November 11, 2011

MAFIA PATRIACH NICOLO RIZZUTO GUNNED DOWN

MONTREAL - Members of the Rizzuto family took control of the Montreal Mafia by crushing their enemies. Wednesday night's brazen killing of 86-year-old patriarch Nicolo Rizzuto is a sign that such vengeance is coming back to haunt them, experts in organized crime say.

"They are the titans of the crime world," said Julian Sher, an investigative journalist who has written a book about organized crime. "It is a brazen attack - literally going after the head (of the Mafia)."

Killing the Montreal Mafia's senior members would have been unthinkable a few years ago, he said.

Last December, a gunman fatally shot Nicolo Rizzuto's grandson Nick Jr. in Notre Dame de Grâce.

"If you would have said five years ago that Nick Sr. and Nick Jr. would both be assassinated and Vito (Rizzuto) would be in jail, people would be thinking you were watching a bad version of the Godfather," Sher said.

"To think that three of the most powerful Rizzutos are either dead or in jail is shocking."

The Rizzuto clan has been battered and beaten over the past few years, likely because there is a major shift in the organized crime world and in the Mafia, he speculated.

"People in organized crime have long memories," Sher said.

Pierre De Champlain, a retired RCMP organized crime analyst, said he wasn't surprised to learn of Nicolo Rizzuto's killing.

The killing of Nick Rizzuto Jr. and the kidnapping of his uncle Paolo Renda last spring is evidence that there is an organized attempt to get rid of the Rizzuto clan, he said.

"Tonight, they assassinated the patriarch - the symbol of the Rizzuto clan."

The killings and kidnapping of senior members of the Rizzuto clean have sent a clear message to Vito Rizzuto, who is in a Colorado prison, that his days as godfather of the Montreal Mafia are over, he said.

"I think that he got the message a long time ago," De Champlain added.

Vito Rizzuto is eligible for parole in 2012. He has been serving a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in a racketeering case, which involved the 1981 murders of three mobsters in Brooklyn, N.Y.

"His situation is precarious," De Champlain said.

When Vito Rizzuto was extradited to New York in 2006, he told two police investigators escorting him that "he was the only person able to maintain a relative peace among the diverse criminal organizations in Montreal."

Antonio Nicaso, the Toronto-based author of several books on organized crime, said he believes several groups are behind the plot to remove the Rizzutos from Montreal's organized crime scene.

"There is no war because the victims are all on one side," he said.

Nicaso said he suspects a combination of groups from Ontario, New York and Montreal, including members of the Mafia and street gangs, are behind the attacks on the Rizzutos.

"It is their enemies from the past and enemies from the present," he said. "They want to get their hands on the narcotics trade, the extortion business and the (construction industry). They will do everything to remove the Rizzuto crime family from the map."

Ricardo Padulo, who owns a restaurant on St. Zotique St. said Nicolo Rizzuto and his family used to come to his grandmother's Italian grocery story back in the 1950s.

"My grandmother opened the first Italian grocery story in Montreal and they would encourage us," he said. "We know them as customers."

Padulo said many Italian Montrealers know the Rizzutos because they hail from the same village in Sicily.

"They keep a low profile and they don't show off," said Padulo, who attended Nick Rizzuto Jr.'s funeral last winter after he was fatally shot in Notre Dame de Grâce.

"From what we know, they don't really bother anybody. They don't brag, they don't take space."