In many ways, Smiling Joe Di Maulo was like Vito: likeable, tough, confident, smart and capable of getting along with a variety of people. The fact that they were in different camps now called to mind the old Woody Allen joke: “Why are we fighting? We both want the same thing.”
There had never been a time in the milieu when clear, sharp, trusted thinkers were in more demand. If a third of the underworld was on Vito’s side, another third yearned to see him dead. The remaining third would enthusiastically support whoever emerged as the last man standing. Smiling Joe knew as well as anyone who was in what camp.
For all the current turmoil, there was no record of Vito and Di Maulo ever fighting. Di Maulo had been the first to rise to power, alongside Paolo Violi and Moreno Gallo. While Vito ultimately surpassed Di Maulo in power, Smiling Joe always enjoyed a certain elite status. On the surface, Vito and Di Maulo were long-time golf buddies, with Vito playing in Di Maulo’s hospital fundraisers. These were classically Montreal events, with well-dressed criminals wrapping themselves around a good cause to cleanse their image and public institutions making deals with the devil to gain funding. The golf fundraisers also drew at least one city councillor and strip club owner Paolo Gervasi, in 1992, 1993 and 1994, before Vito had Gervasi killed. Joe’s older brother Jimmy had also been in the trusted circle of Vito’s golf buddies. Vito and Joe Di Maulo travelled together to Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic with three others in 2003. Even after Vito’s arrest, Di Maulo had attended the 2005 wedding of Frank Arcadi’s daughter, suggesting at least some level of solidarity with the old Rizzuto group.
Maybe Di Maulo sensed something bad was about to happen when, back in December 2011, he agreed to meet with La Presse reporter Daniel Renaud in the third-floor office of his loans business on Jarry Street, at Viau. Di Maulo had been upset by a story the veteran journalist had written that linked him to a drug trafficker—Di Maulo had no record for drug trafficking—and left a message on Renaud’s voice mail saying as much. The two met behind two locked doors, in a room with no decorations or bodyguards. Di Maulo was calm and friendly as he insisted he never had anything to do with selling drugs. Sounding like a man trying to cleanse his image for posterity, he told the respected journalist: “I have grandchildren, and I do not want them to have this image of me.”
The talk took place a few days after Desjardins was arrested for murdering Salvatore Montagna, so naturally the topic of his brother-in-law was inescapable. Di Maulo wasn’t about to step away from Desjardins, even though he would be one of the men in Vito’s sights now. “Raynald Desjardins, he is my family and I cannot deny him,” Di Maulo told Renaud. “He is still my brother.” Di Maulo then continued, in French, to talk about how he felt about his own security. Di Maulo was thinking of his place in underworld history as he continued: “I’m seventy years old, and there are people who are seventy-five years old and should be afraid for their lives, crossing the street. They could get hit by a bus and die. I do not have bodyguards and I do not look behind me when I walk in the street. I walk with my conscience, and my conscience is clean.”
There was talk in the milieu about Di Maulo receiving several visits in 2010 from a Hamilton Mafia family that hated the Rizzutos. Vito most likely was angered when he heard of this. Around the time Vito stepped back into Canada, police warned Di Maulo that his life was in danger, much as Paolo Violi had been warned before his murder a generation earlier. Di Maulo apparently responded just like Violi, with a shrug. When was a man in his milieu not in some danger? It was like asking when a fish was not wet. He wasn’t about to run from his luxury home in suburban Blainville, just a chip shot from a well-manicured, tranquil golf course. Di Maulo wasn’t a nervous man like Agostino Cuntrera, and eschewed armour-plated cars, bodyguards, bulletproof vests and thoughts of suicide, although he did refresh his weapons collection with what his brother-in-law liked to call a small “toy.” Di Maulo realized that if his enemies really wanted to kill him, they would do so. All he or the police could hope to do was postpone it. Death was inevitable, but death with dignity was still an option.
On November 4, 2012, no one reported hearing any gunshots outside the home of Joe Di Maulo as his body collapsed onto the driveway. Perhaps the gunman used a silencer, as Di Maulo was shot at least twice in the head. His wife, Huguette Desjardins, discovered her bleeding husband lying near his Cadillac Escalade. A neighbour said the first sound he heard from Di Maulo’s home that night was the widow’s screams, leading him at first to wonder if it was a heart attack. After Nicolò Rizzuto ’s murder at home, the businesslike conduct normally expected in mob slayings was clearly being set aside in favour of an intensely personal approach.
Smiling Joe’s murder incited comment from as high up the political ladder as Quebec’s public security minister, Stéphane Bergeron. He said police had been placed on high alert, as he didn’t want to see a repeat of the 1990s biker war. “We certainly want to avoid vigilante justice in the streets,” Bergeron told reporters. “When scores are settled, there’s a real danger of collateral victims.”
It wasn’t that long ago that Vito had been the one who would settle disputes to preserve the common interests of criminal enterprise and keep police at bay. It was Vito who urged Mom Boucher of the Hells Angels to talk with the Rock Machine in September 2000. That push came when Vito heard that tough anti-gang legislation was in the works, after the near-fatal shooting of reporter Michel Auger. Boucher met with leaders of the Rock Machine on neutral ground in a conference room at the Palais de Justice. Then they made their truce public by breaking bread in a crowded and trendy Crescent Street restaurant in the city’s downtown on October 8, 2000. The move was designed to quell public fears about organized criminals. Veteran crime reporter Claude Poirier and a photographer from the Quebec tabloid Allô Police were summoned to record the Thanksgiving feast that included Boucher and Rock Machine leader Frédéric Faucher, and about twenty of their lieutenants. Vito was the unseen hand behind the public relations move—but that was several lifetimes ago, and his place in the Montreal underworld had radically changed.
Smiling Joe Di Maulo had many friends, contacts and relatives, but the turnout for his funeral was poor. He would have understood their reluctance to step forward publicly. In uncertain times, funerals after mob hits are seldom well attended. Among those notably absent from Di Maulo’s funeral was Vito. More telling yet, Di Maulo’s visitation was not held at the Rizzutos’ upscale Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard. Vito’s family didn’t attend or send a wreath as a sign of respect. Flowery best wishes appeared in the form of a white wreath from Raynald Desjardins, who was in the Rivière des Prairies penitentiary. The Cotroni family sent flowers, as might be expected from in-laws. Di Maulo’s casket was open, so that mourners could see the rosary in his hands, and there were no signs of violence on the body. The undertaker had done his job as well as the hit man.
Mourners heard Di Maulo described as “a man of honour, a man of courage.” With no explicit mention of his role in the underworld, he was remembered as a lover of golf, wine and the music of Frank Sinatra. Others paid tribute to a man who gained respect “in the world of business, arts and politics.” Although Di Maulo had ties to the GTA, there were no out-of-province licence plates outside. When the service was almost over, Di Maulo’s widow, Huguette, and other close family members released white doves into the sky.
The Journal de Montréal reported talk that Di Maulo had been summoned to a meeting with Vito shortly before his death. Had this been Smiling Joe’s day of reckoning? Raynald Desjardins reportedly went into segregation in jail after his brother-in-law Di Maulo’s murder, but he was up to date on the news and clearly annoyed when some stories claimed that the Complexe Funéraire Loreto had flatly refused to deal with the Di Maulo family. That kind of speculation about tensions between Vito and Desjardins’s camp might excite fellow inmates and further endanger his life. After a request from Desjardins, a Loreto official sent out a public letter to say that Di Maulo’s family hadn’t asked to hold Di Maulo’s service at their establishment. There had been no snub from the funeral home. That still didn’t explain why no member of the Rizzuto camp—including Vito—attended the funeral. No explanation was needed, really, for those who understood Vito’s rage.
In fact, it was becoming impossible not to read dark motives into what otherwise might be considered accidents or coincidences. On October 8, 2012, seventy-nine year-old Domenico Arcuri Sr. dropped by to see how things were going at a Pompano Beach, Florida, construction site where his son, Domenico Jr., had been working as a subcontractor on a one-storey industrial garage for more than a week. Father and son lived in the same condominium development on the 4000 block of Galt Ocean Drive, Fort Lauderdale, as did a dozen Montreal-area construction and real estate business owners and their families.
As Domenico Jr. later told police, it was late in the morning and he went to retrieve something from his car. Before he reached the vehicle, he heard a crashing sound, turned and saw his father lying under the garage’s collapsed roof. After getting up, Domenico Sr. seemed his gamely self, even though he was seventy-nine, and claimed to have hurt only his shoulder. Domenico Jr. said that he decided to take his father to the hospital after he saw him turning pale and blood coming from the back of his neck. When an officer went to see him at North Broward Hospital, he was told to wait because the senior needed a CAT scan. Before the day was over, Domenico Sr. surprised hospital authorities by passing away.
It might have been considered a sad if somewhat commonplace death if not for Arcuri’s long-time criminal associations. Since August 17, three Montreal construction companies and an Italian ice cream company connected to the Arcuri family had been hit by arsonists. Domenico Arcuri Sr. had assumed control of the Ital Gelati ice cream firm after Paolo Violi’s murder in 1978. He had connections to both the Violi and Rizzuto sides in the murderous feud, and at one time was considered a potential peacemaker. For this, the Violi side ultimately considered him a traitor, as did Vito’s men.
Enterprising Montreal Gazette reporter Paul Cherry dug up the coroner’s report into Arcuri’s death, and it outlined reservations about whether or not the death was accidental. Rebecca MacDougall, associate medical examiner for Broward County, wrote in her report on the death that it was an accident, but “the context is worrisome.” MacDougall continued: “By report, the decedent was under a roof when the roof collapsed. Although the context of the death is worrisome, the manner of death, at this time, is best classified as accident. Should any probative information pertaining to this case become available, such information may be used to amend this report at that time.” The report didn’t elaborate on the context of the death. However, Domenico Jr. had been threatened in the month before the collapse.
Was it a coincidence that the dead man was the one who introduced Montagna to others in the milieu, setting in motion the decimation of Vito’s group while he was in prison? Was it also coincidental that, a generation earlier, he had helped lure Paolo Violi to the card game where he had been murdered? Or was it revenge, served stone cold?