Just off the rugged northeast coast of Newfoundland, Canada’s most easterly province, the rocky hills that form the tiny island of Ireland’s Eye rise steeply from the seawater of Trinity Bay. From the north, the approach to the tiny island is one of imposing red-and-gray-streaked rock, poking through a green canopy of stubby coniferous trees, that forms a threatening barrier from the sea. To the south, however, lies a narrow sound that cuts its way inland, twisting so deeply into the center that it very nearly cuts the island in two before coiling around to form a tranquil, protected lagoon. The round, dark pool may well have given the island its odd name, but this natural harbor certainly did offer settlers protection from the hard wind and choppy water. Which is why, despite its remoteness, Ireland’s Eye was first occupied in the 1600s by fishermen who drew from the teeming cod stocks and hid their meager earnings from Peter Easton, the marauding “pirate admiral” who led an armada of privateers in shaking down these maritime communities, one of North America’s first acts of organized crime.
Covering just two square miles, Ireland’s Eye reached a population peak of 157 people in 1911 before decline set in. Under a government relocation plan, people living in dozens of tiny outport fishing communities were moved to larger, better-serviced towns and, by the 1960s, Ireland’s Eye was abandoned, becoming a picturesque ghost town of well-spaced clapboard houses, some with tiny wharves jutting out into the harbor, a post office, schoolhouse and the once-impressive St. George’s Anglican Church, with its tall spire and stained-glass windows. The buildings are now a rubble of weathered planks and stone foundations that are slowly being reclaimed by nature.
It was this unlikely spot, in the fall of 1987, that the Sixth Family chose as its base for another revenue stream, part of a purposeful diversification plan to expand its portfolio. Man cannot live by heroin alone, and, like good businessmen and astute investors, the Rizzuto organization moved diligently to ensure relevancy, profitability and flexibility in an uncertain market. The expansion of the drug enterprises came through a startling array of contacts, both international and local, forming a multicultural stew of global underworld confederacies that would frustrate and bewilder police investigators trying to sort through, and, more important, penetrate them.
Some partnerships were more successful than others.
For the Ireland’s Eye enterprise, the Sixth Family turned to Raynald Desjardins, who had his first drug conviction in 1971, and later married the sister of Joe DiMaulo, a veteran Montreal mobster, bringing him into the Sixth Family orbit. Desjardins was one of several men over the years to be described by police and the media as the “right-hand man” of Vito Rizzuto, and his purchase of a home at the far southwestern corner of the Rizzuto clan’s exclusive neighborhood was further evidence of Desjardins’s standing. His interest in this stretch of Newfoundland coast seems to have been piqued, in part, by Gerald Hiscock, a corrupt Newfoundlander with a criminal past. Between them, police suspected, they worked to arrange the tail end of a series of transactions that started far from Ireland’s Eye, in the Middle East.
For years, Montreal’s mafiosi had been buying hashish by the ton from Christian Phalangist militia factions in Lebanon. The city’s underworld connections to Lebanon were both broad and deep. As far back as 1975, police wiretaps on Frank Cotroni’s telephone revealed that he made calls directly to the home of Suleiman Franjieh, the then-president of Lebanon. Cotroni was also meeting personally with high-ranking Lebanese government officials. When the Rizzuto organization seized Montreal, they inherited the rich connections in Lebanon as well.
Mostly their business involved straight cash transactions, proceeds from which the militia fighters funded their war efforts in strife-torn Lebanon. Sometimes the drugs were swapped for explosives, high-powered guns and clips of ammunition. Such firepower is rare in Canada, and authorities had long suspected that the Montreal gangsters were using their links to New York gangsters to secure the weaponry in the United States and smuggle it into Canada before forwarding it to the Middle East. This theory was proven in 1980, when the FBI managed to track a large shipment of weapons, including U.S. military assault rifles and matching ammunition, that had been stolen from a Boston armory; it made its way first to Montreal, and then to Lebanon in exchange for hashish.
Some time later, police informants recounted how Montreal mobsters had made a visit to Lebanon to meet with their business partners, swapping samples of their respective wares. During a meeting, automatic weapons were test-fired at the unfortunate residents of a Palestinian refugee camp. As horrific a scene as that was, Canadian investigators also worried about possible ramifications closer to home—for it showed that the Montreal mob had easy access to high-powered weaponry. They worried what might happen if it was ever needed. The Lebanon–Montreal connection flourished and, by the late 1980s, the RCMP estimated that 90 percent of the hashish smuggled into Canada came from Lebanon. Never ones to stand still for long on such matters, though, Montreal gangsters found other sources of the drug to supplement even this rich supply. They were quick to expand supply lines, looking to add to the routes from Lebanon, rather than replace them.
With backing from the Rizzuto organization, Allan “The Weasel” Ross, the boss of the West End Gang, a tight group of Irish gangsters, forged a new supply line for hashish through his connections with the Irish Republican Army and the Irish mob of Boston. The IRA talked loudly about its political agenda against the British, but tried to keep hush-hush its role in international drug smuggling as a means of financing its struggle. Montreal gangsters also forged ties in Pakistan when Adrien Dubois, one of the notorious Dubois brothers, who formed a feared francophone gang in Montreal, introduced a Sixth Family associate to his impressive source for hashish—a corrupt government official in Pakistan who had a ministerial position and a thirst for foreign currency. With financial backing from the Sixth Family, and its assurance that no amount of hashish would be too large, the Montreal organization was able to command the minister’s exclusive attention. The official agreed to sell them the entire year’s production of hashish from the portion of the Pakistani border region under his watch.
Then, in the early 1990s, yet another considerable source of hashish was secured in Libya. A scheme to import 50 tons of hashish from Libya was intercepted by police, however, and during an extensive investigation, code-named Project Bedside, they traced telephone conversations between Desjardins, Vito Rizzuto, Joe LoPresti and Samir Rabbat, among others, according to Montreal police. Rabbat was once decribed as one of the world’s top-10 drug traffickers and was in the process of building a large house in Montreal, just blocks from Vito’s home, when he was arrested.
All of that hashish made for a hugely profitable supply, with bulk loads being arranged—sometimes simultaneously—in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, all of it making its way to the Canadian coast and then into Montreal for redistribution across the country and into the United States. High-quality hashish was a cash cow, particularly in Canada, where the drug remains strangely popular. The hashish added another revenue source to Sixth Family holdings, as it continued to diversify from its near-dominant position in the heroin trade.
In the fall of 1987, gangsters arranging their latest hashish load from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley thought the toughest part of their operation was over—its purchase in unstable Lebanon, the loading of the drugs onto a freighter and the paying off of harbor masters, Lebanese officials and senior Christian Phalangist militia leaders to allow the vessel to slip, unfettered, out to sea. When word arrived in Montreal that the shipment was en route, the receiving end of the arrangements swung into action. This was supposed to be the easy part.
With past shipments, the Canadian end had gone like clockwork, apart from one disappointment. For at least a decade, large loads of hashish had been smuggled successfully into Canada on foreign freighters traveling from Lebanon and arriving on Canada’s East Coast. One such ship certainly passed through the Port of Halifax in 1980. Police learned of a larger shipment—12 tons—that had been secretly offloaded in 1985 from a freighter anchored off the desolate coastline of Nova Scotia and placed onto small boats. When a 1986 shipment into Halifax was discovered and seized by police, the gangsters went looking for more remote drop-offs.
Ireland’s Eye seemed perfect. With its hidden harbor and no prying eyes for miles—and with a rudimentary infrastructure, including pathways and wharves—it was a smuggler’s paradise. What’s more, once a shipment was shifted over to the Newfoundland mainland, the area was not so remote as to make transport by land unreasonable. There was an access road to the Trans-Canada Highway.
Despite all the planning, the operation ran into difficulty.
On October 17, 1987, RCMP officers boarded the Charlotte Louise, a 100-foot fishing trawler, while it was docked at Blanc-Sablon, a small port and Quebec’s easternmost community, just across from the northern tip of Newfoundland. Despite initial confidence in their tip, a thorough search of the filthy trawler did not uncover any drugs. Even drug-sniffing dogs brought in for a second search found nothing untoward. Officers were feeling a little uncomfortable when two investigators in the bowels of the ship suddenly noticed that a number of bolts were not encrusted with rust like most everything else on board. The officers asked one of the ship’s mechanics to come down and remove the fresh bolts, a request he nervously refused, at first declaring the cover to the trawler’s drinking water tanks was not meant to come off and then that he did not have the tools to do it. The officers were increasingly insistent and eventually persuaded him to start twisting off a dozen or so bolts. When the metal panel was lifted off, the officers instantly knew they had found what they were looking for.
“When it was finally opened, the odor of hashish burst out and we almost got high on the smell,” said Michel Michaud, one of the RCMP officers onboard at the time. Reaching deep into the darkened water tanks, they pulled out bale after bale of tightly packed hashish. “All of the bales of hash were wrapped in many layers of cheesecloth, plastic bags and other materials and all were submerged under the water.” When tallied and weighed, the officers found about 500 kilograms of hashish, a load with an estimated street value of $9.5 million. On deck, covered by a tarp, were a small speedboat and an all-terrain vehicle. Officers arrested four crew members, all from Quebec, but Brian Erb, the ship’s flamboyant skipper, managed to flee. Erb was a notorious seafarer who had become a modern-day pirate, a freebooter with liberal views on what constituted marine salvage rights.
Erb had gained some fame-cum-notoriety more than 10 years earlier when one of his marine stunts captured world attention. The irascible skipper had hauled a 2,500-ton abandoned freighter out of the St. Lawrence River, patched it up and renamed it the Atlantean, a ship that was later impounded because of unpaid debts. After it had been auctioned off, Erb led a ragtag co-ed crew of teenagers to reclaim her. In the middle of a late-February night in 1975, the Atlantean slipped her moorings and set off downriver on only one working engine, as Erb defiantly tried to make his way through the ice-clogged St. Lawrence in a slow dash toward open seas. His act of piracy led to a dramatic 11-day chase by police. Daily reports on the ship’s progress and evasive stunts were carried in newspapers around the world. Once stopped by police, Erb agreed to head for port, followed closely by the RCMP. During the night, however, Erb slipped a small boat carrying two storm lanterns into the water, turned off the Atlantean’s lights and bolted for sanctuary while the police icebreaker continued to follow the decoy’s lights. He was soon recaptured, but by then he had been dubbed the “Errol Flynn of the St. Lawrence.”
Erb’s more recent adventures along the coast of Newfoundland, however, were not the escapades of a lovable rogue. Police were certain the hashish they found in his boat was but a small portion of a much larger load; in fact, it was probably only his payment for services rendered. Weeks before she was seized at Blanc-Sablon, the Charlotte Louise had been anchored off the shore of Ireland’s Eye while bales of the hashish were dropped on to a small speedboat, whisked to shore through the narrow harbor and then shuttled about the island on an all-terrain vehicle to hiding spots among the ruins.
The allure of fast money and a break from the grueling work of the commercial fishery brought otherwise honest fishermen under the control of gangsters from Montreal. Gerald Hiscock was the alleged Newfoundland contact for the Montrealers, whom police say hired local strong-arm fishermen to help unload the cargo. Their pay of between $17,000 and $20,000 made it an attractive alternative to hauling in fish for a pittance.
The drug trade, however, was hard to swallow for most fishermen. While in the past they may have enjoyed the easy money from Prohibition-era rum-running, few had much desire to be involved in illegal street drugs. They soon confirmed police suspicions about the movement of drugs with tales of unusual sea traffic along the craggy shores of Trinity Bay. Police were starting to get a pretty good idea of what was happening on the supposedly deserted island.
When the RCMP descended on Ireland’s Eye, the island had not seen so much activity since Pirate Easton brought his ships to harbor. Three fishermen had already shuttled some of the hashish to the mainland. From there, it had been loaded aboard a truck, hidden under a layer of onions and was en route to Montreal. Police arrested the fishermen, seized the main load of hashish and went patrolling down the highway for a truck with Quebec license plates. They found it, 17 miles east of Gander, driven by a father-and-son team from the Montreal area. (The Newfoundland town of 10,300 people earned renown years later when, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it took in 6,000 passengers from diverted and grounded transatlantic jumbo jets.) The Charlotte Louise, with the drugs still in the tanks, was towed by a Coast Guard vessel to Sept-Îles on the Quebec north shore, with two RCMP officers taking turns guarding the dope, despite one being seriously seasick after too heavily celebrating the arrests with his colleagues the night before.
All told, the operation uncovered about 17 tons of hashish, with a retail street value estimated by the police at about $225 million. It was, at the time, the largest drug seizure in Atlantic Canada, but nabbing a handful of fishermen and two truck drivers did not seem to solve the riddle of the huge find.
On Monday, November 30, 1987, police significantly added to their catch of the day, however, when they arrested Vito Rizzuto, Raynald Desjardins and a third man, all in Montreal; Hiscock was arrested in Newfoundland. Vito was then 41 years old. It was six years after the New York slayings of the three captains, five years after Gerlando Sciascia and Joe LoPresti had been charged with heroin smuggling and three years after Vic Cotroni died. Until this arrest, Vito had not been in police custody for 13 years, since his release in July 1974 on the barbershop arson conviction, other than two brief tangles in September and December 1986, when he was charged with impaired driving. Desjardins was then 34 years old and nominally running an auto repair garage in Saint-Léonard. They were charged with conspiracy to traffic in drugs and, after a quick court appearance the next day in Montreal, flown to Clarenville, Newfoundland, where, by week’s end, they were sitting with their alleged co-conspirators before a provincial court judge. Authorities were overjoyed at laying such serious charges against operators as renowned as Vito and Desjardins.
As evidence of Vito’s collusion in the plot, prosecutors would point to a three-page transcript of a telephone conversation between Vito, in Montreal, and Desjardins, in Newfoundland, in late November. The conversation was oblique. Vito wanted to know when Desjardins would be returning to the city and Desjardins said he would explain everything in person when he arrived. Desjardins then said there was “something happening next week.” Police and prosecutors claimed that this was a reference to the unloading of the hash from Ireland’s Eye a week later. Lawyers for the accused men described it as an innocuous conversation between acquaintances.
Vito spent Christmas in jail before obtaining bail in March 1988. He returned to Montreal while lawyers worked on his case.
Vito was out on bail when, on October 20, 1988, more than 60 officers with the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, fanned out through several rural coastal communities at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. They uncovered a second hashish importation scheme remarkably similar to the Ireland’s Eye find. Another modest vessel, the Jeanne d’Arc, was searched while anchored at the port of Mingan, near Sept-Îles, Quebec. On board, police found 38 tons of hashish, said to have a street value of more than $450 million, along with lesser amounts of cocaine, marijuana and weapons. This seizure was more than twice what had been found at Ireland’s Eye, and was in turn declared the largest ever found in the area. Nine people were arrested, including Normand Dupuis, 38, the boat’s owner and skipper.
Dupuis was wealthy by the standards of local fishermen and operated his vessel on the lower North Shore. He was also a self-confessed cocaine addict. Perhaps it was his drug habit that made Dupuis unstable, but his progress through the courts was anything but typical. Within two weeks of his arrest he had already agreed to cooperate with authorities and, to the glee of police, implicated as the mastermind of the venture none other than Vito Rizzuto. His demands in return for his cooperation were as modest as his ship, especially considering the stakes involved. In exchange for testimony against Vito he wanted $10,000 to help him resettle, a new identity, help in obtaining a passport, $120 a month while he was in prison and—perhaps the most sensible demand—drug treatment for him and his girlfriend. The authorities quickly agreed to it all and, on November 4, 1988, Dupuis and government representatives signed a contract for the seaman to become a cooperating witness. Six days later, his case was whisked before a judge and he pleaded guilty for his role in the hashish conspiracy. He was handed a four-year sentence that was to be served concurrently with a 30-month term for possession of 585 grams of cocaine. Dupuis then entered a protective wing of a provincial jail to keep him safely away from the general population while prosecutors digested their new evidence and drafted charges against Vito.
Just after lunch on November 17, 1988—precisely one week after Dupuis’s plea deal—Vito drove away from his Antoine-Berthelet home, backing out of his driveway and heading west. Officers with the Sûreté did not let him get far before they pulled in behind him and signaled for him to stop. There, officers broke the news to him that he was to face another court on another charge of large-scale hashish smuggling. He was taken into custody and, the next day, flown from Montreal to Sept-Îles and formally charged with conspiracy to import hashish.
Vito now faced two serious drug charges, stemming from separate, but nearly identical, enterprises. While police wondered how many similar boatloads they might already have missed, or how many more might be heading toward their shores, prosecutors settled down to prepare their cases. Confidence ran high that Vito was down for the count, if not on both of the charges, then at least on one. The government even started making preparations to seize Vito’s house and other property under new proceeds of crime legislation, legal actions that were supposed to be unveiled upon his conviction. The resolution of these charges, however, would come in unexpected ways. Both cases would take on the status of underworld legend, but it was Vito’s second charge that was settled first.
Normand Dupuis had not been in jail long when he started to have doubts about his deal with police. As part of his plea agreement, he had asked to be placed in a provincial jail, rather than a federal penitentiary, and as his accelerated parole date drew closer he grew increasingly agitated. One day, while in Parthenais detention center, a fellow inmate approached him and made him a surprising offer—a $1-million cash “reward” if he declined to provide evidence against Vito at trial, Dupuis said.
“I refused,” Dupuis said. “Then some time later the same prisoner came back with an ultimatum, warning that I had better cooperate or they would come after my family.” Dupuis had three school-age children and the news affected him deeply. He felt trapped. He had already testified at Vito’s preliminary hearing, implicating him in the hashish scheme, and signed the cooperation agreement with police.
“I did not want to commit perjury,” he said. About to be released from jail and fearing that his deal with police would not adequately protect his family, the troubled seaman started to hatch a scheme that might offer him a better option. “I had decided I wasn’t going to testify,” Dupuis said.
After his release from jail, Dupuis telephoned Jean Salois, a longtime lawyer for Vito who has handled many of his legal affairs. Dupuis introduced himself to Salois and then asked for a meeting. Salois said he rebuffed the offer as improper, but as Dupuis grew insistent he reluctantly agreed to have the government’s star witness against his client meet him in his law office. Salois then made careful plans.
“I hired a private investigator and told him to tape-record everything that was said and to photograph everyone who walked into my office that morning,” Salois said. “I feared a trap. I worried that the plan was to attempt to incriminate me or to do something that would force me to abandon the case.”
The day that Dupuis arrived at Salois’s Montreal office, July 7, 1989, started with a brief thunderstorm, and, although the rain quickly cleared away, the day remained cloudy. As the unsuspecting Dupuis approached the office, a photographer’s camera clicked away, unheard and unseen. Dupuis entered the office and announced why he was there: He was ready to disappear before Vito’s trial opened, thereby destroying the prosecutor’s case. In return, Dupuis wanted “a lifetime pension.” No amount was named, but Dupuis no doubt remembered the million-dollar sum the inmate had supposedly mentioned earlier. That might have been his starting point.
To Dupuis’s dismay and disappointment, Salois did not seem overly interested. Some time after Dupuis left his office, Salois gathered together the photographs and the audiotapes and went to the authorities, presenting his evidence. Disappointed police then spoke with Dupuis and listened to his story of the inmate in Parthenais and the offers and threats against his family. The other inmates in the protected prison wing where Dupuis had served his time were interrogated by provincial police officers looking for something—anything—to corroborate the story. Finding nothing and faced with the compelling evidence offered by Salois, prosecutors felt they had little choice.
“As a result, we decided to charge Dupuis with instigating the incident,” government lawyer Louise Provost said. With a sick, sinking feeling, authorities charged Dupuis, their star witness against their biggest catch, with obstructing justice. It was August 16, 1989. Vito’s trial before a jury in Sept-Îles was set to begin in less than a month and the government could no longer call Dupuis as a credible witness. Fearing again for his own safety, Dupuis agreed to stay in prison until his preliminary hearing, where the key witness against him would be Jean Salois. On August 29, Dupuis pleaded guilty. Provost, the prosecutor, expressed appropriate outrage at the breach of judicial propriety attempted by Dupuis. She argued in court that his actions could encourage other witnesses to put a price on their testimony.
“It’s like holding out for the highest bidder,” she told the judge, asking for a stiff prison term on top of the unfinished four-year term for drug conspiracy that had been knocked off when he agreed to cooperate with the government, a deal the government now felt no obligation to meet. Dupuis was sentenced to 32 months in prison.
Without the testimony of Normand Dupuis, the case against Vito for the Sept-Îles hashish bust was in tatters, but the government glumly soldiered on.
“After Dupuis’s visit to my office there was first a rogatory commission in the Dominican Republic,” according to Salois. “After that, the trial took place in Sept-Îles. The authorities dedicated significant resources, going so far as to dispatch to the scene a senior Crown prosecutor.”
On December 18, 1989, after several days of trial, all pretense of a prosecution against Vito was dropped. He appeared once more in a Sept-Îles court where he was formally acquitted of all charges related to the 38 tons of hashish found by police aboard Dupuis’s boat. Police were deeply disappointed, for this was the stronger of the two smuggling cases against Vito, and the one they thought presented more compelling evidence of his involvement because of the cooperating witness.
Meanwhile, any joy felt by Vito and his family was tempered by the looming approach of his other trial, the one stemming from the Ireland’s Eye seizure. With the dismissal of the charges in Quebec, the case in Newfoundland became, for investigators, all the more crucial.
Some might say desperate.
In October 1990, three years after police swooped down on Captain Brian Erb’s trawler and uncovered the huge hashish stash on Ireland’s Eye, Vito appeared in court in St. John’s, Newfoundland, to answer his other set of drug charges. Salois represented Vito; Pierre Morneau, another Montreal lawyer who often represents Sixth Family clients, represented a co-accused. With Vito in the prisoners box were Raynald Desjardins, Gerald Hiscock and Michel Routhier, who, like Vito, were contesting the charges. Prosecutors planned to map out the connections: how Hiscock had been seen meeting with Routhier, a Montreal man, a week before the shipment arrived; how Routhier was then seen meeting Desjardins in Newfoundland; and how Desjardins had spoken about “something happening next week” to Vito on the telephone. It placed two men between Vito and Hiscock and three between Vito and the fishermen who would be handling the drugs.
In what was becoming a pattern for Vito, this case would prove another spectacular fiasco for the government. And, as with his previous case, the best drama did not take place in a courtroom. Instead of a secretly recorded conversation in a lawyer’s office in Montreal, this one involved similar intrigue at a hotel restaurant.
Newman’s, a fine-dining establishment on the ground floor of the Radisson Plaza Hotel in St. John’s, attracted hotel guests and city dwellers alike, with its formal service and varied menu. The Radisson, now the Delta St. John’s Hotel, was Pierre Morneau’s choice of accommodation while working to defending the men against the drug charges. He was a creature of habit. Each night, he reserved Table 6 at Newman’s for himself and his fellow lawyers, who were defending Vito’s co-accused. Every evening, they retired to the restaurant to dine together, discuss the day’s events and prepare for the next day’s challenges. The lawyers’ chats did not go unnoticed by members of the RCMP. For whatever reasons, investigators—who swore in an affidavit that they were conducting a completely separate investigation from the one at trial—placed electronic bugs in a hotel meeting room, several of the bedrooms and at the lawyers’ favored dining spot—Table 6.
For three days, from Monday, October 15, to Wednesday, October 18, the lawyers dined at their regular table while a bug hidden in the base of a lamp secretly captured their conversations. On Thursday, however, before Morneau’s party arrived to take its usual place, a New Brunswick businessman named Guy Moreau arrived at the restaurant for dinner. The hostess who greeted him got the similar-sounding French names confused—Moreau? Morneau?—and, quickly scanning the reservation’s list, thought the businessman had reserved Table 6. She promptly seated him at the table normally used by the lawyers. By the time the lawyers arrived, Moreau was already settled in and, with apologies offered, the hostess sat the lawyers at Table 3 instead.
The restaurant’s manager, who was in on the RCMP operation, noticed the hostess’s mistake and was concerned that the secret mission could be in jeopardy. He discreetly called to Greg Chafe, a busboy, and told him to swap the lamps between Tables 3 and 6. Chafe, who could see that both lamps were working fine and that neither customer had complained of the lighting, balked at the strange command. The manager, however, insisted. Chafe realized something peculiar was afoot.
Meanwhile, Moreau, the businessman sitting at Table 6, had an issue unrelated to his seat or his lamp. His roast duck had arrived cold. He asked that the dish be returned to the kitchen and heated. The busboy saw his chance. When he swooped in to retrieve the duck, he also picked up the lamp. Moreau, thinking the busboy planned to use the lamp to heat his duck, objected. Promising that the duck would be properly heated, Chafe was able to make off with both the cold meat and the hot microphone. Chafe was a curious and questioning sort and, while he was carrying the lamp, he noticed it weighed less than the other lamps. Examining it, he saw that the metal base normally fitted to the bottom was missing. Before he could poke around further, the manager pushed him to get it over to the lawyers’ table. The lamps were switched and no one at the lawyers’ table seemed concerned by the activity. The manager no doubt was relieved that tonight’s meal was supposed to be the last night of the police operation, as the court hearings were set to adjourn.
The trial, however, was unexpectedly extended for another day, and so the following evening, the lawyers were back again for dinner. This time they secured their regular table.
It was likely with a wave of panic that the manager realized the bugged lamp had been left on Table 3, after the switch the night before. Again the manager called Chafe over and, just as he had the night before, ordered him to swap the lamps between Tables 3 and 6. Chafe quickly figured out what was going on and, for whatever reason, plunked the bugged lamp down on the lawyers’ table along with a handwritten note saying: “Be careful, you might be bugged.”
The note was like a bombshell for the lawyers, who knew their conversations were privileged. The real shock over “the zeal of the police,” however, came when Salois learned listening devices had also been placed in his suite and in a conference room, he said. “It was in this location that the lawyers talked with their respective clients or elaborated between lawyers on the strategy they would follow in the hearings,” according to Salois. To make matters worse for the government’s case, the defense team called into question the wiretap recording of Vito speaking with Desjardins.
On November 8, 1990, almost three years after he was arrested, Vito appeared before Newfoundland Supreme Court Judge Leo Barry, a former provincial government minister. Judge Barry examined the wording of the police request for judicial authorization of the wiretaps, then made his ruling: The recordings were illegal and, worse, so injurious to Vito’s right to a fair trial that the entire case against him had been tainted. It was an immense blow to investigators and to the prosecutor.
“You are discharged and free to go,” Judge Barry said to Vito.
Vito greeted the news with only the slightest sign of relief. He stood up, shook hands with the three co-accused seated with him and walked out of the prisoners’ box, taking a seat in the public gallery near the back of the court to watch the remainder of the day’s proceedings. Vito’s lawyer then asked for the return of his client’s $150,000 bail, posted back in 1987. Plus, he added with a flourish, $40,000 in interest. Afterward, a satisfied Vito Rizzuto walked out of the St. John’s courthouse a free man, having won his second acquittal on serious drug charges in less than a year.
“One word can mean so much,” Vito said, “especially when that word is acquittal.”
Vito’s elation contrasted sharply with the mood of an RCMP officer who watched the cases crumble: “We were devastated.”
A month after Vito’s acquittal, Hiscock, along with Desjardins and Routhier, were similarly freed after a judge declared that the illegal bugs targeting the lawyers in the hotel compromised their defendants’ right to a fair trial. Hiscock then applied to get back his speedboat, which had been seized by police.
Vito’s pair of stunning acquittals did more than merely enhance his reputation for being untouchable, although that it did. John Gotti, the publicity-hungry Gambino boss in New York, had recently been dubbed the “Teflon Don” by the press because charges against him never seemed to stick. Vito, in turn, was sometimes called the “John Gotti of Montreal,” a comparison that likely rubbed the unassuming Montrealer the wrong way. In fact, by contrast, a better name for Vito would be the “Quiet Don.”
The two acquittals had another, more important ramification: Prosecutors grew distinctly gun-shy in dealing with Vito. There was a fear of bringing anything less than ironclad charges against him out of concern that more cases would similarly backfire or, worse, suggest a pattern of harassment, incompetence or corruption among authorities. Instead of sparking a renewed drive to slap fresh charges on Vito, the result was that authorities retreated.
“They kept saying, ‘Next time, we’ll measure twice and cut once,’ but from then on they did a lot of measuring but no cutting. It was disheartening,” an organized crime investigator said.
A confidential RCMP report from 1990, noting the legal defeats, summarized the fallout a little differently, seeing some measure of success in the failures: “Rizzuto is keeping a very low profile,” it says.
Profitable as the massive hashish shipments were, cocaine offered an even better return for invested drug dollars in the 1990s. The Sixth Family was moving to be a leading player in that as well, but after the arrest of Nick in Caracas, the South American outpost was thrown into jeopardy. The Sixth Family was hungry for new sources of supply.
They found it closer to home.