If you must live in exile, there are far worse places than the resorts and warm sands of Acapulco, Mexico. For Moreno Gallo, there was also the comforting presence of many of his contacts in the Canadian mob. Most of the Ontario camera di controllo maintained businesses or vacation homes in Acapluco. Despite the resort town’s warm charms and familiar faces, though, the millionaire baker still missed Montreal, and talked of plans to move north to rejoin his wife and sons. His desire to return raised eyebrows, as back home men considered disloyal to Vito were falling at a steady pace.
In Mexico, Gallo took frequent trips to the Forza Italia pizzeria in a tourist area near the beach on the Costera Miguel Alemán. The food and the coffee were to the baker’s liking, and the owner was a friend. So it wasn’t surprising that the exiled Mafioso was there on the evening of Sunday, November 10, 2013, looking casual in white pants and a pink polo shirt with white stripes. Forza Italia is an often-bustling place, although Sunday nights are calmer. No one paid much attention when a thin man in black entered around 9:40 p.m. Perhaps customers and staff thought he was reaching for his wallet when his hand moved towards his waistband.
Gallo sat near the entrance, so it took only a few strides before the thin man was directly behind him. He pumped nine shots from his nine-millimetre pistol into Gallo’s back and head, ignoring the panicked customers and staff. Then the stranger disappeared quietly into the warm evening. There’s no doubt that, back in Montreal, Vito was thinking of his father as Gallo lay freshly dead on the floor. It was three years minus a day since Nicolò was shot dead in front of Vito’s sister and mother.
Vito’s enemies kept dying as the Christmas season of 2013 approached. On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 18, someone took a break from the season’s festivities to shoot Roger Valiquette to death beside his black Mercedes SUV, in the parking lot of a St-Hubert restaurant in the Chomedey district of Laval.
He was less than three kilometres from the office of his mortgage brokerage. Despite a criminal record for cocaine trafficking and active mob associations, Valiquette somehow still had a permit from the Office of Consumer Protection to loan money as an “alternative” lender. He also owned ATMs and was involved with Desjardins in the soil decontamination business.
At the time of his murder, Valiquette faced charges for death threats and assault with a firearm. He must have known he was in danger of not living to his trial date. His partner in real estate development was convicted cocaine trafficker Tonino Callocchia, who had survived five bullets in a similar murder attempt in another Laval restaurant parking lot on February 1. Valiquette had also been close to Joe Di Maulo and Moreno Gallo. All three men were enemies of Vito, and all three assassinations remained unsolved.
Just because Vito likely had reason to want Valiquette dead didn’t mean that he ordered the hit. Valiquette had plenty of other enemies in the milieu. At the time of his murder, he was vying for control of the Rivière des Prairies territory in Montreal, which had previously been controlled by Ponytail De Vito. Remants of Ponytail’s old group opposed Valiquette’s push into their territory. The surest way to keep him out was to fill him with bullets.
Ponytail’s name was back in the news that December, after the coroner’s office finally completed its investigation into his death. That work had been delayed as coroner’s office resources had been diverted to the fiery train derailment that took forty-seven lives in Lac-Mégantic in July. Ponytail’s autopsy showed that he died from cyanide poisoning. How the lethal drug was smuggled into maximum-security Donnacona Institution remained a mystery, although Ponytail had orchestrated plots to smuggle drugs and cellphones into the Rivière des Prairies detention centre when he was an inmate there. It also wasn’t clear if Ponytail’s death was a murder or suicide.
It wouldn’t have been the first time the mob turned to cyanide. Prolific New Jersey mob hit man Richard (The Iceman) Kuklinski claimed to have taken more than one hundred lives, sometimes with cyanide. Men like Kuklinski knew that the chemical compound quickly dissipated from a body and required an experienced and alert pathologist to detect it. A cup of coffee spiked with cyanide had been used to murder imprisoned financier Michele Sindona in 1986 in Italy. He was believed to be on the verge of exposing government ties to the Mafia and the Masonic Lodge, and exposing details of the murder of bank director Roberto Calvi under a London bridge, at the time he sipped from the fatal cup.
In the fourteen months since his return to Canada, Vito had clearly put revenge ahead of business. One man who met Vito in the Toronto area during the second half of 2013 remarked that he had the bullet eyes of a stone-cold killer. His work was far from over, as at least a half-dozen of his enemies were still believed to be targeted for death. This all-consuming lust for vengeance upset many of Vito’s former associates, including influential people in the construction industry. The continuing scrutiny of the Charbonneau Commission meant that the mob had to scramble to regain contacts in industry and government. It was a job Vito could have handled, had he not been preoccupied with bloodletting on an epic scale. The milieu had never needed a clear mind for industry more than it did now, but the undisputed CEO of the Canadian underworld was suddenly bad for business.