Canadian organized-crime author James Dubro wrote this interesting sentence in his Facebook status update from this morning:

But maybe he [Vito Rizzuto] let it be known that he had a terminal ailment both in Mafia circles & cops circles which might have spared him all sorts of problems in his last year.

I think if illness allowed Rizzuto to be given a pass -- and that's a very big if because the theory is fairly weak -- he would have had to promise something in return. He was always known as a conciliator and mediator, and Peter Edwards of the Toronto Star did report on a possible meeting in the Dominican Republic that Vito held back in April with some of his detractors. Did Vito know about his illness back then? Did he disclose the illness at that meeting? at other meetings?

Still, there's something unusual about Rizzuto's suddenly dying in hospital after 13.5 months of renewed violence that began with Jos Di Maulo's death, which itself happened less than a month after Rizzuto got out of the Colorado prison.