You’re the enemy within, which means there’s never a moment they’re not trying to hunt you down to exterminate you. Hit before it’s too late.
Beirut, November 22, 1989: The Lebanese had had it with their civil war. Well into its fourteenth year, the war had killed nearly 120,000 people and there was absolutely nothing to show for it. Only the most bloody-minded didn’t want the Lebanese government back, warts and all. And indeed, the violence did seem to be ebbing, but not even the sunniest optimist thought the calm would hold.
When the time arrived for parliament to elect a new president, the delegates met at a remote military base, helicopters buzzing overhead and tanks prowling the perimeter. But the day passed as quiet as the grave. A lot of people thought it was thanks to Syria and the United States compromising on a single candidate. Some even predicted he’d be the man to finally stand Lebanon back up on its own two feet.
In the name of caution, the newly elected president rarely left his palace. When he did, his motorcade routes were cleared of parked cars to prevent an assassin from turning one of them into a bomb. This offered the added advantage of allowing his motorcade to move at high speed. To prevent an inside job, his personal security people were all related by blood, cousins and second cousins. But what no one could do anything about was the official functions that the president felt obligated to preside at. It offered any would-be assassin a fixed place and time.
By Lebanese Independence Day—just seventeen days after the election—the president was a bit more at ease. The evening before, the Syrian intelligence chief had told him Syria wouldn’t tolerate an attempt on his life. Anyone who posed a potential threat had been rounded up, he said. Considering that Syria occupied about a third of Lebanon, the Syrian intelligence chief’s assurances carried a lot of weight in the president’s mind. Who’d want a Syrian armored division bent on retribution coming down on his head? As the Syrian was about to leave, he proposed that one of his men accompany the president’s convoy, both to the ceremony and then back to the palace.
It rained the night before, offering up a crystalline morning and a rich, benevolent sky. The snow-dusted mountains and the silver-flecked turquoise sea were a spectacular amphitheater for it all. When the band started to play the national anthem, the president had to hold back a tear. Afterward, he stopped to talk to old friends. Aides had to hurry him along, ushering him into a black Mercedes. He sat in the backseat.
The lead police car pulled away with a screech of tires and sirens wailing. The convoy moved through the cleared streets at a brisk fifty miles an hour, spreading out across two blocks. People tried to get a glimpse of their new president, but with the convoy’s speed and nearly identical cars with smoked windows, it was impossible to tell whose car was whose.
Just as the president’s convoy started up a hill into Beirut’s commercial center, there was a flash and a terrible trembling of the earth. It felt like a 747 had crashed somewhere nearby. At first, the only thing certain was that the convoy had been right in the middle of whatever it was.
As the smoke drifted off, it now was clear there had been an explosion. Several cars in the convoy were on fire. What was left of the president’s security detail jumped out to check on the president, only to find his Mercedes gone. Vanished. They thought at first that the driver had taken advantage of the confusion to get away. But then someone noticed what was left of the Mercedes. It had been ripped in half, the pieces blown hundreds of feet away. The rear right door had taken the brunt of the explosion, exactly where the president had been sitting. A tank’s armor wouldn’t have saved him.
It turned out that an abandoned candy shop along the route had been packed with explosives, about a ton. But in order to concentrate the force into something like the size of a dinner plate, the assassins had molded the explosives into a conical hollow, a so-called shaped charge. Its force was such that it passed through one interior wall and then an exterior wall. But other than that, the investigators had nothing to go on. The firing device had been obliterated in the explosion. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, no claims. Motive and intent were also a mystery.
The only thing clear was that it took talent to hit a car moving at fifty miles an hour, not to mention driving the explosion’s force through two walls. The assassins clearly had had some sort of advanced military training. That and a lot of practice. But the real mystery stood: Who were these people capable of carrying off the assassination of a head of state in seventeen days?
Although no one dared put it to paper, a few investigators thought they recognized the work of Hajj Radwan. By 1989 he’d mastered the art of shaped charges, thanks to experimenting with them on the Israeli army. He could hit any moving vehicle no matter the speed. He’d also picked up the technique of “enhancing” a charge by mixing heat-generating aluminum powder in with the explosives.
Years later, a high-ranking Lebanese intelligence officer would tell me he’d come across some chatter that put Hajj Radwan in the middle of the president’s assassination. When I asked him why it had never come out in an official report, there was no mistaking the incredulity in his voice: “Don’t you understand what these people are capable of?”
I tried to persuade him to give me more, but he wouldn’t budge. In fact, he cautioned me not to write anything about Hajj Radwan—it could get me killed. When I asked him whether it might be worth calling the president’s widow to get her opinion, he said he’d advise her not to talk to me.
I tried a couple of other people but had no luck. Most didn’t even know who Hajj Radwan was, and they were content to blame Syria for the president’s murder. Being a distant and clumsy enemy, Syria was a ready-made scapegoat. Who knows, there’s always the possibility it was the Syrians who commissioned Hajj Radwan to do the job. Just as I suspect they’d done with Hariri.
It left me to speculate why Hajj Radwan—or whoever it was—would want to murder the president of Lebanon in the middle of a touch-and-go war with Israel. You’d think he’d have more important things to attend to than assassinating a man of little political significance. Why not finish off the Israelis first and then put Lebanon’s house in order?
What I’m pretty sure was at play is the principle that assassination is an instrument that serves the powerful whose power goes unrecognized rather than the merely powerless. If I’m right about Hajj Radwan’s part in it, he murdered the Lebanese president to put the Lebanese statists on notice that they could forget about their fantasies of getting their state back. He and Hezbollah were in charge now, and no one was going to revive Lebanon with some silly parliamentary vote, especially a vote by parliamentarians who possess no power. The new president could go on all he liked about restoring the state’s sovereign authority and standing Lebanon up out of the ashes, but the truth was that Lebanese sovereignty was a fiction.
Indeed, Hezbollah was pretty much the de facto Lebanese state. By the president’s assassination in 1989, it had subverted much of the army, large parts of the security services, and the police. It effectively ran Beirut’s only airport and its main seaport. In other words, Hezbollah was in a position to destroy any fool who wouldn’t recognize reality for what it was.
Consider Hajj Radwan’s point of view: With the new president proclaiming that he was determined to revive the state, could Hajj Radwan afford to sit on his hands while he tried? Wouldn’t the first thing on the president’s agenda be to exterminate Hajj Radwan and his coven of assassins? Hajj Radwan then saw no choice other than to put the state in its place.
There are a lot of parallels with the Hariri assassination. With his personal fortune and unreserved backing in Washington, Paris, and Riyadh, Hariri had started to labor under the delusion that he was the state. How long would it be before he deluded himself into trying to disarm Hezbollah? I imagine Hezbollah decided it couldn’t wait around to find out. (See Law #21—Get to It Quickly.)
Every country has its own constitution; ours is absolutism moderated by assassination.
—AN ANONYMOUS RUSSIAN
Assassinating people with hollow pretensions to power isn’t peculiar to Lebanon. Whether Benazir Bhutto was murdered by the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or a group we’ve never heard of, her loud and empty claims to power condemned her. She was tragically deceived into believing power in Pakistan is won at the ballot box.
Even in countries where the rule of law is given passing respect, the state at times will find it in its interest to murder upstarts who don’t seem to understand the way things really work. What’s sometimes called the “deep state”—secret units in the intelligence services or hired assassins—is called in to give the slow-to-comprehend a not so friendly reminder.
Between 1988 and 1998, Iranian intelligence operatives assassinated more than eighty dissident intellectuals. What the victims shared in common was a delusion that the mullahs’ power was on the wane and a political space was about to open up. Dubbed the “Chain Murders,” the assassins seemed to know what they were doing, never missing or murdering the wrong person. In many cases, they attempted to conceal that a murder had been committed at all. Some deaths occurred by injections of potassium chloride to induce a heart attack, others by fake car crashes.
A lot of people suspected that Iranian intelligence was behind the murders, and as the bodies started to pile up, even the regime recognized it looked silly trying to deny it. Its default defense was to point the finger at “rogue elements” of Iranian intelligence, conveniently naming an operative who himself may have been assassinated. Whether or not the assassination orders went all the way to the top or not, I doubt we’ll ever find out. But the point is that the assassins got what they were after: drowning the budding Iranian Spring in blood.
Just as Vladimir Putin was coming to power in 1999, a wave of assassinations hit Russia’s shores with a ferocity that surprised even the most cynical. No one seemed to be immune—big-name journalists, senior army officers, billionaire oligarchs, and even humble bookkeepers. One victim of assassination may have been Putin’s old boss, the ex-mayor of Saint Petersburg. According to a couple of reputable Russian journalists—a dying breed, to be sure—he was murdered by a poisoned lightbulb. The way it worked was the assassins coated the bulb of the ex-mayor’s bedside table with a toxic substance that atomizes with heat. A little late-night reading, and that was it for him.
Then, of course, there was the 2006 celebrated assassination of ex–Russian intelligence officer turned Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko. A minute but deadly dose of the isotope polonium-210 killed him. It’s almost certain that the assassins had expected the poisoning would go undetected. But when British police officials did discover traces of it, they concluded with near certainty that it was the Russian state that had assassinated Litvinenko.
(One of the small ironies in the Litvinenko assassination is that he may very well have signed his own execution order by openly accusing Putin of murdering a prominent journalist, who herself may have been assassinated because she’d accused Putin of assassinating a Russian general serving in Chechnya. I suppose if there’s a lesson to be had, it’s that it doesn’t pay to call an assassin by his name.)
But it’s not that regime assassinations are without risk. Again, it’s all in the timing. Too early and you get a reputation for unnecessary brutality, too late and you’re in trouble. The KGB must have often regretted not early on assassinating Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader credited with opening the first crack in the Soviet bloc.
While there’s no way of getting the timing exactly right, Machiavelli advises a prince to undertake extrajudicial executions (read: assassinations) at regular intervals.
“For one should not wish ten years at most to pass from one to another of such executions; for when this time is past men begin to vary in their customs and to transgress the laws.”
Or as the old Chinese proverb goes, “If you want to scare the monkeys, kill the chicken.”
Montreal, January 20, 2004: A young Canadian man I knew called me one morning to ask if I’d come up to Montreal. He wanted to introduce me to a man he was thinking about doing some business with. I’ll call my friend Marc.
Marc had just opened a nightclub in downtown Montreal. Although only in his late twenties, he was determined to make serious money. I was more than happy to help him if I could, but I was tied up with a new book and asked if I could put the trip off for a couple months.
“Are you sure?” Marc asked. “It’s very important to me.”
He told me how his would-be business partner had read my memoir and genuinely wanted to meet me. If only I could fly up for dinner, or even lunch.
I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t a shred of practical business advice in any of my books. I left it with a vague promise that I’d do my best to make some time for a trip.
Two days later, Marc’s father, an old friend, called me. He was a man who spoke deliberately and with a gravelly voice you had to take seriously. “You really must meet my son’s friend,” he said. “He’s a good family man. The two of you have a lot in common.”
I wondered what was going on with the two of them pressing me like this, and I decided I’d better go up to Montreal sooner rather than later. But before I could make reservations, Marc called the next morning: “Now it’s urgent. My friend’s been arrested.”
“Arrested?”
“Some bullshit charge. Please come up and talk to his son. He’ll explain everything.”
Before I got off the phone, I made Marc tell me the father’s name. “Vito Rizzuto,” he said. Other than I knew it was Italian, it meant nothing to me. I wrote it down to Google later.
I drew in a deep breath as I read about the notorious Canadian Mafia boss named Vito Rizzuto. A capo in the Bonanno family who more or less monopolized North American heroin smuggling, he was one of the most powerful gangsters in the world. The Canadian press dubbed him the “Teflon Don.” He was memorialized in the film Donnie Brasco, where in a true-to-life scene his character jumps out of a broom closet, a pistol blazing, cutting down three Bonanno family rivals. A classic regolamento di conti. A settling of scores.
Rizzuto had just been indicted in New York for those murders and racketeering, and the United States was now asking Canada to extradite him to stand trial. Rizzuto’s arrest in Montreal on January 20, 2004, was the first step in the process of extradition.
Now I was definitely interested. I didn’t care so much about the mob as I did about Rizzuto’s connections to the Lebanese heroin trade, which were supposedly tight. Taking into consideration the rumors that Hajj Radwan might have been dealing in the stuff to support himself, I wondered if there wasn’t something to be done with it. I’d come right out and ask the Rizzutos about him.
Marc was curbside at Montreal’s airport, behind the wheel of a new black Porsche Cayenne. With his angular face, slicked-back hair, and Hugo Boss suit, he easily could have passed as a made man.
“You want something to eat?” Marc asked as I climbed in. “Or maybe go to the hotel and take a rest?” He didn’t wait for an answer: “Let’s go grab a drink.” Marc accelerated fast, nearly clipping a bus pulling away from the curb.
Marc caught me looking at the patchy snow along the skirt of the highway: “Welcome to Montreal, dude. More on the way tonight, a big dump.” You couldn’t tell it from the sky. It was patchy too, thin blades of sun slicing through it.
When Marc pulled up in front of his club, the lights were off, but a tall, slouchy blonde with high cheekbones and a short tube dress stepped out of the doorway. Her accent was Russian. We got out, and she took the Cayenne’s keys from Marc.
As Marc pushed through the front door, I asked him where he’d found the Russian. He didn’t answer. I followed him up a flight of stairs, two steps at a time, and then through two doorways with bead curtains. We came to a room with a proper door. He closed it behind us, turning on the lights. It was a private dining room, a dozen erotic Japanese gouache drawings lining the walls.
A second girl, as beautiful as the first, came in with two glasses of white wine on a tray. It wasn’t even noon, but I took one. Marc motioned for her to put his glass on the table. He told me he needed to step out to make a call.
Fifteen minutes later, Marc was back with a slender man in a tan cashmere overcoat and turtleneck. I stood up to shake hands. “Delighted to meet you,” he said. “I’m Leo Rizzuto.”
Marc pulled up a chair next to mine so Leo could sit next to me. Marc called into the darkness of the hallway: “Please bring us a bottle of red. A decent Bordeaux.”
“Do you smoke?” Leo asked, holding open a slim gold cigarette case. When I said no, he put it away without taking a cigarette.
“My father had so wanted to meet you,” Leo said. “It’s too bad you were busy.”
Marc had told me on the drive in from the airport that Leo was a lawyer with a good, legitimate practice. Now meeting Leo, I believed him. He seemed uncomfortable speaking with an ex–CIA agent on behalf of his Mafia father. But as Marc’s father told me, the Rizzutos were a tight family, which meant Leo had no choice in the matter.
Marc walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain, flushing the room with light. As he’d promised, it was snowing—small, dry flakes. It must have turned cold very fast, I thought.
Marc turned to me. “I have something to do. I’ll leave you two alone.” He closed the door behind him as he left. I noticed that Leo hadn’t touched his wine.
“I don’t want my father extradited to the United States,” Leo said. “He could spend the rest of his life in jail.”
“I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not sure how I can help.”
I considered asking him if his father really was in on killing the three men in Queens. But it would have been an unwelcome, not to mention pointless, question—the facts had been established long ago. A better question would have been whether it was the murder of his three rivals that had propelled Vito to the head of the Bonanno family. But I wasn’t going to ask that one either.
Leo went on: “My father knows a lot of people . . . a lot of things about them that aren’t well-known . . . about heads of state in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. He knows who’s selling what to whom, who’s on whose payroll. He has people everywhere. He knows people and can get things done you can’t imagine.”
I now finally understood what Vito Rizzuto wanted from me: a channel to American intelligence, the CIA. He’d probably tried but failed to reach a deal through the Department of Justice, and now he was looking for a back door. I couldn’t come up with another explanation.
“Was your father well connected in Lebanon?”
“I believe he was. But he’d have to give you the details.”
I had to laugh to myself when I pictured my returning to Washington and calling up the CIA to let them know that, after all these years of missteps and failure, I had finally found the perfect assassin to take care of Hajj Radwan. All I’d need is their help springing him out of a Canadian jail and the clutches of the Department of Justice. The telephone would have melted in my hand before I could get halfway through my pitch.
That night Leo and Marc took me to an Italian restaurant for drinks. They drifted off to talk to friends, leaving me to talk to a squat man united with a Roman nose. He never took off his fedora as he told me how tough things were in the wholesale fish business.
After round three of grappa, he asked me if he could trust me. When I said yes, he told me that, the night before, his car had been firebombed and burned to the rims. It was over a contract dispute.
“They’ll pay,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
I changed the subject: “I have to go to Lebanon next month. [It was a lie.] Ever been there?”
“No.”
“No Lebanese business contacts?”
“No.”
I looked out the window at the snow; it was now a driving blizzard.
Somewhere between the Italian restaurant and a nightclub, Leo disappeared. As Marc drove me back to my hotel, breaking through a wall of falling snow, I thought about Leo’s offer, or at least the one I thought he’d made. It intrigued me; I could only guess what sort of people the Rizzutos keep on their speed dials, no doubt among them the heroin dealers in Hajj Radwan’s backyard, the Bekaa Valley.
But I didn’t think anything was really lost. The American Mafia may have a long history of settling disputes in blood, but they’re loath to do it for outsiders, especially governments. Maybe in Italy, but not on this side of the Atlantic. (At this point, some fool’s going to raise his hand to ask if the CIA didn’t try to recruit the Mafia during the Kennedy administration to assassinate Castro. It did, but it never got off another fool’s drawing board.)
None of this is meant to imply that the Mafia doesn’t know what it’s doing when it comes to murder. They know who their enemies are, who deserves it, and who doesn’t. They know to strike early, before the victim gets the same idea. The three Bonanno captains Vito murdered in the Queens social club would have done the same to him had they known about his ambitions. Murder is a two-way street.
In December 2009, Vito’s son—not Leo, but rather his heir apparent—would be assassinated in a Montreal suburb. Nearly a year later Vito’s father, the Rizzuto patriarch, would meet the same fate when a single sniper’s bullet punched through the double-paned patio doors of his house, killing him instantly. As for Vito, he was jailed for five years at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He was paroled early, but died of cancer on December 23, 2013. I imagine this was the end to the Rizzutos’ reign, the complete destruction of its tabula patronatus.
NOTE TO ASSASSINS: It works best inside the family.