page_title: Vito Rizzuto
section_title: Criminal career
hierarchical_section_title: Vito Rizzuto / Criminal career
caption_attribution_description: English: Murdered Canadian gangster Gerlando Sciascia, left, looks for the car keys while Joseph Massino, right, waits to get into a car in New York in 1981. In the middle, in the dark suit, is Montreal's Vito Rizzuto.
context_page_description: Vito Rizzuto, also known as "Montreal's Teflon Don", was an Italian-Canadian crime boss alleged to be the leader of the Sicilian Mafia in Canada. He headed the notorious Rizzuto crime family based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
  Rizzuto was born in Cattolica Eraclea, Sicily, Italy in 1946 and immigrated to Montreal with his parents in 1954. His father Nicolo married into the mob, and later started his own crime syndicate in Montreal after overtaking the Cotroni crime family in the late 1970s. He had several run-ins with the law but was able to avoid conviction for any major offenses until 2004. In 1981, Rizzuto participated in the killing of three rival capos in New York City ordered by Joe Massino of the Bonanno crime family, and he was indicted by a Brooklyn federal grand jury in connection with these killings in 2004. He was extradited to the United States in 2006, and pled guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering charges in 2007. He was given a 10-year prison sentence, but was released in late 2012. The Rizzuto crime family was in the midst of a power struggle while Rizzuto was jailed; his son Nicolo Jr. was killed in 2009, and his father was killed in 2010.
context_section_description: In the 1970s, his father Nicolo was an underling in the Sicilian faction, led by Luigi Greco until his death in 1972, of the Calabrian Cotroni crime family. As tension then grew into a power struggle between the Calabrian and Sicilian factions of the family, a mob war began in 1973. This led to a violent Mafia war in Montreal which resulted in the deaths of Violi and his brothers, along with others, spanning the mid-1970s to the early 1980s until the war ceased. By the mid 1980s, the Rizzuto crime family emerged as Montreal's pre-eminent crime family after the turf war.
  According to law enforcement officials, Rizzuto oversaw a criminal empire that imported and distributed tons of heroin, cocaine and hashish in Canada, laundered hundreds of millions of dollars, lent out millions more through loansharking operations and profited handsomely from illegal gambling, fraud and contract killings. In 1972, Rizzuto was sentenced to two years for conspiring to commit arson of Renda's hair salon in Boucherville in 1968 with the intention of defrauding insurers; he served 18 months of the sentence. In October 1987, a ship off the coast of northeast Newfoundland and Labrador was seized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
  The RCMP found 16 tonnes of hashish in the surrounding area, and Rizzuto, Raynald Desjardins and four associates were arrested; Rizzuto was freed on bail in March 1988. Rizzuto's trial began in October 1990 in a St. John's courthouse, but when the RCMP overstepped the bounds of Rizzuto's warrant by wiretapping restaurant conversations between Rizzuto and his lawyer, the Newfoundland Supreme Court threw out the case. Later that year, Rizzuto was arrested again for conspiring to import hashish into Canada.  Drug dealer Normand Dupuis ready to testify against him for a reduced prison sentence, monetary compensation and a new identity.  Before the trial, however, Dupuis contacted Rizzuto's lawyer Jean Salois with an offer not to testify in exchange for $1 million. Salois recorded this conversation and got Dupuis charged with obstruction of justice. With the witness unfit to testify, Rizzuto was acquitted in 1989. In the early 1990s, the RCMP secretly ran a phony currency exchange in Montreal as part of an elaborate sting operation, called Project Compote, ending with 46 arrests and a Rizzuto lawyer, Joseph Lagana, convicted for laundering $47 million. Rizzuto was named as a co-conspirator, but there was not enough evidence to charge him.
  Though only considered a soldier of the New York Bonanno crime family by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rizzuto was considered by Canadian officials to be the most powerful mob boss in the country. The Canadian authors Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys consider the strength of the Rizzuto clan to rival that of any of the Five Families in New York and dubbed it the "Sixth Family." Rizzuto worked closely with the Sicilian Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan – major illicit drug traffickers – that was led in Canada by Alfonso Caruana.
caption: From left to right: Gerlando Sciascia, Rizzuto, Giovanni Ligamarri and Joseph Massino in 1981.
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