Moreno Gallo liked to describe himself as a family man and a Little Italy baker who gave back to the community. That was accurate as far as it went, but hardly a complete description. The Canada Border Services Agency was less charitable, calling him someone with an “active implication in organized crime.” Authorities also noted that he was vulnerable for deportation. Gallo had lived in Canada since 1954, when he arrived from Calabria at age nine to join his father. He had never bothered to take out citizenship, and that came back to bite him hard in the winter of 2012, when he was a sixty-six-year-old man.
For a time, the wealthy baker protested his innocence through lawyers and fought the deportation to Italy. “I was nine when I arrived in Canada,” he told court through his lawyer. “I have no recollection of Italy.” He suddenly reversed course in late January 2012, agreeing to leave of his own accord. He sold his $1.2-million home in Laval, on the shore of the Rivière des Prairies, apparently deciding that life outside Canada was preferable to a possible burial in Montreal. “He understood that if he had stayed here, he would have been vulnerable,” his lawyer, Stephen Fineberg, told reporters. “He chose to live in total freedom overseas.” Gallo might once have been considered a mediator in the underworld, but these were tough times for peacemakers. The underworld was split into Vito’s friends and Vito’s enemies, with no safe ground in between.
In March 2012, a New York Post story suggested Vito was slipping emotionally. The article quoted an unnamed source from the Florence, Colorado, prison as reporting that Vito said: “I do not just want to be the godfather of Canada. I want to be the godfather of the world.” The report also quoted unnamed American police sources as saying they believed the hit on Sal Montagna was ordered by Vito. The first statement about Vito was questionable. The second one was clearly wrong, but the fact that it was believed was a tribute to Vito’s former stature. It was also an accepted truth that Vito would have to return to Montreal once he was released in early October 2012. Vito was a proud man, and to avoid the city after the murders of his son and father would be a public admission of defeat.
Gallo’s decision to flee Montreal seemed wise, as bodies kept falling in his old milieu and paranoia was the new norm. Closure Colapelle chose to stay. Around 6 p.m. on March 1, 2012, a bullet caught Desjardins’s spy as he sat in his SUV outside a pub in a Saint-Léonard strip mall near the intersection of Langelier and Lavoisier boulevards. Closure had always felt that killers would come after him, if they couldn’t get to Desjardins and Mirarchi. The dead spy had been right.
Giuseppe (Joe) Renda feared he was possibly next in line for a hit man’s bullet. A decade ago, he had been one of Vito’s point men in Ontario. Then it had seemed a safe bet to hitch his saddle to Montagna, but those days too were long gone, and now it was time to duck and look for cover. The murder of Larry Lo Presti had shaken him. Then there was the attempted murder of Tony Suzuki and a visit by police saying his life was in danger. Still, he had to make a living. He presented himself like a rich man but had a crushing mortgage on a luxurious stone home on De Maisonneuve Boulevard in Westmount and outstanding utility bills and taxes to the tune of almost $600,000.
On May 4, 2012, he reportedly had a business meeting with someone from the old Agostino Cuntrera camp. At ten-thirty that morning, he said goodbye to his wife Benedetta (Betty) and walked out the door. Betty notified police when he didn’t return by suppertime. His car was later discovered on Saint-Urbain Street in Little Italy. Forensic testing yielded nothing. Six days after he went missing, police searched a building under renovation on Jeanne-Mance. Again they didn’t find a thing. The fifty-three-year-old left no clues behind, just a massive debt. His home was sold for $1.15 million and his widow declared bankruptcy, sold her Mercedes and moved into a condo with relatives. Her husband had been known as a discreet man. Now she and police believed he was the victim of an equally discreet abductor.
The remains of Vito’s side took a hit in July 2012 when Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito was arrested on a parole violation, after he was spotted in a Laval bar with men who had criminal records. He had been free for a year and was due for full, unconditional release in October, less than two weeks after Vito was due back in Canada on parole. By then he wouldn’t have to report to parole officers at all, but now he’d spend the time until his statutory release back in prison.
Sollecito’s rearrest came a week after his son Giuseppe (Joe) Sollecito was sentenced to six months in jail and fined $200,000 for keeping the Rizzuto family gambling house on Jean-Talon East, along with Nick Jr. Joe Sollecito also ran a thrift store and pizzeria in Florida. Nicola Di Marco had already been hit with a $50,000 fine and an eighteen-month jail term in the case. Another co-accused was Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, but he had met his fate before the case got to court.
There weren’t huge headlines when, on Sunday, July 16, 2012, sixty-year-old Walter Ricardo Gutierrez was killed in a hail of gunshots while walking towards his west-end home. There were nods that Gutierrez had been involved in the mid-1990s with Vito’s group in money laundering, along with lawyers Joseph Lagana, Richard Judd and Vincenzo Vecchio. Back then, Vito was always reported in the press as too elusive for police ever to capture. More recently, the Montreal Gazette had taken to referring to his family with the phrase “once-powerful.”
Still, Vito’s group seemed to have bite. His name was whispered after street gang leader Chénier Dupuy was shot dead that August as he sat in an SUV outside a restaurant. Hours later, assassins ended the life of Dupuy’s friend Lamartine Sévère Paul outside his apartment building in Laval.
There was talk that Dupuy had recently attended a meeting of street gang leaders in Sainte-Adèle, where he refused to join a new street-gang alliance run by black biker Gregory Wooley, who was close to Vito. There also was talk that an intergenerational war was tearing apart the Reds street gang, also known as the Bo Gars (Cute Guys). While older members had an association with Vito, younger ones were hungry and frustrated at being left little more than crumbs.
The same week as the murders of Dupuy and Paul, Riccardo Ruffullo, a man with Mafia links, was slain in his Côte-des-Neiges penthouse condominium. Not surprisingly, the mood in the milieu was one of hyper-alertness and caution. Vito was coming home soon and people would be called to account for their actions, or lack of action, while he was gone. Maria Mourani, author of two books on street gangs and a Bloc Québécois member of Parliament, told the Montreal Gazette that others in the underworld were equally stressed: “One of my sources said there are people sleeping in hotel rooms under false names.”
When it might be safe to return home was anyone’s guess, but for those who’d laid claim to a piece of Rizzuto turf in Vito’s absence, things were about to get a whole lot worse before they got better.