by Lamothe, Lee
For in New York, the rats were waiting.
NEW YORK, AUGUST 17, 2006
Vito’s winning streak in the courts had already taken a bruising by the time the Supreme Court of Canada came to decide whether or not it would hear the mobster’s appeal of his extradition order. In the two and a half years since his arrest, despite his legal firepower, he had lost his motions and appeals in the Quebec Superior Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal, withdrawn his appeal to the Federal Court of Canada, and had the Supreme Court of Canada decline to hear his appeal over being denied bail. By the summer of 2006, it must have been difficult for Vito to retain much optimism that the Supreme Court would agree to intervene at the eleventh hour to prevent his extradition and, as expected, the justices in Canada’s highest court were just as cool to Vito’s legal arguments as their lower court colleagues.
Almost immediately after the court declared that it would not hear his appeal, Rizzuto was whisked from jail and escorted by Montreal police officers to Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, where an aircraft supplied by the U.S. government was waiting for him.
Three hours later, he finally appeared in an American court. Facing Judge Nicholas Garaufis, Vito pleaded not guilty to his racketeering charge for the murder of the three captains and was ordered to be held in custody. For the Sixth Family, this was the most serious crisis it had faced since Vito’s father Nick was imprisoned in Venezuela.
There was more anguish to come.
CHAPTER 42
LAVAL, QUEBEC, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006
Intruders found a stash of money crammed inside a sports bag and hidden under the basement stairs of a Laval home. Wads of hundred-dollar bills—more than 28,000 of them—and one lonely fifty-dollar bill were bundled and banded. The trespassers took their time removing the haul of almost $3-million. They knew that they would find serious cash here, in a comfortable home connected to a Sixth Family drug trafficker. They also knew that they had the house to themselves, since the residents were on holiday in Las Vegas, unaware that they were losing far more at home than they could ever hope to win at the casinos.
When the man who had hidden the money flew home the following day and discovered his loss, he was petrified. Some of the money was his—that was bad enough—but a large chunk belonged to Giuseppe “Pep” Torre, one of the Rizzutos’ closest associates and accused prolific drug trafficker. The victim gathered his wits and called Torre on the telephone with this alarming news.
“Pep, I’m finished,” he said.
“Don’t tell me this,” Torre warned.
“I feel like crying, man,” he replied. He suspected the cash had been stolen by his brother-in-law, one of the few people who knew where it was.
“I’m going to fucking choke the guy,” he told Torre. “I’m gonna kill him,” he said, before storming out of the house with a gun.
It was one more in a series of unexpected upsets for the Sixth Family. A bookmaker who ran a $1-billion gambling operation in Ottawa and Montreal left his car parked on the street for a moment while he visited a betting shop. When he returned, a suitcase stuffed with $43,000 in cash had been pilfered from the trunk. Another of their drug dealers found that $280,000 had been looted from a metal safe in his home.
The rash of thefts did not go unnoticed by Sixth Family bosses. Even with Vito Rizzuto, their chief, in jail while fighting his New York charges, the organization was not short of leadership. Meetings were held to ponder who could be behind these thefts and how to safeguard their cash. Mobsters moved bags of money to safer locations. Suddenly, fewer and fewer people were trusted.
For police, this confusion was all good. The frenzied chatter about missing money must have brought mischievous smiles to some in Montreal because the anger and accusations brought carelessness to men who were unaccustomed to being victims; they spewed a wealth of information about the inner workings of their organization as they tried to pinpoint who had turned bad.
“We’re getting busted every day,” Lorenzo Giordano, a leading Sixth Family henchman, complained to his colleagues. “I’m calling everybody every morning to see if everybody’s okay.” In hindsight, such calls were not a good idea. Unbeknownst to the drug traffickers, money launderers, gangsters and bookies, a select team of police investigators had an unusual vantage point from which to watch and listen to this underworld chaos. For police, the best part of this situation was that they already knew exactly who had taken the money from the basement in Laval, from the trunk of the bookmaker’s car and from the metal safe—police officers had.
Taking the money was a tactic designed to spark exactly the sorts of phone calls, meetings, whispers and suspicions that were taking place. It was all part of a daring police plan that had been years in the making.
If the Sixth Family bosses thought Vito Rizzuto’s trouble in the U.S. was their biggest worry in 2006, they were wrong. What the gangsters did not know was that representatives of several law-enforcement agencies had gathered together four years before to meticulously start pulling threads from the broad tapestry of criminal conspiracies that were the domain of the Sixth Family.
The police efforts would eventually be codenamed Project Colisée and mushroom into the largest coordinated attack on any Canadian Mafia group in history. In the 1990s, a tightly focused operation, Project Omertà, had taken out the leadership of the Sixth Family’s close allies, the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, sending to prison several of its world-class drug traffickers, including the family head, Alfonso Caruana. Police hoped Project Colisée could do the same—and more—to the Sixth Family. For decades, the organization had proven virtually untouchable. They had shed a member here or there to police enforcement—Domenico Manno, Emanuele Ragusa, Girolamo Sciortino and Gaetano Amodeo among them—and even fewer to gangland intrigue, most notably Gerlando Sciascia, Joe LoPresti and Vito’s grandfather generations before. In each case, however, the core of the organization remained strong. Could that dismal enforcement record ever be undone? The task was daunting. At least 10 previous RCMP-led projects in several provinces, all aimed at putting Vito and his senior mob colleagues behind bars, had ended in failure. This time, however, police had a particularly intriguing base to build a case on, although, ominously, it came from another failure.
Project Calamus, the RCMP’s operation set up in 2001 to probe a $500,000 loan between car dealers, had wrapped up without charges against Vito, his son Nick, or anyone else. Project Calamus’s sister investigation in Ontario, however, codenamed Project R.I.P., was continuing to gather intelligence. Information about the attempts to recover the $500,000 enabled York Regional Police, located north of Toronto, to obtain court authorization to conduct secret electronic surveillance that came dangerously close to the Sixth Family.
“We ran our lines into Montreal,” said an Ontario investigator, a reference to police wiretaps.
On September 23, 2002, based on evidence from the Project R.I.P. recordings, a Quebec judge gave police in Montreal some wiretaps of their own to monitor. The timing was perfect. After the 2001 arrests of the leading Hells Angels, police in Quebec could finally pull their attention and resources away from the deadly biker war. A secret police team was established, bringing together investigators from the RCMP, Montreal city police, the Sûreté du Québec, Laval police, Canada Customs, Canada Border Services Agency and the Canada Revenue Agency. Called the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU)—or, to its many francophone officers, the Unité mixte d’enquête sur le crime organizé (UMECO)—it was modeled on the successful CFSEU in Toronto that had been the bane of mobsters for decades. It was the Toronto CFSEU that put the Caruanas in prison. The Montreal CFSEU divided its meager resources between two investigations. One team, using the codename Project Calvette, targeted Raymond Desfossés, a West End Gang veteran running a burgeoning drug empire. The other took the codename Project Cicéron, the original codename for Project Colisée. Both the Cicéron and Colisée monikers—the first a nod to the great orator of ancie
nt Rome and the other to the Colosseum, the iconic Roman amphitheatre—allude to their target: the primarily Italian gangsters of the Sixth Family.
Project Cicéron’s wiretaps first targeted Vito and 12 of his close associates. Hope among the few officers who knew of it was high. The objective was ambitious: to seriously destabilize the Montreal Mafia by charging Vito and senior members of his organization with violating Canada’s anti-gang laws. To do that, however, they needed to penetrate the inner sanctum of the Sixth Family. For generations, that had proved impossible.
The investigators knew exactly where they should start.
MONTREAL, JUNE 2003
There is little in the way of beauty in the back room of the Club Social Consenza. Cream-colored walls bordered by green; a single picture—of a running animal—hung on a wall in an oddly shaped wooden frame. The furniture is spartan: a long metal coat rack against one wall with a dozen unmatched hangers dangling from it; a small television propped in a corner; a round cherry wood table topped by a green ceramic ashtray and surrounded by steel tube-frame chairs. The table is lit by a conical lamp overhead, casting a theatrical spotlight over the men who sit hunched around it. Outsiders do not make it into this back room. Out front, the Consenza is technically open to the public. As a café in a commercial strip mall at 4891 Jarry Street East in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighborhood, it offers espresso, cappuccino and café au lait. The large men near the entrance who glower at all strangers, however, make it an uncomfortable place for a leisurely drink. Since the 1980s, this had been the home base for older members of the Sixth Family.
When Nick Rizzuto arrived at the Consenza, as he did most days, he would nod a greeting to those already inside, hang his trench coat and fedora on the coatstand near the entrance and take a seat at a table with friends for a leisurely game of cards. He would then disappear into the back office when those close to him arrived, including Paolo Renda, Frank Arcadi, Rocco Sollecito and, until his arrest for the murders of the three captains, his son Vito. It was clear to police that these five men were the absolute top of the organization.
When someone arrived at the Consenza who wanted to talk to one of the bosses, the visitor would wait in the front section, perhaps ordering an espresso, while one of the men with slicked-back hair who spent their days watching over the club walked to the door of the back room, gently knocked and told the bosses who was here. The visitor would typically be escorted in and the door then closed behind him. The Project Cicéron investigators knew they needed to peer behind that door. From the beginning of their investigation, the Consenza was identified as the headquarters of the senior bosses and if investigators were to make any serious progress they needed to see and hear what happened when Vito, Nick and their colleagues gathered around that table.
By June 2003, investigators had gathered the evidence needed to secure a judge’s approval to secretly intercept private conversations taking place at the Consenza. Next, they needed to actually get their gadgets inside without anyone knowing. That was not an easy task. When it came time to wire up the Consenza, investigators working on Project Cicéron left nothing to chance. As many as 50 officers were divided into carefully coordinated specialist units: locksmiths skilled at getting through any door; alarm wizards who could bypass security systems; technical experts who knew how to set up miniature lenses and transmitting microphones; and dozens of physical surveillance teams.
On the night of the planned penetration, police needed to know with certainty where everyone who had keys to the club was at all times. The last thing they needed was one of their suspects arriving at the Consenza to find police technicians fiddling with wires inside. Included in those having to be watched was a caretaker who often showed up at 4 a.m. to tidy the café before the start of the next business day. Each target was given a code name. Eschewing the drama of movies and television, the names were bland; every suspect in the growing files of Project Cicéron was assigned a number and a letter, starting at A-1. The list would stretch to A-205. From early in the evening, all key-holders were put under tight surveillance by officers who watched their assigned targets as they went about their business and eventually retired at night.
“A-12 has settled in,” a surveillance officer would report over a secure radio.
“A-3 is now home,” another would report. One by one, the surveillance teams checked in until none of the targets were still out prowling. As an added precaution, a perimeter of plain-clothed officers with a list of license plates and descriptions of Sixth Family vehicles sat in unmarked police cars watching everything that came within five blocks of the Consenza. These officers were authorized to take extreme measures to stop a suspect from reaching the club—including crashing into a target’s car in a staged accident.
When everyone was accounted for, the commanding officer finally gave his technical teams permission to start their spycraft. To reduce the chances of being noticed, technicians planned to push their lenses and microphones through the ceiling from a neighboring office in the commercial strip rather than going through the front door of the club. While the techies worked for more than two hours, surveillance officers across the city kept their lonely vigils, constantly watching their targets to make sure no one started making unexpected moves towards Jarry Street.
The plan called for three miniature video cameras and several audio probes to monitor the Consenza. One camera was placed outside, aimed at the front doors. Another captured most of the goings-on inside the main portion of the café and the third, the most important, was pointed directly at the round table in the small back office. Some 30 times over the next two and a half years the cameras needed to be adjusted, when the focus was off, for instance, or when the round table was moved to the other side of the back office. Each time, the same elaborate procedure and precautions were required. Sometimes, when not all of the targets could be accounted for, the operation was scrubbed at the last minute and rescheduled for another night.
When the cameras and microphones were finally switched on, to be monitored around-the-clock by officers in a secret wire room, it was a significant coup for Project Cicéron. There was elation within police ranks. The Sixth Family had never before been so exposed. Police could finally see and hear what they had been missing.
“Sette, otto, nove,” Nick Rizzuto said, counting in Italian. “Uno, due, tre, quattro,” said another man with him in the back office of the Consenza, who joined in the counting of a bundle of cash, about an inch and a half thick. The counting went on laboriously. “Ventisette, ventotto, ventinove.”
“That’s half,” the man said.
“Twelve and twelve is twenty-four, no?” replied Nick. He then lifted up his pant leg and stuffed his share of the money into one of his socks. It was a Wednesday afternoon but it could well have been any day, for there always seemed to be counting going on in the back office of the Consenza and much dividing of thick piles of cash. People routinely arrived at the Consenza offering cote d’argent, tribute money. Despite the gifts, their reception was often gruff.
“How much is it?” Nick would say, getting right down to the nittygritty. Sometimes, the bearer was invited to sit with the bosses at the back room table.
On May 11, 2005, after lunch, Moreno Gallo arrived at the Consenza and slipped into the back room with Nick, Renda, Arcadi and Sollecito. In his cream-colored jacket, Gallo, a veteran mobster on parole from a life sentence for a 1973 murder, stood out from the other men, who all wore dark clothing. Before Nick could even settle into his seat at the round table, Gallo pulled a large bundle of cash from the inside breast pocket of his jacket and held it aloft for Arcadi, who sat across from him, to gawk at. Arcadi beamed his broad, toothy smile. Gallo placed the bundle on the table in front of Renda, who then counted it and separated it into five piles. Renda quickly put Vito’s share into one pocket of his stylish grey suit jacket and his own share into another. Nick, Arcadi and Sollecito also grabbed a pile each. As Nick proceeded to recount his portion, a
s he typically did no matter who had handed him the money, the other men chatted. Renda smiled congenially at Gallo. After a few minutes, when Nick had finally sorted his money, they all got up and left. The scene would become routine. The person passing over the money would change from day to day, but the pattern was clear. Cash came in, was counted and divided into five piles, and the recipients happily stuffed their share into their pockets or socks or wallets. After Vito was arrested on the American charge, Nick or Renda would take Vito’s share, presumably for safekeeping. Police documented 191 occasions when substantial sums of money were delivered to the back room of the Consenza and divided at the table of five.
The men were not shy about the split. On May 23, 2005, the wires picked up Sollecito explaining it to Beniamino Zappia, the man who had decades before helped the Rizzutos set up their bank accounts in Switzerland.
“When they do something—and it doesn’t matter when they do it—they always bring something here so it can be divided up among us five: Me, Vito, Nicolò and Paolo,” he said. Unspoken but understood was that the fifth share went to Arcadi, who had become the street boss for many of the activities of the organization, police allege.
