Virgin Mary, Espresso, And A Bullet Hole In The Window: The Rizzuto Crime Scene

A single bullet hole through the window. White chairs arranged in the sunroom with a serene view onto the backyard bushes. And a statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms outstretched.

 

This is where Nicolo Rizzuto met his end.

Evidence at the crime scene supports the theory, cited in news reports, that a gunshot through the window brought down a Mafia don who once lorded over the underworld with powerful international ties.

The decision to kill him in his own home, with his wife and daughter nearby, was interpreted as an intentional deviation from the Italian Mafia’s standard modus operandi for murder.

“It’s out of the ordinary,” said Pierre de Champlain, a retired RCMP organized-crime analyst and author.

“In the Sicilian Mafia, when we want to kill a leader, usually it’s done in public and face-to-face. It’s never done in the house and even less often with family members present.

“It denotes to me that Nicolo Rizzuto had really become a disgrace in the eyes of the Montreal Mafia.”

Getting onto Rizzuto’s property would have been easy. There is no backyard fence.

But with security cameras protruding from every corner of the red-brick home, there would have been only one way for a gunman to make his way onto the property unnoticed.

By hiding in the bushes, 15 metres from the window.

Police were combing the area Thursday, one day after Rizzuto was felled in the cozy living area by an assassin’s bullet.

By mid-afternoon, however, the police tape was gone and life appeared again to be normal — at least from the outside — on the street dubbed “Mafia Row.” The only outward sign of turmoil was the dozens of visitors filing in to pay their respects at a neighbouring home, one of several houses on the street belonging to the Rizzuto clan.

The 86-year-old don spent his final moments in the comfy back room, with the half-dozen windows looking onto the yard.

On Thursday, there were still three chairs resting against the windows, an espresso-maker on the nearby counter, and a religious statue sitting on the table to the left.

There was also a bullet hole about a metre off the ground, between two of the chairs.

“They could have killed him in any other place,” said Antonio Nicaso, a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in the Mafia.

“The fact that they killed him at home is really an insult. Killing him infront of his wife and daughter was a punishment they could have avoided.”

He cites three lessons from the murder.

First, some group wants “to burn all the ground around (Nicolo’s son) Vito,” so that there’s nothing left when the current boss gets out of a U.S. prison in 2012.

Second, the killing of an 86-year-old great-grandfather proves “retirement is not an option in the Mafia,” Nicaso said.

And, finally, he said it suggests there is no statute of limitations on revenge. Over several decades, the Rizzutos made powerful enemies — along with allies — in many places.

The killing certainly generated attention beyond Canada’s borders.

Italy’s major newspaper websites all carried reports about it, with some media and blogs interpreting the impact it might have on the underworld.

“With the death of its historical patriarch the clan from Sicily has suffered a blow that could prove fatal,” said one news report from Italy’s Ansa agency.

“After 30 years of dominance, the power of the Rizzutos on Montreal’s organized-crime scene has been called into question over the past year.”

One of those same newspaper websites, the Corriere della Sera, also carried a report on 40,000 people attending a recent anti-Mafia march in Calabria and denouncing the pervasive criminal presence in the country.

The resentment of many Italians toward the Mafia was summed up in the first reader comment on the Rizzuto story on the website for Il Giornale: “Uno di meno (One less).”

The reach of the Mafia is notorious in Italy — and the arms of the Montreal-based family allegedly extend deep into the old country.

An arrest warrant was issued five years ago for Nicolo’s son, Vito Rizzuto, in connection with one of the most ambitious public-works projects in Italian history.

The Rizzutos are accused of trying to muscle in on a project to build a bridge between Sicily and mainland Europe. It’s a dream that’s been touted, and abandoned, since the time of the Romans, Emperor Charlemagne, and Napoleon.

The Rizzutos allegedly planned to get in on the $8.4-billion project, with the goal of laundering money through it.

Now the Rizzutos appear to be almost powerless.

Vito Rizzuto himself predicted that peace in the underworld would be interrupted by his departure, according to the recent book Mafia Inc. by journalists Andre Cedilot and Andre Noel.

He was right.

Vito Rizzuto is currently in a U.S. prison. His son, Nicolo’s grandson and namesake, is also dead. His neighbour and brother-in-law Paolo Renda is missing, kidnapped just around the corner from the so-called “Mafia Row.”

And scores of others close to the clan’s leadership have been arrested or killed since 2004.

In recent weeks, police say, Rizzuto allies have taken to travelling in armoured cars, wearing bullet-proof vests and arming themselves to the teeth.

Nick Rizzuto was warned by police, earlier this year, that his life was in danger.

Analysts disagree about who might be behind the killings — with theories ranging from ambitious Mafia families in Ontario and New York, to an internal war in Montreal within the Rizzuto clan itself.

One thing they agree on, in the words of de Champlain, is that the rule of a once-mighty Sicilian family appears “over.”

On Thursday afternoon, a crew from a private cleaning company showed up to get to work scrubbing down the back room of the home of its latest, most famous, victim.

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