The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto

I just received an email from Amazon.com that my copy has been shipped and will arrive around 31 August.

Attention News Editors, Crime and Justice Desks:

Rizzuto biographers available to comment on extradition of Canada's reputed Mafia boss to New York
TORONTO, Aug. 17 /CNW/ - Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys, authors of the
just-released book The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and
the Rise of Vito Rizzuto, are available to comment on today's decision by The
Supreme Court of Canada that clears the way for reputed Montreal Mafia boss
Vito Rizzuto to face gangland murder charges in the United States.
Rizzuto is alleged to have been the lead gunman who carried out the
May 5, 1981 murders of three leaders of the Bonanno crime family in New York.
The mobsters were ambushed after being lured to a meeting at a social club in
Brooklyn, New York.
"The man who has earned a reputation as Canada's 'Teflon Don'-someone to
whom charges never stick-seems to have run out of options in his bid to avoid
facing American justice. The biggest name in Canadian crime has never faced
such a daunting legal challenge," said Humphreys.
"The Rizzuto name has been in the background of virtually every
significant drug investigation in the United States for several decades, and
now the American justice system will be able to put a face to the name," said
Lamothe.
In their new book, Lamothe and Humphreys chronicle a 40-year war by the
Montreal family to become the world's wealthiest and most influential Mafia
clan - a "perfect" Mafia that has now eclipsed the Five Families of New York
and the clans of Sicily.
This dramatic, major new work also reveals for the first time the hidden
history of Vito Rizzuto, the reputed head of "the Sixth Family," who is also a
wanted man in Italy (after a $6-billion public works scandal). He has been
fighting to stay in Canada, where he and his organization remain the top
criminal targets for the RCMP.

Lee Lamothe is the author of the best-selling Bloodlines: The Rise and
Fall of the Mafia's Royal Family, Global Mafia, and the recently released
Angels, Mobsters and Narco-Terrorists: The Rising Menace of Global Criminal
Empires; and The Last Thief, a novel about the Russian Mafia. As a journalist
and writer, he has covered organized crime across North America, Mexico,
Europe, South America and Asia.

Adrian Humphreys covers organized crime for the National Post and is
author of The Enforcer, the best-selling biography of Johnny "Pops" Papalia,
one of North America's longest-reigning Mafia bosses. He is the principal
consultant for History Television's popular crime series "Mob Stories"; has
had his exposés turned into movies; and written on crime for the Chicago
Sun-Times, Britain's Daily Telegraph and Reader's Digest.



For further information: To arrange an interview please contact Pat
Cairns, (905) 569-0002

A terrific read if you want to learn about how lax/inept Canada is when it comes to organized crime.

The big players love it up here.

This was posted by Cheech on The Real Deal Forum VIP Lounge:

Posted by Cheech on 11/18/2006, 3:54 pm
User logged in as: Cheech
Lee Lamothe can sympathize with police. The veteran crime writer and co-author of The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto spent a year and a half trying to get a sense of Vito Rizzuto, the reputed Montreal mobster and head of a global criminal enterprise. And while he and National Post crime reporter Adrian Humphreys have written a fascinating book, which turns many assumptions about the mob on their heads, he admits to being frustrated that he was never able to establish a sense of Rizzuto the man—much as Canadian, American and European law enforcement officials had spent decades trying to nail Rizzuto as the head of one of the world’s largest and most successful heroin and cocaine traffickers, without success.

“That’s the major weakness of the book,” he says from his Toronto home. Perhaps—but perhaps he’s being too harsh. The Sixth Family is a riveting read for anyone who’s interested in organized crime and has a sense of Montreal pride. It was in Montreal, say Lamothe and Humphreys, that Rizzuto built what was originally an outpost of the New York Bonanno family into a massive empire spanning continents, cultures and crimes. The Rizzutos, they say, eclipsed the parochial confines of New York’s gangsters, and eventually called the tune to which the Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, Colombo and Genovese families danced.

Farm to arm

It’s a daring assertion. From The Godfather to Goodfellas to The Sopranos (which, rumour has it, will feature a strong Montreal connection in the upcoming episodes this March), not to mention countless other books, films and TV shows, the supremacy of the New York mafia captured the imagination of those outside lives of crime and law enforcement. But the reality, says Lamothe, is somewhat different. Thanks to the Rizzutos’ close connection to a particular town in western Sicily, Cattolica Eraclea, and through bonds formed by marriage and blood, they became the prime importers of heroin into North America. From the processing labs in Sicily through the porous ports of Montreal to the streets of New York and other cities—“From farm to arm,” says Lamothe—the Rizzutos controlled almost every aspect of the North American heroin trade, and were soon awash in money. And money means power.

“When we talked to our law enforcement sources in the States about our theory, they laughed,” says Lamothe. “But then they started figuring it out. Because they controlled drug trafficking, the Rizzutos were able to determine the leadership in the U.S. families simply by supplying the drugs.”

According to the book, various mobsters confirmed that whoever controlled Montreal controlled the turnkey to vast drug-fuelled riches. The theory, says Lamothe, “re-analyzes almost 40 years of underworld activity.”

Until recently, Rizzuto was the last high-profile mafioso still at large. The heads of the Five Families are either in jail or, in one stunning development, turned informant. Rizzuto’s unassailable position as one of the most powerful criminals in the world, however, came crashing down thanks to a crime committed over two decades ago, and became the stuff of gangster lore.

Omèrta at work

In May, 1981, three Bonanno captains on the losing end of a family power struggle were gunned down in the basement of a Brooklyn social club, and their bodies were buried in a shallow grave near JFK airport. The book alleges that Rizzuto, then 35, was the lead gunman. It was to face murder charges, not drug trafficking, that he was extradited to the U.S. from Canada last August.

Canadian authorities had tried to convict Rizzuto before. He’d beaten several drug-smuggling charges, thanks largely to law enforcement bungling. “We didn’t find any systemic corruption,” says Lamothe. There was no need: He says Canada’s relatively weak laws against organized crime didn’t necessitate the mob buying off cops or judges.

As eye-opening as much of the book is though, Rizzuto himself remains enigmatic. Lamothe says he was stymied when trying to get a sense of who Rizzuto was because, firstly, he was extremely cautious, and second, everyone close to him is related, and none of them would open up. “No one ever got violent, but we were told very firmly that they didn’t want to talk,” he says. “We know he was polite, and that he was a good tipper.” He also dressed well. And that’s about it. While other mobsters routinely broke their vows of omèrta (silence), no one close to Rizzuto turned pigeon.

“It was a real problem,” says Lamothe. “There were no surveillance transcripts of him talking. We had one transcript, where he said 10 or 15 words, out of the 1,000 or so transcripts we’d looked at.”

you go that right. Especially the biker mafia

Accordin to Lamothe:

"The natural leadership floats to the top without an election or any input from anybody outside the family," Lamothe said from Toronto, describing a leadership structure closer to a cult than the traditional pyramid."

Where does Lamothe gets that from?

Is the Montreal Mafia a crew in the Bonnano Family under a Capo?

A Family/Cosche with their own Boss, Underboss, etc?

Or a group of gangsters with a lot of connections around the world, who at the same happens to be in family with each other through blood or marriages?

All the writers, the so called experts, never agree on how the Montreal Mafia is organized, which is one reason why it is so interesting.

What do all of you think?

Greetings Peter

p.s. I haven't read the book

Yes, we have no Bonnanos

K. G. E. (CHUCK) KONKEL

The Sixth Family:
The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto

By Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys
Wiley, 386 pages, $34.99

Court file 03.CR-1382 rests somewhere in the secure bowels of the Federal Justice Building in Brooklyn. In detached detail, it outlines events surrounding the 1981 New York murders of three captains in the Bonnano crime family. Among the dead was George Sciascia. The accused is Vito Rizzuto. Both are from Montreal. The Sixth Family is Rizzuto's story, and that of his criminal organization.

Until very recently, five crime families controlled the Big Apple. After a concerted effort by U.S. law enforcement, by 2000, four of the organizations were rudderless, their bosses languishing in jail. In New York, the Mafia leader was fast becoming an endangered species On July 30, 2004, Joe Massino, Bonnano family don and the last of the Mafia mob heads, was found guilty of seven gangland murders. Facing the death penalty, he co-operated with the U.S. District Attorney.

As a consequence, on Oct. 4, 2004, detectives, cadaver-sniffing dogs and earth-moving equipment descended on a vacant lot in Queens to dig for human parts. After weeks of probing, the soil reluctantly gurgled up three grizzled remains; one was identified as George Sciascia.

On June 23, 2005, in a hushed courtroom, Massino -- in an admission decried by his family as breaking the code of honour -- publicly declared he'd given the order to kill "George from Canada."

Soon, Joseph Massino will become the star witness for the U.S. government in the trial of Vito Rizzuto, head of the Rizzuto crime family, who was recently extradited to the United States. The charge will be the murder of the three Mafia capos, and the trial will garner international headlines. This alone makes The Sixth Family incredibly timely.

But the book is much more. It is a Machiavellian mystery tour of the mob underworld, from its contemporary foundation in southern Europe to its current North American state of disarray.

The authors, Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys, are respected journalists with impeccable credentials and equally unimpeachable sources. Their reference index is as meticulous as that kept by the Senate Commission on Organized Crime.

Television series with Mafia bosses under therapy and suffering from guilt complexes do little to inspire fear in the community. But rest assured, mob reality is far different.

In The Sixth Family, opponents are whacked with numbing regularity, and go to their deaths with blood-curdling flamboyance, or silently, with the grim resignation of the doomed. In one case, an unfortunate is crudely cut in half, covered in glue and lime, and stuffed into several oil drums. Another is shot point blank in the back of the head, his brains splattering the inside of the car.

Yet there is humour, even here on the doorstep of Hell. Mobsters have nicknames that cry for Central Casting: Quack Quack, Louie Ha-Ha, Big Trinny, The Chin. One mob boss, ever the fearful husband, offers to bribe investigators so he'll be arrested anywhere but in the company of his mistress. An FBI agent sheepishly confronts a surveillance subject to reclaim an expensive bug after it is discovered by the mobster. (He gets it back.) The Rizzutos, after becoming involved in the lucrative smuggling of Persian carpets into the United States, joke that they have become "rug mules" and members of a "rug cartel."

A long-dead mobster once stated with genuine sincerity, if not fluency: "Like an American kid falls in love with baseball, I fell in love with Mafia. . . . A Man of Honour no go around stealing and killing for money. A Man of Honour, he kills for some reason, to help people." That mobster killed 13 in his quest to make the world a better place.

Yet, in the end, it is not honour that makes the mob world go round. It is all about making money, any way they can. The Sixth Family thoroughly explains that reality. Swiss bank practices are outlined in a remarkable chapter which deftly shows the flow of laundered money from the Rizzutos and others to the gnomes of Zurich; in this case, Lugano, a city with one of the highest banks-per-capita rates in the world, more than twice that of Zurich.

Equally crucial to mob efficiency is the interplay between geopolitics, security and drugs, as is the case when the Rizzuto clan cozies up to the one-time president of Lebanon and Christian Falangist militias in a deal to exchange guns for drugs, and, more recently, with selected Venezuelan authorities, to ensure unfettered cocaine smuggling from Columbia through Venezuela and thence to North America.

Readers will learn how cost overruns at Montreal's Olympic Village were mob influenced, and how the Rizzutos tendered for the recent bridge contract linking Sicily to the Italian mainland -- allegedly financing the tender with laundered money.

And before the guardians of the Thin Blue Line smile too smugly from their comfortable doughnut counters, there is the Montreal-based RCMP sting operation to tap into laundered money, which was far too successful (for the crooks), being overwhelmed by a deluge of shady deposits that the RCMP had no means of tracing. And specific instances when the Mob guys call on "their little cousins on the inside" to inform on secret police operations.

That is not to say The Sixth Family is without faults. Some of the text reads like poorly disguised police surveillance notes, complete with superfluous descriptions of vehicle types and suspect clothing. Lists of gang members playing no part in the furtherance of the theme pop up here and there and only confuse the reader.

More critically, one could plausibly argue against the major premise of the book: that the Rizzuto family is, in fact, North America's sixth mob family, rather than a Canadian branch plant of the Bonnanos, one of the American five. And one could also challenge the statement that the Rizzutos are as powerful as Triads, the Russian mafia or the Japanese yakuza. No one strain of evil overrides evil in its totality.

But all this, frankly, is like a group of biologists splitting hairs over the nomenclature of a deadly virus. Ultimately, exposure to it will prove lethal. The Sixth Family is about life and death and the foul business of the mob, in all its unparalleled and emotionally draining horror. It is essential reading, not only in the context of the looming Rizzuto murder trial, but for anyone concerned about the intrusion of traditional organized crime into every facet of our society.

Wiseguys want you to "fuhgedaboutit," to let it all "sleep with the fishes." But, no, Tony, this ain't The Sopranos and the truths exposed in this book aren't going away.

Ciao . . . for now.

K. G. E. (Chuck) Konkel is a Canadian police officer who served in the Royal Hong Kong Police. He has written two novels, Glorious East Wind, set in Hong Kong, and Evil Never Sleeps. He is at work on his third novel.

How does the Rizzuto Family operate with The Siculianas? being they`re "Canadian Families"?

Some may already be aware that the paper edition of The Sixth Family: The Collapse of the New York Mafia and the Rise of Vito Rizzuto is now available in North American bookstores and can also be ordered online.

The hardback of the book, which came out in 2006, is 416 pages. The new "paperback" weighs in at 432 pages. I browsed through the paper edition at a bookstore this past weekend. (I did not buy the book.) I noticed there were more photographs. The paperback also describes events affecting the Rizzuto organization that transpired after the publication of the book: the sweep by the RCMP in November 2006, the developments in Vito Rizzuto's case and his eventual guilty plea, sentencing, etc., and even the arrests of members of the Rizzuto crime family in Italy last October 23. The prices listed on the jacket of the book are $21.95 Canadian and $19.95 US. I have not checked what the prices of the book are online.

if your a member of the barnes and nobles book club you can get it cheaper tehn list price.....i know for a fact a book that costs 7.99 will be 7.19( either way you bought it: on line or at the store).

The short item below can be found at

http://www.agrigentonotizie.it/notizie/leg...-cattolica.html

Canada, appassiona la saga dei Rizzuto di Cattolica
di Calogero Giuffrida

In breve - Cattolica Eraclea - 06/03/2008

Continua ad appassionare autori e opinione pubblica, in Canada, la saga dei Rizzuto. Un nuovo libro, "Rizzuto, ascesa e caduta di un padrino", di Lee Lamothe e Adrian Humphreys, pubblicato dall'Editions Carré, ricostruisce la storia della famiglia mafiosa italo-canadese originaria di Cattolica Eraclea.

Il libro inchiesta, si legge in copertina, contiene "materiale inedito" e gli aggiornamenti sulle ultime operazioni di polizia che avrebbero "decapitato", anche in Italia, il clan Rizzuto (operazioni "Colosseo", "Orso Bruno" e "Ponte dello Stretto"). Gli autori sono stati già denunciati per diffamazione dai figli di Vito Rizzuto, entrambi avvocati, che hanno chiesto 700 mila dollari di risarcimento danni per le ipotesi di un loro coinvolgimento negli affari del padre contenute nel precedente bestseller "La sesta famiglia".

"Ma tutto quello che è scritto nel libro - ha detto l'editore Julien Béliveau - è dimostrato ed è materiale che proviene da fonti di polizia. Per la prima volta – ha aggiunto - questo libro dimostra che i Rizzuto sono una famiglia vera e propria, e non solo un ramo di una delle famiglie di New York".

Notizia stampata dal sito http://www.agrigentonotizie.it/ il 12/03/2008 alle 13:45:19

great read.

i plan on buying by the end of next week when i should have finished Gomorrah by then

Started to read it but couldn't finish it, boring and jumping too much in my opinion. Might have something to do with that there is not much new, that the writers/police don't know all about the Montreal crew, and that the writers are journalists.

But for those of you who have read the book.

Do they write about when Vito was made? Do they know?

After Cotroni who was boss of the Montreal crew? And who is now?

Looking forward hearing from all.

When Paolo Violi was caught on wiretaps, the Rizzuto's who were in south america at the time thought it was a good time for Violi to be whacked so they went to the Bonnano administration and they sanctioned the hit, after that Cotroni was boss in name only, they didnt kill him because the rizzutos respected him more than they did Violi. When the bonnanos sanctioned the hit on Violi they had to do a favor for them after that, the favor was killing those 3 captains in 1981 which Vito was charged with and convicted.