DECEMBER 1994

  It was shortly before Christmas and spirits might well have been high among workers in Puerto Cabello, a bustling old seaport to the west of Caracas. Puerto Cabello was once considered among the best deep-water ports in the New World and was the departure point for cocoa, coffee and cotton heading to Europe. In the 1700s, this seafaring activity attracted pirates who roamed the Caribbean Sea, prompting the construction of extensive fortifications along the coast, called the Fortín de San Felipe but often nicknamed the “Castle of the Liberator.” The fort was later used to jail political dissidents and the messages of its desperate occupants, scrawled on stone walls, are still decipherable. And just as the stone fortifications remain visually dominant, so remains the importance of shipping in this city, which is considered Venezuela’s primary commercial and military port. While fear of marauding sea pirates has receded over the centuries, Puerto Cabello has retained its attraction to organized criminal elements.

  Cocaine comes to Venezuela from its neighbor. The country is linked to Colombia by the Pan-American Highway and smaller spur roads that carry the heavy traffic of buses, cars and trucks through two official border crossings. Both the highway crossings and clandestine border crossing points are used to shuttle drugs. The quantities are large and, often, stockpiled to ensure a smooth and steady supply not dependent on border interdictions.

  “Methods of shipment and concealment are sophisticated, similar to those used in Colombia, and traffickers often establish ‘front’ companies using false documents. Traffickers use key urban and port centers around Maracaibo, Maracay, Caracas, Barquisimeto and Puerto Cabello to temporarily store drugs, then evade local law enforcement by shipping them from these poorly monitored ports,” according to a report by the U.S. Department of State. Puerto Cabello is further described by the U.S. Embassy in Caracas as: “a known embarkation point for multi-ton containerized shipments of cocaine to the U.S.”

  Increasing pressure on Venezuela from the American government had brought an incremental increase in narcotics seizures and arrests. Corruption, however, was still rampant. About the time that Pagano said he was arranging a test shipment of cocaine to Canada at the behest of the Sixth Family, President Carlos Andrés Pérez was on trial on charges of embezzlement, and a scandal was emerging after arrest warrants against more than 35 money launderers connected to the Cali cocaine cartel were dismissed by a corrupt judge, according to the U.S. Department of S
tate. “Corruption poses a threat to the Government of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and is a significant impediment to effective narcotics control programs,” the State department concluded in its narcotics report that year.

  In these uncertain times, officers with the Guardia Nacional, one of three Venezuelan federal agencies sharing drug-enforcement responsibilities, swooped down on a shipping facility in Puerto Cabello and arrested seven people who were loading 12 barrels containing mined magnesium into a shipping container destined for Montreal. When authorities inspected the shipment, mixed in with the metal was 543 kilograms of cocaine, with an estimated value of $100 million.