The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  For his part, Vito appears to have recognized the impressive breadth of the Nomads’ drug distribution network and the determination of its leader. Boucher came to represent a one-stop retail outlet. His reach was dominant in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and growing steadily across Canada. Like an oil-patch baron meeting a gas-station magnate, the two found good reason to talk. Never friends, but typically treating each other with courtesy, the Hells Angels and the Sixth Family started to hammer out an arrangement. The Sixth Family was the only criminal check on Boucher’s ambition and power, and Vito could do that through reputation alone. While violence filled the streets of Montreal, precious little of it involved the Sixth Family.

  “They basically signed contracts to be the sole supplier,” said André Bouchard, the former head of the Major Crimes Unit of the Montreal police. “The Italians had the contacts in South America and the bikers didn’t, not at that point. The Italians said to the Hells, ‘We’ll bring it into the port, you arrange to get it out of the port and it’s yours to distribute in the province,’” Bouchard said of the early deal that set out the primary roles of the Mafia, the West End Gang and the Hells Angels. The West End Gang, an Irish-based mob, had a foothold in the Port of Montreal and, for a price, which might just as easily be a share of the drug shipment, they would make sure a load made it off a ship and into the hands of the Hells Angels, without anyone in the Sixth Family having to touch the drugs. Handling the bulk importation exposed the Mafia to the least risk of arrest. An agreement was formed between the three criminal organizations to control the supply and price of drugs, a forum called the Consortium.

  By the summer of 1995, the deal was such that the supply of drugs was restricted considerably for most dealers—but not for Mom Boucher. Dany Kane, a biker well placed with senior Hells Angels who became an informant, told his police handlers on June 20, 1995, that the “drought continued” among drug dealers not tied to Boucher. The other Hells Angels realized that the Sixth Family was freezing them out, declining to sell to anyone but Mom Boucher. Boucher had formed an internal board of control for drug distribution, consisting of himself and four other Nomads, called La Table, “the table.” Most Hells Angels in Quebec were forced to buy their drugs through La Table.

  On the streets of Montreal, the dealers realized they had two real options for supply, the Mafia or the Hells Angels. As these middlemen worked their schemes to move the drugs around the province and into the bars, cafés and nightclubs where they were sold, they developed a simple hand sign to alert the people on the other end of the transaction as to just whose product they were dealing. A flash of a V with the fingers, like the peace sign given backwards, with the knuckles facing out, meant it was Vito’s load; a twisting motion of the fist at the wrist, mimicking the turning of the throttle on a motorcycle’s handbar, meant it was Mom Boucher’s. Conversely, they might use two sets of letters.

  “People will also say ‘V-R’ to refer to him. They will say, ‘This is coming from V-R’ or ‘This is coming from the ‘H-A,’” a Montreal gangster said, referring to the initials of Vito Rizzuto and the Hells Angels. Vito was also well-known by his nickname “The Tall Guy.”

  The Hells Angels generated a lot of fear on the street, but a February 1997 incident is a telling display of Vito’s reputation. Dany Kane told his police handlers that two or three bikers, including Donald Magnussen, the right-hand man of a powerful Hells Angel, beat up Vito’s youngest son, Leonardo, outside a St-Laurent Boulevard bar. It was not meant as a challenge to Vito’s authority but simply a case of mistaken identity—the bikers just did not know who it was they were pounding. Talk rippled through the underworld of Vito wanting revenge and Magnussen, normally a thundering, murderous presence himself, cowered in fear. He refused to go out alone. Not long after the incident, he was calling his biker buddies looking for someone to go to the gym with him, Kane said. Few were willing to help out. Magnussen had also upset fellow bikers with an intemperate killing of a biker from the Los Brovos motorcycle gang, a group of bikers from Winnipeg that the Hells Angels were courting to join them. Whether one or the other enemy caught up with Magnussen, in 1998, he was found dead, floating in the St. Lawrence River. He had been savagely beaten before being killed. A Quebec criminal with long ties to organized crime said he doubts Vito would have gone after Magnussen.

  “He was probably more upset with his son. He probably gave his son shit for getting into that kind of trouble; for causing a disturbance and allowing himself to be in that position. Vito likes to avoid that sort of thing,” the underworld source said.

  “They are very, very, very conservative people. Extremely conservative. Anytime there was any commotion or any attention, that was a bad thing. Things you wouldn’t think would be a problem were—if you saw them in a restaurant and called them out by name, that would be a problem. If you were drunk and loud in a bar and saw them and came over to them, that would be a problem. They are actually very boring people,” he said of the Sixth Family’s inner core.

  MONTREAL, APRIL 2000

  The more it looked like the Hells Angels were winning the war for control of drug distribution in Quebec, the more the Sixth Family extended its hand in friendship to the gang. By 2000, they were working closely together, coordinating activities, prices and manpower and, in April of that year, senior Nomads and their closest associates were meeting with Vito’s son Nick, according to Kane. Normand Robitaille, a Nomad member and a favorite of Mom Boucher’s, was the gang’s main liaison with the mob. Kane would often stand guard outside their meetings. The interaction, apparently, did not need to be hidden: a meeting between Nick, Robitaille and other Nomads on April 10, 2000, was held in a Montreal restaurant’s bar; another, between Nick and Robitaille, on May 25, was in the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, Kane told his handlers. From the Sixth Family’s end, Antonio “Tony” Mucci acted as something of a go-between with the bikers, Kane said. Mucci gained notoriety when, in 1974, he walked into the newsroom of Le Devoir, a Montreal newspaper, and shot crime reporter Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, who had been writing about mob activity. Charbonneau survived and continued to expose the Mafia’s activities and later became a popular politician.

  By late May, the meetings between the Sixth Family and Hells Angels bore more fruit. A cartel had been formed that set a uniform price for cocaine at all levels: at the bulk rate it was to be $50,000 per kilo, a huge jump from its price of $32,000 a few years earlier, and at the street level it was to be sold for $25 for a one-quarter gram. By mid-June, the bikers and other dealers who were left out of both the Consortium and La Table were complaining of the price-fixing. They were losing customers because of the price. The Consortium did not seem to care. They insisted that the price could not be lowered, no matter what.

  The mob’s relationship with the bikers was working so well they started talking about other cooperative ventures, such as a telemarketing scam that involved phoning Americans to inform them they had won a car in a lottery; all the victims had to do was pay the taxes. Those foolhardy enough to pay the money would only kick themselves, not the tires of a new car. Kane told his police handlers that he was promised a cut of the telephone scam just for standing watch over the organizational meetings. The scheme was expected to clear $1 million each week.

  The alliance with the Hells Angels caused some ruffled feathers within the Mafia, just as it had for bikers who were left out of La Table. Salvatore Gervasi, for instance, was a big man, not only because of his 300-pound frame but because his father, Paolo Gervasi, was a mafioso with close ties to Vito. Paolo Gervasi also owned Cabaret Castel Tina, a Saint-Léonard strip club popular in the Montreal underworld. The elder Gervasi was believed to be a made man in Vito’s Mafia, or, as some in Montreal’s underworld say, he had “hot hands,” a reference to the burning picture of a saint that Mafia members hold in their hands during their induction ceremony. In the mid-1980s, Vito used Gervasi’s club as a base, making frequent phone calls from its office. A decade later,
it remained a great place for conducting illicit business. Salvatore, 32, was using his father’s club as his base when he started into a criminal career.

  “Salvatore used to hang around with the Rock Machine at the club. They wore their patches in the club and he furnished them, through his contacts, with narcotics,” said André Bouchard, the retired Montreal police commander. “It didn’t go over well with the Hells Angels because the Hells Angels were dealing directly with the Italians and the Italians weren’t supposed to be working with the Rock Machine.” After the Hells Angels complained to the Mafia leadership, Paolo Gervasi was told to keep his son in line. The warnings became graver but Salvatore’s relationships with the Rock Machine continued.

  “The night of Salvatore’s murder, we found him in the trunk of a car. They parked the Porsche in front of his father’s home in Saint-Léonard. His father arrived and came crashing into the crime scene; we had to tackle him to keep him away from the trunk,” Bouchard said of the April 2000 murder of the young Gervasi.

  “So the old man got pissed. He got really angry at the Italians when he found out that they killed his son and he said he was going to get rid of the club. The Italians offered to buy the club from him and he told them to go fuck themselves and he actually got up on a bulldozer and tore down his own club. It was his way of getting back at them. He built condominiums over top of the club, and a parking lot. That really pissed the Italians off and that was the first time they shot him.” Four months after his son’s murder, Gervasi was shot repeatedly as he walked out of a bank. The bullets were not meant to kill, unless the gunman was incompetent. The message, however, was ignored by Gervasi, a tough and hot-headed man who, in response, did the unimaginable—he went after Vito himself.

  Police learned of the plot and, for weeks, watched two men who had been hired as hitmen. Investigators also felt it was necessary to warn the targets—Vito Rizzuto and Francesco Arcadi—according to an RCMP report. On July 13, 2001, police were watching the alleged assassins, who were driving in different vehicles and seemed to be converging on Vito’s Consenza headquarters. Fearing imminent gunplay, police stopped both vehicles and arrested two men. Although neither was armed, a search of one of their homes turned up an AK-47 automatic rifle, a .357-caliber magnum revolver, two 9mm pistols, two bulletproof vests, walkie-talkies and ammunition clips, police said. The tension was not over. On February 25, 2002, a passerby reported a suspicious object underneath a Jeep Grand Cherokee parked near the Consenza club. Police do not believe Vito was the target of that bomb plot, investigators say in internal documents; it was meant for Paolo Gervasi. The old mobster’s luck would not hold forever. He would later be killed, caught in a flurry of gunfire as he sat behind the wheel of his Jeep, but that final chapter for Gervasi was not yet played out when the Hells Angels and the Mafia were dividing their spoils.

  On June 21, 2000, Robitaille had nothing but warm regards for the Sixth Family, gushing over Vito and Tony Mucci to Kane. Affairs between the two groups had been tense in the past, but, Robitaille told Kane, they were now one big team. Robitaille’s confidence stemmed from a meeting earlier that day at a restaurant in Laval, across the river from Montreal. Vito, Mucci and two of their associates met with Robitaille and two senior members of the Hells Angels Nomads.

  “Norm told me that Vito was very nice and it wasn’t pretense,” Kane wrote in his diary of a conversation with Robitaille. “He told me that the Italians were strong and that if they were at war with them, the Hells Angels would have more trouble with them than they had with the Rock Machine.” On July 31, Kane again stood watch over a meeting between the organizations. The St-Laurent Boulevard restaurant was closed, so Kane could hear some of the chatter between Vito’s son, Nick, and Robitaille, he told his handlers. Nick said that 250 kilos of cocaine a week were moving through Montreal. At the new fixed rate, that meant $12.5 million in revenue each and every week.

  Along with letting others do the more dangerous hands-on work of selling the drugs in Canada, the Sixth Family’s business model offered other benefits as well, investigators said.

  “Vito never brings anything in that isn’t already sold. He wouldn’t bring in 5,000 kilos if he had only sold 1,200 kilos. The stuff is bought and paid for in advance and his job was to bring it to the Port of Montreal or the Port of Vancouver or the Port of Halifax—whatever port you want,” André Bouchard said. An experienced drug investigator agreed that Vito was a master of financing.

  “Vito never put a dime of his own money into a deal. It was always somebody else’s money but he would end up with 60 percent of the product. He would take no risk but imprisonment—and that was remote with his level of insulation—and if the deal worked out he puts $50 to $60 million in his pocket, and if it didn’t work out, well, other people lose their money,” the officer said. “He is a very clever man.”

  The bikers meant more to Vito than just men to push his dope. The nagging war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine drew the attention of the police and the public, making the bikers the number-two criminal organization but the number-one police target in Quebec and, later, in all of Canada.

  “We didn’t really have enough time for the Italians. All the time, it was the bikers,” Bouchard said. This meant Vito went about his business largely unimpeded by city and provincial police. It had nothing to do with corruption, Bouchard said. It had to do with the in-your-face nature of the war waged by the rival biker gangs that left bodies in Montreal streets.

  “The Italians played it very smart,” Bouchard said. “[Police] put all of their money and all of their eggs in one basket and said, ‘We have to attack the motorcycle gangs. They’re the ones making the most noise.’ If you throw enough money at something, you can get things done. My guys were working 16-hour days for years on the bikers.” There was little left over to keep an eye on the Sixth Family. During the biker war, Vito got an easy ride in Montreal.

  “During that whole period, from 1992 to 2001, nobody touched the Italians. The police didn’t go after them. We didn’t check on them, we didn’t wiretap them. And any information that came in largely came from other police departments. They said, ‘Watch out for this guy, watch out for that guy.’ The Italians sat back, made all their money, bought up businesses, laundered their money. They became specialists in laundering money,” said Bouchard, who added he regrets not having the resources to focus on both organizations.

  The sparks from the biker war soon grew too hot, even for the Sixth Family. Innocents were getting caught in the crossfire. First, in 1995, an 11-year-old boy was killed by shrapnel from a car bomb. Two years later, two Quebec prison guards were killed in a bid to destabilize the justice system. Then, in 2000, Montreal’s best-known crime reporter, Michel Auger, was shot in the parking lot of his newspaper, the popular tabloid Le Journal de Montréal. Despite six bullets in his back, Auger survived, but the outrage over the bold attack was palpable. Protest marches were held and demands made for tougher anti-gang legislation to tackle this criminal audacity. Politicians started talking about an American-style racketeering law. Suddenly, the biker war was putting a crimp in the Sixth Family’s quiet existence.

  “Vito did sit down with Mom Boucher and say, ‘You have to stop these things, it’s hurting everyone,’” Bouchard said.

  Even a crime boss as powerful and as aggressive as Mom Boucher needed to listen when Vito spoke. Vito could make peace as well as war.

  MONTREAL, MARCH 2001

  In the early hours of March 28, 2001, authorities mustered some 2,000 police officers from numerous federal, provincial and municipal forces for what would be the largest police assault against organized crime in Canada. After years of investigation by police using a number of informants—one who had been murdered when his cover was blown, killed while still wearing his police wire, ghoulishly capturing his own death on tape, and another, Dany Kane, who committed suicide—a stack of arrest warrants had been assembled as part of a major police operation for targets in
Quebec and Ontario. By the end of the day, 128 people had been arrested in what was called Operation Springtime 2001. All of them were bikers or biker associates. The members of the Hells Angels Nomads were pinched; their puppet gangs and assassins, their money launderers and drug runners were arrested.

  The Hells Angels, by taking on society so openly and defiantly, had drawn all of the heat and now faced all of the repercussions.

  Their partners, the Sixth Family, once again skipped over the carnage and went on with its business.

  CHAPTER 34

  TORONTO, JANUARY 2001

  Before the police toppled the most aggressive of the world’s Hells Angels, Vito Rizzuto and his Sixth Family kin were already planning a strategy to deal with the growing strength of the bikers. He recognized them as a threat at the same time he accepted them to sit at his table, likely with an eye to the old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.

  In the months before Operation Springtime 2001 largely settled the matter, Vito was working to do with the Mafia what the Hells Angels had managed to accomplish with the bikers. The Hells Angels had recently accepted several veteran motorcycle gangs in Ontario into their fold, dramatically waiving their own rules on membership and granting full-patch membership status to all of the bikers in the independent gangs who agreed to bury their own gang colors. It had been a bold move that gave the Hells Angels coast-to-coast coverage of the prime drug markets of Canada. Vito wanted to do the same for the Mafia clans, uniting them all under his banner, a move that would give him unprecedented power and position.