The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  “I can tell you one thing, if you want to discourage organized crime people and let them know clearly that Canada is not a good place to do business, seize their assets,” said RCMP Deputy Commissioner Pierre-Yves Bourduas. “These people get involved in organized crime above all to acquire assets.”

  The lavish home that appeared to be beyond the means of the Torres’s incomes was not the only incongruence tax agents found. Torre and his wife, a former Air Canada flight attendant, had claimed almost $100,000 in personal expenditures in 2001 on declared combined income of $30,562. Credit card receipts showed that $1,902 had recently been spent on lingerie at Victoria’s Secrets. There were painful hair transplants for Torre—more than a thousand grafts; second-row seats at the World Cup in Germany; trips to New York and Alberta to see hockey games; flights to Acapulco, Mexico City, Frankfurt, San Francisco and Los Angeles. There were gambling binges—on a single day Torre lost $100,000 on sports bets. Despite the luxury, his wife complained about having to drive a BMW M3 because Torre refused to buy her a Porsche.

  Similar contrasts were found when the tax agents looked at Nick Rizzuto. In 2001, for instance, Nick was a pensioner living on $26,574 in old age security and income from his investment portfolio, according to his tax returns. Yet he lived in a mansion, had a condo in Milan, almost $2-million in blue chip stocks, cruised around in a 1987 Jaguar XJ12 and a 2001 Mercedes E430 and pampered his wife, Libertina, with furs and jewels. And while Nick and Libertina did not list any off-shore accounts in their tax returns, investigators believed they had more than $5-million in Swiss banks. Nick’s investment accounts showed cash injections from the money-laundering capital of Panama. A constant fear haunted investigators that their targets would liquate their assets and move the money beyond the government’s reach.

  “Nick Rizzuto could, without any constraints whatsoever, liquidate his investments that he holds at RBC Dominion Securities, National Bank Financial and National Bank of Canada by transferring his assets to Panama,” Jean-Pierre Paquette, one of the tax investigators, wrote in an affidavit filed in court.

  What was of most concern for the Project Colisée team, however, was the “For Sale” sign on Torre’s home. When they looked at his other assets they found that two income properties, rental units owned by Torre and his wife, were also on the market.

  “Giuseppe Torre is actually in the process of emptying his assets and his real estate holdings,” tax investigator Benoit Martineau wrote in an affidavit. The liquidation came just as police were winding down Project Colisée and planning arrests. Could it mean there had been another leak? Were the subjects of their investigation preparing to flee?

  Just a few weeks before, Del Balso had left for Acapulco, causing some concern. Upon his return to Montreal, his luggage was checked by border agents at the airport. Del Balso mocked their efforts. He could “buy this fucking airport if he felt like it,” he quipped.

  “You’re wasting your time checking me out when all the drugs in the world are passing under your nose,” he said. He should know, officers thought.

  Investigators worked frantically with federal prosecutors to sort out who they could charge, who would be arrested for what and who would be let go, perhaps for another day. With Vito facing American justice, he was, for the moment, no longer a Canadian concern. The sprawling lists of hundreds of suspects began to be whittled down.

  There were the senior leaders—Nick Rizzuto, Paolo Renda, Rocco Sollecito and Francesco Arcadi—who police claim orchestrated and profited from a vast array of criminal enterprises. There were the street bosses—Lorenzo Giordano and Francesco Del Balso—who allegedly supervised the activities of the family. There were 38 people allegedly working to smuggle drugs into Canada through the Montreal airport, including Giuseppe Torre, the suspected manager of the ring, a female customs officer with the Canada Border Services Agency and a dozen airline and airplane food service workers. There were others alleged to have arranged cocaine importation from South America and the Caribbean by way of shipping containers, including another female border guard. There were 10 people alleged to be running a large Internet betting service through a computer server located first in Belize and then moved in 2005 to the Kahnawake native reserve. (Court documents say they took in $391.9-million in less than a year.) There was a separate group of 24 men and women who allegedly exported marijuana to Florida through the Akwesasne reserve and brought money from its sale back into Canada. There were those accused of specific acts of violence and several bodyguards accused of firearms offenses.

  The rest would have to wait. As with past investigations, there were leading subjects of investigation that police wanted to arrest but that prosecutors declined to charge. In the end, the Project Colisée bosses settled on securing arrest warrants for 91 people, most of them in Montreal, but others in Toronto and Halifax.

  MONTREAL, NOVEMBER 22, 2006

  By 5 a.m., more than 700 officers with the RCMP, Montreal and Laval police and agents with the Canada Revenue Agency were marshaled together in several staging areas and briefed on the basics of why they had been roused this early. To maintain security, just 90 of them knew who the targets were to be when the raiding teams started swooping down on almost a hundred homes, businesses and offices. Rather than a television-style smash-and-grab of suspects, officers were instructed to take a “passive approach” to the arrests and the targets responded in kind; all were arrested without incident. In most cases, their capture came with an early morning knock at the front door of their home.

  At Nick’s mansion, police allowed the old mafioso to dress in his trademark gangster chic: knee-length designer coat and snappy fedora. His wife, however, was so distraught that officers called an ambulance. Nick was then led from their home, his hands bound in front with plastic handcuffs. Seeing the media’s cameras, Nick forced a toothy smile. Project Colisée was finally going public.

  On the same street, police went to Renda’s to arrest him and Vito’s house to search for evidence. Sollecito was also arrested quietly at his home. Arcadi was found in the Hemmingford area, south of Montreal, just about to head out on a hunting expedition. He was brought back to Montreal still dressed in camouflage. Most of the 91 suspects were found easily. By the end of the day, the only major target still unaccounted for was Giordano, who fled to Toronto; he was arrested there almost six months later. Six men and one woman remain fugitives, all wanted on drug charges.

  The RCMP quickly declared Project Colisée to be “one of the most important police operations in the history of Canada.”

  “I have to admit that over the 32 years that I’ve been in this organization, the Rizzuto organization has been on our radar screen for most of my service. So it was quite a feat,” said Deputy Commissioner Bourduas. “The Rizzuto family syndicate has been operating in Canada since the 1950s and has implications in all parts of the world. When you tackle these types of organizations, there’s a price tag and if I quoted the price for Colisée, it would be in the millions of dollars. It’s staggering, but it’s a price we all have to pay.”

  The cost of the project will undoubtedly exceed $50 million. Nearly $35 million of confirmed expenses have been tracked, with many of the biggest bills still unaccounted for. The RCMP had, by far, the largest share of the costs, with its expenses leading up to the arrests in 2006 of $32,084,823. That includes more than $26 million in salaries and $4 million in overtime, according to the RCMP. The Sûreté du Québec picked up $1,628,269 of the cost. The Sûreté’s expenses started in 2003, with $228,937 in costs and peaked in 2005 when $504,957 was spent, according to documents provided by the force. The Canada Revenue Agency spent $752,640 in the short time it was involved, starting in May 2005; most of it in salaries to its agents, according to the agency. The accounting is far from complete, however. One of the largest partners in Project Colisée, the Montreal city police, could not provide an accounting of its costs, but did give as an example that it had 1,015 hours of overtime to pay its officers j
ust for November 21, the day of the Colisée arrests. Laval police, likewise, declined to provide information on its share of expenses. Canada Border Services Agency, named as a Colisée partner, has declared that it incurred no expenses for the operation. And then there are the significant costs of the prosecution and the incarceration of the accused after the arrests. The legal bills for the government will be immense.

  Inspector Aubin, Project Colisée’s commanding officer, said success should be measured by more than just what it will do to the Sixth Family. Aubin believes that “With Project Colisée, we have cut to the core of traditional organized crime. If we were successful in striking this organization where they thought to be safe, we could do the same against other criminal groups. With the dismantling of this organization, we can safely say that no criminal organization will be able to rest easy.”

  What is more, officers say, their work is not done.

  “It has been a very large investigation,” said a veteran Project Colisée investigator. “After this there will no doubt be Colisée 2, Colisée 3 and 4.”

  “It was like my wife knitting a sweater,” another investigator said.

  “Gather, gather, gather. You drop a stitch here, you pick it up and you keep on unrolling the wool. Well, we dropped a stitch or two but when we finished the sweater was a quilt.” He laughed.

  “And we still have a little wool left, eh?”

  EPILOGUE

  BROOKLYN, MAY 4, 2007

  “Okay. Mr. Rizzuto, how do you plead to the charge contained in count one of the superseding indictment, guilty or not guilty?” The question, put to Vito Rizzuto by Judge Nicholas Garaufis in a spacious Brooklyn courthouse on the morning of May 4, 2007, brought the wealthy and powerful mafioso to a crossroads. Remarkably, despite being the leader of the Sixth Family, the biggest name in Canadian crime and a global superboss, he had avoided answering such questions in the negative for 35 years. And for 26 years—minus one day—he had also avoided admitting his involvement in a mob massacre, the storied shooting of the three Bonanno captains.

  Now, dressed in a baggy prison uniform rather than the designer suit he would have preferred, with his usually well-coifed hair shorn unfashionably short by a prison barber, and with his unease revealing itself in the repetitive jiggling of his legs as he stood before Judge Garaufis, Vito hesitated in his answer just long enough for the clutch of reporters to wonder what surprise maneuver might save him this time. And then he answered in a steady but slightly raspy voice.

  “Guilty,” he said, his hands clasped meekly in front of him.

  “Are you making this plea of guilty voluntarily and of your own free will?” asked the judge.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Vito then needed to tell the court what he had done wrong, a way for Judge Garaufis to weigh the appropriateness of the five-page plea agreement that had been hammered out by Vito’s attorneys and Greg Andres, the federal prosecutor, and signed by Vito earlier that day, stipulating that in return for his guilty plea Vito would be handed a 10-year prison term. For this, Vito put on a pair of reading glasses and turned to a scrap of paper on which one of his lawyers had crafted a bare-bones outline of his admission.

  “Between February 1, 1981 and May 5, 1981, I conspired with others to conduct the affairs of an association, in fact, enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. Specifically, on May 5, 1981, acting with others in Brooklyn, New York, I committed the racketeering acts of conspiracy to murder and the murder of Alphonse Indelicato, Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera,” he said. The awkwardness of the statement, sounding more like a government indictment than an honest admission of guilt, brought a moment of silence to the courtroom. Judge Garaufis, who had overseen dozens of court proceedings against the Bonanno Family, was unimpressed.

  “You haven’t told me anything about what he did,” the judge said, visibly becoming more annoyed as he spoke. “I want to know more about it. This is not some game. I am the judge. It is unacceptable. Was he the driver? Was he one of the shooters?” the judge asked. “Why should I accept his plea and accept a 10-year sentence when he could be sentenced to 20 years? People have gone to jail for the rest of their lives, as a practical matter, because of their involvement in these crimes. If he’s got something more to tell me, I’d like to hear it before I accept this plea.”

  Vito’s New York lawyer, John Mitchell, was taken aback.

  “May I have a moment, Your Honor?” he asked. During a short break, Vito and Mitchell had an animated exchange. Gone was the meek Vito who had been addressing the judge. Here was the Vito of old, the man in control. Motioning sharply with his hands as he spoke quietly to his lawyer, Vito had opinions, apparently, about what he would and would not admit to and he seemed to be accepting little debate about it. One suspects he was making it clear that he would not admit that he was a member of the Mafia. When court reconvened, Vito was prepared with a less scripted account of his crime.

  “Well, I was one of the guys who was to participate in this,” Vito began. “My job was to say, ‘It’s a holdup,’ when I went in the room, ‘so everybody stand still.’ This moment the other people came in and they started shooting the other guys.”

  “You were armed?” asked Judge Garaufis.

  “I was armed,” said Vito.

  It then fell to Andres to explain why he was settling for a 10-year sentence for such an atrocity.

  “Given this crime happened over 26 years ago, given that it gives some finality in part to the victims, it allows us to return some of the evidence at least to some of the victims, and given the time passage, while that’s no excuse it’s certainly one of the things that factors into the government’s calculation as to how to dispose of the case,” he said.

  A few weeks later, on May 25, 2007, Vito appeared once more before Judge Garaufis for his official sentencing. Here, he tried to dodge a hefty fine by presenting financial statements claiming he was broke. His only assets, he said, were $3,000 in cash and the $468,000 value of his one-third stake in Construction Renda, Inc., a family-owned Montreal firm. That was more than erased, he claimed, by his $475,300 in debts—money he owed to family members: $103,300 to his youngest son, Leonardo; $92,000 to his only daughter, Bettina; and $280,000 to his mother, Libertina. The claims were preposterous.

  “His net worth is absurdly and conveniently equal to his liabilities,” Andres said. “Like everyone in the mob, his relatives hold all the assets.”

  Judge Garaufis seemed to agree: “The court is not convinced that the information provided regarding his liabilities can be considered reliable. We have a businessman from Canada who doesn’t own his own house. His only asset is a share of this company—it’s not much to show for 30 years in business and I’m not convinced that the representations are complete or accurate.”

  Vito’s pleas of poverty, in fact, almost derailed the sentencing agreement. The annoyed judge handed Vito the stiffest fine the law allowed: $250,000. Even then, Vito’s lawyers asked that it be paid in installments, angling for a payment plan that would have stretched beyond the end of his prison sentence. They then resisted having the fine secured by Vito’s shares in the construction firm. They pushed too hard. Displaying a flash of anger, the judge ordered the payment within 90 days.

  “Today marks the final chapter in the sad story of the execution of three people some 26 years ago in the pursuit of power and money,” Judge Garaufis said. “As the history of this event unfolded in this courthouse, it is apparent to the court that such a sordid and cynical act deserves only our scorn and condemnation. It is impossible to measure the human misery left in its wake. Our city is scarred by each and every such occurrence. I hope, but do not see much promise, that we will not see such wanton lawlessness and inhumanity in our future.”

  Despite the added burden of the fine, it was, in reality, a sweetheart of a deal. Going to trial would have been expensive and embarrassing, publicly revealing more about the Montreal Mafia than had been uncovered sin
ce the days of Paolo Violi and his indiscretions. The parade of cooperating witnesses would have been overwhelming and, at the end of the day, Vito’s chances of beating the charge were slim. Not one of the 27 people named in the original indictment had won. If Vito lost at trial, he would have certainly been handed a 20-year sentence. What is more, with his guilty plea, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons was accepting the starting date for Vito’s sentence as January 20, 2004, the morning he was arrested inside his Montreal mansion. Under U.S. regulations, he will likely be released after serving 87 percent of his sentence. His projected release date is October 6, 2012. He will be 66 years old.

  Vito, however, could find he is free even sooner. As a Canadian citizen he is eligible to apply to serve his sentence in Canada—where his prison time would be cut even shorter under statutory release rules that effectively reduce sentences by one-third or perhaps even two-thirds if the National Parole Board does not consider racketeering a crime of violence (just as it does not consider drug trafficking or drug importation to be a violent crime). Further, because he was sentenced in the United States, the order from Judge Garaufis for three years of supervision following the completion of his prison term would have no force. Vito would be free.