moneyman:

You and I may never have another exchange here in the future, so let me express now how refreshing it is to read your posts in this thread. You are sensible. You show the humility necessary to try to understand the violence that both preceded and followed Vito Rizzuto's release from prison. You ask questions rather than assert that each new murder victim in the Montreal area and elsewhere was on Vito Rizzuto's "revenge" list of targets.

Living in Toronto, I feel I'm half a world away from Montreal; feel I'm years away from truly understanding the Montreal mob war. There are a lot of what I like to call headscratchers regarding this war.

A recent case in point: the newest victim, Roger Valiquette, was said to have had close ties to Tonino Callocchia, the man who survived a murder attempt in Laval (immediately north of Montreal) on February 1 of this year. Callocchia was reported to be the brother-in-law of the imprisoned Vincenzo Armeni, a major Calabrian drug trafficker based in the Montreal area who commands a lot of respect in the Montreal underworld for various reasons, including being the nephew of Giuseppe Armeni. Valiquette was considered to be a close associate of Raynald Desjardins. On May 9 of this year, Callocchia was arrested for threatening a woman close to Desjardins. Last month, on November 24, visitation appears to have taken place at the Rizzuto-clan-owned funeral home in Montreal for Ernesta Alvaro Armeni, the mother of Vincenzo Armeni. Vincenzo Armeni's father also appears to have been shown at this funeral home in late December 2006. The death notices for Vincenzo Armeni's parents suggest that Callocchia is not his brother-in-law.

There are many more of these headscratchers.

The reality is that no poster on here entirely knows the motives behind the murders, attempted murders, and kidnappings of the last few years. A sizable majority of us, including me, have followed the war by reading current newspaper articles and the Mafia inc. book published in the Fall of 2010, as well as the book's epilogue published 10 months later. The problem is, you can't claim to understand what is truly going on in this war unless you make the extra effort to find other sources of information, such as the Quebec government's ongoing inquiry into corruption in the construction industry, pronouncements in the media (TV, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) by organized-crime experts, journalists, and authors, older newspaper articles and books, and books and articles that are about another subject (hint: Canadian outlaw bikers and gangs) but yield some significant information about Italian-Canadian crime figures and groups. You also have to challenge and question a lot of what you read, which includes noting when organized-crime experts, journalists, and authors are inconsistent in their interviews, reporting, etc. The Mafia inc. book had so many insights when I first read it, but I now realize the book has too many errors in it for me to consider it a highly valuable contribution to the literature of Canadian organized crime -- the book is still important, but my biggest gripe is that it was not solidly researched.

I don't have any doubt that Rizzuto has ordered the murders of some of the victims who have been killed since he got out last October. If one article from this past Thursday is correct, Rizzuto had Valiquette in his sights because Valiquette and Callocchia had taken over territory that Rizzuto wants back.

You are right to question whether Rizzuto is an untouchable. He isn't. No one is. To believe otherwise is pure foolishness.