by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Lee Lamothe can sympathize with police. The veteran crime writer and co-author of The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto spent a year and a half trying to get a sense of Vito Rizzuto, the reputed Montreal mobster and head of a global criminal enterprise. And while he and National Post crime reporter Adrian Humphreys have written a fascinating book, which turns many assumptions about the mob on their heads, he admits to being frustrated that he was never able to establish a sense of Rizzuto the man—much as Canadian, American and European law enforcement officials had spent decades trying to nail Rizzuto as the head of one of the world’s largest and most successful heroin and cocaine traffickers, without success.

“That’s the major weakness of the book,” he says from his Toronto home. Perhaps—but perhaps he’s being too harsh. The Sixth Family is a riveting read for anyone who’s interested in organized crime and has a sense of Montreal pride. It was in Montreal, say Lamothe and Humphreys, that Rizzuto built what was originally an outpost of the New York Bonanno family into a massive empire spanning continents, cultures and crimes. The Rizzutos, they say, eclipsed the parochial confines of New York’s gangsters, and eventually called the tune to which the Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, Colombo and Genovese families danced.

Farm to arm

It’s a daring assertion. From The Godfather to Goodfellas to The Sopranos (which, rumour has it, will feature a strong Montreal connection in the upcoming episodes this March), not to mention countless other books, films and TV shows, the supremacy of the New York mafia captured the imagination of those outside lives of crime and law enforcement. But the reality, says Lamothe, is somewhat different. Thanks to the Rizzutos’ close connection to a particular town in western Sicily, Cattolica Eraclea, and through bonds formed by marriage and blood, they became the prime importers of heroin into North America. From the processing labs in Sicily through the porous ports of Montreal to the streets of New York and other cities—“From farm to arm,” says Lamothe—the Rizzutos controlled almost every aspect of the North American heroin trade, and were soon awash in money. And money means power.

“When we talked to our law enforcement sources in the States about our theory, they laughed,” says Lamothe. “But then they started figuring it out. Because they controlled drug trafficking, the Rizzutos were able to determine the leadership in the U.S. families simply by supplying the drugs.”

According to the book, various mobsters confirmed that whoever controlled Montreal controlled the turnkey to vast drug-fuelled riches. The theory, says Lamothe, “re-analyzes almost 40 years of underworld activity.”

Until recently, Rizzuto was the last high-profile mafioso still at large. The heads of the Five Families are either in jail or, in one stunning development, turned informant. Rizzuto’s unassailable position as one of the most powerful criminals in the world, however, came crashing down thanks to a crime committed over two decades ago, and became the stuff of gangster lore.

Omèrta at work

In May, 1981, three Bonanno captains on the losing end of a family power struggle were gunned down in the basement of a Brooklyn social club, and their bodies were buried in a shallow grave near JFK airport. The book alleges that Rizzuto, then 35, was the lead gunman. It was to face murder charges, not drug trafficking, that he was extradited to the U.S. from Canada last August.

Canadian authorities had tried to convict Rizzuto before. He’d beaten several drug-smuggling charges, thanks largely to law enforcement bungling. “We didn’t find any systemic corruption,” says Lamothe. There was no need: He says Canada’s relatively weak laws against organized crime didn’t necessitate the mob buying off cops or judges.

As eye-opening as much of the book is though, Rizzuto himself remains enigmatic. Lamothe says he was stymied when trying to get a sense of who Rizzuto was because, firstly, he was extremely cautious, and second, everyone close to him is related, and none of them would open up. “No one ever got violent, but we were told very firmly that they didn’t want to talk,” he says. “We know he was polite, and that he was a good tipper.” He also dressed well. And that’s about it. While other mobsters routinely broke their vows of omèrta (silence), no one close to Rizzuto turned pigeon.

“It was a real problem,” says Lamothe. “There were no surveillance transcripts of him talking. We had one transcript, where he said 10 or 15 words, out of the 1,000 or so transcripts we’d looked at.”

The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto, by Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys, Wiley, HC, 386PP, $34.99