Nothing major but this article says the reason for De Vito and the Rizzuto's falling out was the murder of his boss Paolo Gervais in 2004.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Form...4233/story.htmlMONTREAL — “What kind of qualifications do translators for the RCMP have if they don’t even know how to say f**k in Italian?”
Angelo Cecere’s question might prove to be part of his undoing. The former translator for the RCMP’s Montreal C Division is expected to learn Friday whether he will be convicted of attempting to obstruct justice by trying to weaken the police’s case in Project Colisée, the most significant police investigation of the Mafia in Canada in decades.
Cecere has already pleaded guilty to breach of trust and disclosing private communications in the case.
The obstruction charge is significant because the Crown alleges that Cecere, 60, of Saint-Léonard, drew up a plan over six months that he hoped defence lawyers could use against his employer, the RCMP, to knock holes in what he perceived as weaknesses in Colisée.
The investigation produced the arrests, in November 2006, of important Mafia leaders including Nicolo (Zio Cola) Rizzuto Sr. and his son-in-law Paolo Renda.
Cecere, a civilian employee with severely diminished eyesight, had been with the RCMP for 26 years at the time of his arrest in 2007. He worked on Project Colisée as a translator, interpreter and transcriber of some of what was estimated to be more than a million wiretapped conversations gathered during the lengthy probe.
So while they should have been celebrating the major arrests that followed their investigations, the RCMP learned they had a potential leak in their team of translators. The force set up a new investigation, this time an internal one targeting Cecere.
A secret camera was hidden in Cecere’s office and his computer was connected to another remotely, which allowed the RCMP to monitor what he was doing.
On July 17, 2007, the RCMP staged a meeting at their headquarters on Dorchester Blvd., attended by Cecere, and laid out an outline of a fictitious investigation, complete with a fake list of suspects whose phone conversations would be recorded.
Shortly after the meeting, Cecere returned to his office and used his cellphone, which was wiretapped, to call one of his sons. Cecere, who was working a late shift that day, told his son to come to his house around midnight and to “bring your friend.”
After Cecere left work that night, police followed him to his house and watched as Nicola Di Marco arrived with Cecere’s son after midnight.
Di Marco, now 43, is jail for helping the Mafia run a clandestine casino out of a commercial building in Montreal. Police shut it down in 2006. At the time, police knew Di Marco had ties to the Mafia because the casino was financed by Nick (The Ritz) Rizzuto Jr., the now deceased son of reputed Mafia leader Vito Rizzuto, and other leaders in the mob.
Di Marco and Cecere’s son were arrested as they exited the house an hour later. Cecere and his other son, who were inside the house, were arrested as well. Cecere’s sons were not charged in the case.
According to evidence heard in Cecere’s case in October, Di Marco was carrying two versions of a transcribed conversation between one of the more than 60 people targeted in Colisée and an unknown man. Cecere had worked on the translation for the RCMP that day, and corrected a colleague’s first interpretation of the same conversation.
Also in Di Marco’s possession was a document containing notes in which it appeared Cecere pointed out flaws in his colleague’s work, including an inability to translate an Italian slang word for intercourse. The verb, chiavata, can also be interpreted to describe someone putting a key in a keyhole, which probably caused the confusion for the first interpreter. The slang term is also part of a regional dialect in Italy. But to Cecere, the error was a serious flaw that could be picked apart in court.
Another passage read: “How many other so-called mistakes can we find from the many thousands of so-called translations of conversations?”
A search warrant executed inside Cecere’s home turned up a computer diskette containing a document Cecere appeared to start working on in January 2007, just three months after the arrests were made in Colisée. It was titled “Questions lawyers should ask.”
The diskette contained several aspects of the Colisée investigation that had yet to be made public. That included references to Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito, a convicted drug trafficker who was on the lam and being sought in Colisée at the time.
Information on the diskette potentially explains why the relationship between De Vito and the Rizzuto clan turned sour. A summary on the diskette describes how De Vito, now 46, and two other drug dealers stopped paying tribute to the Rizzuto organization after their boss, Paolo Gervais, was killed in 2004 over a long-standing dispute.
The same document made another reference to De Vito, apparently a tip that De Vito shouldn’t surrender to police because, Cecere had learned, the Crown would seek a 14-year sentence in his case. (De Vito was eventually arrested and is serving a 15-year sentence for attempting to smuggle more than 200 kilos of cocaine into Canada. The translation of some of the conversations recorded while he was investigated were called into question during his trial.)
During Cecere’s October hearing, prosecutor Lyne Décarie highlighted another passage from the diskette for Judge Gilles Cadieux. She described it as outlining a strategy Cecere thought defence lawyers could use as the many cases in Colisée progressed.
As part of the strategy, Cecere appeared to advise that “no one should plead guilty.”
In the document, Cecere wrote that at some point in 2007, in the wake of the major arrests, the RCMP had concerns about the overall quality of the translations of conversations they were about to turn over to defence lawyers. Cecere appeared to say in the document that he wanted someone to hire translators from Italy to find flaws in the translations.
RCMP Sgt. Michel Fortin, a supervising investigator in Colisée, testified at Cecere’s hearing in October. He confirmed that there were concerns about some of the translations. But, he added, going over them again and making corrections is standard procedure before they are turned over to the defence.
“(Cecere) was giving advice,” Décarie told Cadieux in October. “He wanted to de-rail the cases in Colisée.”
Cecere’s lawyer Daniel Rock saw things differently, and called the obstruction charge “a good old-fashioned case of reasonable doubt.”
Rock noted Cecere has already pleaded guilty, last July, to removing documents related to Project Colisée from his office and bringing them home.
“That is settled. We can’t find him guilty twice,” Rock said. “(The attempted obstruction charge) requires a supplementary action. Otherwise it is a thought. He had thoughts that he put on (a disk). We can’t convict people for their thoughts.”
Sentencing arguments on the two charges to which Cecere has already pleaded guilty are expected to begin after Cadieux renders his verdict.
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