Rizzuto crime family boss is killed in Montreal
Exactly one decade ago, Rocco Sollecito was part of a group of six men who seemed untouchable.
The six had been chosen to take charge of the Mafia in
Montreal while its leader, Vito Rizzuto, was incarcerated in the United
States.
Now, following Sollecito’s brazen killing on Friday – in
broad daylight and within sight of Laval police headquarters – only two
of those six men remain alive and they both were recently returned to
federal penitentiaries out of concerns for their safety.
According to police sources, investigators have evidence
that a man, described as being in his 30s and dressed entirely in black,
was waiting at a bus shelter on St-Elzéar Blvd. and opened fire into
the passenger-side window of Sollecito’s white BMW sport utility vehicle
when it stopped at a stop sign at around 8:30 a.m. Several shots were
fired into the vehicle and Sollecito, who was alone inside the SUV, was
declared dead after being taken to a hospital.
The
shooter appeared to know Sollecito’s morning routine, one source said,
adding that, besides the shooter, investigators were also trying to
track down the driver of a vehicle that moments after the shooting
appeared to slow down as it approached Sollecito’s SUV and then
continued on in the same direction the shooter is believed to have fled
on foot.
Everything changed for Sollecito and those five other men
in November 2006, when they were the main players arrested in Project
Colisée, a Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit investigation that
struck at the very heart of the Rizzuto organization. All six men
eventually pleaded guilty to various charges in Colisée and received
sentences of varying lengths. The investigation, coupled with Vito
Rizzuto’s absence, left the organization in a weakened state.
The first of the six to go was Vito Rizzuto’s brother-in-law, Paolo
Renda, 70, who was abducted off a street in May 2010, near his home in
northern Montreal, by men who appeared to be pretending to be
plainclothes police officers. Renda has never been seen since and, in
2013, his family sought to have him declared dead in court.
Six months after Renda was abducted, Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo "Zio Cola: Rizzuto, 86, was killed in his home on Nov. 10, 2010.
On March 1 of this year, Lorenzo "Skunk" Giordano, 52, one
of the younger members of that six-person committee, was fatally shot
in Laval, not far from where Sollecito’s slaying was carried out on
Friday.
Giordano had only recently reached his statutory release date on the 15-year prison term he received as a result of Colisée.
The other two men who were part of that group back in 2006
who have survived are Giordano’s close friend, Francesco "Chit" Del
Balso, 46, and Francesco Arcadi, 62, a close lieutenant to Vito Rizzuto
for years before Rizzuto died of natural causes in 2013. Both received
sentences similar to Giordano’s and were released earlier this year when
they also reached their statutory release dates. Following Giordano’s
murder, both men were returned to federal penitentiaries out of concern
for their safety.
Sollecito received a much shorter sentence than Arcadi,
Del Balso and Giordano, in part, because the evidence gathered in
Colisée indicated he apparently steered away from the large-scale drug
trafficking schemes the other men were involved in.
Sollecito’s expertise was in bookmaking. On Sept. 24,
2004, with the Colisée investigation well underway, police secretly
recorded a very revealing conversation between Giordano and Sollecito
inside the Mafia’s headquarters, a café in St-Léonard. They were
lamenting how the long summer had deprived their bookmaking operation of
NHL games and they were eagerly awaiting the upcoming new season.
According to a summary of the conversation that was later
presented as evidence in court, Giordano longed for the NHL season
because of its steady stream of games offered on a nightly basis.
Sollecito was recorded as saying that with hockey their bookmaking
operation “never loses.”
During another conversation recorded inside the café on
May 23, 2005, Sollecito explained how the committee worked to a Mafioso
who was visiting from Italy. Traditionally, a Mafia clan operates with
one leader and the visitor from Italy couldn’t figure out why the senior
leaders; Sollecito, Nicolo Rizzuto, Arcadi and Renda, were splitting
their profits evenly, with a fifth share going to Vito Rizzuto even if
he was behind bars in the U.S.
“How do you see this? What do you think?,” the man from Italy asked Sollecito at one point.
“You have to look at it from the right side because we are
splitting it in five and it is right that we split. You are coming from
the other side (Italy) so therefore you are entitled to your opinion,
the way you see it,” Sollecito said
Renda’s abduction and Nicolo Rizzuto’s slaying in 2010
were the clearest signs the Rizzuto organization was under attack from a
group, led by Salvatore Montagna, a now-deceased mob boss from New
York, that tried to take control of the Mafia in Montreal.
While some people very close to the Rizzutos apparently
betrayed the organization Sollecito remained loyal throughout the
conflict. In 2012, a few police sources speculated that it was
Sollecito’s leadership that held the organization together before Vito
Rizzuto returned from the U.S. in October of that year.
That loyalty was apparently rewarded when a new six-member
committee was reportedly assembled after Rizzuto died of natural
causes. Both Sollecito and one of his sons, Stefano, 48, were reportedly
named as members of the new committee.
In November, the younger Sollecito was identified as a
leader in the organization by the Sûreté du Québec when he and Rizzuto’s
son, Leonardo, 46, were arrested in an investigation into drug
trafficking. While the younger Sollecito was under investigation he was
advised by the police that they had credible information that his life
was in danger.
On Friday, Lt. Jason Allard, a spokesperson for the SQ,
said it was too early in the investigation to begin discussing possible
motives behind the shooting. He also cautioned that it was too early to
say with certainty whether Sollecito was killed by only one gunman or
how many shots were actually fired.
As he made the comments investigators and crime scene
technicians were combing over St-Elzéar Blvd. looking for evidence and
witnesses and slowly working their way back to Sollecito’s SUV.
Allard said the SQ will wait until a coroner has examined
the body before the provincial police can confirm the victim was
Sollecito. But he could confirm that the victim “was 67 years old and
had ties to organized crime.”
The investigation was taken over by the SQ because of the
organized crime element but, Allard said, “that means we work along with
the municipal (Laval) police in the investigation. They know the area.
It’s their investigators who will know what might have been going on.
They will know the lay of the land.”
http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/alleged-mafia-member-rocco-sollecito-gunned-down-in-laval
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