The Drug Connection

Part 8 - How mobsters are poisoning the Canadian economy

Toronto — Canada always imitated the United States. Canadian Mafia bosses themselves found reference in the representatives of the U.S. "families". When Vic Cotroni, representative of the New York City-based Bonanno family, ruled in Quebec, many bosses of the Sicilian Mafia left Canada for South America, especially Venezuela and Brazil. Others chose more exotic places like Saint Martin or Aruba. None dared discuss La Cosa Nostra power balance, at the time seemingly untouchable.
The Gambinos, Bonannos, Genoveses, Colombos, Luccheses, Magaddinos, Brunos and Trafficantes were extremely powerful Mafia families. And their prestige extended to Canada, subsidiary of their business.
The Rizzutos and the Cuntrera-Caruanas, connected with the Sicilian Mafia, which was different from the Sicilian-American one, had moved to Venezuela waiting for better times. Tommaso Buscetta himself, a famous Mafia turncoat had little luck in Canada.
During his stay in Canada, in Toronto and Montreal, he had established many connections with local drug dealers, and many claim that the strongest link to the so-called "Pizza Connection" — one of the world’s largest international drug operatives — was Canada. Somebody still remembers Buscetta sitting at a table at the "Gatto Nero", the well-known bar at College and Grace streets in Toronto’s Little Italy.
Since he began to collaborate with police forces from half the countries in the world, Buscetta talked little about his Canadian experience. He was a lone Windsor dealer who was caught up in the net of justice. None were touched in Toronto or Montreal. Investigators believe that those connections prove Buscetta’s involvement in the world of drug dealing, something he stubbornly denies.
Things started to change in the late Seventies, when Paul Violi replaced Cotroni. The return of the Cuntrera-Caruanas and Rizzutos did not happen casually, and the subsequent elimination of the Calabrian boss and his brothers removed the last obstacles from the ascent of the Sicilians, who had cut all connections with their U.S. cousins because they didn’t want to be treated like subordinates anymore.
According to confidential police files Nicodemo Rizzuto and his son Vito, with Alfonso Caruana and his brothers, nephews and brothers-in-law, assumed control of Montreal.
They allegedly began to deposit millions of dollars in local banks creating an empire. La Cosa Nostra's decline in the U.S. encouraged their plan. The Bonannos lost ground, the Sicilian Mafia bosses affirmed themselves, Quebec was theirs.
"Nobody ran off to New York any more," explains Sergeant Pietro Poletti of the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada. "Bosses active in Montreal in the Eighties discontinued their connection with the Americans and decided they could get along on their own. They had the means to do that."
But in Ontario things were different.
John Papalia, despite being hated by many, remained in the saddle.
The Magaddinos, the powerful Buffalo, N.Y., family, continued to have an influence, albeit greatly diminished. Hamilton was the heart of La Cosa Nostra, Toronto champed at the bit, the new bosses looked for dialogue. There was room for all since the English language had become a sort of criminal Esperanto.
But Papalia was a man of the old school: he spoke English, but thought like the bosses of the Fifties.
He was wary, disliked new friends, couldn't bear the young. He was not far-sighted and, despite his age, did not think about succession, and gave no room to anybody else.
He was the centre of everything. At least this is what emerging bosses said about him. "We had to respect him because of his role," admitted a boss who was forced to endure him, "but he got on everybody's nerves."
There were some who supported Montreal’s break from the Americans. "Do like we did, don't work for the Americans."
It was a difficult argument to understand, and Papalia was a hard nut to crack. It was mostly he who forbade entry into Ontario to the Hells Angels. It was he who disliked Russians and Chinese gangsters. It was he who hated change. He was finally killed in front of his house on May 31, 1997.
One month later in Niagara Falls his right-hand man, Carmen Barillaro, was also murdered.
He was the final obstacle towards the Canadianization of the Mafia. The South Ontario police created a task force to investigate those two murders.
The hypothesis about a connection with gambling, of a struggle to control the casinos in Canada's richest province, came out.
One year later, unlike what had happened with the murders of Domenic Racco, Paul Volpe and other bosses, the police arrested Angelo and Pasquale Musitano, the sons of boss Domenic Musitano, who died in 1995 from a stroke.
They seem to have ordered the murders of Papalia and Barillaro. They were implicated by Kenneth Murdoch, a thug also pleading guilty to Salvatore Alaimo's murder in 1985.
Murdoch was convicted to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole before 13 years.
He told the judges: "I killed Papalia for $2,000 and 40 grams of cocaine, then I killed Barillaro." For this latter inconvenience, he'd been promised $10,000.
Difficult scenarios to unscramble. Murdoch also said that he had to eliminate other bosses in Hamilton, wiping out the old guard or the sons of the bosses who once dominated the iron town.
"The stakes are high. With new investments from Hong Kong and the former Soviet Union, with new ideas of the Mafiosi who decided to reach for everything [including those illicit activities, like cigarette or liquor smuggling, once thought of as unprofitable and left for years to minor groups] and the increase in biker gangs, the face of the mob is changing," says Ben Soave, the chief of the task force against organized crime in the Greater Toronto Area.
It’s interesting to understand how.
How, then, are the 1997 murders to be read?
The Musitanos trial, which began this month, will be a hard test for the prosecution. The good faith in Murdoch, accusing the Hamilton brothers to be the principals behind the Papalia and Barillaro murders, will have to be proved. And who called for the Alaimo murder?
"La Cosa Nostra's control over Canadian families has slackened, that's for sure," Soave admits. "The newcomers are champing at the bit, they want everything and they want it now." Interests are high.
Last October, for instance, it came out that YBM, a magnet manufacturer listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, was connected with the Russian Mob. In the past four years its shares had grown from $1 to $20 each.
The Board of Directors, among others, includes former Ontario Premier David Peterson, while one of its major shareholders was Semion Mogilevitch, a boss well-known to the police of several countries for his precedents in prostitution, arms and drug dealing and vast-scale extortion.
Igor Fisherman, YBM's chairman of the Board, was allegedly a friend and associate of Mogilevitch's.
But this is no isolated case.
Some months ago the RCMP arrested four people and seized heroin worth $14 million. "The ring worked along the Vancouver/Toronto/ Hong Kong axis, they imported quantities of drugs large enough to control the entire heroin market," says Inspector Terry Towns of the Vancouver RCMP. Investigators found the drug in a warehouse in Richmond, a town on the outskirts of Vancouver.
The owner of the warehouse was unknown to the police.
"There are very few people in Canada working at these levels," explains Al Armstrong, RCMP Staff Sergeant and chief of Vancouver's Drug Squad.
The Hong Kong police found a bank account with $6.5 million in the name of a "courier" shuttling between Hong Kong and Vancouver. "Often the police only catch small fry; this time the contrary was true, and we caught people above suspicion but powerful and availing themselves of enormous capital," adds Armstrong.
This is the new frontier. Bosses about whom little if anything is known, sprouting like mushrooms.
These are the new godfathers who are poisoning the Canadian economy.
(translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=89