Free The Sixth Family by Lee Lamothe Page A

men, despite their neat short hair, suit jackets and expensive clothing, still looked like tough customers and, far more alarming, three .32-caliber handguns were clearly visible on the car seats. The men were arrested and additional police officers soon arrived, as did a second car full of civilians who were likewise asked to get out of their vehicle. When a starter pistol was found under the seat of their car, the four new arrivals were also arrested.

    At a Montreal police station, the seven men stood about impatiently, smoking cigars and asking that the proceedings be moved along more quickly. Police were taking their time, however, because of the unusual cast of characters before them and the many questions they had for them. Most of the officers were personally familiar with only one man in the group: Luigi Greco, whom they knew as a local hoodlum whose fortunes in the underworld had been soaring of late. The remaining men were all American. Wearing a casual and slightly wrinkled dress shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and black pants, Bill Bonanno towered over Greco. With them were Vito DeFillipo and his son, Patrick DeFillipo. Patrick, who became known to fellow gangsters as “Patty from the Bronx,” would go on, more than 30 years later, to orchestrate the execution of one of the key members of the Sixth Family, a rare attack on the clan. Peter Magaddino, of Brooklyn, Joe Bonanno’s cousin and close ally, was also identified by police. He wore a suit almost identical to Patty DeFillipo’s but filled it out considerably more, in all the wrong places. Also identified by police were Carlo “Buddy” Simaro, of New Jersey, and Peter Notaro, of New York, both Bonanno bodyguards. (Notaro later joined Joe Bonanno when he was deposed and went into exile in Arizona.) Bill Bonanno recently said he came to Canada with the soldiers who remained closest to his father, Joseph, during an acrimonious split within the organization in New York.

    “They were loyal to us. Patty was there with his father, Vito DeFillipo. Vito DeFillipo was one of our closest confidants. He was very loyal to us,” said Bonanno.

    Had the approach by the constables been accidental, the officers would likely have been stunned to find Bill Bonanno and his cronies in Montreal. It was, however, part of an extensive police surveillance operation. Throughout the day, investigators had secretly watched as the men met with Vic Cotroni, Paolo Violi, who was Cotroni’s favored young gangster in Montreal, and Giacomo Luppino. Luppino was an old boss of the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia organization originally formed in Calabria, the southern part of mainland Italy, who had moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and had recently become Violi’s father-in-law. Police had seen Bill Bonanno, with Notaro and Cotroni, in a shopping plaza making dozens of telephone calls, one after another, from a public pay phone. In police custody, however, they were far less talkative. Grilled by detectives about drugs and illegal immigrant smuggling, gambling and extortion, the mobsters feigned ignorance of it all. They had only come to Canada, they insisted, to attend a wedding.

    In a way, they were not lying. It was a wedding that had drawn them across the border and it was their own paranoia and precarious situation in New York that had prompted the Bonanno men to so heavily arm themselves. But in the world of the Mafia, social engagements and criminal business blur into one impenetrable mix.

    Two days earlier, on November 26, 1966, a half-day’s drive to the west of Montreal, Vito Rizzuto was married in an elegant ceremony in Toronto. It was part of a thoughtful reorganization of Vito’s life that suggests he was starting to take his role in the Sixth Family more seriously. This was two years before his botched arson at the barbershop but two months after he obtained his Canadian citizenship; on September 27, 1966, he had been granted government certificate #947663, allowing him all the