The surveillance team of carabinieri caught sight of its target at 9:25 a.m. on Friday, September 14, 2012. They were stepping off the direct flight from Madrid to Palermo’s Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino, named after martyred judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, childhood friends who were murdered in 1992 by the island’s Mafia.
The police target that day was former Toronto and Montreal resident Juan Ramon Paz Fernandez, a.k.a. Johnny Bravo, Joey Bravo and James Shaddock. The night before his arrival in Sicily, he called his local contact Pietro Sorci, asking him to show up at the airport to give him a ride. Fernandez wanted Sorci to arrive alone. Clearly, there were things he wanted to discuss in confidence.
Fernandez was moving fast and travelling light since his release from prison the previous April, after serving a ten-year term for an assortment of underworld offences around Toronto, including murder conspiracy and drug trafficking. After being deported to Spain, he quickly embarked on a trip to South and Central America, where he had tried to secure cocaine deals with associates of Vito’s family. Now, as he landed on the island of Vito’s birth, it was easy to think that Vito—a month before his release from Colorado, at this point—had devised an exit plan for him that would allow Fernandez to keep making money for the family.
The carabinieri had been tipped off by the RCMP about Fernandez’s imminent arrival. The surveillance team followed Sorci’s Hyundai Veloster along the only highway from the airport to Palermo. It was the same route that Falcone had travelled two decades earlier, until his armour-plated Fiat Croma reached a spot where the Mafia had hidden thirteen metal drums containing 350 kilograms of explosives in a drain-pipe. From a vantage point high on the white sandhills overlooking the highway, amidst the prickly pear and olive trees and cane thickets, a Mafioso pressed a detonator. With that small movement, he made instant martyrs—cadaveri eccellenti, illustrious corpses—of Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards.
There had been a time when the arrival of a Spaniard in Sicily brought terror. The Spanish Inquisition raged for almost two centuries there, beginning in 1592 with Tomás de Torquemada, the First Grand Inquisitor of Spain. So great was the terror that mi spagnu—spagnu referring to Spain—means “I have a fear” in the local dialect.
The carabinieri weren’t fearful of this Spaniard, but they were wary. They kept pace as Sorci turned the Hyundai along Via Tornatore towards Bagheria, a Mafia-ridden town in Palermo province. They lost sight of the car for a brief time and then caught sight of it again, shortly before 10:40 a.m., when Fernandez was dropped off at his apartment at 18 Via Tornatore. At 4:30 p.m., the Hyundai pulled up outside a fruit and vegetable shop on Via Nino Bixio. The shop was run by forty-nine-year-old Sergio Rosario Flamia, who was considered by police to be the treasurer of the Mafia family of Giacinto (Gino) Di Salvo, top Mafia boss in the mandamento, or district, of Bagheria, which also included the towns of Altavilla Milicia, Casteldaccia, Villabate and Ficarazzi. Di Salvo’s group ran a network of extortion and narcotics. Sorci got out of the car and went inside to talk with Flamia.
The next day, September 14, police overheard Sorci via wiretap in conversation with Carmela Starita, a woman living in Perugia whose husband, Luigi Scuotto, was in prison north of Naples for drug trafficking and possession. Sorci reached her at an unlisted number registered to a Senegalese drug trafficker living in Naples. Sorci talked about “it” and said “it” would arrive in twenty to twenty-five days. In case there was any doubt about what “it” was, Sorci asked the woman about the market price of fumo—slang for marijuana—in Perugia, a city known for rich international students at the University of Foreigners and the most enthusiastic per capita illegal drug consumption in Italy. Starita said she’d ask someone the next day about the going rate for fumo.
That evening at 10:33, Sorci and Starita were on the phone again talking about the fierce Spaniard who had just arrived in their midst.
“He is fifty-eight years old,” Sorci said, overestimating Fernandez’s age by two years, then added that Fernandez looked much younger.
Indeed, Fernandez appeared a decade younger than his real age, although he was a bit thicker around the waist than during his heyday. His arms were also a little thinner than when he had posed for that photo with Hulk Hogan back in the 1990s. Still, Fernandez remained a fit man and a black belt in karate—not someone you’d want angry at you in an alley.
“Yes, yes,” Carmela said. “He looks more like a forty-year-old.”
As Carmela laughed, Sorci said Fernandez hadn’t slept in two days. “He kept me half an hour to talk, then you know what he says?” Before Carmela could answer, Sorci answered his own question: “ ‘Now I’ll go to the gym!’ ” Sorci expressed his amazement at the Spaniard’s energy, using an impossible-to-translate local phrase—buttana di tua sorella—meaning roughly “whore your sister,” then explained, “Fuck went to the gym for two hours.”
Fernandez planned to settle down in a region whose name carried connotations of Mafia as strong in pop culture as in reality. Bagheria featured prominently in the Godfather movie trilogy, as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone character hid out there under the wing of a politically connected Mafia leader for two years after he killed a corrupt New York cop.
Not surprisingly, Bagheria was also a real-life stronghold of the remains of the Mafia-friendly Christian Democrat Party, which had run Italy for four decades. It sat in the centre of what locals called “the Triangle of Death,” between the mountains and the Tyrrhenian coast. Once a country playground for Palermo’s princes, it was a place of fantastical stories of abuses of power, the oddest of which were often true. One of the city’s prime tourist attractions was the baroque Villa of Monsters, built in 1715 for the Prince of Palagonia. It was decorated with hundreds of stone statues resembling handbags, dragons, griffins, hunchbacks, soldiers and centaurs, as well as a particularly hideous one that was said to be a caricature of his promiscuous wife. Chair pillows inside had been spiked with thorns, for the prince’s amusement when guests were seated.
Bagheria was also home to Sicily’s first “illustrious corpse,” Marchese Emanuele Notarbartolo, an incorruptible director of the Bank of Sicily. On February 1, 1893, two well-dressed assassins stabbed him to death on the train to Palermo. The man behind the slaying was Raffaele Palizzolo, a former Palermo city councillor and a Member of Parliament. Bagheria also had the dubious distinction of being the only town in Italy to name a square after a suspected Mafioso, Pasquale Alfano. Following a public outcry, the square was renamed in 1993 for cadavere eccellente Beppe Montana, a police commissioner who was assassinated by the Mafia.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, left-leaning youth began plastering the town with Wanted posters for seventy-three-year-old Mafia leader Bernardo (by then known as The Ghost) Provenzano, who had lived underground there for more than four decades. Police relied upon descriptions from informers and a police Identikit to create a portrait of a thin, grim man with a scar on his neck, who looked like a menacing farmer. Under the sketch the posters read, “Don’t Be Afraid, Turn In the Mafia.”
Anti-Mafia prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna appeared on national television to call Provenzano “the invisible man” and read one of the notes written by the boss to guide his men. In the missive, the invisible man referred to an old nail factory in Bagheria that had once been a heroin production facility for Leonardo Greco, a former local Mafia boss. At the time of the letter’s writing, the factory served as Provenzano’s execution chamber. Provenzano wrote on the paper: “If you can, see if they’ve managed to put any cameras at the bottom end of the factory, close in or far off. Tell everyone not to talk inside the place or close to the machines. Even at home, they mustn’t talk loudly.”
Much of the slaughter in the old nail factory took place in the 1980s, after Provenzano graduated from being a senior member of the Corleone family to interim capo di tutti capi, or overall boss of the Mafia in Sicily. In one court case, former loyalist and one-time school-teacher Antonino Giuffrè called it a “factory of death” and continued: “Horrible things happened there.… Many people went there never to return home again.” Giuffrè described how victims were strangled and tossed into drums of acid, then buried in nearby fields. He wasn’t able to forget “the nauseous stench of bodies dissolved in acid.” He told authorities that the Mafia thrived because of corruption, in a description that would have had resonance in Montreal: “It’s very simple,” Giuffrè said. “We are the fish and politics is the water.”
By the time of Fernandez’s arrival, the old nail factory had been seized by local authorities and transformed into a youth recreation centre for theatrical and musical events. Fernandez’s old Toronto associates Michele (Mike, The American) Modica and Andrea Fortunato Carbone had resettled in Bagheria after the California Sandwiches shooting in Toronto. It hadn’t taken long for Modica and Carbone to get back into trouble. They were now in jail for Mafia association, after Sicilian police heard they were plotting to murder Pietro Lo Iacono, acting boss of a Bagheria Mafia family. Modica and Carbone were due to be released from prison in April 2014.
On the streets, Fernandez had links with Carbone’s brother Giuseppe—known on the streets as Salvatore—as well as Pietro Sorci and Sergio Flamia. His other contacts in Bagheria included former GTA residents Pietro and Salvatore Scaduto, brothers who had worked in Canada for Vito’s family. The Scaduto brothers had lived in Canada for a quarter century, moving shortly after Pietro escaped a murder bid in Bagheria in 1990. Their father, Bartolomeo, had been slain in underworld feuding the previous year, and it seemed like a smart time to explore the possibilities of life abroad.
Now, the family ran an excavation business and L’Ultima Fermata (“The Last Stop”) pizzeria at the corner of Via Togliatti and Via Papa Giovanni XXIII. Like Fernandez, they kept in frequent phone contact with a Montreal lawyer connected to Vito. Back in Sicily, they chafed at even the thought of Modica. Shortly after the California Sandwiches debacle, the Scaduto brothers had been arrested with a large stockpile of weapons. Faced with the prospect of a deportation hearing, they voluntarily left Canada. If not for Modica’s arrogance and stupidity, they might all still be in Canada. They had made it to the promised land of nice cars and good money and Modica had got them expelled.
Fernandez sported a sparkling gold Rolex believed to have been given to him by Vito, back when he was known on the streets of Toronto as Johnny Bravo and his benefactor Vito valued business over revenge. The Spaniard opened up a karate dojo that doubled as a dance studio in his new town, but it would soon become clear that his passion remained crime.