Nicola "Nick" 'Nero (Italian pronunciation: [niˈkɔːla ˈneːro]; born 1977) is a Canadian gangster currently serving a life sentence for murder.
[1] Nero told the reporter Wade Hemsworth of The Hamilton Spectator that he could bench-press 600 pounds and spoke of his desire to be Canada's greatest professional wrestler.
[4] Nero used his robbery proceeds to enter the cocaine smuggling business in partnership with a Hells Angel, Zavisa "Zav" Drecic.
[6] The fact that Nero refused the Crown's offers of a plea bargain where he would testify against his Hells Angels associates improved his reputation in the underworld as someone who could be trusted not to turn informer.
[8] Scarcella had been nearly killed by another prisoner who stabbed him half dozen times with a homemade knife in an attempted "jailhouse hit" in April 2007 and he was afraid for his life.
[11] After his release on day parole in November 2009, Nero started to work with one of Scarcella's associates, Martino Caputo, the Toronto agent for the Rizzuto family of Montreal.
[9] Nero's request to join the Mafia was refused under the grounds that he was a "heat score" (slang for a criminal who attracts police attention), but Caputo went into business with him.
[13] The Wolfpack leaders used encrypted texts on the Pretty Good Privacy system to communicate, and wrote frankly about plans to commit crimes.
[11] In 2011, Nero had met Tawnya Del Ben Fletcher, a young woman from a wealthy family at a gym in Niagara Falls and started to date her.
[2] In October 2011, Nero became engaged to Fletcher, a much younger woman at the age of 27 with an MBA who turned down admission to a medical school in Australia to live with him.
[21] Nero lived in a St. Catharines half-way house from Sunday to Thursday and a place of his choosing on Fridays and Saturdays per his parole conditions.
[26] Several of the other residents of the half-way house-who were jealous of Nero's way of flaunting his wealth-reported him to the police, saying he was living well beyond the means of an unemployed man.
[12] Despite her later claims to only play a passive role in the Wolfpack, the police bugs inside their condo recorded Fletcher and Nero engaged in frequent conversations about how to discover internal theft in the smuggling ring as both were convinced that someone was stealing the cocaine on its way up from Mexico.
[34] One of Nero's Wolfpack associates was a Croat immigrant, Nebojsa Dronjak, the director of a luxury automobile dealership in Port Robinson turned cocaine dealer.
[37] Despite his claims of friendship, Dronjak seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in telling Nero's misinformation designed to work him up into fear and rage.
[39] As Dronjak continued to tease him about the supposed Montreal meeting, Nero finally snapped as he texted: "We all responcble [responsible] for our own losses.
[43] Alkhalil accused Nero of gratuitously straining relations with the Sinaloa Cartel and only seemed to tolerate him because he was one of the top drug smugglers in the Niagara Peninsula.
[52] Notably, Nero tended to be submissive in his texts to the Hells Angel Larry Amero and Shane "Wheels" Maloney, the boss of the West End Gang as the Hells Angels control the port of Vancouver while the West End Gang controls the port of Montreal.
[55] By 9 May 2012, Nero was boasting to Alkhalil in his texts he was at the northern end of a vast smuggling nexus running north from Tijuana into Los Angeles and on to Buffalo.
[56] Nero also claimed in his texts to have purchased the services of the crew of an Air Canada passenger jet to smuggle cocaine from Mexico into Toronto.
[58] Besides for bragging about his love life, Caputo argued to Nero that because Raposo disliked texting via the Pretty Good Privacy network, and instead preferred to use the telephone that proved he must be an informer.
[63] The possibility that the audit might have been caused by the fact that he lived on welfare while driving about two luxury Italian sports automobiles seemed never to have occurred to Nero.
[64] Raposo, Nero, Alkhalil and Caputo were planning to bring in a shipment of cocaine from Mexico via Chicago that was worth $5 million with the profits to be split equally four ways.
College Street is heatey [hot, i.e. difficult to operate on] but if I get em [them] inside the shop its ok no noise why are we killing ice cream people?
The initials stand for Pretty Good Privacy; alas, when the user thoughtfully provides his secret password on a sticky, it's easily defeated.
[77] Wiwchar walked into the Sicilian Sidewalk Café dressed as a construction worker while wearing a dust mask and a wig.
[19] In April 2015, Fletcher was granted full parole, as the National Parole Board declared: "You are reported to have been a member of the conspiracy for three months and intercepts indicate you had done mathematical calculations for the drugs and finances of the operation, typed emails and cautioned your fiancée on how not to get caught and that he was getting to be too high a profile... You claim you now understand how you became trapped by the lure of an exciting lifestyle with a 'bad boy' who spoiled you with extravagant gifts, exotic vehicles and high-end properties.
[87] The defense lawyers argued the man responsible for the Raposo murder was a Wolfpack leader, Frédéric Lavoie of Montreal, who had been dismembered into four pieces while still alive in Columbia in 2014 and thus was conveniently unable to defend his reputation.
[88] The Crown Attorney Maurice Gillezeau by contrast argued the texts were evidence of a murder plot, noting that Alkhalil was thrown into a state of panic when Wiwchar was arrested on 21 June 2012, which did not support the fantasy role-playing defense.
[92] It is believed that the murder attempt was to punish him for leaving his email address and passport to the Pretty Good Privacy network out in plain view in Fletcher's condo.