Nicolò Rizzuto was a semi-literate, one-time South American chicken farmer who had managed to create a government within a government in Montreal. He had pulled himself up from a relatively humble birth in Sicily through hard scheming, contacts, travel, innovation, good fortune, risk taking, marriage and murder. Despite running several construction-related companies, and even more politicians and police officers, Nicolò retained a certain common touch. When he collected money in a backroom of the Consenza Social Club in Saint-Léonard, he sometimes tucked a wad of cash into a sock for safekeeping. There, between a cheese shop and a tanning salon, mobsters sipped espresso, settled disputes, and accepted tributes from associates in the underworld and the world of ostensibly legitimate business. Nicknamed “the house of problems” by his son-in-law, Paolo Renda, “the Cos” sat in a nondescript strip mall at 4891 Jarry Street East, a few minutes from the site of the late Paolo Violi’s old Reggio Bar.
Even when things got rough, Nicolò maintained his ability to wink at the world, as though everything was under control. He courted the image of Mafia don, and was seldom seen in public without a sweeping Hollywood-style fedora on his bald head. When he fled to Venezuela for a time in the 1970s, he opened a restaurant in Caracas called El Padrino, Spanish for “The Godfather.”
The old man was stuffing money into his socks well into his ninth decade of life because he had the survival instincts of a feral cat. In the dirty, chaotic milieu, Nicolò was also known for his catlike mania for cleanliness and order. Friends became rich and enemies became corpses, fueling the dual engines of greed and revenge that powered his world. Through it all, Nicolò’s family remained true to each other, if not towards the rest of the world.
The only pronounced difference between Nicolò and his son was Vito’s notorious womanizing. Mistresses are a constant in North American mob life, but Nicolò continued to conduct himself like a resident of semi-rural Cattolica Eraclea in Agrigento province, where sexual indiscretious are hard to hide and often end in death. This was particularly true in his case; Nicolò never wavered in his fidelity to Libertina. Only a foolhardy man would brook the ire of the formidable woman and her father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno.
Libertina was just eighteen and Nicolò twenty-one when they pledged their devotion to each other on March 20, 1945, in Cattolica Eraclea. There was no doubt that Nicolò was the one marrying up. His union with Libertina gave him strength and status, as he rose from campiere—an enforcer for local landowners—to the manager of a flour mill and a black market wheat vendor in Sicily.
Nicolò was thirty years old when he and Libertina brought their young family to North America. He declared that he had just thirty dollars on him when they arrived in Canada on February 1, 1954, at Pier 21 in Halifax. It was Vito’s eighth birthday. In a photo taken around this time, Vito looks a bit grim, perhaps even scared. Standing up straight, he is a head taller than his sister, Maria, who is only six years old. Vito’s hair is neatly trimmed and combed back well out of his eyes. Both children wear carefully chosen clothes: Vito is in shorts, which would have been cold in the Canadian winter, a matching jacket, and light-coloured shoes; Maria, a party dress and white patent-leather shoes. The little white purse in her hands matches the ribbons in her hair. Neither child had any grasp of either of Canada’s official languages, but the camera captures something defiant in the young pair’s gaze. They give the impression of submitting to their parents’ photo out of obligation, and they do not feign joy. Vito’s left arm is around his little sister and he also holds her with his right hand in a protective gesture.
By 1956, Montreal city records list Nicolò’s occupation as “cement contractor.” He evidently became a successful one soon after setting foot in Canada. By 1958, he was a player in Montreal’s construction world, with a scent of collusion and corruption already around his tangled and profitable dealings. He ran his own firm yet somehow borrowed $1,777.50 from a rival contractor, and he won a municipal contract despite not being the low bidder. His company, Grand Royal Asphalt Paving, was involved in bidding with the City of Montreal, winning a contract in January 1962 to make over Parc Masson. His paving firm also worked for the municipalities of Laval, Pierrefonds and Saint-Léonard. The City of Jacques-Cartier (now part of Longueuil, on the south shore) was considered particularly corrupt, and Nicolò made money there too.
The early 1960s was a time of mass migration out of Sicily’s Agrigento province. In Montreal, Nicolò was soon reacquainted with members of the Cuntrera–Caruana clan, who were originally from Siculiana, just twenty-four kilometres from Cattolica Eraclea. The Cuntrera–Caruanas, who were also known to police as the Siculiana crime family, had existed for generations in Agrigento. They graduated from working as guards for a local land baron to being powers in the twentieth-century drug trade, with a firm grip over local politics. It was an accepted truth in their home region that people got hurt when things didn’t go their way. Pasquale Cuntrera and his brother-in-law Leonardo Caruana were each acquitted in 1953 of double murder, cattle theft and arson before heading abroad. In the early 1960s, Pasquale Cuntrera, the head of the Siculiana Mafia family in Agrigento, moved to Caracas, Venezuela, as the family gained international scope. A key to their success in the illegal drug trade was their flexibility: they worked with anyone who could help them but steadfastly refused to align themselves exclusively to any of Sicily’s feuding Mafia families. As they gained power and connections, the Cuntrera–Caruana men developed their own look. They differed from old-school fedora-wearing mobsters and staid, buttoned-down, pinstriped international financiers. Instead, they tended to resemble mildly successful Florida used-car dealers, with an affinity for white shoes, eye-popping gold watches and poorly dyed jet-black hair.
On September 11, 1964, Nicolò’s father-in-law, Antonino Manno, immigrated to Canada as well. Like several of the Cuntrera–Caruanas, Don Nino had been forced to serve a period of court-imposed internal exile in Italy. The sentence was called a soggiorno obbligato, and for its duration a mobster was banished from living near his hometown or criminal associates. Such a record might have been an impediment if Canadian authorities had been more vigilant.
In 1967, Canada was marking the one hundredth anniversary of its arrival as a nation with year-long Centennial festivities. There was plenty for Nicolò Rizzuto to celebrate in his new home. He was now a partner in four construction-related firms and had secured construction work on the Expo 67 world’s fair in Montreal. His mob counterparts Paolo Violi and Vic (The Egg) Cotroni were also involved in the Expo fun, supplying the international showcase with hot dogs made from tainted meat. Opportunity found Nicolò’s son, Vito, as well. After he had dropped out of high school, there was work running the New Cheetah nightclub at the corner of Beaubien Street and Saint-Laurent Boulevard.
Nicolò Rizzuto was sponsoring many Agrigento residents to move to his new city, expanding the Cuntrera–Caruanas’ Canadian base, and expanding the clan’s financial base too, bringing heroin to Montreal by boat and then transporting it to New York by car. For three months in late 1969, they hosted Tommaso Buscetta, the hound-faced senior member of the Porta Nuova Mafia family in Palermo, Sicily. Buscetta would become a key figure in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, as the network’s first major informer. At the time of his arrival in Montreal, his mob credentials were still intact and impressive, as he had helped set up the Sicilian Mafia Commission, which ruled upon disputes between members. His acquaintances included top-level New York mob figures Charles (Lucky) Luciano and Joe Bonanno.
Buscetta’s Montreal visit was at least his second trip to Canada. He had been in Toronto in the fall of 1964, travelling under the name Manuel Lopez Cadena and trying to gain a visa under this false identity to enter the United States. While in Toronto, Buscetta stayed at the home of Antonino (Nino) Cammalleri, the uncle of Vito Rizzuto’s future wife. Decades later, Buscetta would remember playing cards at the Il Gatto Nero café.
When Buscetta returned to Canada in 1969, staying in Montreal from October until just after Christmas, he did so for medical reasons. He sought treatment for a genital infection, long rumoured to be a venereal disease. He feared he actually had cancer, although he would later claim to have learned he suffered from an African fly bite.
Twenty-three-year-old Alfonso Caruana chauffeured Buscetta around Montreal during those three months, as the visitor met with Nicolò Rizzuto, Pasquale Cuntrera and other local Mafiosi. Buscetta picked up on tensions between Paolo Violi and Nicolò. Violi struck Buscetta as a jealous man. Relationships were complex and sometimes crossed ethnic lines. He noted, for instance, that the Calabrian Violi was a close associate of the Sicilian Leonardo Caruana (in 1981, Caruana would be deported from Canada and murdered in front of his Palermo home, on the day of his son’s wedding, in a gesture of operatic cruelty), and although Nicolò wasn’t a member of the Siculiana crime family, he did work closely with them.
Despite his standing in the Sicilian Mafia, Buscetta—in the guise of Manuel Lopez Cadena—remained under the radar of Canadian police until long after his departure from Montreal. He later recalled an odd incident that occurred toward the end of that visit. He was standing outside his Montreal motel when police moved in and blocked his exit. He must have feared that his cover had been blown. Then police began grilling him about a bank robbery. Unbeknownst to Buscetta, he had been standing near a bank-robbery team’s getaway car, and police mistakenly thought he was part of the gang. Once they were convinced he was innocent of that crime, he was freed to go and made his way to Pasquale Cuntrera’s home for Christmas dinner.
A few days after Christmas, Buscetta left Montreal. He was reunited with his friend Nicolò in Caracas in 1972. Buscetta was in South America on his honeymoon with what was believed to be his third wife. Nicolò told Buscetta that he had left Montreal for a far less happy reason. He had been “called for an appointment” of the Montreal décina, a branch of the Bonanno crime family, headed by Vic Cotroni and Paolo Violi. Nicolò was certain he knew the agenda for the meeting: he was to be murdered.