Live By The Sword, Die By The Sword

Thirty years ago Sicilian-born Nicolo Rizzuto took control over the Montreal underworld by launching a deadly assault against the Calabrian-based Cotroni clan, and mob watchers are noting striking parallels between the murder which brought down the Rizzuto patriarch on Wednesday and Rocco Violi in 1980 as reported by Les Perreaux for The Globe and Mail: "In 1980, the coup de grace came when Rocci Violi, the lone survivor of three Calabrese mobster brothers, sat down for a family dinner. As his wife and two young sons looked on, a sniper's bullet smashed through a window and killed Mr. Violi. * * * At suppertime on Wednesday, Nicolo Rizzuto, the aging Sicilian godfather of the Montreal mob believed to have orchestrated the deaths of the Violi brothers, met an end almost identical to the one that befell Rocco Violi. Two women in Mr. Rizzuto's suburban Montreal mansion watched as a sniper's bullet pierced the glass of his enclosed verandah and struck him in the head." Over the last year several top leaders of the Rizzuto clan have been taken out, including Nick Rizzuto Jr. – Nicolo's namesake and grandson – who was gunned down last December, and the circumstances of those murders are uncannily similar to the fates which befell the top leaders of the Cotroni clan thirty years ago as reported by Adrian Humphreys for The National Post: "In fact, each of the four murders that have recently cut the Rizzuto family to its core, are so remarkably like each of their antecedents that ushered the family to the throne, that police investigators are now pulling out their old files in their search for answers." Mobsters invoke symbolism, appreciate irony and there is no statute of limitations for revenge. Investigators have all but concluded that 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian mobsters from Ontario are responsible for the ongoing massacre against the Rizzuto clan. Vito Rizzuto – Nicolo's son and the reputed family boss – currently is serving a ten-year term at a federal penitentiary in Florence, CO following his 2007 racketeering conviction involving the 1981 murder of three Bonanno capos in NYC, and Lee Lamothe, co-author of The Sixth Family about the rise of the Rizzutos, says that Vito is "a dead man walking." The Italian press is having a field day with screaming headlines about the end of Rizzuto rule in Montreal as reported by Andy Riga for The Montreal Gazette. Meanwhile, the Rizzuto widows are getting by as best they can as reported by Linda Gyulai for The Montreal Gazette.