INCARCERATION AND RELEASE

Later that year, Rizzuto was arrested again for conspiring to import hashish into Canada. Drug dealer Normand Dupuis was ready to testify against him for a reduced prison sentence, monetary compensation and a new identity. Before the trial, however, Dupuis contacted Rizzuto’s lawyer Jean Salois with an offer not to testify in exchange for $1 million. Salois recorded this conversation and got Dupuis charged with obstruction of justice. With the witness unfit to testify, Rizzuto was acquitted in 1989.] In the early 1990s, the RCMP secretly ran a phony currency exchange in Montreal as part of an elaborate sting operation, called Project Compote, ending with 46 arrests and a Rizzuto lawyer, Joseph Lagana, convicted for laundering $47 million. Rizzuto was named as a co-conspirator, but there was not enough evidence to charge him.

Though only considered a soldier of the New York Bonanno crime family by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rizzuto was considered by Canadian officials to be the most powerful mob boss in the country. The organized crime authors Lee Lamothe and

Adrian Humphreys consider the strength of the Rizzuto clan to rival that of any of the Five Families in New York and dubbed it the “Sixth Family.” Rizzuto worked closely with the Sicilian Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan – major illicit drug traffickers –that was led in Canada by Alfonso Caruana.

In early 2004, Rizzuto was indicted by a Brooklyn federal grand jury in relation to racketeering conspiracy charges, including loansharking and murder, in connection with the May a power grab after the incarceration of then-boss Philip

Rizzuto was arrested on January 20, 2004, in Montreal.

On August 17, 2006, after a legal battle of 31 months, he was extradited to the United States, and appeared before a United States magistrate judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. Massino, who received a life sentence for murder after he turned state’s evidence in 2004, was also expected to testify against Rizzuto regarding his role in the three capos murder, but Rizzuto accepted a plea bargain in May 2007 before the case went to trial.

On May 4, 2007, Rizzuto pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder as well as racketeering charges, admitting that he was present at the triple murder in 1981, but stated he had only yelled

“it’s a holdup”, while others did the shooting; he received a 10-year prison sentence and was fined $250,000, to be followed by a threeyear supervised release as part of the plea bargain.Rizzuto’s statement was contrary, however, to a previous testimony given by Bonanno family informant, Salvatore Vitale stating, “Rizzuto was the first mobster out from a hiding spot during the ambush and the first to start shooting.” Organized crime authors Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe stated of the sentence respectively, “It’s a great deal. He couldn’t expect anything better”, and, “I think the system has been beaten again”.

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