Hit man Calautti was gunned down at a stag party
‘Stone-cold killer’ had many enemies, RCMP officer recalls
The hundred or so stragglers who remained outside the Terrace Banquet Centre in Vaughan didn’t do a thing when the hit man approached Salvatore (Sam) Calautti’s sleek black BMW X6 after a stag party.
Calautti and his long-time associate James Turek didn’t seem particularly concerned either as the gunman walked closer, at about 1 a.m. on Friday, July 12, 2013.
Perhaps Calautti and Turek trusted him. Perhaps they just let their guards drop for a second. Or maybe Calautti assumed his reputation protected him.
“He was a stone-cold killer,” said retired RCMP Staff Sgt. Larry Tronstad, a longtime member of the elite Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, which targeted organized crime.
Whatever the reason, the gunman got up close to the BMW before he opened fire, killing Calautti and Turek before either of them could manage a single shot.
A police source said he wondered if the killings were set up by someone Calautti trusted. “It’s hard to think someone snuck up on him. Sam was the type of guy who always carried a gun.”
It was quickly assumed that Calautti was the intended target and that Turek was collateral damage.
No one who knew Calautti professionally was surprised that his life ended the way he lived it. At the time of his murder, he was the prime suspect in a half-dozen murder investigations in the GTA and Montreal.
One was for the underworld assassination of 86-year-old Nicolo (Uncle Nick) Rizzuto of Montreal, who was arguably the most powerful mobster in Canada. A sniper snuck behind Rizzuto’s mansion and killed him with a single rifle shot through the double-paned glass of his solarium early in the evening on Nov. 10, 2010.
His wife and daughter were both in the home at the time and were treated for shock. The long-range shot with a highpowered rifle wasn’t Calautti’s style, but he was deeply in the camp of Rizzuto’s bitter enemies.
“(Calautti) was up-close-andpersonal,” Tronstad said. “Maybe he had a skill we didn’t know about.”
No charge was ever laid in Rizzuto’s murder.
Calautti was just 24 when police started to see him as an underworld killer, although he didn’t look like a dangerous man. Short and squat, his passion was gambling, not the gym. He could also be found dishing out gelato and pizza at his restaurant on Dufferin Street south of Lawrence.
There was also talk that Calautti took on enforcement jobs to pay down his gambling debts, which sometimes hit six figures.
The massive Montreal RCMP investigation dubbed Project Colisée found that, in 2006, Calautti had amassed more than $200,000 in gambling debts to the Rizzuto crime family.
Some of his other gambling debts were considered a spark for the hostilities that led to the 2004 shooting that paralyzed Louise Russo, an innocent bystander in an attempted gangland hit in a North York sandwich
shop.
While contract killing provided much needed financial relief, there was also much talk that Callautti really enjoyed the work. He was considered by police to be muscle for at least three local mob groups, including bitter enemies of the Rizzuto crime family in the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.
Calautti was also suspected of the hit on Francesco (Frank) Loiero, 38, in 1996. Aside from being a drug courier, Loiero was a father of three, long-time associate of key GTA mobsters and owner of Rustic Bakery on Rustic Road in Toronto, near Keele Street and Highway 401.
Someone lured Loiero with a phone call to a parking lot at Martin Grove Road and Steeles Avenue in Vaughan at about 8 p.m. on Jan. 7, 1996. Loiero’s body was found there, seated in his green Dodge Caravan.
Whoever killed Loiero wanted to make it clear he wasn’t a common thief. On the dead man, police found about $5,000 in cash, a $10,000 ring and a Rolex watch estimated to be worth as much as $25,000. He was also wearing a gold bracelet and necklace, police said.
“We can certainly rule out robbery as a motive,” a York Region
spokesperson said at the time.
Nine months after that, on Sept. 5, 1996, Giuseppe Conguista, 32, of Woodbridge was killed in a similar fashion. He was also a drug courier, connected to a St. Clair Avenue travel agency.
Again, Calautti was the prime suspect. Again, the murder was committed in a vehicle.
The killer opened fire as Conguista got out of his wife’s Mercedes in the parking lot of an industrial mall early on Sept. 5, 1996, near a North York social club. He was shot nine times in the head and chest.
Like Loiera, Conguista was lured to his death. He drove to the club alone.
Calautti turned himself in to police six months later and was found not guilty of first-degree murder by a jury.
Calautti was also a prime suspect in the Oct. 3, 2000, murder of Gaetano (The Discount Casket Guy) Panepinto, a GTA lieutenant for Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto.
Police believe one of Panepinto’s crew murdered two ’Ndrangheta mobsters in his discount casket shop on St. Clair Avenue West. Panepinto was driving his maroon Cadillac
when a van pulled up alongside him and opened fire, killing him.
There was a modest turnout to Calautti’s funeral at St. Margaret Mary church in Woodbridge.
That wasn’t surprising — funerals for enemies of Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto tended to have particularly low turnouts.
The pallbearers at Calautti’s funeral wore white gloves and white roses on their black jackets and shirts as they carried his casket from the church.
Gossip about Calautti’s murder was floated out in the March 2018 trial of Giuseppe (Pino) Ursino, 64, and Cosmin (Chris) Dracea, 41.
Ursino was found guilty on several charges related to cocaine trafficking for a criminal organization while Dracea was found guilty of charges related to cocaine trafficking, but not guilty on a charge of trafficking the drug for a criminal organization.
That trial heard dozens of secretly recorded conversations from a former mobster who worked as a police agent between 2013 and 2015.
Ursino said that he warned Loiero that he might be in trouble with Calautti, after Calautti scammed one of Loiero’s inlaws out of $17,000. Apparently, Loiero made a threat to a man who didn’t handle threats well.
“So he got upset, you understand, and he wanted the money back for his brother-in-law,” Ursino said on Dec. 9, 2014, in a secretly recorded talk. “So he put pressure on him, told him that if he would not give it back, he told him that, uh, he would kill him. Ca’, he scared him.”
The murders of Calautti and Turek remain unsolved.