Montreal mob figure Alessandro (Allie Boy) Sucapane was released to a halfway house in the weeks before Christmas after almost eight years in prison on racketeering and drug-trafficking charges stemming from the high-profile Project Clemenza case. Sucapane, 53, was part of the insurrection in the Rizzuto crime family that began in the late 2000s and still rages to this very day. More than 100 casualties are attributed to the epic mob war stretching from Quebec to Ontario and beyond and still showing no end in sight. Don Vito Rizzuto died of natural causes in 2013 at the age of 67, just over a year removed from a prison stint of his own. A number of his family members and close friends have been slain in the mob war. The television series Bad Blood, currently available for streaming on Netflix, dramatizes the events surrounding the conflict. Sucapene served as a key lieutenant to one of the palace coup’s leaders, Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito, who was killed behind bars via cyanide poisoning five years ago. De Vito had joined with one-time Vito Rizzuto confidant Raynald Desjardins and deported New York mob boss Salvatore (Sal the Ironworker) Montagna to challenge Rizzuto’s power while Rizzuto was locked up. Three of De Vito’s top men, Giuseppe (Joe Closure) Colapelle (2012), Vinnie Scuderi (2013) and Nick Di Marco (2017) have been murdered in the war as well. Joe Closure was De Vito’s liaison to Sal Montagna, clipped in 2011 when he and Desjardins fell out of favor with each other. With De Vito incarcerated facing narcotics charges from a case that dropped years before Project Clemenza surfaced, Sucapene and Scuderi acted as his main go-betweens with the street. Police surveillance units would often follow Sucapene from prison visits with De Vito directly to meetings with Joe Closure at a series of Montreal coffee shops and cigar bars in which he delivered orders from the boss. Sucapene also oversaw the De Vito crew’s marijuana grow operations, constructing state-of-the-art greenhouse facilities in multiple locations across the country for use, and a contraband smuggling racket at the prison (Riviere des Prairies Detention Center) where De Vito was doing his time. He headquartered his affairs out of a pair of bars in Montreal owned through De Vito crew front men.
