The Rizzuto™ {BMOTD/MVC} on RolePlayer.me -
www.roleplayer.me/TheRizzutos The Rizzuto™ {BMOTD/MVC}
Multiple Roles/Characters. Rizzuto Mafia Pride. The history of two generations of crime, both commanded the most powerful and merciless crime organization in the world, both men created the most powerful mafia hybrid family history has ever known.
Who I'd like to meet: Rizzuto crime family
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Rizzuto crime familyFounded 1970s
Founded by Nicolo Rizzuto
Founding location Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Years active 1970s–present
Territory Greater Montreal and the province of Quebec and Ontario; Venezuela
Ethnicity People of Italian descent as "made men", and other ethnicities as "associates"
Criminal activities Drug trafficking, illegal gambling, murder, loan sharking, extortion, racketeering, weapons trafficking
Allies Bonanno crime family
Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan
West End Gang
Hells Angels
Musitano crime family
Rivals Siderno Group
Cotroni crime family
Commisso 'ndrina
The Rizzuto crime family (Italian: [ritˈtsuːto]) is an organized crime family based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, whose criminal activity covers most of southern Quebec and Ontario.[1] The FBI considers the Rizzuto family a faction of the Bonanno crime family,[1] while Canadian law enforcement consider it an independent crime family. They are sometimes referred to as the Sixth Family.[1]
Sicilian immigrant from Cattolica Eraclea, Nicolo Rizzuto established the organization in the 1970s as part of the Sicilian faction of the Montreal Cotroni crime family. An internal war broke out by the late 1970s which resulted in the death of acting captain Paolo Violi and his brothers, allowing the Rizzutos to overtake the Cotronis as the preeminent crime family in Montreal.
Nicolo's son Vito Rizzuto was indicted in 2004 and imprisoned from 2007 until 2012 for murders in which he participated in 1981, causing a power struggle among criminals in Montreal. During Vito's imprisonment, his son Nicolo Jr. was killed in 2009, and Nicolo Sr. was shot by a sniper while in his home in 2010. Upon Vito's release, several people were killed in what was suspected to be retaliation for the murders of his family. Vito died of natural causes in 2013, and the head of the Mafia in Montreal is now assumed to be his son Leonardo.[2]
Overtaking the Cotroni family
Nicolo Rizzuto married Libertina Manno during the early 1940s, the daughter of a Sicilian Mafia leader, Antonio Manno.[3] Rizzuto emigrated from Sicily with his family to Montreal in 1954.[4]
In the 1970s, Rizzuto was an underling in the Sicilian faction, led by Luigi Greco until his death in 1972,[5][6] of the Calabrian Cotroni crime family. As tension then grew into a power struggle between the Calabrian and Sicilian factions of the family, a mob war began in 1973.[7] In 1977, Rizzuto and Cotroni capodecina Paolo Violi met face-to-face in the home of a Montreal resident for a last-ditch effort to resolve their differences, according to a police report. But the peace talks failed, and most of the Rizzuto family fled to Venezuela.[8] This led to a violent Mafia war in Montreal which resulted in the deaths of Violi and his brothers, along with others, spanning the mid-1970s to the early 1980s until the war ceased.[8] Antonio Manno's son Domenico was also instrumental in Violi's murder.[9] He received a seven-year sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to kill Violi;[9] Rizzuto confidant Agostino Cuntrera received a five-year sentence in relation to Violi's murder.[10] By the mid 1980s, the Rizzuto crime family emerged as Montreal's pre-eminent crime family after the turf war.[1]
Nicolo's son, Vito, later followed him into the Mafia. He kept a low profile, working only with trusted people close to the family. They worked with the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan,[11] Colombian and Venezuelan drug cartels, and the Bonanno crime family in New York City. Gerlando Sciascia was a Bonanno caporegime that served as a representative for the Rizzutos.[12] Rizzuto was the mediator who oversaw the peace among the Hells Angels, the Mafia, street gangs, Colombian cartels, and the Irish mobs such as the West End Gang.[13][14]
Canadian Mafia journalists Lee Lamothe and Adrian Humphreys dubbed the Rizzuto clan the Sixth Family to describe them on an equal footing with the Five Families of Cosa Nostra in New York. According to the book The Sixth Family:
By 2003, the Rizzuto organization was variously listed in FBI and DEA files as merely 'the Canadian crew of the Bonanno Family' or the 'Montreal faction of the Bonannos.' The reality is far different. The territory under its control is huge—more than a million square miles of Quebec and Ontario directly fall under its influence, an area larger than one-quarter the size of the entire United States. It includes major cities, the busiest border crossings between the U.S. and Canada, and many mature Mafia clans that are, by and large, cooperating under the Sixth Family's banner. Where American Mafia bosses controlled criminal activity in portions of a city or a New York borough or the criminal activity in an industrial or commercial sector—such as construction or New York's garment district—the Sixth Family was an enterprise with a true global reach. The Sixth Family had outpaced any crew in the Bonanno Family and, indeed, man-for-man, dollar-for-dollar, had eclipsed the family as a whole. ... 'The nucleus of the Montreal-based Sicilian Mafia ... (comprises) hundreds of soldiers and associates,' says a Canadian police report drafted in 2004. Those who merely do business with the Sixth Family or work with them in short-term ventures are not included in this. Neither, generally, are the businessmen who do mostly non-criminal favors for the organization.[15]
