The "Montreal Mafia" is a bit of a misnomer - Americans are tempted to think of these guys like being a Montreal crime family the way US families are set up. But while the American Mafia has taken on its own culture in the US melting pot, the Rizzutos were Sicilian Mafiosi who just so happened to be doing business out of Montreal. It's not that they're these second tier Canadians who won't take any shit from the Yanks - they are Sicilian originals from Cattolica Eraclea who have set up shop in Montreal.
Trying to figure out how they run in US family terms is a waste of time - it's not a TV show and it's not organized the way Lucky Luciano delineated the U.S. Mafia. It's its own beast entirely, and much more like a Sicilian set-up. Of course it's more complicated than that because at one time the Bonannos were very influential in Montreal and there is that overlap (under Cotroni) - there are also key members of the Rizzuto organization who were not Sicilian - the Sollecitos are from Bari, Frank Arcadi was Calabrian - but they all got united behind Rizzuto because they recognized a good thing when they saw it. Those divisions were still there, but they took a backseat in the good times in the '90s and early 2000's when everybody was making too much money to care.
The New York Bonannos, separated by a border and multiple language barriers (how many New York based mobsters speak fluent Italian, never mind French?) were powerless to come to a whole other city and start bossing around a bunch of Sicilian OG's who now refuse to be bossed around. The Montreal LCN was now so big and so extremely violent in their own right that some guys from Brooklyn aren't going to be able to just walk into town and lay down the law. The Rizzutos had multiple police, border guards, everything on the payroll. They even had a member in the Federal Cabinet at this time. I know for a lot of Americans you'd like to look at us up here like we're a bunch of idiots and that there is no possible way we could be home to an autonomous, top tier crime family, but that's what happened - and as I said in the beginning, these guys really aren't "Canadian" anyway - they are Sicilian, Calabrian, Neapolitan and Pugliese through and through.
In Vitale's testimony he himself shared Massino's fear at what would happen if Rizzuto found out that he was behind Sciascia's murder. Think about it - how many Bonanno hits had gone down under Massino's reign versus how freely Rizzuto would have people whacked? Montreal in the '90s and 2000's was like Brooklyn in the '50's and '60's. There isn't an LCN family in the U.S. that has kept pace with Montreal in terms of violence.
By the end of the '90s the Rizzutos were dealing in the billions while NYC LCN was still under a heavy LE microscope. A Sicilian OG like Rizzuto, making billions, isn't going to take orders from Joe Massino just because they've seen Donnie Brasco too many times and regard the Bonannos as legendary. It's all about what have you done for me lately, and by the early 2000's, the Rizzutos had the Bonannos outclassed at every level.
Clearly the U.S. Government thought so - why put some meagre Bonanno soldier or even Capo in a SuperMax prison for a 10 year sentence?
