|
At 4
a.m. last Wednesday, Marianne Iannachino's
water broke, and when she decided to go to
the hospital three hours later, she nearly
had the baby on her doorstep. Outside, the
serenity of her cul-de-sac of monster homes
and manicured lawns in Woodbridge, Ont., had
been broken by eight police cars that showed
up to arrest Alfonso Caruana, reputed to be
one of Canada's most powerful mobsters.
``I'm scared,'' she called out to her
mother, worrying whether she'd be able to
get through the roadblock at the end of
their street (she did, and delivered a
healthy boy seven hours later). Bewildered
residents of the bedroom community northwest
of Toronto had already begun to descend on
the roadblock. And when he learned what was
happening, Mike De Frenza, a local
businessman, said he was happy the arrest
could mean safer streets for his children.
``You work hard to afford to bring your
family up here to a clean area, and look
what happens,'' he said. ``You only think
it's clean.'' Caruana
was only one of 12 people arrested and
charged with drug trafficking in last
Wednesday's police operation--encompassing
not only Canada but Mexico and the United
States as well. But the majority of the
arrests--eight--were in Toronto and
Montreal. And of those, Caruana's was the
most pivotal. Police say that he oversaw an
organization of Sicilian origin that ran
drugs and laundered money for other mob
families. The arrests, triggered by the May
16 discovery of 200 kg of cocaine carelessly
concealed by drug couriers in Texas, are
being hailed as the biggest organized-crime
bust in Canadian history. And they cap a
two-year international investigation that
was nearly stopped in January for lack of
funds.
That, in fact, partly explains last week's
well-orchestrated media coverage of the
arrests. RCMP Insp. Ben Soave, who oversees
the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit
that co-ordinated the investigation,
acknowledges the need to convince the public
and politicians that such lengthy and costly
investigations are worthwhile. In fact,
several well-placed leaks to the media
ensured splashy coverage of the operation. A
huge news conference, clearly planned well
in advance, featured money-flow and
drug-flow maps as well as officials of some
of the other police forces involved,
including the Italian Carabinieri and
American Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Soave even tried to simplify his complex
investigation into a catchy sound bite,
calling Caruana the ``Wayne Gretzky'' of
mobsters.
In an interview with Maclean's, Soave said
that taking on organized crime is like
finding a dandelion--and instead of pulling
it out by its roots, mowing the lawn. ``It
will still look manicured,'' he notes, ``but
you will get a bunch more dandelions as long
as those roots are still there. Before you
know it, your whole lawn is infested and it
has spread to your neighbors' lawns.''
Organized crime, he adds, has been involved
in 20 murders in southern Ontario alone over
the past five years. Besides, criminals
regularly corrupt public officials--and
youth. In Toronto, Soave says, the Russian
mob is recruiting teenagers as young as 13.
``The public never looks at that,'' says
Soave, who has been in police work for 28
years. ``Then again, do they stop to think
when they buy a package of smuggled
cigarettes they are supporting an organized
criminal group? It's very difficult to
perceive, it's not visible.''
Neither, for the longest time, was the
organization headed by Caruana. Police claim
it has been active in Canada for 30 years,
for the most part unimpeded by law
enforcement agencies. Not only could it
count on the Mafia code of silence, known as
omerta, to keep its operations quiet, but it
was what Toronto-based organized-crime
expert Antonio
Nicaso calls a ``biological'' mob
family: two Sicilian clans, the Caruanas and
the Cuntreras, connected by intermarriages
to the point that anyone breaking ranks
would have to betray a relative. As well,
the organization was so international--it
operated in Thailand, India, Europe, the
Caribbean and North and South America--and
had such a complex network of bank accounts
that any investigation would have to be
long-term and involve huge travel and
surveillance costs.
Soave says that, over the years, mob
investigations have collapsed or never got
started due to lack of funding. Last winter,
his own investigation, which relied on
cooperation and resources from more than 20
police agencies around the world, also faced
that possibility, with costs running into
the millions and funds running out. In the
end, the unit received funding--Soave would
only describe it as a ``six-figure''
sum--from the Criminal Investigations
Service of Ontario, a provincial government
agency, to complete its task. But the work,
Soave admits, will never be complete. If the
arrested members of a family are
successfully prosecuted, new leaders are
likely to take their places. In Soave's
metaphor, the dandelions will be back. |
