Valentine’s Day, when romance is in the date book if not always in the hearts of long-married couples, was a time for Pietro Sciarra to put aside the consuming intrigue of the Rizzuto–Violi power struggle in Montreal and snuggle close to his wife. He had been in the hot seat lately, and the pressure had been intense. In some ways, there was more pressure on him than there was on Paolo Violi and Nick Rizzuto, for Sciarra was caught in the middle of these two indomitable forces. Even though he was Sicilian he was a trusted advisor to the Calabrian Violi—police describe him as Violi’s consigliere—and had openly sided with his boss. Several attempts had been made by the Sixth Family to bring Sciarra into their new Sicilian-centered reality. These were entreaties he had explicitly refused.
Sciarra was a Sicilian mafioso Violi had embraced and welcomed when he fled to Canada. Violi valued Sciarra for his ability to listen and for offering sober, sound advice. Violi shared with him some of his most private thoughts and trusted him with serious business, particularly when it involved interactions with those outside his milieu. Sciarra was, in a way, Violi’s minister of external relations. When Vic Cotroni was jailed by the Quebec organized crime commission, it was Sciarra that Violi sent to New York to plead his case for being named acting boss of the Montreal decina. And when a man named Frank Tutino ran for public office in the 1974 city election, it was Sciarra that he sent to suggest to Tutino that he withdraw from the race, after Violi had thrown his support behind a rival candidate. (Tutino refused, but was trounced at the polls.) And it was Sciarra that Violi relied on for advice on how to deal with the Rizzutos and his Sixth Family kin. Sciarra was repaid with respect and a fond nickname from Violi, who was often heard calling him Zio—“Uncle.”
Even though he was skilled at diplomacy, Sciarra was not all talk. In Italy he had been declared by a judicial tribunal to be a member of the Mafia and sentenced to preventive detention under anti-Mafia laws. To avoid prison, he had fled to Montreal. His status as a fugitive and a mafioso, however, did not prevent him from traveling easily back and forth, entering and re-entering Canada and Italy, seemingly at his pleasure. Although deportation orders were eventually issued against him in Canada, he filed repeated court appeals, extending his stay by years. He was free on bail from ongoing immigration proceedings when, just weeks before the Valentine’s Day movie date with his wife, he was called to testify before the Quebec crime commission. Smartly dressed in a dark pinstripe suit and spotted tie, Sciarra was asked about his links to organized crime.
“Do you know what the Mafia is?” Judge Jean Dutil, the commission’s president, asked Sciarra, after hearing extensive evidence about his involvement with Violi in running the affairs of the Montreal mob.
“No,” Sciarra said, looking perplexed.
“You don’t have any idea of what Mafia means?”
“No,” he said, with a straight face.
“But you were designated by the anti-Mafia law!” the judge exclaimed.
“I don’t know what anti-Mafia means.”
With all of these tensions, Sciarra’s desire for a quiet, relaxing night out with his wife is understandable. For their Valentine’s date, however, he chose an American classic dubbed into Italian—Il Padrino parte seconda, or The Godfather, Part II. Many a mafioso has expressed admiration for the famous series of Mafia movies that presents their traditions in such a romantic light. After the couple watched two generations of the fictional Corleone family solve their mounting problems with acts of murder, they left the small theater that was something of a family holding, owned, as it was, by Palmina Puliafito, sister of Vic Cotroni.
If a director were looking for a location to film a mob rub-out, he would have to look no further than the area around this theater, with its faded, inner-city feel that came from being nestled in the shadows between expressways. Arm in arm, Sciarra and his wife were walking to the parking lot when a hooded man stepped from the darkness. The masked figure quickly drew a 12-gauge shotgun and leveled it at Sciarra. There must have been a sudden moment of panicked understanding by the mobster before the blast wrenched him from his wife’s arm and knocked him to the ground, where he lay dying.
If Sciarra had thought his Sicilian blood offered him some insulation from the Sixth Family, or if he felt his patron, Violi, was powerful enough to protect him, he was terribly shortsighted on both counts. Straddling two worlds had made Sciarra particularly vulnerable: he was a member of the Sicilian Mafia and, as such, the Sicilian Mafia had no need to go through diplomatic channels or take into consideration another mob group’s code. They could deal with him in the way they wanted.
The blast that killed Sciarra was the opening shot in a war that had really been declared three years before. In the wake of Sciarra’s murder, police investigators and mobsters of all stripes braced for an all-out war in Montreal.
A careful chess player might take out an opponent’s strong supporting pieces before advancing on his king. It weakens the opposition, makes the final assault safer, with fewer casualties and, most important, saps the opponent’s ability to raise an effective counter-attack. Such moves by a tactician—a careful planner who thinks before moving, never rushing—might take more time, but are calculated to lead inexorably toward the final, decisive victory. It is this strategy, that of a chess player, that police ascribe to the Rizzuto organization when it finally moved against Violi. The removal of Sciarra was a sound opening position; it garnered attention, made a clear point and removed a valuable strategic asset from the enemy. But there were other obstacles blocking the path to power, and additional targets in this creeping, rather than sweeping, coup d’état.
Francesco Violi was nine years younger than Paulo Violi and yet was the tallest and most physical of the family. The top of Paolo Violi’s head barely made it past Francesco’s ears, and while Paolo Violi had a certain girth, his center of gravity was lower in the gut than that of Francesco, whose shoulders were broad and muscular. Francesco’s physical attributes had been put to good use; he had accepted his role as an enforcer, the most trusted of the family’s muscle, and dutifully did much of the dirty work, seemingly without question or compunction. He would do anything to protect his brother and the family name. He could be cruel and stern, quick to hit and slow to relent. Francesco was considered even more volatile than his brother, who was known for his temper. If Paolo Violi went to war, he would want Francesco in the front lines. And if Paolo was hit, Francesco could be expected to explode with bloodthirsty rage and exact an awful revenge as a matter of honor. This family dynamic did not go unnoticed.
On February 8, 1977—just six days shy of the anniversary of Sciarra’s murder—Francesco Violi was working in the office of Violi Importing and Distributing Co. Ltd., a family firm located in an industrialized stretch of Rivière-des-Prairies, on the northern shore of the Island of Montreal. Francesco was apparently alone and talking on the telephone at his desk, set well inside the office, when assailants marched in and opened fire. The attackers—police believe there were at least two—did not wish to botch the job; besides a shotgun blast to the face, Francesco’s body was peppered with bullets from a pistol.
“Although it was not proven,” says an FBI report from 1985, “Nick Rizzuto is suspected of ordering this murder.”
Paolo Violi was in jail at the time, serving the last of his sentence for contempt. He had been greatly shaken by the murder of Sciarra, and was no doubt terribly upset by the death of his brother. He would have known by then, if not before, that he was a marked man. And yet, upon his release from jail, he remained impassive and restrained. There is no indication he was rallying his troops for war. He maintained many of his old routines and old associations, visiting gangsters and friends alike along the familiar streets of Saint-Léonard. And even though the Reggio Bar, his old headquarters on Jean-Talon, had been sold to a pair of Sicilian mobsters, he continued to visit and could often be seen there sipping espresso.
Despite the felling of Sciarra and Francesco Violi, there was—unbelievably—still talking to be done. A last-ditch effort was made to settle the dispute. It is unknown who insisted on the meeting, for it is difficult to imagine anyone believing that things could now be settled in any other way than more bullets and blood. And yet, there it was, a face-to-face meeting arranged in 1977 between Nick Rizzuto and Paolo Violi, a rarity since Nick’s relocation to Venezuela.
His other failings aside, few could accuse Violi of cowardice. It must have taken significant internal fortitude for him, at such a heated, vulnerable time, to willingly return to the Arcuri home.
For this final sit-down, Nick and Violi arrived separately. With the Reggio wiretaps now removed, such private moments were once again closely guarded secrets. As such, it is impossible to say how sincere either was in proffering peace. Violi brought no offer of abdication; Nick, no sign of submission. Neither apparently was conciliatory. Perhaps Nick wished to formally deliver to Violi—faccia-a-faccia—something of an ultimatum. For his part, Violi likely wanted to show he was unmoved, unafraid and unprepared to waver from his position that he was the rightful heir to the Montreal decina. Whatever was said between the two men that day did not erase their disagreement or ease its tensions. They had, in the parlance of the modern divorce court, irreconcilable differences.
“The meeting held in Montreal did nothing to stem violence,” an FBI briefing paper noted.
Police realized something was amiss when the tone and tenor of underworld talk about Paolo Violi slipped from derisive to malevolent. Within the inner circle of the Sicilian coterie, thoughts were shifting from merely wishing calamity upon him to actively plotting it. Police were hearing rumors from street sources and wiretaps that Violi’s position was precarious.
If the plot against Violi was obvious to investigators, Violi himself surely knew of it. In fact, police tried to discuss it with him, but he rebuffed them, just as he had refused the Quebec crime inquiry. Violi was not one to run, nor to seek the aid of the state, even if it was his best—or only—chance of survival. When word reached Montreal police that several Rizzuto men were plotting Violi’s murder, surveillance officers started keeping a close eye on the suspects. Much of their time was spent watching the comings and goings at Mike’s Submarines in Saint-Léonard. After weeks of police surveillance, often late into the night, nothing happened.
On Friday, January 20, 1978, the police surveillance teams were called off for the weekend, an officer involved in the surveillance said. It was about money. The overtime bills were getting too high and the officers had gotten nowhere in their search for information that might result in the laying of charges, he said. The anniversary of Francesco Violi’s murder was 19 days away. The second anniversary of Sciarra’s murder was six days after that. Thoughts of mortality must have been on Violi’s mind.
On Sunday evening, January 22, two days after police were told to suspend their watch of Mike’s Submarines, Violi was at his old headquarters, the Reggio Bar on Jean-Talon. He had received the invitation by telephone, after dinner with his family. Perhaps a dozen familiar faces milled about inside. A game of cards was under way and Violi, wearing a wide-lapeled leisure suit over a white shirt, a popular style at the time, sat in a plastic and steel-tube frame chair, pulled up to a wood and Formica table at the back of the wood-paneled bar.
Someone at the bar placed a phone call: “The pig is here.”
Shortly afterward, at 7:32 p.m., a masked man carrying an Italianmade shotgun called a lupara, a stubby, double-barreled weapon, crept toward Violi from behind. The masked man shoved the barrel into the back of Violi’s head and fired. His body slumped to the fake marble floor, where he lay sprawled, arms and legs outstretched, in a growing pool of blood.
There followed a second phone call.
“The pig is dead.”
Although the hit was successful, it was by no means carried out without flaws. Police had more clues to work with than in most Mafia murders, which are notoriously hard to solve without cooperating witnesses. Circumstantial evidence gathered before the killing was compelling. Police issued arrest warrants for five suspects. Three men were quickly arrested in Montreal: Domenico Manno, Vito Rizzuto’s uncle on his mother’s side; Agostino Cuntrera, a proprietor of Mike’s Submarines who was a cousin of Alfonso Caruana; and Giovanni DiMora, a brother-in-law to both Agostino Cuntrera and Liborio Cuntrera, one of the patriarchs of the Caruana–Cuntrera clan. Another man arrested was Vincenzo Randisi, one of the new owners of the Reggio Bar and a friend of Nick Rizzuto’s, but he was quickly released and the charges against him dropped for lack of evidence. The remaining official suspect became a fugitive. Paolo Renda had left Montreal for Venezuela, where he remained out of reach of Canadian authorities.
The Sixth Family had struck.
On September 15, 1978, Domenico Manno, Agostino Cuntrera and Giovanni DiMora pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Violi. They were issued modest sentences, the judge having been convinced that their efforts to establish legitimate careers and firm community ties made them good candidates for rehabilitation. In the end, the killing of Violi was strictly a family affair. All of those convicted were related by blood or marriage, a key marker of Sixth Family success. Curiously, when Manno was arrested, he was quick to distance Nick and Vito Rizzuto from the crime, telling authorities they were not implicated in the plot.
“After his arrest, Dominico Manno signed a written declaration that notably mentioned that Nicolò Rizzuto is his brother-in-law and that Vito Rizzuto is his nephew,” a report by the Montreal police says. “He says that both of them have been in Venezuela for about two years. It is important to underline that [Vito] Rizzuto has maintained ties with people associated with the murder of Paolo Violi over the years.” Indeed, over the following years, the trio of conspirators remained close to each other and to Vito and Paolo Renda as well. When police raided the Club Social Consenza, the Sixth Family’s headquarters, a little before 10 p.m. on March 3, 1983, among the 22 people inside were Vito, Renda and Agostino Cuntrera. In December of that year, at a boxing match at the Montreal Forum, Vito was seen talking with all three men convicted in the death plot. They were seen together again on March 25, 1984, at a boxing match that pitted Dave Hilton, Jr., against Mario Caisson. Vito sat with Cuntrera and Renda, with DiMora seated nearby, at the end of their row. And Manno and Cuntrera were also invited to the June 3, 1995, wedding of Vito’s son, Nicolò, to Eleonora Ragusa, daughter of Emanuele Ragusa, another figure in the constellation of Sixth Family clans.
“[Nick] Rizzuto is suspected of authorizing the murder,” an FBI report says. “Other suspects were Paolo Renda, Rizzuto’s son-in-law, and Joseph LoPresti, another member of the Sicilian faction in Montreal.”
After the convictions, authorities seemed satisfied; the only outstanding arrest warrant in the case, the one against Paolo Renda, was canceled and he returned to Montreal a free man. LoPresti remained untouched, despite deep and enduring suspicion by police.
The end of Paolo Violi, however, was not entirely the end of things between the Sixth Family and the Violis.
It was two and a half years after the death of Paolo Violi when Rocco, the last of the Violi brothers (another brother, Giuseppe, who was Rocco’s twin, had died in 1970 in a car crash), realized that the mob was not yet finished with his family. Rocco was in the driver’s seat of his Oldsmobile, idling at a red light in Montreal, when a motorcycle pulled alongside him. A sawed-off shotgun was lowered and fired. The blast narrowly missed Rocco, who, despite the shock, jammed on his accelerator. The motorcyclist caught up to him and fired again, catching him in the head with a splatter of pellets. Almost miraculously, he survived, but then, like his brother, declined the assistance of the authorities.
Summer slipped into fall and Rocco perhaps thought he had been given a reprieve. He was not, after all, a major player in the mob, had no apparent designs on the leadership in Montreal and had not sought revenge over the death of his brothers.
On October 17, 1980, Rocco was seated with his family in the kitchen of their Saint-Léonard home when a single sniper’s bullet, from a high-powered rifle, punched through a window and killed him. No one can accuse mobsters of not being thorough when they put their minds to it. The Violi boys were all dead, buried together at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery, on the imposing heights of Montreal’s Mount Royal, a generation destroyed.
If New York had finally turned its back on the Violis in their dispute with the Rizzutos, at least one old mafioso remembered the family’s hospitality. A wreath sent to Rocco Violi’s funeral bore the name of Joe Bonanno.
The FBI attributed Rocco’s slaying to the war with the Rizzutos: “Nick Rizzuto is believed to have ordered this killing as well. This murder is described by the RCMP as yet another act of revenge by Rizzuto for his expulsion to Venezuela,” an FBI report says.
Though the blame may lie with the Sixth Family, it was not about revenge. It was about the future, not the past.
With Violi and his brothers eliminated, the Sixth Family’s primary irritant and impediment was removed—just as Pietro Licata had been removed in New York. The ensuing transformation of organized crime in Canada was unequivocal.
Despite the seemingly interminable delays, the mob had secured Montreal in time to allow the Sicilian expatriate clans on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border to put the final pieces together in what would become the Pizza Connection. This drug-smuggling and distribution enterprise brought in high-quality heroin that had been processed in clandestine laboratories in Sicily. Much of it was channeled through Canada and sent on to New York, where it was distributed through storefront retailers, many of them pizzeria owners for whom the restaurants were legitimate fronts that hid their criminal activity. The billion-dollar Pizza Connection would go on to eclipse the famed heroin rings of the past, including the French Connection. And, like its antecedent, it was really a system of intersecting, meandering routes that at once competed and complemented each other.
The end of the Sixth Family–Violi feud brought two changes that Canadian police noted in internal reports. The first was the return to Montreal of Vito Rizzuto. Vito returned from Venezuela “to slowly take over,” RCMP documents said. The second was an increase in drug activity in the city.
“After the Paolo Violi murder,” says an internal Canadian police intelligence report from 1990, “the Sicilians took the dominant role in Montreal. The Sicilians quickly and quietly began a large drug importing operation. They transformed the port of Montreal into the gateway to North America for hashish shipments from Pakistan and Lebanon and large heroin shipments from Sicily and Thailand. They sold most of their heroin in New York and New Jersey.”
Nick and Vito, however, did not immediately seize control of the city’s rackets. The official boss of the Montreal decina was still Vic Cotroni, who had left the day-to-day business to Violi. Even if the Sixth Family had wished to kill him, it would have been frowned on. It was not necessary for the Sixth Family to remove Cotroni. The wise old don seemed to know better than to try to hem in the Rizzuto organization. As long as the Sixth Family could fulfill their obligations in the drug pipeline, their patience seemed endless. Although Cotroni kept his job as boss, the demise of Violi allowed a reordering of power that would continue to tip in favor of the Sicilians.
“The already tenuous alliance between Calabrian and Sicilian factions worsened. The ‘Sicilian faction’ began its take-over of Montreal,” a private RCMP briefing says.
If the changing of the guard was slow to manifest itself on the streets of Montreal, it was strikingly evident elsewhere. The Rizzutos were active with major Sicilian mafiosi, South American drug lords and leading New York gangsters in the years immediately after Violi’s murder. The Sixth Family seemed content to concentrate on building its international infrastructure, shoring up its networks and conducting private business until Montreal was formally cleared for them. They knew the wait would not be long, as Cotroni was dying of cancer. Nick and his family had their official mob status restored in Montreal, although Nick still spent much, if not most, of his time in Venezuela and Europe in the years after Violi’s death. Vito was the family’s face in the city and he prepared for a future where the Sixth Family would be soundly and securely in control. Cotroni was often said to be in semi-retirement when Violi was running things on his behalf; with the Rizzutos running free, there was little that was “semi” about it. His title remained and little else.
By September 1981, Nick, Vito and other family members, along with some of their closest associates, had bought a long strip of property along Antoine-Berthelet Avenue, in an exclusive Montreal neighborhood near the waterfront on the southwestern edge of the city. Here they built several large, posh homes and moved in, signaling not only their return, but their triumph.
Along the far side of the street at the end of the secluded sub-division was a short string of mansions. Near one end was Nick and Libertina’s house, in a Colonial-revival style of red brick with white decorative accents and dramatic circular porch featuring two-story columns. Over time, the evergreen trees planted in front would grow to tower over the pagoda-like roof. Next door was the home of their daughter, Maria, and her husband, Paolo Renda, with a wraparound front porch, double front doors, white stone facade and a terracotta tile roof, an outsized version of the roofs typical in their old village in Sicily. Beside that was the home of Vito and his wife, Giovanna, the most spectacular on the street; a colossal structure that was part Tudor style, with decorative half-timbering, and part Medieval revival, with imposing dark stone and recessed doorway. It was with an eye to Vito’s interest in expensive automobiles that the design included an impressive three-car garage, larger than the entire area of most homes. Toward the end of the block, on the other side of Vito’s house, was another impressive home, with a two-car garage and white brickwork. Joe LoPresti and his family would move in here. Beside the LoPresti property at the time was an empty lot that was awaiting construction of yet another home, this one for Gerlando Sciascia. It would never be built. Although only a few people on the street are linked to the mob, it is still often called Rue de Mafia, “Mafia Street,” in Montreal.
As their business was to be largely kept away from their homes, they also established a headquarters where more unsavory people could visit. Long before Cotroni died, the Club Social Consenza, on Jarry Street East in Montreal, was in full swing as a gambling den, organizational headquarters and social club in the New York City Mafia tradition.
Like his Godfather, Joe Bonanno, Cotroni enjoyed a relative luxury among mob bosses who had lost a showdown with a rival. His life was claimed by nature, not man. He died of cancer on September 16, 1984, apparently while watching television coverage of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Canada. It was a serene end for a man who had seen so much vice and violence during a career at the top of the underworld. Cotroni’s funeral, in north Montreal, was a send-off fit for minor royalty, complete with a 17-piece brass band and a road-choking number of limousines just to carry the flower arrangements. Among the many mourners were two tall, neatly dressed men who showed the appropriate respect and sadness at the passing of the Godfather.
Police identified them as Vito Rizzuto and his loyal Sixth Family colleague Joe LoPresti.
With Cotroni’s passing, the Rizzutos’ control over Montreal was complete. The rank-and-file members and associates of the Mafia quickly fell into line, easily flipping their allegiance and answering as smartly and respectfully to the Rizzutos as they had to Cotroni and Violi.
Leslie Coleman, for instance, had been a young enforcer for Luigi Greco in the 1950s and was “inherited” by Violi when Greco died. After the deaths of Violi and Cotroni, Coleman was frequently seen flexing his muscles beside members of the Rizzuto organization. Similarly, Joe DiMaulo, who was such a close and personal part of Violi’s inner circle that Violi asked him to represent the entire Montreal organization in meetings with the Bonanno leadership in New York, seemed just as content to ply his trade under the Rizzuto banner. Most surprising to many, even the remnants of the Cotroni family bowed to Nick and Vito Rizzuto. In 1979, Frank Cotroni was released from a U.S. prison and returned to a Montreal that was vastly different from the one he had left. As a good mobster, Frank accepted the changing of the guard and settled in to play his part in the new order of the Montreal decina. As an enthusiastic drug trafficker, Frank fit in far better with the Sixth Family than with Paolo Violi. He died in 2004, also of cancer, at the age of 72.
The taking of Montreal was a significant feat in the context of global crime.
“For the past 25 years, Montreal has been the key that turns the lock of America,” said a high-ranking anti-Mafia investigator in Italy who has spent a career probing organized crime and the drug trade as an officer in the Carabinieri. “The one holding that key becomes the pinnacle. You can ship the narcotics, but if there is no one to facilitate the reception of the drugs and the transition into the marketplace, you have no profit. The Montrealers have long held that position.” From the 1970s on, expatriate Sicilian Men of Honor—many of whom made up the Sixth Family drug consortium—“smothered” the American Mafia in both Canada and the United States, the Carabinieri officer said.
“They are beguiling. Little of what transpired in America is known, but from the activities of Catalano, Salvatore, it’s clear he was able to make significant profits for the bosses of [the American Mafia],” he said of the Zip leader who had taken over Brooklyn. (Italian investigators typically state the last name of a person first, and then the given name.)
“In Canada, things are a little more transparent, thanks to the Violi transcripts: the Rizzuto family was able to promise a transport between the Mafias of Europe and the Mafia of America. Riches were promised for all. Codes meant nothing in the onslaught of finance. It was a situation of cynicism. If the Violi situation had evolved in the 1990s, its resolution would not have taken years. He would have been killed instantly.”
The final transfer of power to the Rizzutos had indeed taken far longer than anticipated—six years of battling with Violi followed by six years of waiting for Cotroni to pass away. During those inbetween years, the Sixth Family would have an explosive impact on the American Mafia as they continued to work closely with the other expatriate Mafia clans, Sicilian Men of Honor and members of the Five Families to hammer out a new form of international organized crime.
The prominence and significance of the new Montreal organization in New York City would far exceed anything Paolo Violi likely ever dreamed of.