The woods behind Nicolò’s home offered plenty of cover. It was dark enough at 5:40 p.m. on November 9, 2010, that the intruder was not noticed among the trees and the shadows, close to the statue of the Madonna. So much would depend on the gunman’s ability to concentrate over the next few minutes. There was a wind of twenty-six kilometres per hour, which wasn’t enough to affect a close-range shot, especially when the power of the rifle was factored in. The gunman held a .300-calibre hunting rifle, capable of bringing down a moose or a bear. It was certainly more than enough firepower for an octogenarian mobster suffering a laundry list of medical complaints.
From a distance, he could see Nicolò as he stepped into the solarium kitchen and gazed outside towards the backyard bushes. He could see Zio Cola move close to his wife, Zia Libertina, and their daughter, Maria. She had lost her husband, Paolo Renda, only a few months earlier and didn’t want to eat alone.
The assassin tapped his finger less than half an inch. The bullet dipped slightly as it punctured the solarium glass, catching the old man in the jaw rather than the skull. However, a bullet fragment tore down into his aorta, and that was enough to make the assassin’s job a success. Zia Libertina went immediately into shock as her husband of more than six decades collapsed to the kitchen floor at her feet.
The hit harkened back to the death of Paolo Violi’s younger brother Rocco in October 1980, when he was struck in the chest by a sniper’s bullet as he sat reading a newspaper at his kitchen table. Rocco’s death marked the last time anyone could recall that the Canadian mob executed one of its own with a hunting rifle as he sat at home in front of his family. It showed a rare lack of respect for the victim’s family. Certainly Zio Cola hadn’t been venturing out much recently, but the assassin’s choice of location was almost surely meant as a reminder of the morning Rocco Violi slumped over dead. If that murder had secured the beginning of the Rizzuto era, Nicolò’s was undeniably intended as an emphatic pronouncement of its end.
Prison authorities monitored Vito’s reaction to the news. “Why do they go after an old man?” he asked family members in Italian during wiretapped telephone conversations. He had to vent, his voice filled with fury. There had always been much affection between Vito and his father. The transfer of power between them had been so seamless that it was impossible to say exactly when it happened. They had always presented themselves as a team, and now Vito was very much alone. For all his anger, Vito’s reaction was different from when he’d learned of the murder of Nick Jr. He didn’t seem to think anyone would ever do such a thing to his son. His father’s death was painful too, but less of a surprise. For all of Vito’s adult life, people had sought to murder his father. It was a tribute to the old man that he had lived as long as he did.
There had been eighteen gangland murders, sixty-seven arsons, eighteen attempted murders and two disappearances in Montreal since the start of 2007. Vito had predicted his removal from the country would mean increased chaos in the Montreal underworld. His words now bore a nasty ring of truth.
Four days after Zio Cola’s murder, a Canadian Tire security camera in Montreal picked up a middle-aged blond man wearing a Rolex stuffing merchandise into his coat pockets. The store was about five kilometres from where Nicolò was slain. Among the filched items were a black balaclava, a handgun holster and a pouch for ammunition. When staff moved in to apprehend the thief, one was shoved and another was bitten in the hand. The employees eventually won the struggle, which caused the would-be shoplifter to drop a roll of more than three thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.
Once subdued, the man identified himself as Vincenzo Sestito, the name that appeared on his Italian passport, issued the previous July, as well as on his temporary Ontario driver’s licence, current international driver’s licence and debit card. The identification seemed genuine. When his fingerprints were run through a police database, however, the results showed he wasn’t Vincenzo Sestito but rather forty-six-year-old Nicola Cortese of Halton Region outside Toronto, a cousin of Toronto-area Calabrian mob boss and convicted killer Vincenzo (Jimmy) De Maria. De Maria was on lifetime parole for second-degree murder after shooting a man to death in 1981 over a debt. De Maria’s parole conditions forbade him from associating with Cortese.
A little more investigation showed that Cortese was wanted by Niagara Regional Police in Ontario for his role in a $15-million marijuana grow-op bust that included cultivating the drug in a former Ukrainian church in nearby Thorold. One of his co-accused in that case was James Tusek, an associate of hit man/restaurateur Salvatore (Sam) Calautti. Cortese was also sought by Halton Regional Police, west of Toronto, following his arrest and incarceration for a complicated multi-million-dollar mortgage fraud that involved inflated property values and falsified invoices and lease agreements. The Justice of the Peace at Cortese’s bail hearing in the mortgage fraud case was told by a family member that Cortese was on his way to the courthouse when he fell and broke his ribs. Rather than return to court, Cortese assumed the identity of Vincenzo Sestito and vanished, until his ill-fated Canadian Tire shoplifting bust.
Cortese would later vaguely tell another parole board hearing that he bought the fake identification at a store in Italy, during his two years at large from Canada. He was a self-confessed former heavy drug user with fifty-three convictions, including fraud, breach of trust, assault, robbery, assault with intent to resist arrest and possessing weapons. He’d also had charges withdrawn for armed robbery, possessing unregistered/restricted weapons, sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and assault with a weapon.
Police detectives tend to mistrust coincidences, so it was natural to wonder why Cortese was in Montreal so close to the time of Nicolò’s killing. Was it also a coincidence that two of Paolo Violi’s relatives had been seen in Montreal the week before the murder? Given all the ’Ndrangheta connections and activity around Montreal at the time, and the inside co-operation that seemed to have been part of the recent killings, it was easy to wonder if Vito had been sold out by Calabrian members of his own crime family.
Cortese lasted one night in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison, where prisoners had treated Nicolò with such respect just a short time before. Cortese then pleaded with corrections staff to be transferred. Fast. There were a number of Rizzuto men from the Colisée roundup on the same cellblock range and he wanted to be at a safe distance from them. He was quickly dispatched to safer quarters.
In the hours before Nicolò’s funeral, someone left a black box with a white cross taped on it on the steps of Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church. Fearing explosives or body parts from the missing consigliere Paolo Renda, police evacuated the area and summoned bomb disposal experts. Police were relieved to find only a note inside, a cryptic message written in Italian that seemed to allude to the funerals of the Violi brothers three decades earlier at the same holy spot in Little Italy, with words to the effect of: “Let’s stop this church being the church of the Mafia and start it being the church of everyone.” To someone with a Mafia frame of mind, it was easy to see the odd message as meaning: “You’ve suffered the way we suffered. Let’s put an end to this sad story.” Or maybe it was just a member of the public, tired of his place of worship becoming widely known as the church of the Mafia.
Inside, Nicolò’s funeral was much like that of Nick Jr. less than a year before in the same church. Powerfully built men wearing earpieces and black leather gloves scanned the entrances to make sure no gawkers or enemies tried to enter. Four guards inside the church carefully eyed attendees. Not all of the eight hundred seats in the church were filled, and there were notably no representatives of the Bonanno crime family.
The ceremony was a simple one, in Italian, with no members of the Rizzuto family rising to say a word. There were no personal comments from anyone about the deceased, although the priest did thank those who sent their condolences but did not attend. White roses adorned the altar, with other white flowers on the golden casket. The only ostentation was in the form of some two hundred wreaths, arranged from floor to ceiling. A soaring rendition of “Ave Maria” filled the church. A choir sang hymns in Latin. A single trumpet sounded a tribute. Selections played on the organ, strings and brass ranged from melancholy to uplifting. Finally, the godfather was carried from the church under the eyes of mourners in sunglasses and dozens of police and media. His casket was escorted to St. Francis of Assisi cemetery by limousines carrying stacks of floral tributes, including at least one from a real estate developer.
Libertina looked stoic. Often, mobsters have lovers on the side to help them cope with the stress of their work and the constraints of arranged marriages, but that had not been the case with her devoted Nicolò. Libertina’s composure was all the more remarkable in that she was grieving once again without Vito there to comfort her. She knew well how life so often ended in their world, which meant her only son could be next.
Nicolò abhorred sloppiness, and he would have been impressed by the undertaker’s job, which had rendered even his wounded neck suitable for an open casket. He would also have appreciated how his family now guarded Mafia Row with private security firms, which used trained bodyguards and discreet auto patrols. Most of the people flooding to the cul-de-sac were gawkers, but the security men took down all their licence numbers anyway. It all seemed too little, too late, but it had to be done.
No one from Vito’s group did a thing to avenge the latest bloodletting. His men were all either in prison or ineffectual or they had defected to the other side. Whatever their reasons, their inaction compounded the insult.
While the elder Rizzuto was meeting his fate, Antonio Coluccio quietly slipped back into North America from the United Kingdom with his bodyguard/driver. In November, he arrived in New York City, then travelled to Niagara Falls, NY. His visitors there included an Ontario man specializing in high-level money management who had been close to Vito.
Early in January 2011, vandals firebombed the Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard. They did little actual damage, but attacking the Rizzuto-owned business was a powerful public statement nonetheless. It was open season on Vito’s family.
Just a few months later, Big Joey Massino made history by becoming the highest-level rat in the history of La Cosa Nostra when he testified against his successor, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano. In the course of his testimony, Big Joey calmly explained how he hadn’t really wanted to kill Vito’s friend and associate George (George from Canada) Sciascia back in 1999, after the Montrealer broke mob protocol and criticized a Gambino family member. Big Joey made it sound as though he was just a worker doing his job. “As much as I didn’t want to kill him, I had to kill him.” News of this latest Bonanno defection brought a screaming headline in the New York Post: NOMERTA! MAFIA BOSS A SQUEALER. The April 13, 2011, story began: “There isn’t a hunk of cheese big enough for this rat.” If anything, it was confirmation that Vito—despite his family’s desperate need for friends—had been right in his decision to pull away from the Bonannos.
On March 31, 2011, police found the body of Antonio Di Salvo in his home on Perras Boulevard in Rivière des Prairies. The forty-four-year-old had been a low-profile member in the Rizzuto group, with ties to Francesco Del Balso and Compare Frank Arcadi. The assassination occasioned no real surprise, despite Di salvo’s peripheral association. How could anyone be shocked by a murder after Nicolò was gunned down in his own house, at the feet of his wife and daughter no less? This was a fight to the death, but it was still impossible to identify all of Vito’s enemies. The family’s attackers remained in the shadows, and some still posed as friends.