The unrest in the Canadian underworld continues. There were three mob-related shootings in the past week across the border, two resulting in fatalities. For the past decade, crime syndicates in Montreal and Toronto have been under siege by upheaval in the country’s first family of the mafia, the Rizzuto clan out of Quebec, a series of intertwined conflicts that has accounted for a spate of gangland slayings now numbered in the hundreds. Last Tuesday, Montreal Irish mob lieutenant John McKenzie survived an attempt on his life outside a suburban gym in a Laval strip mall. Montreal Italian mobster Steve (Stevie the Jew) Ovadia wasn’t so lucky the following day, as he was shot dead leaving a Laval eatery Tuesday. On Friday, Toronto wiseguy Cosimo E. Commisso, the 33-year old cousin of Ontario mob boss Cosimo (The Quail) Commisso, was killed alongside a female companion in front of his home. The Commisso clan are at the forefront of the Canadian Calabrian mafia. Calabria is a region of southern Italy. The Quail is one of the country’s most powerful crime lords. For the past few years, the Commissos have been feuding with a gang known as the Wolfpack Alliance. In 2016, the younger Commisso (seen in the photo above) butted heads with Wolfpack Alliance affiliate Anastasios Leventis, having just landed in Toronto from Montreal where he had been sent by the Rizzuto syndicate to collect outstanding debts. Leventis was killed in January 2017. The 48-year old McKenzie is a loanshark in the West End Gang, Montreal’s de-facto Irish mafia. McKenzie was best friends with slain West End Ganger Richard (Slick) Griffin, the organization’s liaison to the Rizzuto crime family until he was killed in July 2006 over a dispute involving a gambling debt. According to police sources, McKenzie assumed ownership in two local taverns from debtors who owed him money from juice loans. Ovadia, 45, was an associate of current Rizzuto regime leaders Leonardo Rizzuto and Stephen (Little Sauce) Sollecito. Longtime Montreal Godfather Vito Rizzuto, Leonardo’s dad, died in December 2013, his mob family and blood family in tatters after a war erupted upon his incarceration in the United States in the 2000s for the infamous “Three Capos” murders in New York back in the 1980s. The tensions haven’t ceased in the five years since the elderly Rizzuto passed away, allegedly from an aggressive bout of cancer. Rizzuto walked from Colorado federal prison sentence in 2012, returning to Canada and seeking to avenge the betrayal of a laundry list of loyalists-turned-enemies. Police observed Ovadia meeting with Leonardo Rizzuto and Little Sauce Sollecito and a 24-year old drug dealer named Mario Campellone in September 2015. Three days later, Campellone popped up dead. Rizzuto is reputed to have grabbed the reins of the Montreal mafia from his father. Sollecito is alleged to be his underboss. The mob war that has engulfed Canada in the last nine years took the lives of Rizzuto’s brother and grandfather and Sollecito’s dad.
