"[1] According to the Italian Antimafia Commission the Cuntrera-Caruana clan played a central role in international drug trafficking, extending their interests from Italy to Canada and Venezuela.

The Cuntrera and Caruana families originated from Siculiana, a small village on the south coast of Sicily in the province of Agrigento.

Both were acquitted in 1953 per non aver commesso il fatto – not having committed the act – an almost ritual verdict where Mafia crimes were concerned in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s.

[1] Some returned; however in the 1970s Leonardo Caruana became capo mandamento – after he was deported from Canada – of the area under the leadership of the Mafia boss of the province Agrigento, Giuseppe Settecasi.

The influential politician Calogero Mannino of the Christian Democrat party (DC – Democrazia Cristiana) was a witness at the marriage of Leonardo Caruana's son Gerlando in 1977 in Siculiana.

[7] In 1966, most of the clan left the village, when they were banished by court order, as a result of a crackdown by Italian police after the Ciaculli massacre.

The Cuntrera-Caruana clan had direct links with the ruling Commission of the Sicilian Mafia, and are acknowledged by the American Cosa Nostra.

[1] In the Second Mafia War the Cuntrera-Caruana clan initially sided with the established Mafia-families of Palermo who were massacred by the Corleonesi headed by Salvatore Riina.

They had the same source – suppliers from the Corsican underworld in Marseilles with their high quality laboratories – and the same destination – the North American consumer market.

[1] The famous "pentito" (turncoat) Tommaso Buscetta told Antimafia judge Giovanni Falcone in 1984, how he had met the clan in Montreal in 1969 during Christmas.

The Italian police was following the movements of Giuseppe Bono, the middleman between the buyers of the Gambino and Bonanno crime families in New York and the Sicilian clans who organized the heroin traffic to the US.

The shipments were financed by consortium of Sicilian Mafia clans, who had organized a pool to provide the money to buy the merchandise from Thai suppliers.

[1] In 1985, in a joint operation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and British Customs and Excise, a heroin transport was seized in London and Montreal.

[1] In 1988 the RCMP seized a 30 kilo load of heroin at a factory owned by Cuffaro's brother-in-law in Windsor in Canada near the U.S. border.

[1] The pipeline fell apart when the Italian police seized 5,497 kilos of cocaine (a European record at the time) in March 1994 near Turin.

[1][5][11] The Caruanas moved the cocaine pipeline towards Canada, where the family took care of wholesale distribution with the consent of Vito Rizzuto the leader of the Cosa Nostra, who came from the same region in Sicily as the Cuntrera-Caruanas.

[14][15] In 1993, the Italian Corriere della Sera reported that the Cuntrera-Caruana clan owned 60 per cent of the Caribbean island Aruba, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands through investments in hotels, casinos and the election-campaign of Prime Minister Henny Eman.

[8][24][25] In February 2000, Alfonso pleaded guilty to charges of importing and trafficking narcotics, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison by the Ontario Superior Court.

[27] In June 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled Alfonso Caruana to be sent back to Italy to face jail time.

[29][30][31] Agostino Cuntrera, cousin of Alfonso, and presumed acting boss who was believed to have taken control of the Rizzuto crime family, was killed together with his bodyguard in Saint Leonard, Quebec, on 30 June 2010.

A Molotov cocktail was thrown into the Di Manno Bakery in Vaughan on June 12, and gunshots struck the door of his home on the same night.