by Lamothe, Lee
Money flowed in from across the country: from Montreal traffickers, from gangsters in Toronto and from smugglers on Native reserves; from extortions and gambling in most major Canadian cities; from enforcers and runners who made collections on behalf of the Sixth Family; and from criminals who sent bundles of cash without being asked—just because they thought it was the thing to do. Mike LaPolla, the man who would later be gunned down in the Moomba supper club, delivered packages of cash to the back room. Antonio “Tony” Mucci, a long-time mobster who gained notoriety in 1973 for shooting Le Devoir crime reporter Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, turned over money.
The flood of information being gathered by Project Cicéron investigators was immense. Officers identified a huge Mafia enterprise composed of many cells. The leaders of each of these cells kept in daily contact with the senior bosses.
Key secondary players who were involved in the hands-on running of a multitude of criminal ventures were soon identified, police say. Two men in particular drew their attention: Lorenzo Giordano, a muscular man known as “Skunk” because of the white strips through his black hair, and Francesco Del Balso, a heavy-set man with a taste for expensive cars. Police allege that these two men collectively acted as the right hand of Arcadi, supervising drug importations, sports betting, and contact with other criminal groups, and as leaders of a crew of aggressive enforcers who instilled a climate of fear for the Mafia on the streets of Montreal. These younger men—Giordano was born in 1963 and Del Balso in 1970—had a regular hangout of their own, the Bar Laennec, in a strip mall at 2004 Boulevard René-Laennec in Laval. In February, 2005, the Laennec was also wired by police.
The joy of finally peering into these inner sanctums of the Sixth Family, however, came with a growing sense of panic for police. The operation was moving faster than the team could efficiently manage. Officers were struggling to keep up with thousands of conversations spoken over telephones and in clubs in English, French and Italian, often all within the same chat. Some 1,200 conversations each week had to be listened to, transcribed and analyzed. Many chats were about criminal operations and others were just run-of-the-mill gossip and the daily trivia of living. For the officers on Project Cicéron, the conversations started backing up, suspects were going unidentified and surveillance photographs were left unsorted and unlabeled. The overtime logged by the too-few investigators was extensive. When officers finished a shift of live monitoring of the wiretaps they often moved right on to a second shift processing the backlog of recorded calls. Just as the investigators who had worked on the RCMP’s currency exchange operation in the 1990s had felt, there were fears that Project Cicéron would collapse under the weight of its own success.
The growing unease over the sprawling nature of the investigation—an officer described it as like “holding a tiger by his toenail”—was further fuelled by slips, leaks and screw-ups.
It was about 3:00 a.m. on a freezing cold night when plain-clothes police officers started working furtively in the dark to pick the lock on the front door of a modest tavern in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard neighborhood. It did not take them long to crack open the door, allowing a team of police specialists to slip inside with microphones and miniature cameras. Another penetration of a secretive club, believed by investigators to be yet another rallying point for Sixth Family members, was under way by the Project Cicéron team.
By now their moves were well-practiced. Many of the surveillance officers had become comfortable with their targets and knew their routines. There was little difficulty picking up their trail and, one by one, each surveillance team had checked in that their target was settled in for the night. Officers in unmarked cars were also in place, watching the club from the outside. This bugging operation was going like clockwork.
Then someone slipped up. The alarm inside the club had not been properly disabled and just as the technical team was preparing to get to work, an alarm was flashing at a private security firm and the club’s proprietor of record was being woken up with news of a suspected break-in. The proprietor, who lived just a few blocks away, quickly jumped into his car to investigate. The surveillance officer watching him immediately reached for his radio to send a warning that his target was on the move. In a case of compounding bad luck, the officer’s warning went out just as another officer had clicked his radio on to say something else. The surveillance officer’s warning was never heard by his colleagues at the club. It was not until the proprietor had pulled his car into the club’s parking lot that startled surveillance officers at the scene were able to radio a warning.
“He’s here, he’s here,” came a frantic call. As the proprietor got out of his car and walked towards his club, the officers inside dove for cover, awkwardly trying to hide under tables and chairs, yanking bags of tools and electronic equipment with them. The proprietor had walked up to the front of his club and was reaching out with his keys towards the door—which had been left unlocked by the officers inside—when a Montreal city police cruiser with its lights flashing screeched to a halt behind him.
“Don’t touch the door, there’s a bomb threat here,” the officer bellowed, getting out of his cruiser.
“No, no, I want to go in and check on my place,” the man protested, reaching up once more with his keys.
“No, there’s a bomb threat. You have to leave immediately. Don’t touch that door.” There was, of course, no bomb threat. It was hastily enacted crisis control, a way of stopping the man in his tracks, hopefully without him seeing or suspecting what was going on inside. Maintaining the ruse, city police roped off several city blocks around the club under the guise of public safety. In reality, the wide perimeter gave the Project Cicéron techies the time and space needed to crawl out from under the tables and slink away from the club. Before the “bomb threat” was declared “unfounded” and the area opened to the public, however, police had one last trick to pull. They erased the video tape from the club’s security camera that had captured the bungled entry and frantic hiding.
Scrubbing clean the tape did not erase the tavern owner’s suspicions, however. Not long afterwards he called in private electronics experts to scan the club for wires and bugs.
There were other scares as well. A microphone hidden in a couch at the club was discovered one day by a surprised Consenza regular. The entire couch was quickly disposed of. Later, the dowdy club was given a makeover. Police heard of the plans for fresh paint, new furniture, new window signs advertising its espresso and, in a quiet rechristening, a large new name to be posted above its door. Just before the renovation was scheduled to begin, an urgent police operation went into play to secretly remove all of their cameras and microphones to prevent them from being discovered. When the paint was dry and the Club Social Consenza had become the Associazione Cattolica Eraclea, an homage to the Rizzuto’s hometown in Sicily, another elaborate police operation was undertaken to put the wires back in.
Trouble of a different sort came to Project Cicéron when a newspaper reporter who had stumbled upon some elements of the Rizzuto investigation called the RCMP seeking official confirmation and comment. The reporter had used the probe’s supposedly secret codename in his query: Project Cicéron. Worries over the leak were not eased by the fact that the reporter was a veteran, well known and trusted by many of the officers. As a precaution, “Cicéron” as a codename was retired. The investigation, which was by then moving into its final phase, was renamed Project Colisée. Along with the new name, what was now known as Project Colisée got a boost in manpower. As the CFSEU’s other operation, Project Calvette, successfully wrapped up with arrests and seizures in late 2004, bringing the drug schemes of Raymond Desfossés to a close, officers from that investigation were reassigned to the Sixth Family probe. The team grew to include about 100 full-time officers, plus another 10 investigators from the Canada Revenue Agency who were tracing assets of the key suspects.
Project Colisée was also given a new commanding officer, one who had, as a young constable a decad
e before, worked undercover to tackle the Sixth Family’s cocaine importing schemes at the Travelodge Hotel in Cornwall. Back in 1994, the RCMP’s Michel Aubin had played a modest but important role in the drug case. Having steadily been promoted to the rank of Inspector, he was now calling the shots. It was his job to ensure that Project Colisée did not join the long list of case files that tried but failed to seriously debilitate the Sixth Family. Aubin had the unenviable task of plotting the endgame. Unlike other operations that had targeted the Mafia in Canada, Project Colisée was evolving into a broad, multi-faceted probe. It did not narrow its focus to concentrate on a single revenue stream, such as drugs or gambling, or on a specific incident, such as a murder. Nor did it seek to only scoop up the top bosses—it was casting its net wide. The Sixth Family as a whole was put under the microscope and Aubin and his Colisée colleagues were building an American-style racketeering case. They were finding murders, murder plots, shootings, bribery and corruption of government officials, drug shipments and drug conspiracies, multi-million-dollar gambling rings, money laundering, extortions and gun offenses on which to gather evidence.
The bill for the investigation was likewise exploding. The global reach of the Sixth Family meant investigators needed to travel the world to investigate it: the Unites States, Italy, England, Germany, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Belize, Aruba, Venezuela, Switzerland and the Bahamas.
Three times the date of the planned sweep of arrests had to be postponed. There was much work still to be done, but time was clearly running out.
MONTREAL, AUGUST 30, 2006
A Cadillac pulled to a stop at the intersection of Henri-Bourassa Boulevard East and Rodolphe-Forget Boulevard in Montreal’s Rivière-des-Prairies district, an ominous location for the Sixth Family—if they thought of such things—as it was where the body of Joe LoPresti, their close colleague and kin, had been discovered by police in 1992. Two men riding on a Japanese-made motorcycle pulled up beside the Cadillac shortly before 3:20 p.m.; the passenger, dressed in black and wearing a full motorcycle helmet that hid his face, hopped off and immediately opened fired into the passenger side of the car. The shooter then climbed back on the motorcycle and the pair sped away.
The driver, Mario Iannitto, was only slightly injured. Taking the brunt of the bullets was the Cadillac’s passenger, Domenico Macri, who died from his wounds. Macri, born in 1970, was a gifted and intelligent man who left a wife and young son. He was known to police as a Sixth Family confidant, an up-and-coming gangster from the Calabrian wing of the organization who, in 1993, pleaded guilty to possession of heroin. Of chief concern to the Sixth Family, however, was the fact that Macri was frequently Arcadi’s driver and bodyguard and at the time of his murder was, in fact, on his way to Arcadi’s house to collect him.
Within minutes, word spread among Macri’s Montreal colleagues as dozens of cell phones, already bugged by police, started chirping and bleating around the city.
“Yeah, bro, they shot D.M.,” Giordano told Del Balso, who was stunned by the news. Giordano could barely contain his shock. “He’s dead! He’s dead! What happened? What are we going to do now?”
Arcadi’s immediate reaction was that he must have been the intended target. He knew he had angered a rival by double-crossing him in a recent transaction. He wondered, aloud and in horror, about what might have happened had he been in the car with his family at the time of the attack. The Bar Laennec buzzed with activity as people came and went, whispering and hugging. Iannitto, the injured driver, was roused from his recovery and hauled in for questioning by leading Sixth Family soldiers. He was then summoned to meet directly with Renda, Sollecito, Arcadi, Giordano and Del Balso to give his account. Clearly, this was serious business. At a meeting in the Bar Laennec the following day, Sollecito, Renda and Arcadi met to discuss the murder.
“We are already starting to study the situation. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a big fucking problem,” Sollecito assured Arcadi. Renda said he would ask about the incident at a meeting he was having the next day with a man who he felt might have some answers. Arcadi, however, was anxious for action.
“Here we are, father, son and holy spirit,” Arcadi said, evoking the religio-criminal mindset of the Mafia. “I agree that it’s things that we have to reason out; things have to be measured, things have to be evaluated. But when it gets to a certain point, and we are touched by some stupidities, the discussions have to be short.”
Believing Arcadi to have been the intended target in the murder, Renda suggested he leave town. “See, what you gotta do now: find an island, take your wife and leave.” Arcadi was unsure. He did not like the idea of people thinking he was fleeing.
“I have to decide if I go or don’t go,” he said. “Maybe I go to Italy with my brothers.” He then declared that he would triumph in any war. “Nobody is going to get rid of me, but we are looking. We are looking for that pig; we are looking for him because he’s a sea of problem,” he said in frustration. “What do we do—us? What do we do—us—when one of us has been killed? To tell you the truth, we do what we have to.”
The visitation and funeral of Macri was a set-piece of Sixth Family solidarity. Macri’s family and friends mingled with the cream of the Montreal underworld as they gathered for two days of visitation at the Loreto funeral home on Boulevard des Grandes-Prairies, a swank parlor owned by members of the Rizzuto and Renda families. At Macri’s large funeral on September 5, 2006, at Marie Auxiliatrice Catholic Church, just a two-minute drive from where he had been shot, mobsters spanning the generations were out in force. Paolo Renda stood with his son, Charlie. Old-timer Agostino Cuntrera, who had helped murder Paolo Violi back in 1978, stood within arm’s reach of Frank Cotroni, Jr., the son of the last of the old Cotroni bosses to die. Vito’s son, Nick, was there. Lorenzo Giordano, looking smart in a black shirt, black tie and black suit jacket, walked beside Giuseppe Torre. Iannitto, the driver of Macri’s Cadillac, watched somberly, knowing how close he had come to also being in a casket. Francesco Del Balso was included as a participant in the service. Wearing a black leather coat over a black shirt unbuttoned at the neck, he was one of several who held a quivering white dove to be released into the heavens.
Despite the doves of peace, the Sixth Family was preparing for war. Police surveillance teams spotted Giuseppe Fetta, Danny Winton, Martinez Canas and Charles Edouard Battista—pegged by officers as Mafia bodyguards—as they checked out and tested a silenced pistol in a garage, police say. Battista fired a shot into the ground to test the efficiency of the silencer. Police saw Battista give a machine gun to Fetta, while putting together a second automatic weapon. An arsenal was assembled: two AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles, a machine gun, a shotgun, bulletproof vests and ammunition.
Del Balso called Streit Manufacturing, an armored vehicle company north of Toronto, and told a sales agent he needed a “high-level” vehicle that was “full bullet proof” and available immediately. He wanted a certified protection rating of B-5, which would stop bullets from an AK-47, have a grenade-proof floor and inserts in the tires that allowed it to drive on flats. Del Balso rejected a bone-white Cadillac as being “too flashy.” After hearing the other options, Del Balso said he would take two sport utility vehicles, a Toyota 4Runner and a Nissan Armada, provided they were dark-colored and available immediately.
The senior Sixth Family members started traveling with bodyguards. Men with guns were stationed in cars outside the Consenza. Guns seemed to be on everyone’s mind and never far from reach. Del Balso and one of his bodyguards, Ennio Bruni, compared weapons one day inside the Bar Laennec.
“What you have?” Del Balso asked.
“A .38,” Bruni replied.
“That fucking old cop [gun]” Del Balso said dismissively. Bruni was a fan of the weapon.
“That’s the best one, that’s the best one,” Bruni said, showing how it handled. “Like this. Look! How you gonna miss? It’s dead. You crank it one time.” A loud
shot rang out.
Del Balso was impressed: “That’s what I want.”
Police fretted about the increasing signs of violence. Senior officers felt that Project Colisée needed to wrap up soon or their cameras and microphones would be recording a bloodbath. There were also signs that some police targets were restless in other ways.
MONTREAL AND LAVAL, NOVEMBER 6, 2006
A “For Sale” sign at a mansion in Laval’s tony Val-des-Brises development was noticed by investigators two days after it was hammered into the immaculately landscaped front lawn. With an in-ground pool, hardwood floors, doors imported from Italy, heated ceramic tiles in the fully finished basement and a superb fireplace in the living room, the home was called a “a real jewel” by the Realtor, with a selling price of $999,000 to match. The house was owned by Giuseppe Torre, who police say managed the Sixth Family’s drug importation schemes through Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport. When Torre and his wife bought it in 2004, a year when the couple declared a combined income of $87,384, the house had already come to the attention of tax investigators.
About 10 agents with the Canada Revenue Agency had been added to the Project Colisée team to help the government track down and secure assets of the top targets. Officers watching their secret videos knew the look of joy on the faces of the bosses as they collected their cash. They knew that loyalty and blood made the Sixth Family strong but revenue was what made it happy.
