Vito had been in custody awaiting extradition for only a few months when things started to go horribly wrong in Toronto. As if being locked up in a Montreal jail wasn’t trouble enough, he was about to endure more grief, and much of it would arrive through the misbehaviour of Sicilian mobster Michele (The American) Modica and Toronto restaurateur Salvatore (Sam) Calautti.
Wherever he landed, Modica proved to be a big money-earner and a consummate management challenge. In the 1980s, he worked for the Gambino family while living illegally in the USA, until he was pinched for drug trafficking. He faced deportation in 2000 after his prison stint and the Gambinos tried hard to find a way to keep him in their ranks. Some men can quietly hide, but Modica was too loud, well known and abrasive to fade into the background. So the Gambinos worked out an arrangement with the Sicilian mob in Toronto and Modica headed north, where he would live for a year under the names Carlo Martoni and Antonio Reta. Vito’s associate, blue-eyed Peter Scarcella of York Region, just north of Toronto, took him under his wing and floated him $300,000. The idea was for Modica to put the money out on the street for loans, and things would have gone swimmingly had Modica simply stuck to the plan. Instead of pumping his grubstake into loansharking, which promised a stable monthly return of $30,000, Modica invested in the drug trade, with potentially much higher rewards but equally higher risks.
Eventually Modica had screwed over Scarcella and most of his other Canadian hosts, as was his way. Bit by bit, he muscled his way into debt collection, drug trafficking and running illegal gambling machines, and seemed to think it was his birthright to rip off and even slap some small-time local mobsters.
Understandably, few tears were shed across the GTA underworld when Modica’s Canadian adventure went sour. On June 19, 2001, police charged him with possession of stolen property. He volunteered to go back to Italy at his own expense in return for a stay in proceedings of the outstanding charges.
To all concerned, Modica’s compromise seemed too good to be true. It was. In April 2003, he snuck back into Canada using a forged passport and quickly re-established himself with Michael Marrese, a round-faced, avuncular-looking man who specialized in stealing people’s homes through mortgage fraud. Modica also felt a bond with Sam Calautti, and the feeling was mutual. Calautti had a split personality of sorts. Diners at his Italian restaurant on Dufferin Street in west-end Toronto would have been shaken to learn that the same soft-spoken man who gloried in serving them such tasty comfort food was also a hit man who revelled in inflicting extreme pain on the streets.
Calautti’s big weakness was gambling, and whatever he won, he quickly lost. Some of his bigger losses came online through Platinum SportsBook, a Canadian-run, multi-million-dollar sports betting enterprise that linked Vito’s group, York Region mobsters, independent criminals and some London, Ontario, Hells Angels. Platinum SB had an offshore server in Costa Rica, but local thugs collected its debts. Often, it was other thugs who were running into debt problems. In fact, Calautti owed Platinum about $200,000. He dealt with it like his friend Modica would: Calautti told his creditors to go fuck themselves.
Calautti sat beneath Modica in the mob pecking order, meaning that Modica bore ultimate responsibility for the lesser’s conduct and debts. It wasn’t just that Calautti was taking Platinum SB’s money; his refusal to pay up was making all the organizations involved in running it, and Vito himself, look as if they couldn’t handle him. If Calautti wasn’t made to pay up, others could be expected to shrug off their debts too. A string of meetings followed, in which senior mobsters resembled harried schoolteachers trying to decide what to do with a particularly troublesome student. Gambinos from New York City came up to York Region for some of the meetings, including one on April 9, 2004, that drew some thirty men to the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Woodbridge. Modica arrived with two mobsters from New York and another from Ottawa. He proposed at the meeting that Calautti just pay the principal on the gambling debt and not the interest. But Calautti argued that he had already covered this and refused to pay anything more. Suspicions emerged in the room that Calautti was telling the truth, and that in fact Modica had taken Calautti’s money and pumped it into a drug deal, screwing over both Calautti and his creditors.
The mob diplomats made every effort to reason with Modica, but in the end it was futile. Scarcella, who had been asked to loan out even more since the original $300,000, stepped away from the man he had once hosted and sponsored. Marrese’s driver, Raffaele Delle Donne, later said he heard about what had gone on from attendees at the hotel summit: “Scarcella [was not] told the whole truth … and Mike Modica asked Scarcella to help him out … and at that point Scarcella is saying at the hotel that he washed his hands … basically that he wanted nothing to do with Mike Modica.” According to Delle Donne, “Uh, after the meeting was over, this is what … I didn’t see it but I heard that uh, [Platinum official] Mark [Peretz] … and uh, his bodyguard [Paris Christoforou of the Hells Angels] I guess … kicked [Modica] in the face and put a … gun in his mouth.” Delle Donne said that Modica responded with threats of killing Scarcella, Peretz, Christoforou and others in their circle, with the ungodly phrase “clean house.”
Later that month, Modica was out looking for an evening snack and stopped in at a shop called California Sandwiches in north Toronto. With him were Michael Marrese and Sicilian bodyguards Andrea Fortunato Carbone and Pietro Scaduto. These guys were serious protection befitting a tense time. Carbone was eluding Italian charges for shooting a police officer in Sicily, while Scaduto was the son of a murdered mob boss whose name still carried weight in Bagheria, nineteen kilometres outside Palermo.
A van cruised by the sandwich shop and three dozen bullets were fired inside. Modica, Carbone and Scaduto each drew nine-millimetre handguns but fled out the restaurant’s back door without firing a shot in return. When the shooting stopped, Louise Russo, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, lay on the floor paralyzed.
Up to that point in Toronto, the Mafia had thrived in large measure because it didn’t draw attention. Great pains had been taken to avoid blood on the streets, as this invariably brought headlines and pressure on police and authorities to crack down on crime groups. Far better to allow politicians to pretend the Mafia didn’t exist.
At the time of the California Sandwiches shooting, the Ontario Hells Angels had also been making a massive effort to distance themselves from the bloody, warlike image of their Quebec brothers. They had even taken out a billboard overlooking Toronto’s heavily travelled Don Valley Parkway, likening themselves to war veterans and guardians of liberty. All of that public relations work was ruined in a matter of seconds with a hail of thirty bullets.
Modica knew his would-be killers wouldn’t stop at a single botched attempt. When strangers approached him near Queens Quay at the Toronto lakeshore, he dropped to the sidewalk and clutched his chest. When they told Modica that he was under arrest and not about to be murdered, his apparent heart problems abated and he got up on his feet.
On May 21, 2004, Modica was deported once again to Italy. Distance didn’t cool his fury or his lust for revenge on Scarcella, his one-time sponsor. For all his own lying and cheating, Modica believed that he was the victim. Delle Donne later told police that he’d heard Modica wanted revenge on Scarcella, Peretz and Calautti. One plan was to kill Scarcella, an avid soccer fan, when he attended the Euro 2004 soccer championships in Portugal. It didn’t jell, but there would be other chances. In Modica’s world, a vendetta need not be rushed.
It came as no surprise that such spasms of underworld tension increased when Vito went behind bars. This situation called to mind comments made decades earlier by Palmina Puliafito, sister of mobster brothers Vic (The Egg), Frank (The Big Guy) and Giuseppe (Pep) Cotroni, to journalist Joe Marrazzo on the May 4, 1980, edition of Italian national television’s Dossier program. She spoke proudly of relative peace when Vic the Egg was on the streets. “When my brother was in jail, someone was shot here every day,” the Egg’s sister said. “My brother was not here and they all felt they were the boss. When he’s around, he always puts peace ahead.”
Her words had a prophetic ring midway through 2005, as Vito’s world felt ready to explode. Mobsters from Granby, Quebec, a small city east of Montreal, felt ripped off by Vito’s group after an $11-million marijuana-smuggling operation was derailed. At the centre of the hostilities was an enigmatic strip club operator named Sergio (Grizzly, Big Guy) Piccirilli. Once a gunsmith in the Canadian Forces, he had returned to Saint-Léonard to work as a driver and muscle in the Rizzuto group. There was a story that he had fallen afoul of some of Vito’s people when he refused to kill a woman and a child over a drug debt, and that he then shifted over to the Granby mob. Grizzly Piccirilli was neither a biker nor a Mafioso, but he did have connections in both camps, including Salvatore Cazzetta and relatives of Paolo Violi in Hamilton.
Some of Piccirilli’s influence came from his girlfriend. Her name was Sharon Simon, but the press loved to call her “the Queen of Kanesatake” or “Smuggling Queen-pin”—she’d been previously convicted for cannabis production and smuggling tobacco and cigars, among other things—and she was the focus of a massive police operation named, in her honour, Project Cleopatra. Simon lived in a luxury home/bunker with a three-car garage on Simon Street in the Kanesatake Mohawk community fifty kilometres west of Montreal. Neighbours sometimes heard popping sounds from her backyard, as the Queen-pin undertook target practice on tin cans with an AK-47 assault rifle.
In a male-dominated milieu, Simon’s connections were formidable, including links to the Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières Hells Angels and former members of the Magog municipal police. In the world of marijuana trafficking, she was a bulk distributor, moving some forty-five kilograms of Quebec-grown marijuana to the United States per week, mostly by truck at crossings between Coaticook, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and Cornwall, Ontario. When Piccirilli told her he’d heard that Vito’s group had a contract out on him, she grabbed him an AK-47 out of her car.
On February 4, 2005, Piccirilli drove to Hamilton, Ontario, where he met with relatives of the late Paolo Violi. By this time, Vito had been in custody for more than a year and it wasn’t looking as if he would be back any time soon. Rumours circulated that Piccirilli now planned to kill Nicolò Rizzuto, even though the former soldier had shown nothing but respect for the aging Mafioso while in his employ. He scoped out the Consenza. He also secured the right guns for the job. Like the former military man he was, he watched rooftops in case a sniper was drawing a bead on him.
A last-ditch attempt at negotiations in August 2005 failed miserably, and the milieu appeared on the verge of open warfare. Arcadi may have been talking about Piccirilli when he said that a “biker” in Granby desired “to cut off his head.” The Arcadi forces went on the offensive in a dramatic way, renting a helicopter, flying to Granby and opening fire on the home of one of the Granby mob with machine gun. It didn’t cause any real damage, but it did serve notice that Arcadi was prepared to bring war literally to the homes of his enemies.
Such was the chaos that Vito heard about while fighting extradition in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, often in long and intense talks with his sister, Maria. When his battle to remain in Canada was finally lost, and he was being driven on August 17, 2006, to the airport, Vito lost his composure. Did no one see that he was necessary for keeping things from going even more crazy? Vito began lecturing Montreal police officers Nicodemo Milano and Franc Guimond that he was the only one who could keep relative peace among the city’s criminal organizations. “You should go after the street gangs,” Vito told them. “Not me. They are the ones who would create trouble.”
Vito must have known that Frank Arcadi didn’t have the chops to lead his organization, but Compare Frank seemed to be the best they could muster. “You will rue the day that I leave Canada,” Vito ranted to the police officers. “You will see what will happen when I leave Canada.”
Then Vito’s voice softened. With his final words before boarding the government plane, he made an emotionally charged plea to the officers. “Spare my father,” he said. “He’s an old man. He’s a sick man. Spare my father. He’s not doing anything wrong.”