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worst task a mother can imagine: preparing the funeral of her child.
    Vito also spoke with his mother, Libertina, whom some thought was the true guiding force in the family. In times of enormous stress and emotion, Zia (Aunt) Libertina betrayed the emotion of a sphinx. Vito’s father, Nicolò (Zio Cola, “Uncle Nick”) Rizzuto Sr., had moved up considerably in their world when he gained her hand in marriage over sixty years earlier. In fact, former Sicilian Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta suspected that Nicolò was admitted to the Mafia out of respect for Libertina’s father, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno, one of those old Sicilian Mafia dons who managed to appeared all-powerful and yet humble at the same time.
    Zia Libertina’s name translated roughly to “Liberty,” and she certainly felt free to speak her mind. She and Nicolò raised Vito to be mindful that he was their only son and carried their expectations uponhim, wherever he went and as long as he lived. Vito grew up in a culture where a dutiful son takes every action to salve his mother’s pain, even if it means breaking the most serious laws in the Criminal Code. In Vito’s birthplace of Sicily, men might be the ones with their fingers on the triggers, but often it was the women who dictated the rhythms of a war, calling out for revenge for the deaths of their boys, husbands, fathers and brothers. There is no greater blow to a mob boss’s dignity than to sit at dinner and hear the family matriarch moan, “Noi mangiamo al tavolo e mio figlio mangia terra” (“We eat at the table and my son eats the earth”).
    Vito also spoke repeatedly on the prison phone with his sister, Maria, and his two surviving children, both of whom worked as lawyers. Vito told each of them that he wanted to convince the warden to let him attend Nick Jr.’s funeral. They all came back strongly against this. It would be undignified, even dangerous. His presence would attract more media coverage. He would have to wear handcuffs. “There will be a guard with you.”
    Helplessness was a fresh emotion for Vito. Although for decades he had been on the radar of more police projects than anyone could remember, this was his first prison stint. Vito was generally the one causing the tears and the funerals, and his underlings were the ones who got locked up. Just a few years before, the only thing in Montreal it seemed he didn’t control was the city’s nasty winters, and he routinely fled those for warm Caribbean climes, where he mingled business with pleasure on manicured golf courses with city bureaucrats, union and business bosses, Hells Angels and other Mafiosi. Vito was gliding through life at the top of a multi-million-dollar international empire of large-scale construction fraud, drug trafficking, extortion, bribery, stock manipulation, loansharking and money laundering.
    For all of Vito’s life, the ways of the underworld had been the natural order of things for him, with its cycles of murder and revenge. There had never been room for pacifists at the top level of the underworld, and no one doubted that Vito intended to please his mother and return to the upper echelon of what Montrealers called the
milieu
. Had he been free, an attack on Nick Jr. would have been unthinkable.
    Vito’s father was a product of west Sicily, but he was himself a Canadian hybrid. A large part of his skill was the ability to pull together disparate North American groups who otherwise might have ignored or plotted against each other, such as rival Haitian street gangs, Hispanic cocaine traffickers, Montreal’s Irish West End Gang, rival bikers in the Hells Angels and Rock Machine, and factions from the Sicilian Mafia, Calabrian-based ’Ndrangheta and American La Cosa Nostra. What Vito created was something wholly modern and New World and businesslike: a consortium. Under his leadership these criminal factions could pursue shared