Nov 1, 2019

Mafia, decline and death of the Rizzuto clan: the whole story (true) ended in a film
The elimination of Andrea "Andrew" Scoppa is the latest episode in a war torn between Canadian mafia families triggered by the decline of the Rizzuto clan.
Grandangolo has dealt much with North American mafia events driven by the territorial ownership of its historical exponents of the Agrigento region.
Some time ago with a lucid interview with the former senator of the Democratic Party, Giuseppe Lumia had focused our spotlight on Canada and the Agrigento families operating in that vast territory, illuminating disquieting scenarios on the mafia phenomenon and returning attention to what happened in the past and on the truly prominent role of the Agrigento mafia in all the criminal dynamics, including transnational ones, which have consecrated clans of absolute mafia prestige, such as those of the Caruana - Cuntrera and the Rizzutos, at the top of the international organized crime.
Even today, these names are back in the limelight and have recently appeared among the papers of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Mafia phenomenon.
Not everyone knows that - the events date back to half a century ago, testifying that the mafia of Agrigento was and is powerful - Cosa Nostra had even a head of the so-called Cupola, in that Giuseppe Settecasi, later assassinated under the house, who besides driving the commission of Cosa Nostra flew, at seventy and more years of age, both in Canada and in America to put in place delicate and difficult situations and remedy the disagreements between the mafia and ndrine of the Calabrian ndrangheta.
That Giuseppe Settacasi who was at the head of Cosa Nostra Sicilian for a well-defined period during which the internecine war between Sicilian gangs had "turned upside down" (words of Tommaso Buscetta) the honored society.
For the Canadian red coats, who had intercepted and listened to Settecasi on April 22 and May 10, 1974 in Paul Violi's "Reggio Bar" in Montreal while giving orders and explaining how the mafia worked in Sicily (for the half-island police stations it was a poor 80-year-old pensioner playing cards, in shirt sleeves, with taxi drivers at the central station of Agrigento) the old boss was a mafia authority so charismatic he could heal the disagreements between the ndrangheta and the Cosa Nostra.
Those interceptions that explained the exact organization chart of the Sicilian mafia of those years, ended up in a drawer of the Questura of Agrigento and never used. It took the first massacre of Porto Empedocle, 14 years later, to understand its role and scope. And in these 14 years the mafia has enormously exaggerated its power by carrying out massacres, killing men of the institutions, controlling the social, entrepreneurial and political life of an entire nation.
In 1974, therefore, as proof of the consolidated friendship and business relations between the exponents of the North American mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Vincent Cotroni, Nick Rizzuto and the local representatives of the Cuntrera-Caruana families received Giuseppe Settecasi, head of the gangs, in Canada mafia members of the entire province of Agrigento. The climate of the time was very heavy, the Sicilian mafia was torn by an internecine war that would have allowed, some time later, the climb to the top of the Corleonesi of Riina and Provenzano. In an endless series of meetings in Montreal, Epiphani, Hamilton and New York, Settecasi met the main exponents of the Italian-American mafia, including Paul Castellano, Paul Violi, Giuseppe Cuffaro, Gerlando Sciascia, Angelo Mongiovì, Emanuele Ragusa.
The main reason for Settecasi's trip, according to Canadian authorities, was to strengthen relations between the mafia on the two continents and repair a rift within local criminal groups.
Settecasi was to smooth out the differences that arose in the cosca represented by Vincent Cotroni, between Leonardo Caruana and the same Nicola Rizzuto who had questioned his appointment as head of the district. Rizzuto, in particular, did not like the familiarity created between Vic Cotroni and the Calabrese Paul Violi, strongly on the rise in Canadian crime, also thanks to the marriage with Grazia Luppino, the daughter of Giacomo Luppino, the original boss of Castellace di Oppido Mamertina and representative of Magaddino "family". Precisely Cotroni, in that marriage, had acted as ringleader to Paul Violi.
The pax mafiosa reached thanks to the mediation of Settecasi was short-lived.
In 1975 Vincent Cotroni was jailed for refusing to testify before the Canadian Parliament's Committee of Inquiry on the Mafia phenomenon. Paul Violi was appointed his successor. From Caracas, where Nick Rizzuto had been forced to relocate by starting a restaurant he called "The Godfather", the military counter-offensive against the new Montreal boss was organized. One by one all Violi's subjects fell. The Mafia war was fierce and in the streets of the Canadian metropolis there were about twenty murders. Then, in 1978, it was the turn of Paul Violi himself to end up murdered in the "Reggio Bar", the restaurant he managed in Montreal and which had been the site of the summit between the North American mafia and Giuseppe Settecasi.

For the murder Violi were arrested, among others, Agostino Cuntrera and Domenico Manno, both linked to Nick Rizzuto.
Three years later, no better fate would have fallen to the other antagonist of the former camp of Cattolica Eraclea, Leonardo Caruana. Deported to Italy because he was branded as "unwanted" by the authorities who suspected him of international drug trafficking, Leonardo Caruana was killed on 2 September 1981 in Palermo after attending the wedding ceremony of his son Gerlando. Even the elderly boss Settecasi was the victim of the same year of a blatant murder in the center of Agrigento. It was the epilogue of a long war that had consecrated the new leadership of Nick Rizzuto in the Canadian mafia organization linked to the most powerful Sicilian-Calabrian families.
This whole affair, up until the present day, was represented in a parliamentary question presented by the then Democratic senator, Giuseppe Lumia, which deserves to be recalled given its topicality and effectiveness.
Lumia writes to the Ministers of the Interior and of Justice: given that, as far as the interrogator is concerned, a growing mafia war is taking place in Canada which also involves sectors of the Italian-American mafia of Cosa Nostra and the Ndrangheta; there are more than twenty deaths in what can be defined as the second Mafia war on Canadian soil, especially within the Rizzuto clan;
the Rizzuto clan is now commonly called the "sixth family" of New York, after that of the Gambinos, Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese and Bonanno. The progenitor boss, Vito Rizzuto, was born and raised in Sicily, in Cattolica Eraclea (Agrigento) on 12 April 1901, he was the first of the family to move to the new continent in 1922, along with 5 friends (Calogero Renda, Mercurio Campisi, Francesco Giula , Giuseppe Sciortino, Vincenzo Marino), and after only 8 months from his daring arrival in America he even managed to obtain American citizenship. Immediately engaged in criminal affairs, he lost his life at the young age of 32, quite brutally. The perpetrators of the murder still remain ambiguous, there was a great deal of talk then of bosses like Max Simon, Stefano Spinello and Rosario Arcuro due to a sort of settlement of accounts; in February 1954, Nicolò Rizzuto, Vito's son, arrived in Canada, following in his father's footsteps, he always sought fortune out of Sicily. Unlike his father, Nicolò arrived in the land of lakes with his family and immediately went to the great city of Montreal with the support of a dear friend, Giuseppe Cuffaro, who settled in the Canadian city, a year before and an expert in recycling of money;
the Mafia summit held in 1957 at the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo, attended by the bosses of Cosa Nostra Sicilian and American (Lucky Luciano, Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family, Tano Badalamenti and Tommaso Buscetta, among others), sanctioned the the will of the two mafia organizations to insert themselves in the lucrative trade of heroin, undermining the now decadent "French connection", managed by the famous Marseilles criminals. Asian opium was transformed into heroin in secret laboratories distributed in Sicily and transported to Canada. From Montréal then, it was sorted towards the USA, and in particular in New York, where demand was constantly increasing. For two decades the heroine enriched the Sicilian and American bosses, guaranteeing a monopoly on traffic. In this activity the bosses Caruana and Cuntrera stood out, as it happens, they too come from the province of Agrigento, just from Siculiana, which is only 16 kilometers from Cattolica Eraclea; Vito married in 1966 with Giovanna Cammalleri, originally from Cattolica Eraclea, but moved with her family to Canada, to Toronto. The most influential bosses participated in the wedding, including the Calabrian Paolo Violi. The latter gained a leading position in the management of offenses and Nick Rizzuto was granted the opportunity to build another family outpost in Venezuela, where he moved in 1973. In Venezuela Nick was able to take advantage of the support of the Caruana - Cuntrera, and in that territory he was head of the main business. In reality Nick confided to Buscetta that he had left Montreal, because Paolo Violi wanted him dead, but the removal was only physical,
the Rizzuto family and in particular Nick, is considered the instigator of as many as 3 homicides (Pietro Sciarra, Francesco Violi, Paolo Violi) and from this moment begins a bloody conflict to obtain the full hegemony of the sixth family.
This is a real war, the first mafia war that could count on enormous financial resources coming from drug trafficking and had as its main objective the control of the great deal of the Montreal Olympics in 1976. In the years following Violi's death , won the war against the Calabrian mafia, the Rizzutos go into business with all the major Sicilian mobsters, with the drug exponents of South America and the most important New York bosses;
From the mid-seventies the Rizzutos, completely independent from the Bonanno supervision (weakened by purges and murders in an attempt to block the ever increasing influence of the Sicilians, the "Zip"), imposed themselves in Canada and with the control of Montréal to north and with the alliance with the Cuntrera-Caruana to the south, they got the keys to drug trafficking to the US. The Rizzutos therefore became the intermediary for drug trafficking, forging a profitable and strong alliance with the Cuntrera-Caruana family, which from the Island of Aruba would become the link with the South American narcos also for the paths of the cocaine;
In the space of a decade (1975-1985), drug trafficking was strengthened. Also with the help of the Cuntrera-Caruana, logistic bases were opened in Florida, from where coca was marketed to the north, up to Montréal and from there sent to Europe. Heroin traveled in the opposite direction. Hashish was another very lucrative affair. Numerous traffic routes were opened: the Lebanese way through the Phalangist militias, who sold hashish in exchange for weapons; the Irish way, via the Irish West End Gangs operating in Montreal; the Pakistani way with the complicity of the Gang Dubois; the Libyan way. The traffic was so frequent and profitable that the Canadian police seized 55 tons of hashish for 675 million dollars in two separate operations in the late 1980s;
Drugs were joined by counterfeiting and trafficking in dollars, bank operations and fraud, money laundering and there seems to have been an attempt to get hold of the treasure of the former Asian dictator, the Filipino Ferdinand Marcos and massive investments in Italy and in Europe, like the one foiled by Dia in 2005, to enter with 5 million euros into the business of building the bridge over the Strait of Messina, through the entrepreneur Joseph Zappia, responsible for the construction of the Montreal Olympic village in 1976, or the big fraudulent operations with the founder of Made in Italy Inc, Mariano Turrizi, and with components of the oldest Italian families (for the two operations over 6 billion dollars of investments were available);the proponent of the wealth and power of the Sixth Family was Vito Rizzuto, the gentleman boss, who managed to make his criminal family a powerful and feared money machine, poured into bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein;
The interests of the Sixth Family are very extensive, from Canada to the United States, from Venezuela to Colombia, from Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain, from China, to Algeria, United Arab Emirates to Cuba, from Mexico to Italy, from Haiti to Belize .
Vito Rizzuto managed not to be arrested, until the collapse of the Bonanno family dragged him to a US court. The relations between the sixth family and the Bonanno over the years (since 1995) became increasingly cold, to the point that even the sixth family succeeded in completely obscuring, both for wealth and power, the Bonanno family;
the Sixth Family combines the traditions of the Sicilian mafia with a modern and solid corporate structure, resulting in a strong, stable and constantly expanding mafia company. He abandoned the outdated organizational structure of a military order, for a more familiar one (he joined the mafia organization not so much with the ancient initiation ceremonies, but with marriages or promises of marriage). The result is a sense of solid belonging, based on trust, devotion and unconditional esteem, which protects the structure itself from devastating betrayals and infiltrations. The Bonannos, in fact, put under intense pressure by the American police forces, saw their power and their stability crumble. Many Bonanno first-level bosses, starting with the head of the family Joey Massino, a close ally of Vito and formally his superior, once arrested, they decided to collaborate with the authorities. The help of 4 penitents of great criminal importance, all former members or associates of the Bonanno, led to the disintegration of the family, and dragged Vito Rizzuto to ruin. Arrested at his home in January 2004, Rizzuto was extradited to the United States and sentenced to prison. A pecuniary penalty was applied through an unexpected plea bargain and a declaration of guilt; Rizzuto was extradited to the United States and sentenced to prison. A pecuniary penalty was applied through an unexpected plea bargain and a declaration of guilt; Rizzuto was extradited to the United States and sentenced to prison. A pecuniary penalty was applied through an unexpected plea bargain and a declaration of guilt;
in conjunction with the imprisonment of the boss, the Sixth Family suffered a harsh attack from the Canadian Police, which in several operations arrested numerous high-volume components, putting the dense traffic network at risk. The organization is greatly weakened, but there are many important members of the Rizzuto family clan who remained immune to the arrests and continue to operate;
More recently, a new mafia war has broken out.
This time, the Rizzuto clan was unsuccessful due to the Calabrian Mafiosi of the Siderno group, originating in the province of Reggio Calabria. In fact, the trail of blood in recent years is impressive. On December 28, 2009 Nick Rizzuto junior, son of Vito Rizzuto, the historical head of the family, falls. Thus began a second mafia war, after that of the 70s, where the Rizzutos prevailed over the Calabrian exponents of their own family, linked to the Cotroni and the Bonanno. A year later, a victim of white shotgun is Paolo Renda, brother-in-law of the godfather Nicola Rizzuto senior, followed a month later by Agostino Cuntrera, linked to the famous Caruana and Cuntrera clan. On 10 December 2010, 86-year-old Nicola Rizzuto senior was hit with an extraordinary aim by a sniper while he was in his villa. sitting in the kitchen. The boss of the bosses of the Rizzutos, his son Vito, remained alive, released from prison in October 2012, ready for revenge for the killing of his son and father and able to raise the clan from the dust and thus try to react in this bloody war that saw them unsuccessful. Suddenly, an unexpected opponent arrives, the disease, and is struck down by pulmonary complications on December 23, 2013. Almost all the six members who managed the dome of Montreal during Vito's stay in prison die. Only Francesco Arcadi and Francesco Del Balso remained alive because they were arrested in the meantime. Other exponents fall and even the Rizzutos' grandsons are at risk. Many central figures of this family are missing, Salvatore Montagna in 2011, and more recently in 2016 Rocco Sollecito is also killed on May 27th, and Angelo D'Onofri, on June 2nd. The son of Sollecito, Stefano and a grandson of the Rizzutos, the lawyer Leonardo, remain alive, perhaps because they are under arrest;
A return of the Rizzutos in the province of Agrigento cannot be excluded, because right now in Toronto they are suffering repeated and systematic fatal blows. It is to be assessed if money and assets of this very important clan in the province of Agrigento have already arrived in these years. It is not a peregrine hypothesis to ask where is this money, what are the investments, who are their nominees. It is a first working track on which to engage the best Italian investigative energies. It is also possible to exclude a physical return of some of the offspring of the Rizzutos, in particular of that bourgeois and professional part, which in order to escape death could return to their ancestors' homeland, seen as a sort of safe haven to take refuge in and wait for the end of the terrible storm that hit them.
Now the killing of "Andrew" Scoppa, considered involved in the death of Rocco Sollecito.
A story that repeats itself and never ends.


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