Lorraine Mallinder
BBC World Service
18.11.10
Radio programme in full (Nov 18 edition. Starts at 11.22 mins)
Transcript:
They say old Nick was a real devil. Not that you’d know it looking upon the peaceful face of the ‘Canadian godfather’. Laid out in his coffin, fedora resting on his folded arms, Nicolo Rizzuto seems more amiable grandfather than underworld terror.
It’s just like in the films. The Montreal funeral parlour is filled with weeping womenfolk and stern mobster types here to pay their respects to Il Padrino. There’s even a man with a scar running from cheek to ear talking on his mobile phone.
I didn’t realise this occasion was only for family and friends. Before I knew it, I was hemmed between the corpse and a semi circle of intimates who seemed to be waiting to receive my condolences. “Who the hell is she?” their quizzical looks seemed to say as I cringed my way past them.
Earlier, I’d strolled past his house on what they call ‘Mafia Row’. Rizzuto, 86-years-old, had been shot dead as he sat down to supper by a marksman hiding in the woods. The act had been performed with surgical precision, leaving one clean bullet hole in the window pane.
It was an abrupt end to a brutal life. One of the last old-school godfathers, Rizzuto served his apprenticeship collecting protection money from farmers in rural Sicily, before going on to form one of North America’s most redoubtable criminal groups.
He arrived in Canada in the fifties. At first, he answered to New York’s powerful Bonanno family, but pretty soon he’d established the Rizzutos as a force in their own right, channelling major flows of Columbian cocaine to the US through the port of Montreal.
Night gathers. I’ve left the funeral parlour. A black car drives past slowly, its electric window sliding down. The man looking out at me seems too geeky to be one of them, but I’m feeling jumpy. He’s probably just another tourist, I reason as I quicken my pace.
Men in black stand guard outside the palatial houses of the godfather and his imprisoned son. Vito Rizzuto, allegedly the real power in the family, is currently festering in a US jail for his role in an early eighties’ shooting that became part of mob lore after being recreated in the film Donnie Brasco.
The men in black also show cinematic potential. I’m trying to decide whether it’s a case of life imitating art when two women emerge from one of the houses. The men cluster around Rizzuto’s widow and his daughter. They speed off into the night, leaving two heavies in a minivan outside the house.
Surprisingly, the fresh-faced driver seems unsure whether to be friendly or fierce. He smiles uncertainly as I ask where the godfather lived, but quickly assumes a meaner pose as it becomes apparent his older colleague is ignoring me.
“Gimme the number,” says the latter, holding his hand out for a phone. ‘The number?’ He calls someone – I can only guess who, or why. But, it’s okay. ‘The number’ appears to be engaged. I hover a while. The older guy stares straight ahead, features immobile.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, a little disingenuously.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” he barks, turning to face me.
“Well, you are acting a bit strange.”
He softens and gives a crooked little smile. His younger colleague relaxes too. “Let’s just say, our mouths are taped,” he says.
In the bright morning light, I’m feeling a lot more confident as I conduct some interviews on Rizzuto’s death. The city has been fizzing with speculation. Was it a takeover attempt masterminded by the New York mafia? Or, perhaps an act of vengeance perpetrated by rival, Calabrian, gangsters? “There is no statute of limitation on revenge,” says Antonio Nicaso, author of several books on the mob.
Either way, this seems to be the end of the line for the Rizzutos. When Vito, the son and heir, is released from prison, he will be like a general without soldiers, says Nicaso. Maybe it’s fatigue setting in, but I could swear I can hear the strains of the Godfather Waltz in the background.
Judging by the masses of people who turn up at Rizzuto’s funeral, it’s clear that the public shows no signs of tiring of mobster lore. The church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense – as coincidence would have it, Our Lady of Protection in English - features a fresco of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini astride a horse.
Later, I head to a café in the heart of Little Italy. A bunch of old boys are talking nineteen to the dozen about Rizzuto’s death, their raised voices competing with the high-pitched din of the espresso machine.
“There was a great celebration down there,” rasps a man with slicked back hair and a beige golf jacket, one finger jabbing at the floor. “He was welcomed by his friend. There was food and drink and lots of women.”
“His friend?” I ask.
“Lucifer,” he replies.