Giordano:

I happened to be on Twitter last night when Adrian Humphreys, co-author of The Sixth Family, cryptically asked, in a tweet, which Toronto mafia boss was arrested (with details forthcoming). (DeMaria lives on Swinbourne Dr. in Mississauga, immediately west of Toronto.) I am sure you or others would have learned of Humphreys's article by this morning.

I'm glad you were precise in your post about DeMaria's heading a cell that was one of the 'ndrangheta groups in Ontario that may have been supportive of the attempt to oust the Rizzutos, especially if you are distinguishing that not all 'ndrangheta cells or crime groups in Ontario act together as one.

My opinions about any Siderno Group involvement in the attempted takeover have been quite strong; initially, I refused to believe it because I'm aware of the close criminal ties and other ties between the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) 'ndrangheta and the Rizzuto organization/Montreal Mafia. My position has definitely budged, but only because I now see that some Canadian reporters such as Humphreys and Peter Edwards of the Toronto Star, who have both tried to document the internal tensions within the Siderno Group over a number of years (especially while reporting Vincenzo DeMaria's bouts with the law), have been trying subtly to tell us for the last year that some individuals in the Toronto-area Siderno Group liked Vito Rizzuto and remained his ally, but that some in the Siderno Group were anti-Vito.

Nicola Cortese has been identified in a number of articles as DeMaria's nephew, but you may be right because I often later discover errors in newspaper reporting with respect to how one crime figure is related to another. I am aware of the contiguity between Rizzuto Sr.'s murder and Cortese's arrest in Quebec -- I've read varying accounts that state Cortese was discovered in the Montreal area anywhere from a few hours after the murder to three days afterward. There seems to be some foundation to Cortese and Salvatore Calautti being suspects in the murder. Then again, Rocco Remo Commisso of the Siderno Group in Toronto was in Montreal the day Paolo Violi was killed, but no one seems to ask why anymore, even though the tensions in the late '70s between the Violi brothers and the Commisso brothers have been documented.

Calautti was indeed Calabrian and definitely had ties to Siderno Group members; for all we know, he may have even been inducted into the 'ndrangheta. I was able to find out back in July that one of the pallbearers at Calautti's funeral was DeMaria's son Carlo. What's interesting about Calautti, though, is that he was hired as an enforcer and collector not only by those in the Siderno Group but also by at least one other Italian crime group in the GTA that, I have come to discover, is not Calabrian. I recall one article mentioning that Calautti had ties to three GTA Italian crime groups. When Peter Edwards reported on the fairly recent murder of Moreno Gallo, anyone might have easily missed an intriguing sentence in the article about Calautti's apparently bragging (!) about having killed Rizzuto Sr.

I have thoughts too about the Panepinto murder in retaliation for the murders of Napoli and Oppedisano. Several months ago I asked an Italian journalist to look into whether Oppedisano was the son of a major 'ndrangheta boss in Calabria. The journalist asked an antimafia group in Rosarno (Calabria) and probably asked one or two more pentiti. An answer finally came back after a few weeks: the murdered Oppedisano was not the son of Domenico Oppedisano of Rosarno, and no one seemed to know who this murdered Oppedisano was. More important, though, is that I've realized that a number of murders and incidents between the year 2000 and the present have to be re-examined in the light of tensions and accords between the GTA Siderno Group and the Montreal Mafia. One such murder would be the 2005 murder of Brampton's Vincenzo Raco (just one "c" in his surname) in Woodbridge (Vaughan). Raco, a loanshark who was a Siderno Group member, was shot in his vehicle while in the parking lot of a medical-professional building. Although no one has ever been arrested as a suspect in the murder, a man who police believe to be a suspect was seen meeting with Francesco Arcadi in the GTA several days after Raco was killed. For years, I have interpreted this murder as a sign of the Siderno Group's willingness to sacrifice one of its own to appease the Montrealers. Now I'm not so sure. When you bear in mind that Arcadi was also the liaison between Montreal and the Musitano crime group in Hamilton (another Calabrian crime group that has been considered an ally of Vito), you start questioning — and quite rightly — whether the depiction of harmony and overwhelming consensus in the Ontario 'ndrangheta is a realistic portrait. (Hint: It's not. Never has been.)

At times we are getting closer to the truth about what has happened in Montreal over the last four years specifically. More often than not, I'm realizing just how little I know; I'm also realizing that I may have some of it figured out 10 years from now.