Mafia took a shine to Montreal

By Tod Hoffman / Montreal Gazette

Caruana-Cuntrera could be the name of a grand multinational conglomerate of financiers and merchants. And in a manner of speaking, it is. Except that its fiscal expertise is money-laundering and the product is drugs. Bloodlines: The Rise and Fall of the Mafia's Royal

Family sets about tracing the history of this veritable dynasty from its ascent out of a small town in western Sicily in the 1800s to its undoing in upscale Woodbridge, Ont., in 1998, when family patriarch Alfonso Caruana was arrested along with several of his most prominent associates as part of an international take-down. It's a complex story, made all the more so by the fact that it was never intended to be told.

Veteran investigative journalists Lee Lamothe and Antonio Nicaso, both of whom are based in Toronto and have extensive experience uncovering organized crime, do yeoman work to unravel the twisted connections between the huge cast of players. To that end, they deserve credit for what they have presented. However, it is the nature of the story that it emerges in dribs and drabs - a drug shipment here, a seizure there, funds funneled through this chain of companies, or transferred through this and that country. The early narrative tends to be a blur of drug deals and illicit banking transactions. The point is clearly that lots of heroin and cocaine were trafficked.

By 1982, the FBI estimated that the Caruana-Cuntrera family was responsible for moving half the annual American consumption of heroin into the country. Plenty of money was made, too. Police claim more than $30 million U.S. was laundered through Montreal banks. Where the book really comes to life is in the last 100 pages or so as the authors get into the police operation that finally resulted in the apprehension of the major players. With access to police investigators who worked on the case, wiretap transcripts and much of the evidence assembled against the mobsters, Lamothe and Nicaso peel away the secrecy that shrouds the Caruana-Cuntrera's affairs to recount the last desperate days of a besieged empire teetering on the brink of disaster. Along the way there are interesting revelations about some of the world's most influential Mafiosi. A family in the true sense of the word, generations of sons have entered their father's business. Caruanas and Cuntreras intermarried in such tightly wound circles that, in several instances, first cousins ended up betrothed. Such is the mentality of Sicily that "trust and faith erode the further you stray from the family hearth." At least among those to whom betrayal means lengthy prison terms, a life on the run in far-flung exile or violent death. However, the mobsters in Bloodlines were thugs only as a last resort.

"If you shoot, you make enemies. If you share, you make friends" is the gospel according to Alfonso Caruana. Oh, they shot, all right, as in the case of Montreal underboss Paulo Violi, murdered in 1978 in a turf battle over the drug trade. But they'd rather buy people than kill them. It's less messy, draws less attention. One of the attractions of Montreal in 1968, when the family established itself here, was that it was "a thoroughly cosmopolitan, corrupted, and corruptible city." And a convenient transit point for heroin out of Europe bound for the New York market.

The book is, on one hand, an indictment of Canada's laxity in dealing with organized crime (e.g., giving light sentences and early release when there is no overt violence involved).

While the family's financial tentacles stretched far to encompass countries around the world, they felt safe operating out of Montreal, and later Toronto. On the other hand, the diligent efforts of Canadian police were instrumental in collapsing the family's current generation of leadership in an operation that cost nearly $9 million. The obstacles to writing about the Mafia are formidable. It is a world closed to outsiders and designed to function without written records. The Caruana-Cuntrera family's every overt act was a cover laid thick to build the appearance of innocuousness, while beneath it arose a powerful global criminal empire capable of buying or eliminating its adversaries. Bloodlines offers an intriguing peek beneath the cloak.

August 25, 2001