The bust that almost wasn't
Two-year probe of Caruanas cost $8.8 million
By Dale Anne Freed / The Toronto Star
It took $8.8 million and thousands of hours of surveillance -
including bugging hundreds of pay phones in Greater Toronto and
around the world - to dismantle the billion-dollar
Cuntrera-Caruana criminal enterprise.
But the biggest international mob investigation in Canadian
history almost collapsed under the weight of budget woes and
legal glitches. Now police across Canada are analyzing the
successes - and failures - of the landmark mob bust dubbed
Project Omerta, Italian for code of silence.
"If we hadn't pursued the Caruanas in an all-out effort when we had the chance, they would have disappeared as they had so many
times before and set up operations somewhere else,'' said RCMP
Superintendent Ben Soave, head of the Omerta investigating team,
the combined forces special enforcement unit.
"Then we'd only end up spending twice as much to arrest them
again when they'd eventually resurface, even more powerful than
before, as they always have before.''
The Caruana family - dubbed the "brokers to the underworld'' by
a mob expert - had been trafficking drugs and laundering money
for 30 years throughout Europe, the United States, Mexico, Italy
and South America, police say. Alfonso Caruana, 54, was the
kingpin behind the operation.
Caruana's operations were smashed by officers from Soave's unit,
which included representatives of the RCMP, Ontario Provincial
Police, Toronto, York and Peel police.
Two Toronto police intelligence officers, Detective Constables
Tony Saldutto and Bill Sciammarella, were "the heart and soul''
of Project Omerta, said Soave.
In April, 1995, Saldutto and Sciammarella monitored a wedding at
the Sutton Place Hotel in downtown Toronto, one whose guest list
seemed to be a "who's who of organized crime,'' said Saldutto.
A year later, police intelligence received a request from Italian
authorities to help find Alfonso Caruana, who they suspected
might be in the city.
Saldutto and Sciammarella decided to review the wedding photos,
and found someone they believed was Caruana. As it turned out, he
was the father of the bride.
They also found a licence plate number, which they traced to a
Woodbridge address. There they found Caruana and his wife living
in a $450,000 home.
Police tapped his home phone, but Caruana never made any calls
there. Instead, surveillance teams followed him seven days a week
as he made calls from 40 to 50 different pay phones over the
two-year long investigation.
The next big breakthrough came Easter weekend, 1997, when the
partners deciphered Caruana's secret code for telephone numbers.
It was based on the high-stakes casino game of baccarat.
Caruana's associates phoned the coded numbers and talked of drug
deals as land deals, plots of land as drugs, money as needed
documents and money launderers as engineers or architects.
"Everybody was aware of these guys, but at the same time anybody
who tried was unsuccessful in trying to get them,'' said RCMP
Staff Sergeant Larry Tronstad, who led Omerta's field operation.
"Either they moved on too quickly . . . or maybe it just became
too damned expensive to try and get them. Sometimes the money
runs out first.''
Omerta funding was so chancy that Soave had to beg for $4,000
from another RCMP unit just to buy a new printer to accommodate
the printout of just one 6,200-page wiretap affidavit - a
printout that took three days.
By January, 1998, six months before the probe wrapped up, the
unit's senior management said they had run out of cash for the
investigation.
"This was so close to what we thought was the end,'' Soave said.
The costs were enormous:
At one point, for one month alone, expenses ran to $100,000,
including wiretaps on about 100 pay phones in Greater Toronto and
other phones in Mexico, Italy and Venezuela, Tronstad said.
It cost another $1.5 million to transcribe the Omerta wiretaps
and translate the 20,000 pages from predominantly Italian and
Spanish into English.
"As a field operation, Omerta was a success. This is the most
important organized crime operation in Canadian history,'' said
Antonio Nicaso, an expert on organized crime who is writing a
book on the Cuntrera-Caruana family.
"But from a proceeds-of-crime point of view, it was a failure.''
Police seized $623,578 worth of jewelry from Caruana, $622,000 in
Canadian funds, $60,000 in U.S. money and $585,000 in U.S.
investment bonds.
"They could possibly have seized millions more if they could
have continued the investigation,'' Nicaso said.
"You have to hit them where it hurts - in their pocketbook.
Otherwise they'll just let other people continue to run their
operations while they spend a few years in jail.''
Omerta took investigators from Canada to Italy, the United
States, Mexico and Panama. But the Omerta team wasn't able to get
a wiretap in the United States, where two of Caruana's associates
were located, Tronstad said.
Now top guns in the RCMP are "spearheading'' an attempt to
streamline operations through legal solutions, said RCMP Chief
Superintendent Freeman Sheppard, head of criminal operations of
Ontario.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks was with the 1997 Shirose and
Campbell court decision, which raised questions about police
immunity in reverse stings, where police pose as suppliers of
drugs.
An RCMP officer, working undercover with a U.S. customs team
laundering money for the Caruanas, was required to stop suddenly
or risk being prosecuted because of that ruling.
In their statement of fact, the Caruanas pleaded guilty to having
trafficked in excess of 7,000 kilos of cocaine. Police seized
only 200 kilos of cocaine in Houston.
"Certainly, the potential was there to get millions more'' in
Caruana assets, Tronstad said.
Later in 1997, undercover investigators were granted a specific
exemption for drug trafficking investigations, but it was too
late to get back in operation with the Caruanas without
endangering the undercover officer's life or compromising the
investigation, Tronstad explained.
May 4, 2000
