I'm trying to help determine who the made Canadian members of the Buffalo Family are or were at one time, roughly in the last 30 years.
Please note that the murdered Carmen Barillaro, killed in 1997, was considered made by the FBI. In Peter Edwards's July 29, 1997
Toronto Star article, published the day after Barillaro's funeral, are the following two sentences:
"As a teenager, Barillaro was a member of the Centre Gang on Clifton Hill. He built a fearsome reputation on Niagara Falls streets as he rose to become a 'made member' of the New York State mob's Niagara operations, according to the FBI."
Back on September 7 and 8, 1990, the
Buffalo News published back-to-back articles that quoted FBI Special Agent Robert Ulmer, who referred to Barillaro as made. In both articles, Ulmer also identifies Nicodemo Bruzzese and Dominic Vaccaro (both Ontario based) as made.
Link to September 7, 1990 article (which NickleCity posted on Gangster BB Net last November):
https://buffalonews.com/1990/09/07/14-s ... local-mob/
Link to September 8, 1990 article, as well as some excerpts, appear below (I've added parenthetical information that I've surrounded with square brackets).
https://buffalonews.com/1990/09/08/figu ... ated-them/
Those arrested late Thursday and released on their own recognizance were Carmen Barillaro, 46, 6155 Corwin Crescent [Niagara Falls, Ontario]; Nicodemo Bruzzese, 40, of Tanbark Road, St. Davids [Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario]; Dominic Vaccaro, 44, 6740 Crawford St. [Niagara Falls, Ontario]; Frank J. Spadafora, 36, 6404 Jupiter Boulevard; Nicodemo Scali, 37, 6424 January Drive; John T. Cleary, 47, 6105 McLeod Road; Frederick Campisano, 42, 6353 Franklin Ave., and Joseph F. DeCaria, 28, 5729 McGrail Road.
[snip]
FBI Special Agent Robert Ulmer described Barillaro as the ringleader of the group, which he said is linked to a Hamilton-based faction of the Canadian mob. Ulmer said Barillaro, Bruzzese and Vaccaro are "made members" of the organization and answer to Buffalo organized crime leaders.
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If Bruzzese and Vaccaro are still alive -- I haven't checked obituaries yet -- they would respectively be 68 and 72 years old as of last September, but who knows, if alive, whether they are still active?
Canadian journalists Adrian Humphreys, Molly Hayes, and Greg McArthur had access to the Project OTremens documents; Peter Edwards did not.
According to the documents, Domenico Violi, talking to Vincenzo Morena, said he was "made" into the Buffalo Family in January 2015 (Humphreys quoted the word
made from the documents). Again, according to the documents, Domenico's uncle Rocco Luppino was allegedly named "captain" around the same time (again, Humphreys quoted the word
captain from the documents).
Hayes and McArthur wrote:
"To this day, according to Project OTremens court documents, the Violis’ uncles Natale and Rocco Luppino are both 'made' (that is, official) members of Buffalo’s Todaro family." (Hayes and McArthur quoted the word
made from the documents.)
If Giuseppe Violi was a made Bonanno at the time of the DOJ's November 9, 2017 release ("Members and Associates of Gambino and Bonanno Organized Crime Families Arrested in Coordinated U.S.-Canadian Takedown"), wouldn't he have been identified as either a member or associate of the Bonanno Family? By the process of elimination, at the time of the bust in November 2017, he was either still unmade or possibly now a made member of Buffalo.
In retrospect, what is puzzling about the Violi brothers' attendance at Morena's induction ceremony in November 2015 is that, according to the OTremens documents, Morena didn't know until late October 2017 or early November 2017 that Domenico was made in January 2015. Neither did any of the higher-up Bonannos at the ceremony, unless one of you has a theory that posits some higher-ups did know but that a decision was made not to introduce a made Domenico Violi to the made Bonannos at the ceremony, including the newly inducted Morena.
If the Bonannos undertook such an unusual induction ceremony for Morena in Hamilton by making an exception for the presence of non-Bonannos Domenico and Giuseppe Violi, would the Bonannos have made an even greater exception by permitting a possibly still unmade Giuseppe Violi who, according to Morena's alleged conversations with him, was dithering about whether to be made into the Buffalo or Bonanno Families? Or maybe the Bonanno higher-ups assumed both Violi brothers were unmade?
Some of you might recall Laurentian's post, below, in the thread "Montreal: Rocco Sollecito has just been shot dead" (scroll to the bottom of
http://www.theblackhand.club/forum/view ... &start=120).
Laurentian wrote: ↑Thu Jun 02, 2016 11:00 am[snip]
I want to come back on Cosa Nostra and inductions issue.
The FBI has many years ago set up 3 criteria as to state that someone is a "made" member or not.
a) by the own admission of the person;
b) by information given by another "made" member who is now informing;
c) and by a corroboration by another source closed to that person.
Those three elements have been generally accepted as evidence before courts. So this is why I find always delicate to say that such individual is a "made" member, specially when writing books.
[snip]
Humphreys was careful in his December 3, 2018 article when he wrote the following:
[Domenico] Violi acknowledged through an agreed statement of facts that he met numerous times with the informant, who was a trusted associate and then official “made” member of the Bonanno Family. He did not, however, adopt the Crown’s allegations of far-reaching Mafia involvement.
The conversations were recorded between 2015 and 2017 and the information could not be independently corroborated. The informant was not named in court.
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I encourage any of you to contact Humphreys, even those of you have written the nastiest comments about him on these boards, to ask him his opinions about the Violi brothers and the Buffalo Family. You would probably be surprised to learn that he sees all sides of these debates and does not at all dismiss Pogo's and Wiseguy's views (far from it, in fact). Please don't take my word for it, though -- reach out to Humphreys yourselves, but keep in mind he's fairly busy. The reporting by the four aforementioned Canadian journalists was for the most part unremarkable because they merely relied on the OTremens documents to write the articles; some of the journalists weren't even in court for Domenico Violi's sentencing. On the other hand, Capeci's reporting -- especially the identification of Morena as the informant -- was exceptional.
In Hamilton and the surrounding cities and towns, the biological Papalia, Musitano, and Luppino families are enormous. We can't assume that all the sons, brothers, uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers-in-law, and fathers-in-law are made because they are related to deceased or still-alive made members. Rocco Papalia is still alive -- he is very likely 83, maybe 84, years old -- but we can't even assume he's made just because he is Johnny's brother. If he is made, he sure does like to share tidbits with organized-crime authors about past and current events. I had always assumed that Pat and Angelo Musitano, as well as some of their other male relatives, were 'ndrangheta members. Now I'm not so sure, especially because of more recent information that has dribbled out about whether Buffalo was aware back in 1997 of Pat and Angelo's plots to kill Johnny Pops and Barillaro. We should perhaps take a look at the Canadian names listed in the photo (of names and dates of birth) I uploaded back on November 17, 2017, found at
http://www.theblackhand.club/forum/view ... 744#p61744. Pino Avignone is related to the Musitanos. Bruno Pisani, still alive, was also known as an associate of Vito Rizzuto and is perhaps just a mob rounder. A number of the Canadians on the list are either quite old or dead.
In the Greater Toronto Area, the only made member I can think of who might have a formal affiliation to the Buffalo Family -- and I'm assuming he is made -- is Peter Scarcella. In the early 1980s, while Paul Volpe was still alive, Buffalo enlisted the Commissos in the GTA to kill both Volpe and Scarcella (who was Volpe's driver). The more apparent reason for the murder plots is that Buffalo wanted to regain its share of the illegal gambling in Toronto, lost as a result of Volpe's distancing himself from Buffalo after Magaddino's death in 1974. The plan to kill Scarcella was scrapped -- Volpe's murder is still a cold case -- and Scarcella actually ended up becoming very close to Remo Commisso. While Scarcella continued to meet with associates of the Buffalo Family in the ensuing years after Volpe was killed in 1983, these associates were Canadians themselves; so it's hard to say what Scarcella's actual contact with Buffalo was.
