At seventy-nine years of age, Domenico Manno was a well-seasoned Mafia artifact, with a massive skull, the body of a fridge and the pained expression of a constipated elderly bull. Wrinkled and creaking as he was, he was still the younger brother of Zia Libertina and beneath her in the family pecking order. Their Mafioso father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, had been trying to immigrate to Canada for a decade before he finally arrived on September 11, 1964. Don Nino lived in Montreal until his death by natural causes on October 1, 1980, at the age of seventy-six. He was entombed in a mausoleum alongside his wife, Giuseppa Cammalleri Manno, and their daughter Giuseppina Manno, younger sister of Libertina and Domenico Manno.
In the minds of many involved in law enforcement and law-breaking, Domenico Manno would always be connected to the hit that changed the Montreal underworld forever. Manno was present when a call was placed to his brother-in-law Nicolò Rizzuto from Montreal hours before Paolo Violi was killed in a card game in his old ice cream shop. In the telephone message, Nicolò was told, “The hunting has begun.” Hours later, just after Violi’s death, Manno was also present in the ice cream shop when another call south was made, saying, “The pig is dead.”
For his role in the Paolo Violi murder, Domenico Manno eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, along with Agostino Cuntrera and Giovanni Di Mora. The identity of the man who pulled the trigger of the lupara was never disclosed, and no one publicly dragged the names of Nicolò or Vito into the proceedings. On the stand, Manno was the very personification of omertà. When a prosecutor pressed him about the murder, he replied: “I don’t remember.” Pushed further, he said, “I don’t remember, I don’t remember,” just in case the first lie wasn’t enough. All he could remember, he said, was having a cup of coffee and buying cigarettes in the café where Violi was slain, hours before the murder.
Manno’s wife was the sister of Joe Lo Presti’s wife, making him the uncle of the recently murdered Larry Lo Presti. If Manno held a grudge against Vito for his presumed role in that murder, it didn’t show. These uncomfortable things occasionally happened in this life they led. Like the senior Lo Presti, Manno was also heavily involved in the drug trade. He pleaded guilty in Florida in 1998 to plots to traffic heroin, cocaine and counterfeit money, which included an effort to smuggle twenty kilos of cocaine into Florida in a suitcase on a commercial flight. For this, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
As he prepared to leave Fort Dix prison in New Jersey for Montreal in December 2012, Manno must have contemplated the fates of the cadre of killers behind the murders of the Violi brothers. It seemed that a time of reckoning had fallen upon them. Agostino Cuntrera, Paolo Renda and Domenico Arcuri Sr. had each played a role in Violi’s murder, and now they were each murdered or abducted or dead under odd circumstances. And of course Nicolò Rizzuto, long understood to be the invisible hand guiding the Violi execution, was murdered most infamously of all.
Manno looked hulking and threatening back at the time of the Paolo Violi murder, with sweeping sideburns and long black trench coat to give him the full disco-era hit man look. He returned to Montreal a lumbering old man, but age wasn’t much of a concern in the mob.
In late December 2012, word came that another senior citizen might join Vito’s ranks. Seventy-five-year-old Pierino Divito was also expected to return from an American prison. Divito had been arrested in 1994 in Nova Scotia for drug smuggling and later extradited to a Texas prison. Times were tense and Vito could sorely use all the men he could trust, even if they were a tad long in the tooth.
Meanwhile, in the courts, the foundation of the prosecution’s case against Raynald Desjardins, Vittorio (Victor) Mirarchi and others charged for the murder of Bonanno crime boss Salvatore Montagna was something entirely unprecedented: encrypted BlackBerry messages.
One of the first clues that the case was travelling through uncharted territory came when Quebec Court judge Maurice Parent made the unprecedented decision to deny Desjardins access to some of the evidence against him in the Montagna murder case. Sealed documents in the Joliette courthouse included an affidavit and wiretap warrants used to intercept communications between the suspects. Federal prosecutor Yvan Poulin cryptically said it was in the public interest to keep the documents about the intercepted messages totally secret. “Read the authorization [for the warrants] in your office,” Poulin told the judge. “It speaks for itself.… I can’t say anything more about it.… This is an exceptional case.”
A publication ban blocked the media from reporting the contents of intercepted BlackBerry messages. It was thought that the messages in question were sent by plotters before, during and after Montagna’s murder in November 2011 on Île Vaudry. In short, the prosecution was building its case in large part on the surveillance of Montagna conducted by a murdered underworld spy: Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle.
It wasn’t totally unprecedented for BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion to comply with search warrants. After a case in Pakistan, RIM issued a statement saying: “Like others in our industry, from time to time, we may receive requests from legal authorities for lawful access assistance.” The statement added: “We are guided by appropriate legal processes and publicly disclosed lawful access principles in this regard, as we balance any such requests against our priority of maintaining the privacy rights of our users.” By the time of the news release, some criminals had already moved on to messaging systems such as WhatsApp and Viber, the latter trading on ultrasecurity and boasting on its website that “Not even the staff at Viber have access to your data with UltraSafe enabled.” There was also the Dark Web, or the Deep Web, which allowed communicators to burrow deep between the layers of the conventional Net, paying their way into exclusive, uncharted cyber tunnels.
It was looking as if Desjardins’s trial for the Montagna murder would take place in the spring of 2013. No one expected public outrage if he managed to plea bargain. There had been minimal public response to Vito’s relatively light sentence for his role in three gangland assassinations. The victim in the case was a major organized crime figure and a prime suspect in the failed hit on the accused. Who besides Montagna’s wife, three daughters and mistress really mourned his death? Even the Bonanno family showed no sign that it was upset over the assassination of its leader.
It’s a time-honoured tactic for mobsters like Desjardins to argue self-defence after killing another criminal. Desjardins could make this argument quite strongly after the failed attempt on his life. And if Desjardins played along and cut a deal of his own, the public also wouldn’t hear embarrassing disclosure about the underworld’s relations with the politically connected business people whom Montagna had tried to squeeze a little too hard. He had made plenty of money extorting businesses in New York, but he wasn’t in tune with the climate of Montreal’s milieu. Montagna hadn’t just broken the law; he had upset the finely tuned balance between mobsters, politicians and business. There had been many reasons to kill him.