Criminal Career
His father Nicolo Rizzuto began his Mafia career in Canada as an associate of the Cotroni crime family that controlled much of Montreal's drug trade in the 1970s while answering to the Bonanno crime family of New York. By the 1980s, the Rizzutos emerged as the city's pre-eminent Mafia crew after a turf war between the Montreal family's Sicilian and Calabrian factions and the murder of Paolo Violi, a Bonanno soldier who had been named acting boss of Montreal's family.
According to law enforcement officials Rizzuto oversaw a criminal empire that imported and distributed tonnes 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.
Though only considered a soldier of the New York Bonanno crime family by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rizzuto is 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.
According to Francesco Di Carlo, a Sicilian mafioso turned government witness, Vito Rizzuto is in charge of Cosa Nostra in Canada, he said in an interview with W-Five in 1998.
Read more about this topic: Vito Rizzuto
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