The Sicilian Connection

How Sicily’s mobsters took over organized crime in the Americas.

By Jim Barry / Philadelphia City Paper 

One night, Antonio Nicaso heard two men doing something to his car. He turned on the outside light and the men fled. When police arrived they found traces of dynamite and wires for a bomb.

Nicaso was a journalist in Sicily who covered the Mafia. The police told him that the Mafia tried to blow up his car. They gave him armed bodyguards. Then the Mafia sent Nicaso a warning letter, and Nicaso took his family and left the country.

"This mouth is for eating," is the standard reply of most Sicilians when asked about the Mafia. But Nicaso is different. He has always been intent on documenting the bloody history of the island’s crime clans. Nicaso went first to the U.S. and then to Canada, where he settled near Toronto. He went on to write numerous books about Sicilian organized crime.

His latest, Bloodlines, was published in Canada earlier this year. Nicaso has some interesting things to say about the Sicilian Mafia and Sicilian Mafioso from Montreal to Philadelphia. In a recent interview in Toronto, Nicaso explained why the Sicilian Mafia is still the strongest organized crime group in the world. Nicaso pointed out that both the Montreal and Ontario Mafias had been taken over by the Sicilian mob. In the 1970s, the La Cosa Nostra crime family in Montreal was really an extension of the Bonanno mob in New York City. But when the Sicilian mob decided that Montreal would be the perfect place to smuggle in their heroin, they moved to overthrow the leadership of the Montreal mob.

A Sicilian gunman, working with a rival faction of the Montreal Mafia, murdered Paul Violi, the acting boss. At the same time, Sicilians set up headquarters in Montreal and began to work closely with their allies in the local crime family — now headed by a Sicilian Canadian who was also a close friend of the men from Sicily.

This Sicilian crime family — sometimes known as the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia and sometimes as the Siculiana crime family for the town of Siculiana in western Sicily, where most of its members were born and raised — proceeded to set up an international drug trafficking organization that operated in Sicily, Western Europe, Venezuela and Canada.

In Canada in 1997, the Sicilians struck again. The La Cosa Nostra based in Hamilton and Toronto had a long relationship with the Buffalo New York crime family. So the Sicilians backed a rival who had the Toronto crime bosses gunned down. "For decades the Canadian LCN groups were appendages of the American mob," Nicaso said. "But with the help of the Sicilian Mafia, the Canadian crime families declared their independence from the American La Cosa Nostra. For the Canadian gangsters, it was a mob war for independence from the U.S. underworld."

Once the Sicilian mob in Canada had consolidated their power, they set up a mechanism called "the Consortium." It was like an governing body for the underworld. It formalized alliances among the various criminal organizations and settled their disputes according to Nicaso. "The Consortium is made up of the Mafia bosses in Canada, as well as the president of the Hells Angels, Russian mob leaders, the head of the West End mob, which is an Irish gang, and the Colombian cartels," Nicaso explained. "They work out who has what territories for drug distribution, and they fix the price of the drugs. Sometimes they arbitrate disputes between rival gangs."

Nicaso has studied the Mafia not just in Canada but its operations all over the world. He followed the recent mob trial of Joey Merlino in Philadelphia. And in the mid-1990s, when Sicilian John Stanfa, then boss of the Philly La Cosa Nostra, went on trial, Nicaso met with the prosecutors in that case. "There have been cases where Sicilian Mafia has actually taken over an American crime family.

One example is when Sicilian Mafioso Salvatore Catalano, took control of the Bonanno crime family in New York." Catalano was murdered eventually by the Italian-American faction of the Bonanno crime family which resented the Sicilian influence over their mob.

In a recent interview with City Paper, one of Joey Merlino’s associates said that the mob war between Stanfa and Merlino in the early ’90s, was partially a battle to keep the "zips [Sicilians] from taking the control of the mob from Merlino and his friends." Police sources claim that Stanfa had blood relatives who were members of Mafia crime families in Sicily. And just as the Sicilian mob once tried to murder journalist Antonio Nicaso, Stanfa once plotted to kill George Anastasia, an Inquirer reporter who covers the local mob.

"Stanfa was old world Sicilian," the mob insider said. "He was bringing over guys from Sicily who nobody knew and making them [initiating them into the crime family]. Stanfa was sneaky. He only trusted his own kind. And he was greedy. He only wanted to share with his Sicilians friends."

"He tried to kill us, and we tried to kill him," said the Merlino associate. "I don’t like Stanfa but I admire him now. He’s one stand-up motherfucker. He’ll be in prison until they carry him out in a coffin, but he won’t rat on anybody. It’s funny, right? Our boss, Ralph Natale turned out to be a fraud and a rat. Our enemy, John Stanfa, turned out to be 100 percent gangster."

October 18–25, 2001