A reputed Montreal gangster with ties to the Rizzuto crime family was gunned down in a brazen daylight shooting, police said on Wednesday.
Agostino Cuntrera, 66, and his 48-year-old bodyguard were shot on Tuesday afternoon outside an east-end Montreal restaurant said to be owned by Cuntrera.
Two men in a black Chevrolet Impala similar to one spotted leaving the scene were arrested shortly after the slayings. One of them was released while the other was being held on unrelated charges, police said.
Cuntrera was believed to have taken over the helm of the Rizzuto clan after the 2006 extradition to the US of crime boss Vito Rizzuto on murder charges, public broadcaster CBC said.
Described by local media as “old school,” low-key and shy of the limelight, he is the fourth mafioso to be murdered since Rizzuto’s arrest in 2004.
Rizzuto is serving a 10-year sentence in Colorado for racketeering, related to three underworld murders in Brooklyn in 1981.
His father, the family patriarch Niccolo Rizzuto, 85, was arrested in 2006 in a police crackdown on organized crime.
He was sentenced to four years in prison and sent to jail along with a number of his associates, though he has since been released under strict monitoring.
The same year, a family friend, Domenico Macri, was killed in a drive-by shooting, prompting the city’s mafiosi to enlist bodyguards and start riding in armored limousines.
The murder remains unsolved.
Last December, Vito Rizzuto’s son Nick Rizzuto Jr was gunned down in broad daylight in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grace district.
An elderly man associated with the Rizzuto family was also reported missing in May. Paolo Renda, 70, had been recently released from prison after a serving a sentence for criminal association among other charges, but did not arrive home one night, police sources said.
His wife — sister of Vito Rizzuto — found his car near their home and alerted police, who found the car doors open and keys on the dashboard.
Montreal’s Sicilian Mafia is facing new competition for criminal spoils from a Calabrese clan, street gangs, and even Haitian groups, according to crime experts.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing