The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  Nick, Vito’s first-born son, is more of the hands-on guy in the family, police allege. He frequently meets with someone before that person is allowed to meet with Vito. An astute man with street smarts, he checks out strangers wishing to get close to the family; he often speaks on his family’s behalf. He and a key associate also run a Longueuil real estate firm.

  Beyond this core leadership, the Sixth Family’s ranks—the men under Vito’s command—are expansive.

  “The nucleus of the Montreal-based Sicilian Mafia … [comprises] hundreds of soldiers and associates,” says a Canadian police report drafted in 2004. Those who merely do business with the Sixth Family or work with them in short-term ventures are not included in this. Neither, generally, are the businessmen who do mostly non-criminal favors for the organization. Enumerating the strength of a secret organization is fraught with difficulty. Some members, no doubt, manage to keep below the radar of police and other observers of organized crime. Some members die—some of natural causes, others killed in disputes—and others are imprisoned. The jailed members will, for the most part, remain associated with the group, both inside and outside of the institution, but hardly count when calculating the street strength of an organization while they are away. There are also many fringe players who, for convenience, safety or profit, pledge fealty to the organization but are not a part of it. This applies to a growing number of street gang members in Montreal who have taken up the slack in the Hells Angels drug distribution.

  There is evidence to suggest the number of people who are a routine and continuing part of the Rizzuto criminal organization, those who appear to have a formal role, a specific job and a designated reporting mechanism within the network’s enterprises and are considered to be members by police, exceeds 500 people. For instance:• A recent internal police report on those considered to be the leading targets for investigation as part of the Rizzuto criminal organization in the city of Montreal shows three large cellules, or “cells,” of the organization, two of them comprising roughly 50 people, and a third, 30 people.

  • Each of the cells has its own reporting structure and leadership. Three people supervise each of the two large cells and one leader oversees the smaller one. These seven bosses, who have for decades been among the most prominent men of the Sixth Family, are shown as reporting to Vito.

  • The Sixth Family’s Montreal-based operations also have two smaller satellite cells, comprising about a half-dozen members each, one based on the South Shore, the communities across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, and the other in Cornwall, Ontario, a small border city linking Quebec, Ontario and Massena, New York. There is another outpost linked to the Kahnawake native reserve, also on the South Shore.

  • A dossier on Vito, compiled by the Montreal police, documents some of his meetings and telephone conversations with alleged associates, recorded during police operations into organized crime activities. Taking only those people listed in meetings since 1985, after the death of Vic Cotroni, and removing frivolous or apparently purely social gatherings, the list exceeds 75 names. Most have criminal records and most are well known in the underworld. Only 14 of the names also appear on the above lists.

  • A classified chart prepared by the RCMP’s Criminal Analysis Branch maps out “Vito Rizzuto’s Criminal Affiliations by Kinship and Intermarriage.” It traces the marriages and blood ties between Vito and 10 other families, comprising some 40 people, most of whom form the innermost core of the Sixth Family. Almost all of them have family members who have faced drug arrests or other criminal charges and all of them have members who appear in criminal intelligence files as organized crime members or associates.

  • Yet another confidential police report tracks the organization’s leadership in Montreal in 1997. It shows a spider web of lines linking “sub-organizations” and “henchmen” back to Vito and his father Nick. It shows 13 cells, each headed by a senior underworld player who reports directly to Vito. Another three key men are shown separately as also reporting to Vito. Another four separate cells—the remnants of the old Cotroni and Violi organization, including some of the most venerable mobsters in Montreal—are shown as reporting to Vito, with the now-deceased Frank Cotroni acting as an intermediary. Another four cells are shown reporting to Nick through Agostino Cuntrera. Other core members of the Sixth Family are noted individually on the chart, with most linked to Vito through Nick.

  • A recent report on the Sixth Family’s chief operatives in Ontario shows 15 key men, most of whom run their own powerful Mafia organizations in the Toronto area. These groups range in size from a crew of five or six to a sprawling organization of several dozen, typically related, members that is, itself, an impressive Mafia organization. Also in Ontario, police allege, are four or five active and successful businessmen with no criminal records who work intimately on Vito’s behalf.

  • The Sixth Family has other branches or operatives, smaller in size, in other Canadian cities, most notably Vancouver, a large city on Canada’s west coast, where there is a “Western Front” documented by police.

  • There is a separate group of Sixth Family members that police refer to as the “new generation,” which is generally made up of the sons, nephews and younger cousins of older Sixth Family members. Rizzuto, Sciascia, Manno, LoPresti, Renda and Cuntrera are all last names that cascade through the generations while continuing to find their way into police files.

  Internationally, as well, the Sixth Family’s interests are extensive. Beyond its numerous activities in Canada and the United States, its trafficking enterprises in Venezuela and Colombia and its relatives who remained in Cattolica Eraclea and surrounding Sicilian villages, an unreleased analysis by Canada’s Department of Justice tracked financial holdings and connections from the Sixth Family to 16 other countries. They include:• money laundering, investments and financial transfers through Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain. The family also has at least one operative located in London, England;

  • investments in Saudi Arabia achieved with the suspected involvement of a member of the Saudi Royal family;

  • importation of wood products and wood flooring from, and financial investments in, China;

  • financial investment ventures in Algeria, a North African nation, and in the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich Middle Eastern country on the Persian Gulf;

  • investments in Cuba, along with periodic visits and extended stays in the country;

  • drug transactions, meetings and visits in Mexico;

  • alleged infiltration of public works projects in Italy. Also, at least one family operative is based in Rome and another in Milan;

  • drug importation and involvement in airport servicing in Haiti;

  • gambling enterprises in Belize, a small Central American country that borders Mexico;

  • family members and associates traveling to and attending meetings in Panama, Aruba, Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.

  Perhaps the most alarming aspect of police allegations concerning the Sixth Family’s fulsome ranks is that it has a “Lawyer’s Branch,” one of its most protected, secretive and valued divisions. Police claim that practicing lawyers are involved in the family’s enterprises to such an extent that a small proportion of them is considered by investigators to be a distinct branch of the organization. Police believe that the main cells of the organization each have their own designated lawyers. This would be a key distinction from other criminal organizations that maintain above-board but ongoing professional relationships with lawyers. Investigators suspect that the legal branch is not acting solely as judicial participants. There are no fewer than 11 lawyers from different law firms in Quebec that have raised police suspicions. Another has been identified by police as working closely with the family’s business in Ontario. They have played varying roles in the family’s enterprises, police suggest. But by no means are all lawyers who have acted for members of the Sixth Family implicated in improper activities; in fact, most are no
t.

  One lawyer is dubbed “the Messenger” by police investigators. They say he carries messages: for instance, from Montreal he went to New York City; from New York City he went to Toronto; from Toronto he went to a jail north of the city. Along the way, the Quebec attorney spoke softly and passed along advice and warnings, according to police. He spoke to members of the Sicilian faction and other members of the Bonanno crew in New York, many of them in jail or out on bail, an investigator said. In Toronto he met with lawyers representing the Sixth Family’s associates who were facing charges in that city. In a visitor’s room in an Ontario prison, police say he met with a senior member of the Caruana-Cuntrera Family.

  Police have found that lawyer-client privilege is being used as a prime defense by the Sixth Family. One lawyer, police have marveled, seems to have the job of sitting in on family meetings, bringing down the veil of legal privacy to discussions, as his daily activity. The lawyers’ jobs are often simple: keep the lines of communication open, and prevent Vito’s name and affairs from being brought up in court. Combative, aggressive men facing organized crime charges have meekly made the best deal they could and pleaded guilty, at the behest of Montreal. One suspect, believing he could beat drug charges, told his own lawyer to tell a certain Quebec lawyer that he had a good shot in court.

  “This isn’t about him,” the Quebec lawyer allegedly told the accused man’s counsel. “This is about the big guy. Don’t make beating the charge the saddest day of your client’s life.”

  Informants have talked about investing money through a law firm, about the office being used as a safe meeting place for critical discussions and about escrow accounts being used to launder drug money. Sometimes a lawyer is present for a meeting; at other times he absents himself to another room. Wiretaps on Sixth Family targets that have made their way into the court record have captured loose talk of questionable relationships with some of their lawyers. One gangster spoke of trying to pay his lawyer for certain services but being told the lawyer could not take the cash; the lawyer then said he could sure use a new computer. Others speak of using lawyers to help in getting false travel papers, to unearth personal information about people and other irregular duties. There was the lawyer who was allegedly involved in receiving the payment from the Toronto car dealer on Vito’s behalf. That the substantial sum was returned when the businessman raised the possibility of exposing the lawyer’s involvement suggests the value placed on the branch’s secrecy.

  Some other clues have emerged. Meetings allegedly about large cocaine shipments during which José Guede, a Montreal lawyer, was present are outlined in a Montreal police report filed in open court.

  (The charges against Guede were later dropped.) Similarly, the odd connections between Ramon Fernandez, Vito’s man in Toronto, and lawyer Carmine Iacono emerged during the Project R.I.P. prosecution. Earlier, Joe Lagana, a lawyer for Vito, and three junior lawyers from the same firm, pleaded guilty to laundering drug money after the RCMP’s sting operation at the money exchange house.

  “The lawyers are a tricky part of getting at the Rizzuto family,” an organized crime investigator said. “When we’re up on the wires [running wiretaps], the minute we know it’s a lawyer, we have to minimize [shut the recorders off].” With Vito and his key administrators keeping so many lawyers around them, that leads to a lot of minimizing.

  “We’re in a Catch-22 situation,” said another officer. “If we want to put in an affidavit [requesting a judge’s permission to intercept phone conversations] on a lawyer, we have to say that we have reason to believe that the lawyer is involved in crime. But you don’t have that evidence because you can never listen in on their conversations. We need someone to come forward and tell us that they have evidence of a crime so we can move forward.”

  Several senior and experienced police investigators say they suspect lawyers are used in a number of different ways to thwart police monitoring of conversations.

  “If you are on the wires and a lawyer comes into the conversation, the authorization says you have to cut out. The lawyer comes on the phone and clearly identifies himself as a lawyer and then says, ‘OK, now turning to the case you and I are involved with.’ And you have to stop listening. You have to stop. If the guy is involved in crime, we don’t get to hear it,” said an officer involved in extensive investigation of Sixth Family targets.

  Some phone numbers are known by police to be a number for a lawyer’s office and so officers realize a call is likely being made to a lawyer before any conversation even takes place. More often than not, officers turn off the wire without even waiting for a connection in a scrupulous bid to adhere to the court authorization allowing the wiretap which explicitly forbids intercepting calls between lawyers and their clients. Some officers believe, however, that this situation is being exploited. Investigators say some lawyers are registering cellular telephones in their names and then giving the phone to members or associates of the Sixth Family to use.

  “You now have a bad guy carrying the phone of a lawyer. These guys know we can’t listen to a lawyer. We don’t want to taint the case so we cut out when the call is made,” said an investigator. In the old days, officers might listen to conversations they should not be hearing and then erase the tapes later and pretend it never happened. In a digital age where the calls are exhaustively logged and recorded, there is a permanent record that cannot be hidden.

  “They’ll know if we breach the court order. Is it worth it? No. It is extremely frustrating,” said an officer. At all times, the poor track record of previous investigations against Vito looms large.

  Officers also suspect that some lawyers do third-party transfer of telephone calls. A target of an investigation may call a lawyer, engage in a conversation that would be covered by lawyer-client privilege and then—when they are pretty sure police would have cut out of the conversation—transfer the call to a third person, to allow them to engage in an unmonitored chat.

  “We need some help from the Justice Department,” said an investigator. “We need some ability in certain cases to listen in and see, to just see if it is a legitimate lawyer-client call or something else.”

  As the new millennium dawned, Vito headed an unprecedented criminal organization, the likes of which Canada had never seen. As law enforcement beat back the Five Families in New York, the Sixth Family, safely operating from its base in Canada, steadily expanded its wealth and position. Those two opposite trajectories—the near collapsing of the American Mafia organizations and the growth of the Rizzuto organization—have seen the Sixth Family eclipse the families of the New York Mafia.

  It has forged an organization few criminal cartels in any of the Americas can overshadow.

  Even with all that police were learning about the Sixth Family and its power, wealth and substantial holdings, there were still many secrets; and many surprises to come.

  CHAPTER 37

  MONTREAL, JANUARY 20, 2004

  Wearing a bathrobe pulled over his pajamas, Vito Rizzuto followed his wife to the front door of their Montreal home after a sharp knock woke them at precisely 6:15 a.m. Outside, Sergeant-Detective Pietro Poletti and Detective Nicodemo Milano, both officers with the Montreal city police, stood on the wide front porch of the Rizzutos’ immense Tudor-style mansion at 12281 Antoine-Berthelet Avenue.

  With its impressive cut-stone facade, three-port garage and leaded window panes, the house, near the waterfront of the Rivières des Prairies, is an enviable sight. Poletti and Milano, two dedicated Italian-Canadian officers who had worked on the force’s organized crime squad, had maintained an interest in investigating the Mafia despite the force’s preoccupation with the warring motorcycle gangs. It was more reward for their efforts than strategic necessity that saw these two selected as the ones to knock on Vito’s door that morning. Lurking nearby were four uniformed police officers discreetly placed a little farther from the house in idling squad cars; Montreal police were making an effort to ensure the arrest was handled with
civility, but were not prepared to risk it becoming an ignoble spectacle.

  The two detectives politely greeted Giovanna Rizzuto, Vito’s wife, at the door when she opened it a crack. They apologized for the early intrusion and then explained to Vito, in English and in French, that he was being arrested and charged in connection with three murders, based on indictments issued in New York. Twenty-two years and eight months after the May 5, 1981, slayings of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone and Dominick “Big Trinny” Trinchera, U.S. authorities were formally alleging that Vito, now a 57-year-old grandfather of five, was the one who led the way out of the Brooklyn social club’s closet and started the massacre.