Friends of Ours

Police Bust Drug Ring In Montreal Italian Cafes

In Montreal, QC Canada police yesterday "raided a dozen Italian cafes, arresting 11 people and seizing drugs, money and business documents" in a move to squelch an ongoing turf war among rival Mafia clans which has resulted in the firebombing of 19 establishments over the last few months as reported by The Canadian Press: the raided "cafes are not the same ones that have been targeted by the Molotov cocktail-tossing firebombers.  But police expressed hope the raids will help them gather information they need to calm growing tensions."  Montreal police Commander Denus Mainville said "the 11 people arrested worked for a head of the [alleged drug trafficking] network," and "that head had direct links to the Italian Mafia" as reported by Paul Cherry for The Montreal Gazette.  None of the arrested 11 individuals have been identified.

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Over the last year several Rizzuto clan members and associates – including patriarch Nicolo Rizzuto and his grandson Nick Rizzuto Jr. – have been slain in Montreal. Some mob experts speculate that interloping 'ndrangheta or Calabrian mobsters from Ontario – perhaps with the blessing of some boys from New York – may be responsible for the ongoing massacre against the Sicilian Rizzuto clan.

And to the victors go the spoils which largely is about control over the drug trade as reported by Chris Doucette for The Toronto Sun: "Montreal has historically been Canada's top prize when it comes to the Mafia because of its shipping port. Charlie 'Lucky' Luciano realized in 1954 that controlling Montreal was critical to running the lucrative drug market in New York. The city is ideally situated as a 'gateway' for importing drugs from around the world and then shipping them off to nearby New York." The 'ndrangheta in Canada "is capable of replacing the now weakened Rizzuto clan," and "is considered by Italian authorities to be more powerful, richer and better able to distribute drugs globally than any Mafia group" as reported by Rob Lamberti for The Toronto Sun.

The Mafia long has used food and booze establishments through which to move its drug product.  Vito Genovese was put away in 1959 for trafficking heroin through his gay bars, and in the mid-1980s the feds busted the so-called Pizza Connection ring in which the Mafia distributed $1.6 billion of heroin through pizzerias between 1975 and 1984.

But of course the Mafia's official line for public relations purposes is that it does not deal in drugs.

City Lawyer Charged In Mob Crew Indictment

Among those charged yesterday in a sweeping indictment brought by the Massachusetts Attorney General against an alleged New England Mafia crew run by reputed capo Mark Rossetti is lawyer Charles Toomajian who currently is a special assistant to Malden Mayor Richard C. Howard and previously served as a city solicitor as reported by Shelley Murphy for The Boston Globe. Toomajian is accused of being an accessory after the fact to embezzlement but details of the allegations have not been disclosed.

The charges against Rossetti and several others include heroin and marijuana trafficking, and Thomas J. Foley, former head of the Massachusetts State Police says that "in years past, this would be something that the old Mafia would stay away from because they didn't want the scrutiny of being connected to drug distribution." Actually, the old school Mafia – at least in NYC – made much of its fortune from trafficking heroin and other illicit drugs. Vito Genovese was put away in 1959 for trafficking heroin through his Greenwich Village and East Village gay bars, and in the mid-1980s the feds exposed the extensive involvement of the mob in the heroin trade through the so-called Pizza Connection case which involved distributing $1.6 billion of the product between 1975 and 1984.

Reputed New England mob soldiers Darin Bufalino and Michael Prochilo Jr. also are charged in yesterday's indictment. Yesterday a story from The Boston Globe seemingly reported that Bufalino's defense lawyer was denying the existence of the Mafia by asserting "it's a myth" but the paper now seemingly reports that the quotation was in reference to denying that his client was a mobster.

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The Pizza Connection

New York Times writer Ralph Blumenthal takes a stroll down memory lane with the Pizza Connection trial:

The 1980s Manhattan case, against a mysterious Sicilian Mafia clan charged with masterminding a billion-dollar drug pipeline into the country using pizzerias and other fronts, lasted 17 months and became one of the longest criminals trials in federal history. It began on Sept. 30, 1985 with 22 defendants and ended on March 2, 1987 with 16 (one having been shot dead and another wounded in the meantime), and all but one found guilty. * * * The convicted included an accused boss of bosses of the Sicilian Mafia, Gaetano Badalamenti, who had been seized in Madrid, and many of his family members and associates, along with Salvatore Catalano, a Queens baker identified as a captain in the Bonanno crime family, which the F.B.I. was surprised to have found operating alongside a shadowy Sicililian component here.

Blumenthal wrote Last Days of the Sicilians about the case.

Rosario, We Hardly Knew Ye!

Rosario Gambino, the 67-year-old cousin of the late boss Carlo Gambino, has been deported to Italy to face drug trafficking and Mafia charges.   In 1984 Rosario was convicted in the United States for selling millions of dollars worth of heroin in southern New Jersey for which he was sentenced to 45 years in jail, and he also was linked to the so-called Pizza Connection case pursuant to which the Sicilian Mafia and Mafia families in New York and other cities operated a $1.6 billion cocaine and heroin smuggling scheme from 1975 to 1984 using neighborhood pizzerias as fronts.  Italy has wanted Rosario Gambino since 1980, and his arrest warrant was signed then by none other than anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone who was assassinated in 1992 by the order of Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore "Toto" Riina.  Antonio Ingroia, the magistrate who now holds Falcone's post in Palermo, told Michael Day at The Independent "that Cosa Nostra was currently trying to re-establish links with Mafias in the US, and hopes to speed its transition from the bloodthirsty organisation of the 1980s and early 1990s to an international financial crime syndicate." 

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Sicilian Mafia Goes White Collar

An alleged international bank fraud ring spearheaded by Cosa Nostra or the Sicilian Mafia which attempted to obtain $2.2 billion in credit lines by the use of fake Venezuelan bonds as collateral has been busted according to an article by Steve Scherer for Bloomberg:

The leader of the ring was Leonardo Badalamenti -- son of the late Gaetano Badalamenti, the former Mafia boss of Cinisi, Sicily, prosecutors charge. * * * False Venezuelan bonds were authenticated by corrupt officials within the South American nation's central bank, prosecutors said. The bonds were used to ask for credit lines of $500 million each from HSBC in London and Bank of America in Baltimore in 2003 and 2004. U.K. authorities and the U.S. Secret Service broke up both the deals before either bank provided financing. At the time of the arrests, a third attempt to use false Venezuelan bonds worth 880 million euros ($1.2 billion) was still under way through a San Marino bank and involving U.K. financial institutions, the arrest warrant says.

Apparently, the apple does not fall far from the tree, and according to AKI:

Gaetano Badalamenti, the late boss of Cinisi in Palermo's hinterland, died in prison in the United States. He was convicted of masterminding a scam that defrauded foreign banks and credit institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars of bonds.

In 1987 the senior Badalamenti was convicted as the leader of the so-called "Pizza Connection," a conspiracy between the Sicilian Mafia and Mafia families in the United States to traffick heroin through pizzeria storefronts, and he was sentenced to 45 years in prison where he died in 2004 as reported by Kaja Whitehouse for the New York Post.

UPDATE:  According to a Reuters report "Venezuela's central bank on Friday denied Italian prosecutors' accusations that its staff had participated in an attempted $1 billion bond scam run by the Sicilian Mafia":  "'This institution alerts the national and international financial community that none of its officials have authorized or certified any documentation related to the previously signaled information,' the central bank said in a statement."