It was tempting to wonder if the answer to Nick Jr.’s murder lay behind the walls of the Gibralter-like condominium development near the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. Prestigious, posh and secure, 1000 de la Commune Street was home to millionaire hockey players, socialites and also some mobsters. Owning condos there were Vittorio Mirarchi; Haitian street-gang veteran and convicted pimp Vick Sévère Paul; Hells Angels Normand (Casper) Ouimet and Salvatore Cazzetta; and Ducarme Joseph, co-founder of the 67’s street gang and the Blue gang alliance.
Nick Jr. had been involved in turning the old refrigerated warehouse into the massive complex it is now. The location was inviting: it had a prime view of the St. Lawrence River, and sat close to the earthy thrills of the Main (Saint-Laurent Boulevard) and the boutiques of Old Montreal. The condo project had originally been headed by Montreal developer Tony Magi. When it seemed to be teetering near financial collapse in 2002, some of its investors turned to Vito for help. They didn’t seek Vito’s money. Vito had moved beyond simply pumping money into a project to launder his drug proceeds. It was his arbitration skills among investors and contractors that were needed to keep the project moving. For Vito, it was an obvious opportunity. A police wiretap picked up his reply to a businessman complaining about the financial direction of the project.
“If we get somebody who can help him out either by finance, private finance or finding finance for him to continue the project, he’s willing to give us half of the project,” Vito says. “You get it?”
Vito was a man who could get others to do things on a deadline, with a minimum of haggling. Plumbing, electrical, hardwood flooring and other work could be farmed out to firms with whom he had a friendly relationship. Naturally, he expected that work done at a considerable discount.
Vito displayed his knack for mediation shortly after midnight on May 29, 2003. Someone stole the Cadillac Escalade SUV of one of the project’s investors, who had left it near a Dorval restaurant. A police wiretap picked up the investor’s call to Vito. He told Vito that the Escalade was less than two weeks old, but he didn’t really care about the vehicle.
“Is there any way of tracking, or knowing what happened?” the investor asks Rizzuto. “It’s the briefcase inside it. It’s killing me.”
Vito immediately phones Frank Arcadi.
“They stole a friend of mine’s truck—a Jewish guy,” Vito tells his street boss. “See what you can do to find this truck. He is not interested in the truck; the bag is what interests him.”
The Cadillac was located before noon of that day and the thief was given $3,500 for his co-operation. Who was Vito to punish someone for committing a crime? The vehicle, with the briefcase intact, was returned promptly to the investor. The thief had an easy sale, albeit at a low price, and a grateful, powerful contact, while the investor was duly impressed.
For his efforts as a silent, controlling partner of the condo development, Vito charged 6 percent of monies paid in deals he negotiated. He was also allowed to buy five units there for a combined total of one dollar. Those condos, which had cost just twenty cents each, were then sold for $1.7 million. After taxes, Vito netted $1.6 million, a tidy profit even by his standards.
The condo project wasn’t the only time Magi talked business with Vito. RCMP bugs at the Consenza Social Club picked up a call between Vito and Magi in August 2003. They are discussing a deal for a patch of land at Décarie Boulevard and Chemin de la Côte-Saint-Luc. Magi tells Vito that he is standing with a Montreal city councillor and then tells the councillor that he is on the phone with “my partner Mike Sully.”
Magi refers to the municipal politician, telling Vito: “He’ll help us with his support, what he can do is he’s gonna help us get the zoning.”
“Yeah,” Vito replies.
“Okay,” Magi continues. “I just want to give you, to give you an update, what’s going on and, you know, I told him we have the money ready to close, we just don’t wanna close and get stuck with the piece of land, you know.”
At this point, Vito closes things down, switching to Italian. Even with the bogus name “Mike Sully,” he knows it’s foolish to be speaking so openly. “Yeah,” Vito says. “Ma questo no lo devi dire più al telefono, Tony,” which translates to, “But this, you can’t say it anymore on the phone, Tony.”
The Montreal newspaper La Presse reported that Nick Jr. was “placed” in various construction projects to monitor their progress for his father. The condo development was one of them. However, Magi once told the Montreal Gazette that the name Rizzuto had actually worked against Nick Jr. as Vito’s eldest son tried to make his way in the development world.
“We had bought a piece of land together which we are developing,” Magi told the newspaper. “He’s studied law and he’s a smart kid. He’s smart in real estate. The poor guy. He tries to do something in his life and, because of his family’s past history, every time he turns around, he gets hit with something.”
Whatever law Nick Jr. had studied was outside of law school. Magi’s remarks seemed more than a little disingenuous, considering the mob’s python-like grip on construction projects in Montreal. It was a bit like saying that being a member of the Rothschild family hindered a man in the world of nineteenth-century European banking.
Whatever the case, Magi had troubles of his own. The year before Nick Jr.’s murder, he had barely escaped an attempt on his life by a gunman who opened fire on his Range Rover at a red light. The shooting left him in a coma and it was six months before he could leave the hospital. After that, he travelled with a bodyguard in an armour-plated car.
If the condo development didn’t hold the secret to Nick Jr.’s murder, perhaps the answer lay in recent firebombings of a dozen north and east Montreal Italian-run cafés and bars. With Vito in prison, café owners no longer knew who was receiving their extortion money. In 2008 and 2009, black street gangs from the east end of Montreal flexed their muscles and pushed into territories usually controlled by the Rizzutos, along Saint-Laurent Boulevard and in Rivière des Prairies. Throughout the course of 2008, someone lobbed Molotov cocktails into twenty-four Italian bars and cafés, and the number rose to twenty-eight in 2009. Not so long before, Vito and the street gangs had got along so well that there was only one protection payment necessary for café owners.
With Vito gone, that co-operation had been replaced by confusion and hatred. One member of Vito’s group reportedly referred to the black gang members as “animals and monkeys that grow like mushrooms.” Frank Arcadi had particularly venomous relations with them. Arcadi was so crude and thoughtless, many believed the rumours that he couldn’t read or write.
Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano was one exception in Vito’s group. The gangster—who took his nickname from a prematurely white swath of hair on his head—had enjoyed a positive relationship with the Syndicate, a largely Haitian street gang run by Gregory Wooley, who also guided the Rockers, a Hells Angels support club. Giordano was a fit man with a tough reputation. That reputation was forever linked to an incident in a Saint-Laurent Boulevard bar, when a heroin dealer disrespected him. Skunk opened fire on the man’s groin and left him so terrified he didn’t co-operate with police or seek revenge. On another occasion, in a Peel Street restaurant, Giordano was so offended by a man—a man with links to the Hells Angels, no less—that he went outside and pumped a bullet into the man’s Porsche. The man was likely relieved that Skunk didn’t blast him in the groin too.
In a January 1, 2005, conversation intercepted by police, Skunk Giordano was overheard bragging to Arcadi and rising mob soldier Domenico Macri about the rush he got administering a sound beating on an unidentified man: “We gave it good.… And boom, boom, boom. I made his face like this and he couldn’t even stay in the bar. We cleaned up his face and brought him in his car.… Then he called and he says give me two weeks and I’ll give you the money.” Unfortunately for Vito’s crime family, Skunk Giordano was out of commission for the foreseeable future, after being pinched in November 2006 for Colisée-related charges.
At the time of Nick Jr.’s murder, almost all of the remaining leadership of the family was behind bars because of the RCMP bugs and tiny cameras hidden in the walls of the Consenza Social Club during Project Colisée. While Vito’s Mafia group remained atop the national crime pyramid, those bugs had it sitting upon a dangerously teetering perch. Street gangs had more members than any other class of criminal organization in Quebec, including bikers and the mob. Where street gangs in other provinces were often made up of listless kids with guns and lousy aim, in Montreal the gangs included members in their forties and fifties. The gangs also had far less structure than the bikers or the Mafia, who met regularly and had clear-cut divisions of power. To understand the gangs, you had to understand the idiosyncrasies of key personalities, and toss aside any notion of predictability.
In the absence of Arcadi and Giordano, there was talk that the Mafia offered to share turf with the Bloods street gang but that the Bloods balked. The unprecedented attacks on the north Montreal cafés escalated. Unless something happened soon to stem the tide of disrespect, it was easy to wonder how long it would be until the city’s Mafiosi were reduced to glorified street-gang members themselves.