generalspeaking

In Cattolica Eraclea, Sicily

In this hilltop village, a slightly otherworldly place that retains an aura of the frontier, a full-sized car barely fits down the cluttered, claustrophobic streets until the road suddenly empties into an airy public square fronted by a marvellous clock and bell tower.

It is a decidedly rustic locale where one finds ground zero for both the Quebec corruption scandal and the unfolding drama of the return to Canada of the country’s biggest name in crime.

Despite making headlines in Canada, at the town hall next door to the clock tower, there is little interest in talking about the town’s most famous export: Vito Rizzuto, the once imperious Mafia boss.
An official, who is put forward because she speaks English, pauses when the Rizzuto name is mentioned and says: “You have to talk to the mayor.” The mayor, however, is unavailable.
Many people in this town, founded in medieval times, share her discomfort with the subject.
Mr. Rizzuto left this village in 1954, when he was eight, and settled in Montreal with his family, a clan already entrenched in the Mafia of Sicily. His family went on to dominate the underworld in his new home.

Released this month from a prison in the U.S., where he served his sentence for three New York gangland murders, the embattled mobster was immediately deported back to Canada.

As he acclimatizes to freedom, his family’s affairs continue to be revealed at Quebec’s Charbonneau commission probing corruption in the construction industry. With each bombshell — about political financing, crooked business cartels and payments to the mob — the importance of the town of Cattolica Eraclea is never far away.

Star witness Lino Zambito, a Montreal construction boss, said his entry into the cartel that rigged huge public works contracts came easy because his father, Giuseppe, was from Cattolica Eraclea.
Many of the Quebec businessmen accused of colluding with the Rizzutos, paying them 2.5% on contracts, also have close ties here: Domenico Arcuri, owner of a decontamination company, is the son of an alleged mobster from Cattolica; Accursio Sciascia, a paving company boss, was vice-president of Montreal’s Association Cattolica Eraclea, a group for ex-pats; Frank Catania, founder of a road construction firm, is another Cattolica émigré; as are others.

Even the café used as the Montreal mob’s headquarters, where secret police videos were recorded of businessmen handing over piles of cash, was renamed after the town.

Cattolica Eraclea is nestled 180 metres up in the hills of picturesque Agrigento province in southwestern Sicily, just inland from the Mediterranean Sea. Accessible only by twisting roads, the region’s railway and major highway bend around Cattolica on either side, adding to its isolation.
Quebec mobsters and businessmen have deep roots here and some of the wealth of Cattolica’s émigrés has also found its way back.

The ambulance stationed near the Rizzuto’s former family home, a row house on a dead-end street, has a sign painted on its side thanking Cattolica émigrés in Montreal for its purchase. Now old, the town seeks funds for a replacement.

And if money from construction success in Canada made its way here, the infrastructure the companies produce has not. The town is marked by its small, decaying housing stock and a below-average level of employment, according to government statistics.
On its outskirts, hard-won fields of olive trees, pistachios, almonds, wheat and grapes squeeze into arable patches on craggy mountains and in sloping valleys.

Cattolica’s population stands at about 4,000 people — a 38% plunge over the past 30 years — and the town’s demographics skew towards the elderly.

For these villagers, however, the Rizzutos are not just distant relatives or part of fragmentary memories. The influence of the clan has been profound, even in recent years.

In 2009, police arrested six men, accusing them of Mafia crimes in a probe that started by examining Mr. Rizzuto’s assets in Italy. Police said it revealed: “the close proximity of leading members of the Canadian criminal clique, who originally come from this town.”

The accused mob boss in Cattolica, Domenico Terrasi, a 67-year-old pensioner, maintained a “stable connection to the clan Rizzuto,” which boosted his stature with other bosses, according to police.
While the Rizzutos are accused in Montreal of pocketing millions from the construction of roads and sewers, in Cattolica, Mr. Terrasi was accused of muscling in on aqueducts and wind farms. Same game, different venues.

At the headquarters of the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia in Agrigento, the provincial capital where ancient Greek temples dot seaside cliffs, Captain Antonino Caldarella, head of the region’s antimafia operations, is aware of Mr. Rizzuto’s freedom.

He declines, however, to discuss details of any current interest by investigators into the affairs of the Rizzutos.

“It is covered by professional secrecy,” he said.
Mr. Rizzuto’s situation in Canada is being “monitored” by Italian law enforcement, a federal official said, but authorities decline to say whether they are seeking his extradition.

Capt. Caldarella knows well the problems Cattolica has faced.

He was involved in the probe that implicated mobsters with interfering in the town’s 2007 election, when Cosimo Piro won the mayor’s seat by just 21 votes. Piro’s subsequent ouster and the landslide victory this May of a replacement, Nicolò Termine, a gynecologist, suggests a shift in public attitudes.

There are more concrete signs of renewal, however.

Not far from the town hall is a villa and small square dedicated to the victims of the Mafia. A map of Sicily is mounted on an outside wall with the names of citizens killed by mobsters as a public recognition of the troubles the island has faced.

Even more surprising is a monument found on the western edge of town, in a small park dotted with palm trees. A bronze bust of a stern-faced man sits a stone pedestal above an engraved plaque that reads: “Giuseppe Spagnola, mayor, political leader, killed by the Mafia.”

The public tribute to the death of Mr. Spagnola — and openly blaming the Mafia — remains quietly controversial here and also resonates deeply in Canada.

Mr. Spagnola was the first democratically elected mayor of Cattolica; heralded as the “peasant mayor,” he undertook agrarian reform that threatened the standing of the land barons and Mafia bosses.

Sometime during the night of August 13, 1955, as he slept under the stars, three men crept close, each armed with a lupara, the distinctive stubby shotgun of Sicily.
Mr. Spagnola died in a barrage of gunfire.
Investigation uncovered a conspiracy to silence Mr. Spagnola. One man, Rosario Gurreri, who did not participate in the shooting but lent the gunmen a donkey, provided the names of three shooters.
The men were found guilty in absentia in Italy, including Leonardo Cammalleri, Mr. Rizzuto’s father-in-law, and Giacinto Arcuri, uncle of Mr. Arcuri, the businessmen named at the Quebec commission.
By the time authorities acted, however, the men had fled Cattolica to Canada.

Demonstrating how the Mafia stretches across generations as well as oceans, the mobsters who approved the plot are believed to be Antonino Manno, who was Mr. Rizzuto’s grandfather, and Rosario Terrasi, the father of the alleged current mob boss in Cattolica who was recently arrested.
And, also demonstrating how Mafia vengeance works, Mr. Gurreri, the man who tattled on the gunmen, was found butchered in 1972 in a Montreal restaurant.

Mr. Cammalleri settled in Woodbridge, north of Toronto, and died this month of natural causes at the age of 93.

“The two monuments to the victims of the Mafia in Cattolica Eraclea are certainly a sign of renewal and change of attitude of the local political institutions against the Mafia,” said Calogero Giuffrida, a journalist from the area who wrote a book about the Spagnola murder and frequently reports on the region’s mafiosi.

Until recent years, erecting a statue to Mr. Spagnola in Cattolica was “unthinkable,” he said.
It makes some people uncomfortable, partly because relatives of some of the conspirators remain active in town — and criminal — affairs, he said.

Even so, there has long been a culture of antimafia activism in Cattolica, but it was often silenced by fear.

“It was not easy to talk about these things until some time ago,” said Mr. Giuffrida.

“Actually, it is not even easy now. But it has to be said, something is changing, even though there is a lot that still needs to be done from a cultural point of view: in the family, the schools and in the parish.”

Meanwhile, he said, people in the region — and, in fact, all over Sicily — are carefully following events in Canada involving the Rizzutos, a family branded as “legendary” because of their exploits at the highest levels of international crime.

“There is curiosity to see what will happen after the release of Vito Rizzuto,” said Mr. Giuffrida.
And there is speculation about whether they will ever see him back in Cattolica Eraclea — whether it is for trial or for a visit.