In the late 1970s, a mob war broke out between the Sicilian and Calabrian factions, which resulted in the deaths of Paolo Violi, the acting capo of the Cotroni family, and his brothers.
His father, Vito Rizzuto Sr. had been convicted on 23 June 1921 by an Italian military court of theft after he was caught stealing from the Regio Esercito.
On August 12, 1933, Vito was murdered in Patterson, New York, forcing Nicolo to grow up with a stepfather after his mother remarried to Liborio Milioto.
On February 21, 1954, along with his wife, son and daughter, Rizzuto immigrated to Canada by ship and docked at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before moving on to Montreal, Quebec.
[11] On December 23, 2013, Vito died from complications of lung cancer at a Montreal hospital,[12] after he had been released on October 5, 2012, after serving over five years in prison for murder and racketeering charges.
[17] Rizzuto was enraged when Cotroni appointed Violi as his successor, whom the journalist Jerry Langton noted was "another Calabrian, and an ill-mannered and disrespectful one at that".
[19] In September 1972, Natale "Joe Diamond" Evole, the boss of the Bonanno family, sent Nicky Alfano and Nicola Buttofuoco of New York to Montreal in an attempt to mediate the dispute.
[19] Giuseppe Settecase, a veteran Mafiosi with a criminal record going back to 1936, was sent north from New York in another attempt to mediate the dispute, which was threatening to break the Cotroni family apart.
[19] Settecase's attempt was no more successful and instead Cotroni and Violi asked him to take a message to "the Commission" (the governing board of the American Mafia) for permission to kill Rizzuto.
[21] Cotroni capodecina Paolo Violi complained about the independent modus operandi of his Sicilian 'underlings', Rizzuto in particular: "He is going from one side to the other [i.e. from Canada to the US and back], here and there, and he says nothing to nobody, he is doing business and nobody knows anything."
[20] However, in 1974, Rizzuto was summoned to testify at La Commission d'enquête sur le crime organisé (CECO) hearings, which led him to flee to Venezuela, which had no extradition treaty with Canada.
[20] Rizzuto appointed his son Vito to handle operations in Montreal while he opened up a pizzeria in Caracas called Los Padrinos ("The Godfathers").
[20] Rizzuto became a Venezuelan citizen along with the Cuntrera brothers, Pasquale and Gaspare, who like him fled Montreal to avoid having to testify at the CECO hearings.
[27] Sciara was executed as he was leaving the cinema by a hitman who used a sawed-off shotgun to blast apart his head, which caused his wife to be hospitalized as she was injured by flying fragments of his skull.
[27] Langton wrote that the murder of Sciara "become a precedent for the brutality" of the Rizzuto family, who became notorious for their contempt of the traditional rules of the Mafia which forbade killing a man in front of his wife.
[29] Just before Christmas 1977, Vito Rizzuto and Violi met face-to-face in the home of a Montreal resident for a last-ditch effort to resolve their differences, according to a police report.
[5] Although Rizzuto was in Venezuela at the time, he was linked to the 1978 murder of Paolo Violi, a Bonanno soldier who had been named acting boss of the Cotroni family.
[33] Unlike Violi who relished being at the center of social life in the Italian Canadian community in Montreal, Rizzuto and company tended to keep a low profile.
[42] On November 10, 2010, Rizzuto was killed at his residence in the Cartierville borough of Montreal when a single bullet from a sniper's rifle punched through double-paned glass of the rear patio doors of his mansion; he was 86.