Say whatever you wish about the "fall" of the Rizzuto Clan, but I don't think any of the other groups in Canada will ever be this wealthy and powerful, except for maybe the Ndrangheta:
HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ASSETS SEIZED FROM MOB-LINKED BUSINESSMAN WITH TIES TO MULTIPLE MAFIA FAMILIES June 28th, 2009
A multi-million-dollar treasure trove of art, jewels, antiques, real estate, and luxury cars was forfeited to Italian authorities yesterday by a man named as the longtime financier of the Mafia of Montreal.
"He is part of a criminal organization, the Mafia, but he has good taste," said a spokesman for the Italy Direzione Investigativa Antimafia. "We took away everything he had."
Beniamino Gioiello Zappia, 71, known as "Don Tito," is currently imprisoned in Italy for gangsterism and financial crimes, after a probe by the Rome-based anti-Mafia police targeted the European operations of the Rizzuto organization, a Mafia clan based in Montreal that has already been called the "pinnacle of organized crime" in Canada by the RCMP.
Earlier this year, police found hundreds of pieces of artwork, antiques, and archaeological artifacts at Zappia's homes in Milan and in Cattolica Eraclea, the Sicilian village that is also the hometown of Vito Rizzuto, the head of the Mafia in Montreal. The material was turned over to an Italian cultural office for identification and storage. On Thursday, an Italian court judge ordered the property forfeited to the government.
Among the haul are 345 paintings, including works by famed Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali, acclaimed Sicilian erotic painter Renato Guttuso, portraitist Giovanni Boldini, surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, and other famous Italian artists.
(At least one of the Dali pieces is a fake, according to New York Dali specialist Frank Hunter, who was shown a photograph of the work by the National Post.)
Also confiscated from Zappia were 220 antique clocks; precious stones, gems and crafted jewellery; antique ivory; collector's coins; and many ancient and antique vases, bronzes and statues, including works by Baroque sculptor Domenico Guidi.
More practical items confiscated were several apartment buildings, a jewellery shop, several tracts of real estate, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes and "many nice cars," the D. I. A. said.
An estimated value of the goods had not been calculated but would amount to many millions of dollars, the agency spokesman said.
The seizure adds to the picture of the Rizzuto organization as a vastly wealthy, white-collar and internationally active clan. Zappia was described by officials in Rome as the senior representative of Rizzuto in Italy.
Investigators in several countries have long suspected Zappia to be a financier for the Rizzuto Clan, playing a key role in moving the family's riches to safety.
On May 24, 1988, Swiss authorities tracked him crossing the Italian-Swiss border and making withdrawals from accounts of Rizzuto members at secretive Swiss banks in Lugano. Almost exactly 17 years later he was still a Rizzuto insider, police records show.
On May 23, 2005, wiretaps secretly installed by police in Montreal recorded a Rizzuto leader explaining to Zappia how money from underlings flowed to them at the social club they used as their headquarters.
"When they do something -- and it doesn't matter when they do it -- they always bring something here so it can be divided up among us."
The RCMP shared that information and other suspicious conversations, gathered during Project Colisee, with investigators in Rome. Italian police launched two probes of their own, Operation Brooklyn and Operation Orso Bruno (Italian for Brown Bear), targeting Rizzuto and his men. One investigated attempts to win the massive public works contract to build a bridge linking Sicily to mainland Italy, the other a sprawling European financial empire.
As evidence of the organization's wealth, the bridge contract was worth an estimated $6-billion and the second operation led police to freeze $689-million worth of assets.
"This is the end of our investigations that we started two years ago. We worked with Canadian police against the Rizzuto family," said the D. I. A. spokesman.
In 2007, Italian police arrested bankers, businessmen, investment brokers, and a man linked to the royal family of Italy. In total, arrest warrants were issued against 20 members of the "Italo-Canadian Mafia," including Rizzuto, who is currently in prison in the United States for 3 gangland slayings.
Also named in warrants were Rizzuto's father, Nicolo, and brother-in-law, Paolo Renda. Italian authorities have requested their extradition.
Italian officials yesterday said Zappia is linked not only to the Rizzutos but the Bonanno Family of New York and the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, a notorious group of Sicilian Mafia drug traffickers who were arrested in Toronto in 1998, as well as the Triasi Family. Zappia's sentence is not yet finalized and has several avenues of appeal still open to him.
These guys almost won the contract to build a $6 billion bridge linking Sicily to mainland Italy!
