Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia Clan - Five Decades in The Illicit Drug Trade

Five Decades in The Illicit Drug Trade

The Cuntrera-Caruana clan almost certainly was involved in heroin trafficking networks since the 1950s. Their names appeared at investigations in such famous cases as the French Connection in the 1970s and the Pizza Connection in the 1980s. Several intertwining Sicilian networks were running heroin to the US. 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.

The repression caused by the Ciaculli Massacre disarranged the Sicilian heroin trade to the United States. Mafiosi were banned, arrested and incarcerated. Control over the trade fell into the hands of a few fugitives: Salvatore Ciaschiteddu Greco, his cousin Salvatore Greco, also known as l'ingegnere, Pietro Davì, Tommaso Buscetta and Gaetano Badalamenti. All of them were acquainted with the Cuntrera-Caruana clan.

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. Buscetta stayed at Pasquale Cuntrera's home recovering from a venereal disease. They were introduced to him as "uomini d'onore" – men-of-honour. When Buscetta met them they were already very rich. Pasquale Cuntrera told Buscetta they were trafficking heroin.

The Italian police finally got an idea of the role of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan in 1982-83 when they investigated the Italian end of what later was called the Pizza Connection. 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. "Almost all the money of the Sicilian Mafia in North-America to purchase heroin and the resulting proceeds went through their hands," according to a police investigator.

In 1981, Gaspare Mutolo, who would become a pentito in 1992, organized a 400 kilogram shipment of heroin to the US. The Cuntrera-Caruana clan received half of the load, while John Gambino of the Gambino Family in New York took care of the other 200 kilograms. 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. The system in the heroin-business was that every Mafia-family could invest in a shipment if it had the money. The Cuntrera-Caruana clan were the trusted buyers who supplied the market in North America.

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. Subsequent investigations revealed that the clan was picking up the heroin in Thailand since 1983. They replaced the supply line of Gaspare Mutolo who had been arrested.

In 1988 the RCMP seized a 30 kilo load of heroin at a factory owned by Cuffaro's father-in-law in Windsor in Canada near the U.S. border. The same year Giuseppe Cuffaro and Pasquale Caruana were arrested in Germany. The German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) discovered an extensive network that tried to set up heroin trafficking from the Far East to Europe. Caruana and Cuffaro were supported by relatives and some of the many fellow-villagers who had emigrated to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.