Giuseppe Coluccio knew his time in Canada was up when he tried to drive his black Range Rover out of a suburban Toronto parking lot. His path was blocked by a circle of gun-packing members of the Immigration Task Force. Later, when they checked out his waterfront condo, they found a million dollars hidden in the walls.
Coluccio’s arrest was a key part of Project Reckoning, which centred on the links between the ’Ndrangheta and the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel, with investigations in Canada, the United States, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and Italy. Raids netted authorities more than forty tonnes of illegal drugs, and crusading Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri described Canada as the Coluccio brothers’ “second home.” The case was so big that US attorney general Michael Mukasey, Italy’s defence minister Ignazio La Russa and Canada’s public safety minister Stockwell Day all made triumphant announcements, with Italian authorities calling Coluccio nothing less than the “King of International Drug Trafficking.” It was a rare day when Ontario generated such headlines with an underworld story, as the ’Ndrangheta preferred to operate in the province’s shadows. Somewhere in that darkness, contingency plans were being made.
Back in Montreal, on the afternoon of January 16, 2009, Compare Frank Arcadi’s associate Sam Fasulo had stopped his Jeep at a red light at the corner of Henri-Bourassa and Langelier. He’d been paroled four years earlier at the end of a police operation playfully called Project Espresso, which targeted crack cocaine and heroin dealing out of Italian cafés and bars in Saint-Léonard and Saint-Michel. Fasulo’s National Parole Board decision noted that he headed a drug ring which, according to police estimates, netted $100,000 a week. Aside from drugs, the police who had arrested Fasulo had also seized automatic and semi-automatic firearms.
Project Colisée tapes included a conversation in which Fasulo’s boss, Frank Arcadi, counselled the thirty-seven-year-old how to employ threats of violence. After a drug dealer with Mafia connections was roughed up, a police bug captured Arcadi commanding Fasulo to go into a bar and deliver a stern message. “You tell him: ‘Don’t touch this fellow or I will slit your throat like a goat,’ ” Arcadi ordered.
That day, as Fasulo waited for the light to change, a sport-utility vehicle pulled up alongside his Jeep and someone inside opened fire, ending his life. Anyone keeping track would have been struck by the chilling similarity between Fasulo’s killing and that of Domenico Macri in August 2006. The killer’s motives were unclear, but police suspected the standard ones for the milieu: drug turf, debt, revenge. Whatever the cause of this latest murder, Vito’s crime family was a little weaker by the time the light turned green.
On June 15, 2009, Rizzuto family soldier Dany (Dany Arm) De Gregorio exited a Jarry Street gym in Saint-Léonard into a cloud of bullets. De Gregorio lucked out and survived. There was no such good fortune on August 21, 2009, when old family friend Federico (Freddy) Del Peschio walked from his silver Mercedes in the parking lot of his La Cantina Italian restaurant at the corner of Saint-Laurent Boulevard and Legendre Street. Del Peschio was beginning his work-day and the hit man once again appeared well aware of a Rizzuto associate’s habits. It was no great secret where to find Del Peschio; his restaurant was an elegant spot for municipal political fundraisers, and Vito had felt comfortable enough there to use it as a meeting spot for his own business affairs.
Del Peschio had a long and close connection with the Rizzutos. Nicolò, Del Peschio, Montreal discotheque owner Gennaro Scaletta and two others were arrested on August 2, 1988, in Caracas, after authorities found eight hundred grams of cocaine hidden in a belt, much like a tourist’s moneybelt. The narcotics were split into five different qualities, and police concluded that Nicolò was about to make a bulk order of several hundred kilograms of cocaine he had selected from the samples. Nicolò had lived in Venezuela on and off since the early 1970s, and it was no secret that he was a major player in the cocaine trade there. What had changed by the late 1980s was the political climate, which explained why he was forced to begin his first prison stint while in his sixties.
Vito paid $500,000 to a Venezuelan lawyer to secure his father’s freedom and felt cheated when Nicolò went to prison anyway. When it became clear that his father wasn’t getting out any time soon, Vito asked Italian drug trafficker Oreste Pagano to kill the lawyer to gain some level of satisfaction for the family. Pagano ducked out of the request. In his roundabout way of speaking, Pagano later explained to authorities that this meant “avoiding the consequences and reactions from the Rizzutos that I knew could be serious, taking account [of] the fact that a favor requested by him had to be brought to term.”
Nicolò and his associates, including Freddy Del Peschio, were finally freed on parole in early 1993. Four months after that, the parole board granted his request that he be allowed to return to Canada to be treated for a prostate condition. An RCMP undercover officer later heard that this consent was greased by an $800,000 bribe Vito paid to Venezuelan officials.
Libertina couldn’t wait for her husband’s arrival and flew down to Venezuela with two of her friends so they could escort him back to Canada. When he finally landed at Dorval airport at 4 p.m. on May 23, 1993, sixty-nine-year-old Nicolò was greeted by Vito and thirty other friends and relatives, like a returning dignitary. Shortly after the elder Rizzuto’s return to Canada, a former mayor of Cattolica Eraclea paid him and Libertina a personal visit, staying at their home on Mafia Row. The politician’s house gifts included copies of Nicolò’s birth and marriage certificates, as if they were valued artifacts marking the life of a great man.
The prison stay didn’t appear to have rattled Nicolò too badly. A part of him still seemed to feed off his notoriety. When he and Libertina celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995 at the Sheraton Centre-Ville among some three hundred guests, the accordionist played “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from The Godfather.
Del Peschio’s killing prompted some familiar questions. As in the murder of Nick Jr., a black man was seen running away from the scene, again leaving police and the Rizzuto family to wonder if someone from a street gang had been contracted to carry out the hit. Attacks continued against Rizzuto-connected Italian cafés and bars in Montreal. Even the Rizzuto family funeral business, the Complexe Funéraire Loreto, was targeted by firebombers. Was this the way it would end for the family? Picked off by assassins, one by one?
It was around the time of Del Pschio’s killing in 2009 that wealthy Montreal café owner and Desjardins protege Vittorio Mirarchi quietly made a trip to Woodbridge, Ontario, to attend the opening of a modest eatery in the heart of ’Ndrangheta territory—territory where his was becoming a familiar face as Desjardins’s group sought to firm up its Calabrian connections. The York Region restaurant was the business of a relative of Antonio (The Lawyer, The Black One) Commisso, who might have attended the opening himself had he not been extradited to Italy in the summer of 2005. There, he began a ten-year term for allegedly heading a Siderno-based group that an Italian judge described as “a dangerous, bloodthirsty Mafia association which had for long imposed on the town of Siderno the burden of a permanent criminal presence.” Their crimes included murder, drug trafficking and robbery. (In May 2014, Antonio Commisso won an appeal on the conviction when six other defendants were convicted instead.)
Vito’s old milieu was changing by the minute. Helpless to staunch the bleeding on the streets or to secure the straying loyalties of his former soldiers, he began legal proceedings to get himself out of the Florence prison. He wrote Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who had heard his guilty plea in a New York courtroom, and argued he should be transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Colorado to a New York State penitentiary, so his family could more easily visit. The judge declined. Then Vito attempted to correct Garaufis’s “incorrect calculation” of the length of his prison term. The judge declined to alter the release date.
Next, Vito wrote an appeal to expedite his release. If he failed, he wouldn’t be eligible for release until October 2012. He argued to the US Court of Appeals that his sentence conditions should have been those in place in 1981, at the time the crime was committed. That was before laws were toughened, requiring inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their prison terms rather than two-thirds.
There were many who thought Vito was getting off lightly whichever way his sentence was calculated. Less than six years for three contract murders in a death penalty state looked more like an inconvenience than real punishment—a quick prison stint to shrug off responsibility for his murderous past before enjoying the spoils of his and his father’s work. But now bodies kept falling in Montreal and Vito kept writing appeals in the Colorado prison. It was at least something to focus on, to keep him from being overwhelmed by the big picture. It was a given that there would be more murders. The only question seemed to be: who would be next?