Vito Rizzuto - the most powerful Mafia boss Canada has ever known - dead at '67

Vito Rizzuto, the reputed head of the Montreal Mafia who built a powerful criminal organization with international tentacles, died in hospital Monday.

Rizzuto, 67, passed away of natural causes, said Maude Hebert-Chaput of Montreal’s Sacre-Coeur Hospital.
His death raises questions about the future of the Rizzuto clan’s decades-old empire, which was crippled by his 2006 extradition to the United States.

Rizzuto was arrested by Canadian authorities in 2004 and extradited two years later to the U.S., where he was convicted for his role in the 1981 murder of three Bonanno crime-family members in New York City.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, minus time served while awaiting extradition.

Following his October 2012 release, Rizzuto returned to Canada to a group of family and friends whose ranks had thinned considerably.

The Rizzuto family had sustained damage in 2006 following Operation Colisee, a five-year police investigation that culminated in mass arrests in the largest sweep against the Italian Mafia in Canadian history.

Rizzuto’s eldest son, Nicolo Jr., was killed in broad daylight in December 2009. That brazen daytime shooting would set off a spate of killings and disappearances targeting some of Rizzuto’s closest allies and associates.

Paolo Renda, Rizzuto’s brother-in-law and the consigliere of the clan, disappeared in May 2010, vanishing from near his luxury home in north-end Montreal. Family members found his car but no trace of Renda, who has not been heard from since.

A well-known Rizzuto ally, Agostino Cuntrera, 66, was gunned down in front of his food-distribution business in June 2010.

In November of 2010, Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo Sr., was shot and killed as he prepared to sit down to dinner with his wife and daughter. The elder Rizzuto, 86, was gunned down with a sniper’s bullet through the window in his own mansion, near Vito’s home.

A year later, a man police believe was making a play for the leadership of Rizzuto’s old network met his own demise. Salvatore Montagna, a Canadian who was named by U.S. authorities as a former head of New York’s notorious Bonanno family, was gunned down near the banks of a river near Montreal.

Six people were arrested in connection with Montagna’s slaying including Raynald Desjardins, a former Rizzuto confidant once described as his right-hand man.

Rizzuto’s criminal empire stretched from South America to Europe.

In 2005, Italian prosecutors filed charges against Rizzuto over allegations that the Mafia was involved in the building of a multibillion-dollar bridge linking mainland Italy to Sicily.

That bridge was to be one of that country’s largest-ever public works projects — a dream of myriad people in that region that had gone unfulfilled since the early days of the Roman Empire.