Going home for supper was now a life-threatening activity in the milieu. Everyone seemed a little quicker to settle things with a gun. Saint-Léonard neighbours of Vincenzo (Vincent) Scuderi called 911 at 6:10 p.m. on January 31, 2013, after hearing a volley of shots outside his home on Robert Boulevard. Police arrived to find a handgun beside the forty-nine-year-old’s lifeless body on the sidewalk. He had ties to Ponytail De Vito, Raynald Desjardins and Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, suggesting his killer might be from Vito’s camp.
Scuderi’s old associates needed less than a day to respond. At 10:10 a.m. on February 1, fifty-one-year-old residential building contractor Tonino (Tony) Callocchia was felled by gunshots in a parking lot between two restaurants on Saint-Martin Boulevard West in Laval. Callocchia’s history with Vito’s group ran deep. He was busted in massive cocaine-smuggling and money-laundering cases in the 1990s by the RCMP. “You have … been identified on several occasions as an active member of the Italian Mafia,” his parole hearing panel wrote him in 2001. “The offences you have … committed are large-scale and they required organization and planning at a level that only a highly organized group can hope to execute.”
Good luck spared Callocchia’s life that day in the parking lot. Bleeding heavily from several bullets to the torso, Callocchia managed to stagger into a restaurant. The gunman chose to drive away rather than venture inside and finish the job. There would be plenty more chances.
As the bodies continued to drop, Vito seemed to be pulling ahead in the undeclared Mafia war. Secretly bunkered still in his downtown Montreal condominium, he ventured out only in the company of guards and rode in his armoured car, nothing like the lithe and open Ferrari he sometimes drove in the salad days of the early 1990s. As a possible omen of good fortune, someone finally made an offer to purchase Vito’s Mafia Row mansion in March 2013, almost two years after it went on the market. The offer was for $1.275 million, and it sold for almost three-quarters of a million under the original price. The new buyer would be a pioneer of sorts for Mafia Row, as listing broker Leon Derestepanian noted to the press that they were from a large family without organized crime connections. The Montreal Gazette had fun with the story, headlining it, THE OFFER VITO RIZZUTO COULDN’T REFUSE. Reporter Allison Lampert’s account began, “Vito Rizzuto’s former home in Ahuntsic has finally sold, but it appears the reputed Montreal crime boss has taken a hit.”
Some members of the ’Ndrangheta in Ontario now quietly pined for the big money they used to make while working with Vito in the 1990s and early 2000s. So much blood had been spilled; whatever opportunity had once tempted them was now long gone, replaced by loss and confusion. Baker Moreno Gallo was an exile of sorts in Acapulco, where a friend owned a hotel, and where he was close to other significant Calabrians in the underworld. His wife and sons had never left Montreal, even though he had sold his $1.2-million home, and he retained construction interests in the city. While Acapulco was warm and exciting, Gallo remained a Montrealer at heart, and a homesick one at that.
He filed papers in May 2013 with the Canadian immigration board, arguing he had a right to be in the country even if he wasn’t a citizen. He still had resident status, and he argued that this meant authorities didn’t have the right to push for his expulsion. He further argued that it wasn’t fair for him to be deported for serious criminality, since the murder for which he was convicted was committed before the Immigration Act was revised in 1978. His application included a letter of support from the Mammola Recreation Association, a six-hundred-member group of Montrealers of Calabrian background. Included in his appeal package was an affidavit from the association’s president, Francesco Ierfino, praising the frequency and generosity of his charitable donations. Like Vito and Di Maulo, Gallo had a civicminded side and his largesse included financial support for the Montreal Children’s Foundation, the Breast Cancer Foundation of Maisonneuve, the Rosemont hospital and the Canadian Multiple Sclerosis Association.
Before any sort of meeting was scheduled with immigration authorities, Gallo had a hearing before Vito Rizzuto. He was summoned to meet Vito on vacation in the Dominican Republic, along with a group of other Canadians. Gallo knew that his next round of golf with Vito could be a life-altering or life-ending event. For those in the milieu, a round on the links served as a performance review, and men like Gallo knew there wasn’t much point trying to hide from Vito’s invitations, as his reach was long.
Gallo didn’t seem nervous about trying to come back to Montreal. Did he think Vito hadn’t detected the depth of his betrayal? He was too smart and experienced a man to truly believe that. Did he feel he might somehow be forgiven for transferring Vito’s sports book in the Toronto area to the Calabrians during his absence? Other sports book operations had been turned over to Montagna. In Vito’s world, betrayed accounts were closed with bullets. Gallo knew all of this, and yet he agreed to the meeting in the Dominican.
As Quebec’s criminal body count rose, so too did the political body count. At dawn on June 17, 2013, Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum’s day began with an event that wasn’t written into his itinerary: he was arrested at his home on fourteen corruption-related charges, including fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy. Pundits recalled how Applebaum had presented himself as a cleansing force for the scandal-plagued city when he replaced former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay the previous fall, after Tremblay had resigned amidst construction bid–rigging allegations. “I solemnly vow that I will erase this stain on our city,” Applebaum had promised, eight months before he was taken into custody.
His arrest was news around the world, coming at the same time accusations first surfaced that Toronto mayor Rob Ford was videotaped smoking crack cocaine with street-gang members. Suddenly, the mayors of Canada’s two largest cities had become punchlines. The Atlantic magazine headlined its report “What the Heck Is the Matter with the Mayors of Canada?” and opened it with the line: “So a Canadian mayor was arrested Monday and, no, it was not the one you expect.”
Just a few months earlier, Applebaum was the man who was expected to deal with the city’s potholes. Now he was facing criminal charges and the axle-bending potholes had got worse. The seriousness of the city’s deterioration was driven home on August 5, 2013, when a backhoe collapsed into a sinkhole in the downtown intersection of Sainte-Catherine West and Guy. The symbolism of Montreal’s decay was impossible to ignore.
Other troubling symbolism came when the Charbonneau inquiry was shown a photo of high-ranking Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec union boss Jean Lavallée and construction magnate Tony Accurso together on a vacation trip to the Virgin Islands in 2005. Lavallée, who ran the FTQ’s construction wing, testified that he and Accurso had been friends for three decades. The vacation photo showed the union boss literally getting his back scrubbed by Accurso, as Lavallée stood waist-deep in the water, puffing a cigar. At the time the photo was taken, Lavallée was a board member of the federation’s billion-dollar investment fund, which helped finance several Accursoled projects. At the time the photo was shown, Accurso was facing charges for fraud and influence peddling.
Lavallée testified that he saw nothing wrong with taking about a half-dozen week-long trips as a guest aboard Accurso’s luxury yacht, Touch. He balked at the suggestion that the trips swayed him to grant contracts to his friend.
“I didn’t think it was a sin to go on a friend’s boat,” Lavallée said.
Martin Brett’s writing from the 1950s seemed to echo through the halls of the inquiry, especially his description of the “smirking abnormal” balance between the city’s respectable veneer and its underworld, “probably the most subtle organization of its type in North America, tentacles reaching anywhere and everywhere, with pressure all the way.”
It should surprise no one when a yappy cocaine aficionado utters some shocking words at a party. But one day in January 2013, in a high-end Vaughan restaurant, this particular man’s voice was perhaps the only strong pro-Vito one in a sea of supporters of Platinum Sports Book, and he didn’t even look nervous. Platinum had, of course, once been Vito’s fiefdom, before Moreno Gallo ceded control of it to his fellow Calabrians. Now, Vito’s man was acting like someone with an unusual level of comfort and confidence, even for a man whose nostrils had been liberally dusted with white powder.
He had said something breathtaking in its simplicity and strength. They were words that affirmed Vito’s genius for consensus building, even in these most difficult of times. The man said that Vito wasn’t looking for money from them, related to Platinum. They could keep whatever they had made. That was a triviality. And Vito certainly didn’t need their love. But Vito did need something from them, and it wasn’t negotiable. Vito demanded their loyalty and a clear path to seek justice. For Vito now, revenge and justice were fused into one thing, and nothing short of his own death would stop him from achieving it.
With those magic words, Platinum SB quietly passed back from Calabrian into Sicilian control. It was an easy decision to make. The sports book operators had grown weary of the penny-pinching ways of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta members, and the murders of Smiling Joe Di Maulo et al. showed that Vito’s wrong side wasn’t such a safe place to be.
“Whoever wants to switch to us, they don’t have to pay money,” was the emissary’s message. “They don’t have to share.”
Those words had more power than bullets. With their utterance, Vito became once again the most powerful person in Canada’s underworld. His message, and the locale where he chose to have it spoken, was a direct affront to the ’Ndrangheta, who had played a guiding role in the attacks on his family. By the time Vito’s man sauntered out of the restaurant, some of the York Region ’Ndrangheta were targets themselves, surrounded by people whose loyalty had just been purchased back by Vito—for free.
The words also signalled that something had changed profoundly about Vito. Before the murders of his father and eldest son, Vito was a man who always put business first. He was the man who created money-making opportunities out of chaos and blood. Now, Vito had all the money he would ever need. But without his eldest son to pass his businesses on to, and without his father to impress, his fortune had an empty feel to it. What could he offer his widowed mother that would make her remaining days less painful? All Vito had left was life in the present, and he didn’t want to share a second of that time with his enemies, unless that second was spent killing them.
At the time of the Platinum SB party, the Bonanno family’s credibility hung at a historic low, never having recovered from the defection of its former boss Joe Massino. The family’s failure to avenge the murder of Salvatore Montagna had called particular attention to their weakness. In Ontario, the New York City crime families with the most influence now were the Luccheses and Gambinos, and to a lesser extent the Genoveses. The old Magaddino family of Buffalo was attempting a revival through loansharking at Casino Niagara on the American border. This revived La Cosa Nostra was more loosely structured now, and more of a network than a tight organization. Contacts, expertise and experience were shared across organizational lines, for mutual benefit. These weren’t particularly friendly waters for Vito, but he had navigated far worse.