National Post (National Edition)
Reputed Montreal mafioso gunned down
Rocco Sollecito member of Rizzuto group
LAVAL, QUE .• Exactly one decade ago, Rocco Sollecito was part of a group of six men who seemed untouchable.
The six had been chosen to take charge of the Mafia in Montreal while its leader, Vito Rizzuto, was incarcerated in the United States.
Now, after Solle cit o’s brazen killing on Friday — in broad daylight and within sight of Laval police headquarters — only two of those six men remain alive and they both were recently returned to federal penitentiaries out of concerns for their safety.
Police sources say investi- gators have evidence a man, described as being in his 30s and dressed entirely in black, was waiting at a city bus shelter and opened fire through the passenger-side window of Sollecito’s white BMW sport utility vehicle when it stopped at a stop sign at about 8:30 a.m. Several shots were fired into the vehicle and Sollecito, who was alone, was declared dead after being taken to a hospital.
The shooter appeared to know Sollecito’s morning routine, one source said, adding besides the shooter, investigators were trying to track down the driver of a vehicle that moments after the shooting appeared to slow down as it approached Sollecito’s SUV, then continued in the same direction in which the shooter is believed to have fled on foot.
Everything changed for Sollecito and those five other men in November 2006, when they were the main players arrested in Project Colisée, a Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit investigation that struck at the heart of the Rizzuto organization. All six eventually pleaded guilty to various charges and received sentences of varying lengths. The investigation, coupled with Vito Rizzuto’s absence, left the organization in a weakened state.
The first of the six to go was Vito Rizzuto’s brotherin-law, Paolo Renda, 70, who was abducted off a street in May 2010, by men who appeared to be pretending to be plainclothes police. He has not been seen since and, in 2013, his family sought to have him declared dead.
Six months after Renda was abducted, Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo (Zio Cola) Rizzuto, 86, was killed in his home.
On March 1, Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano, 52, one of the younger members of the six-man leadership committee, was fatally shot in Laval, not far from where Sollecito was shot.
Giordano had only recently reached his statutory release date on a 15-year prison term.
The other two men who were part of that 2006 group and who have survived are Giordano’s close friend, Francesco (Chit) Del Balso, 46, and Francesco Arcadi, 62, a close lieutenant to Vito Rizzuto for years before Rizzuto died of natural causes in 2013.
Both received sentences similar to Giordano’s and were released this year when they also reached their statutory release dates. Following Giordano’s murder, both men were returned to federal penitentiaries out of concern for their safety.
Sollecito received a shorter sentence than Arcadi, Del Balso and Giordano, in part, because the evidence gathered in Colisée indicated he steered away from the large-scale drug-trafficking in which the others were involved.
Sollecito’s expertise was bookmaking. On Sept. 24, 2004, with the Colisée investigation well underway, police secretly recorded a conversation between Giordano and Sollecito inside the Mafia’s headquarters, a café in St-Léonard, Que. They were lamenting how the long summer had deprived their bookmaking operation of NHL games.
According to a summary of the conversation that was later presented as evidence in court, Giordano longed for the NHL season because of its steady stream of games offered nightly. Sollecito was recorded saying the hockey bookmaking operation “never loses.”
During another recorded conversation on May 23, 2005, Sollecito explained how the committee worked to a mafioso who was visiting from Italy. Traditionally, a Mafia clan operates with one leader and the visitor couldn’t figure out why the senior leaders, Sollecito, Nicolo Rizzuto, Arcadi and Renda, were splitting their profits evenly, with a fifth share going to Vito Rizzuto even if he was behind bars in the U.S.
Renda’s abduction and Nicolo Rizzuto’s slaying in 2010 were the clearest signs the Rizzuto organization was under attack from a group led by Salvatore Montagna, a now-deceased mob boss from New York, that tried to take control of the Mafia in Montreal.
Friday, Lt. Jason Allard, a spokesman for the Sûreté du Québec, said it was too early in the investigation to begin discussing possible motives behind the shooting.