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.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS