Who Was Vito Rizzuto? Canada's Teflon Don
Mobsters DailyVito Rizzuto was the boss of Montreal's Rizzuto crime family — Canada's most powerful mafioso, nicknamed the Teflon Don, who spent three decades as the indispensable mediator between Sicilian clans, New York's Five Families, biker gangs and South American cartels before prison and a wave of family murders destroyed his empire. He died of natural causes in December 2013, a free man watching everything he built burn.
The mediator of Montreal
Born in Sicily in 1946 and raised in Montreal, Vito inherited position from his father Nicolo but built something bigger: a consensus machine. Where other bosses ruled by fear, Rizzuto ruled by being useful to everyone. His organisation sat at the crossroads of cocaine routes into Canada, and he brokered peace and profit-sharing between groups that would otherwise have killed each other — the same Sicilian-versus-American tension that runs through the Castellammarese War a generation earlier. Canadian police wiretaps captured the deference he commanded; rivals and allies alike treated his word as settlement.
His one great act of violence came in 1981, when he was part of the team that murdered three rebellious Bonanno captains in Brooklyn — a hit that tied Montreal permanently to New York's Five Families and would, decades later, be the crime that finally imprisoned him.
November is here and the holidays are closing in, which makes this the season of the Tony Soprano Ugly Christmas Sweater — the black-and-white Tony stencil on a proper Christmas sweatshirt. Vito ran December in Montreal like he ran everything else — quietly, and through three intermediaries. The sweater needs no intermediaries.
Prison, and the collapse
Arrested in Montreal in 2004 and extradited to the United States, Rizzuto pleaded guilty in 2007 to racketeering charges tied to the 1981 murders and served ten years. His absence opened the succession war he had spent a lifetime preventing. While he sat in a Colorado cell, gunmen killed his son Nick Jr. in 2009, and in 2010 a sniper killed his 86-year-old father at the family dinner table. Released in 2012, Rizzuto returned to a Montreal where a string of his enemies died in quick succession — a suspected revenge campaign he was never charged with — but the consensus empire was gone beyond recall.
Canada's darkest mob saga
Rizzuto's story is the rare mob rise with no shootout ending: lung cancer killed him on December 23, 2013, aged 67. What he left behind was a case study in how modern organised crime actually works — not one family against the world, but one broker holding a network together by trust, fear and arithmetic — and how fast it dies when the broker is removed.
Frequently asked questions
Why was Vito Rizzuto called the Teflon Don? Like John Gotti before him, Rizzuto wore the nickname because charges never seemed to stick — until the 1981 Bonanno murders finally sent him to prison in his sixties.
What crime sent Vito Rizzuto to prison? He pleaded guilty in 2007 to racketeering conspiracy for his role in the 1981 murders of three Bonanno crime family captains in Brooklyn.
How did Vito Rizzuto die? He died of complications from lung cancer in a Montreal hospital on December 23, 2013, about a year after his release from prison.
Keep reading: How Did Joe Bonanno Die? · Who Was Carlo Gambino? · Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Invented the Modern Mafia · How Did Nicolo Rizzuto Die? A Sniper Through the Kitchen Window
From the shop: Shadows of the Underworld — the real mob history behind the movies and the shows, in one book.
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