November 10th, 2010. 6:15 in the evening, Cartierville, Montreal. A quiet residential street called Antoine Bertha Avenue, the kind of block where doctors and judges park their Mercedes in the driveway. Inside the kitchen of a beige stone house at 12,041 Antoine Berto, an 86-year-old man named Nicolo Ruto sat down to dinner with his wife Libertina and his daughter Maria.
soup, bread, a glass of red wine on the table. Outside, behind a row of cedar trees, a sniper crouched in the cold with a rifle and a clear sight line through the kitchen window. He aimed once, he fired once. The bullet traveled through double pane glass, through Nicola Ros’s jaw, and into the wall behind him.
The patriarch of the most powerful Italian crime family in Canadian history fell forward into his soup bowl. His wife screamed. His daughter dropped to the floor. The shooter was gone in under 30 seconds. Time of death, 6:28 p.m. This wasn’t a robbery. This wasn’t random. This was a message written in blood on the walls of a man who had built an empire so quiet, so careful, so surgically protected that for 40 years nobody could touch him.
Nicolo Ruto wasn’t just a mob boss. He was the founder of a dynasty that controlled the port of Montreal, laundered hundreds of millions through Canadian banks, and sat at the same table as the Banano family of New York. And now he was dead in his own kitchen, killed in front of the women who loved him, while his son Veto sat in a federal prison in Colorado with eight years left on his sentence and no way to fight back.
This is the story of the Montreal Mafia Wars. The Calabrian Sicilian conflict that ran from 2009 to 2013. 150 bodies, car bombs in shopping plaza, parking lots, sons murdered before fathers, fathers murdered in front of wives, an entire generation of Sicilian power erased, while the boss who built it watched from a prison cell 2,000 m away.
And it ends with the most precise revenge in modern organized crime history. The night every man who killed Vto Ruto’s family died inside an 18-month window. But here’s what the headlines never told you. The war that destroyed the Rzuts didn’t start in 2009. It started in 1978 in a banquet hall in Brooklyn with three dead men and a young Sicilian named Veto Ruto holding a shotgun.
Everything that happened in Montreal between 2009 and 2013, every body, every bomb, every betrayal was a debt that came due 30 years late. Let me take you back to the beginning. Nicolo Rosuto was born in 1924 in Collica Eraclea, a sunbleleached town in southern Sicily where the soil grew olives and grudges in equal measure. His father had been murdered when he was a boy.
He grew up with the kind of patience that only comes from waiting your whole life to settle a score. In 1954, he immigrated to Montreal with his wife, Libertina, and his 8-year-old son, Veto. He worked construction. He kept his head down. And he watched. He watched the Catroni family, the Calabrian clan that had run Montreal’s underworld since the 20s under the protection of New York’s Banano family.
He watched their boss, Venenzo Catroni, grow old. He watched the underboss, Paulo Violi, a brash and arrogant Calabrian, take over day-to-day operations. and Nicolo Rzuto, quiet and unassuming, decided that Montreal was going to belong to the Sicilians. You have to understand something about how the underworld worked back then.
The Calabrians and the Sicilians hated each other. They came from neighboring regions of southern Italy, but they spoke different dialects, prayed at different altars, and trusted nobody outside their own bloodlines. The Catronis were Calabrian. The Rzuttos were Sicilian. And in Montreal in the early 70s, the Calabrians had everything.
The trucking, the construction unions, the port, the politicians. Paulo Violi ran his operations out of a coffee shop on Gene Talon Street called the Reio Bar. And he ran them like a king holding court. He didn’t see Nicolo Rzuto coming. Nobody did. Here’s how Nicolo did it. He went to New York. He sat down with the Banano bosses in 1977, the same family that had been protecting the Catronis for decades. And he made a case.
The Calabrians, he argued, were stealing. They were sloppy. They were drawing heat. The Sicilians could do better. They could move heroin through the port of Montreal directly into the American market without the Calibrian middlemen taking a cut. The Banano Commission listened. They thought about it. And on January 22nd, 1978, Paulo Violi was sitting in a card game at the Reagio bar when two masked men walked in, put a shotgun against the back of his head, and pulled the trigger.
The Calabrians lost Montreal in the time it took for one shell to discharge. By the time Vincenzo Catron died of natural causes in 1984, the Ruto family controlled everything north of the border. But there was a debt, and the debt was named Veto. Veto Risut was born on February 21st, 1946. By the time his father took over Montreal, Veto was 32 years old, tall, charming.
The kind of man who wore tailored suits and spoke four languages and could make a federal prosecutor laugh at his own jokes. The papers would later call him the Teflon dawn of Canada, the man who couldn’t be touched. But before he was untouchable, Vto Ruto did the work and the work was a banquet hall in Brooklyn called the Embassy Terrace.
May 5th, 1981, three rival Banano captains, Alons Indelicato, Philip Giaon, and Dominic Trinera walked into a sitdown believing they were about to negotiate the future of their family. Instead, four masked gunmen stepped out of a closet. One of those gunmen was Veto Risut. The hit took less than a minute. Three captains dead on the floor.
The Banano Civil War ended that night. And Veto went back to Montreal to his wife Giovana, his three children, his beautiful house in Cartierville, and he became invisible for the next 23 years. The FBI knew, they suspected, but they couldn’t prove it. The bodies stayed buried in a vacant lot in Queens. The witnesses stayed silent and Veto Risut built an empire.
What he built was extraordinary. By 2004, the Ruto organization was generating an estimated 1 billion a year. They controlled the port of Montreal, where 90% of the cocaine entering Eastern Canada passed through their hands. They owned construction companies that won every major government contract in Quebec, skimming tens of millions on inflated bids and substandard concrete.
They laundered money through the Bank of Nova Scotia, through real estate in Lval, through restaurants and pizza shops from St. Leonard to Rivier de Prairies. They had judges, they had cops, they had a sitting member of Montreal City Council on retainer. And at the top sat Veto, who would arrive at Lamas de Olivier restaurant on Bishop Street every Wednesday for lunch, kiss the matraee, order oso buco, and conduct the business of an empire over espresso.
Here’s the thing about how the risos made their money. The construction scheme was beautiful in its simplicity. It worked like this. The opportunity Quebec was rebuilding its highways and bridges in the early 2000s. billions in public infrastructure spending. The inside connection. Frank Zampino, the chairman of the Montreal Executive Committee, was a friend of the family. The execution.
Bids on city contracts were rigged in advance. Five companies controlled by the Rzuttos would submit bids, four of them deliberately too high. The fifth set to win. The price was inflated 30% above market value. The money on a $100 million contract, 30 million was profit. Half went to the construction company, half went into envelopes that traveled from job sites to social clubs to a small cafe on Jerry Street called the Conenza Social Club.
The problem, the Cenza was bugged. The RCMP had been watching the Consenza for years. Hidden cameras, hidden microphones. They watched Nicolo Rzuto in his 80s sitting at a back table while younger men brought him bricks of cash. They watched him stuff bundles of $100 bills into his socks. They had hours of footage. And in 2006, they brought it all down.
Project Colise 120 arrests. The entire Ruto leadership indicted in a single morning. Nicolo, the brothers, the captains. And in the United States, the FBI finally had enough cooperators to charge Veto Risut with the 1981 Brooklyn murders. Veto was extradited to the United States in 2006. He pleaded guilty to racketeering in May 2007, 10 years in federal prison.
He was sent to a medium security facility in Florence, Colorado, 6,000 ft up in the Rocky Mountains, 2,000 mi from his wife, his children, and the empire he had spent his life building. That’s when the war started. You have to understand, the moment Veto went away, the vultures started circling.
There were two main predators. The first was an old enemy. The Calabrian families that had been pushed out in 1978 had never forgotten. They had been waiting 30 years. The Katrroni remnants regrouped under a man named Salvatorei Montana, a New York banano who had been deported to Canada and saw himself as the rightful inheritor of Montreal.
The second predator was inside the family. Joseeppe Devito, a Calabrian who had married into Sicilian power and now decided he wanted it for himself. They formed an alliance and in 2009 they made their move. The first body was Veto’s son. December 28th, 2009. Nick Rzuto Jr., 42 years old, the era apparent, was walking out of a real estate office on Upper Lasheen Road in Montreal’s West End.
He had just left a meeting. His Mercedes was parked at the curb. A gunman approached on foot, fired three shots, and walked away. Nick was Veto’s only son. He was the next boss. He was the future of the dynasty and he was dead on a sidewalk at 1:15 in the afternoon while his father read the news in a Colorado prison cell with no way to call home.
Veto was permitted one phone call. The conversation recorded by federal authorities lasted 4 minutes. He spoke to his wife. He told her to keep the family together. He told her he would come home. And then he hung up and went back to his cell. And according to inmates who served with him, he did not speak for three days.
Six months later, they came for the consiguary. Paulo Renda, Veto’s brother-in-law, the family counselor, the man who had been the steady hand at the table for 30 years. May 20th, 2010. Renda was driving home from a golf course in the St. Leonard neighborhood. A car pulled alongside him. Two men forced him into their vehicle. He was never seen again.
No body, no grave, no evidence, just a vanished 67year-old grandfather who had eaten breakfast with his wife that morning and disappeared by lunch. To this day, the Renda case remains officially unsolved. Then they came for the underboss. Augustino Contrera, 66 years old, ran the family’s operations while Veto was inside. June 29th, 2010.
Contr was leaving his food distribution warehouse in St. Leonard at 3:30 in the afternoon. Two gunmen on foot opened fire as he walked to his car. 27 shell casings recovered at the scene. Contring lot, his bodyguard died beside him, and every man in the Razuto organization understood that they were now hunted animals.
5 months later on November 10th, 2010, the sniper took Nicolo Rzuto through the kitchen window. In 12 months, the conspirators had killed the patriarch, the heir, the conigliier, and the underboss. The Rzuto family, the most powerful crime organization in Canadian history, was effectively decapitated. Salvator Monta walked through Montreal like a conqueror.
The Calabrians took back the construction unions. The port shifted hands and in a Colorado prison cell, Veto Ruto, 64 years old with 5 years left on his sentence, sat down with a yellow legal pad and started making a list. Here’s what nobody understood about Veto Ruto. The federal prison system thought they were holding a Canadian gangster.
They weren’t. They were holding the most patient strategist in the history of organized crime. Veto had spent 40 years cultivating relationships across every major criminal organization in North America, the Bananos in New York, the Hell’s Angels in Quebec, street gangs in Toronto, Calabrian factions in Hamilton.
He had done favors for all of them. And from prison, using a network of attorneys and approved visitors, Veto Risut called in every favor he had ever earned. The first move was Montana. November 24th, 2011, Salvator Monta, the man who saw himself as the new king of Montreal, was at a safe house on an island in the Assumption River north of the city.
Somebody he trusted set up the meeting. When Montana arrived, gunmen were waiting. He was shot multiple times. He tried to escape across the icy river. He was found dead on the riverbank, half submerged in freezing water. The investigators counted the wounds. Six bullets. The man who orchestrated the murder of Nicolo Rzutto died alone in the snow 12 months and 2 weeks after the sniper took the old man at the kitchen table.
The second move was Jeppe Devito. Devito was already in prison on unrelated charges. Serving 15 years at a federal facility in Donakona. He thought he was safe. He wasn’t. July 8th, 2013, Dvito was found dead in his cell. The official cause was cyanide poisoning. Somebody had paid somebody to deliver something inside the most secure environment in the Canadian justice system.
The Calrian, who had betrayed the family from within, died on a concrete floor without ever knowing who had reached him. But Veto wasn’t done. Not even close. Through 2012 and 2013, while Veto served the last months of his American sentence, bodies kept dropping in Montreal. Joe Demalo, 68 years old, longtime associate who had switched sides during the war, shot in his driveway in Blaineville on November 4th, 2012.
Tonino Calokia, a hitter linked to the conspirators, gunned down in Laval. Vincenzo Scuderi, 80-year-old veteran of the rival faction, shot in a cafe in March 2013. By the time Vto Risut walked out of federal prison in October 2012 and returned to Montreal, the war was effectively over. The men who had killed his father, his son, his brother-in-law, and his closest captain were all dead, buried, or running for their lives.
According to investigators who tracked the killings, every primary architect of the conspiracy against the Risut family was dead within 18 months of Veto’s release. He came home to a city that knew exactly who he was again. He moved back into a house on Antoine Bertha on the same block where his father had been killed.
He attended his son’s grave at Notre Dame Denise Cemetery every Sunday. He resumed his Wednesday lunches at Bishop Street and he sat at the same table where the matraee still kissed his cheek. He was 67 years old. He had nothing left to prove. And in the underworld of Montreal, in Toronto, in New York, in Sicily, the message was clear. You do not move on a risoto.
Not the father, not the son, not the wife, not the dog. You wait your turn or you don’t get one. Veto Ruto died on December 23rd, 2013 of natural causes in a Montreal hospital. Lung cancer. He was 67 years old. He had been free for 14 months. The funeral at Notredam Da Defense Church drew 600 mourners. The honor guard included men who had flown in from Sicily, from New York, from Toronto.
The city of Montreal closed the streets around the church. He was buried beside his father and his son in the family plot at Notre Dame den, the most expensive cemetery in the city on a hillside overlooking the empire he had built and avenged. The Ruto family did not survive him. Veto’s nephew Leonardo and a few cousins tried to hold the structure together, but the war had killed too many captains.
The RCMP had broken too many codes, and the Calabrians, who had survived the revenge, regrouped under new leadership. By 2017, the Montreal underworld had fractured into a halfozen competing factions, none of them carrying the Rut name at the top. The construction scheme got exposed by the Charbano Commission, which spent four years documenting how organized crime had stolen an estimated $2 billion from Quebec taxpayers.
Frank Zampino went to prison. The Consensus Social Club closed. The Bank of Nova Scotia paid record fines. And Lamas de Olivier, the restaurant where Veto held court for 30 years, lost its mob clientele and became just another expensive lunch spot on Bishop Street. Here’s what the Ruto story tells you about organized crime that the movies never get right. It isn’t about loyalty.
It isn’t about honor. It isn’t about family. Those are the lies the bosses tell the soldiers to keep them shooting. What it’s actually about is patience. Nicolo Rzuto waited 24 years to take Montreal. Veto Ruto waited 18 months to bury everybody who killed his father. The men who lost the war in 1978 waited 30 years to come back.
And when they finally moved, they had 18 months of glory before they died. The clock never stops. The debts never expire. And in the end, every man who builds an empire in this world, no matter how careful, no matter how connected, no matter how many languages he speaks or judges he owns, ends up the same way.
Either dead in his own kitchen at 86, or dead in a prison hospital at 67, or dead on a riverbank in the snow with six bullets in his chest. Nicolo Risut built a dynasty that lasted four decades. He sat at the table with the bananos. He owned Montreal. He died eating soup. His son took the most surgical revenge in modern mafia history from a federal prison cell 2,000 m away.
And then he died of cancer 14 months later. 150 bodies, three generations, two countries, one unfinished feud that started in a Sicilian olive grove a century ago and ended in a hospital room 2 days before Christmas. That’s the real story of the Montreal Mafia Wars. Not the glory, not the revenge, the arithmetic.
Every action priced, every debt collected, every empire built and buried on the same patch of ground. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. What mafia figure should we cover next?
