Nicolo Rizzuto, an 86-year-old Italian-Canadian man of Sicilian origin, was killed on November 10, 2010, inside his home on Antoine-Berthelet Avenue in Montreal's Ahuntsic-Cartierville district. Rizzuto was widely described by police and organized-crime investigators as the patriarch of the Rizzuto crime family, which had dominated much of Montreal's organized-crime world for decades.
Shortly before 5:45 p.m., he was inside the residence with his wife, Libertina, and his daughter when a gunman concealed in the wooded area behind the property fired a single carefully aimed shot toward the house.
The bullet traveled through the windows at the rear of the residence before striking Rizzuto in the head. Accounts from the investigation indicated that he was in or near the kitchen and solarium area, apparently preparing for or sitting down to dinner, when he was hit. Neither of the two women with him was physically injured, although both were treated for shock. Emergency personnel rushed Rizzuto to nearby Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal, but he died shortly after arriving. The precision of the shooting, the use of the wooded property as concealment and the fact that only one shot was required led the killing to be widely characterized as a sniper-style assassination.
Investigators immediately concentrated on the wooded area behind the Rizzuto residence. Officers searched it with flashlights on the night of the murder and returned for a more extensive examination the following day. Police determined that the shooter had been positioned behind the house and apparently escaped through the same wooded area. Investigators also examined surveillance equipment that had recently been installed at the residence. Montreal police said Rizzuto had received threats during the months preceding his death and had been approached by investigators concerning those threats, although authorities did not publicly identify who had made them. In the first days after the killing, police said they had little evidence establishing the identity of the gunman or the precise weapon used.
The assassination occurred during an extraordinary period of violence against the Rizzuto organization. Rizzuto's grandson, Nicolo “Nick” Rizzuto Jr., had been shot to death in Montreal in December 2009. His son-in-law and senior family associate Paolo Renda disappeared in May 2010 and was believed to have been abducted, and longtime Rizzuto figure Agostino Cuntrera was killed with his bodyguard the following June. Meanwhile, Rizzuto's son Vito, regarded as the organization's dominant leader, was imprisoned in the United States. Montreal police described the organized-crime landscape as undergoing a significant power struggle and investigated Rizzuto's murder in connection with the broader series of attacks, although no specific motive or ordering party was publicly proven.
One of the most significant names to emerge in the investigation was Salvatore “Sam” Calautti, a Toronto-area organized-crime figure associated with the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. Police later suspected Calautti of involvement in several organized-crime murders, including Rizzuto's assassination. Reports indicated that investigators had taken an interest in Calautti after one of his longtime associates was observed in Montreal around the time of the killing. Calautti was investigated as a possible participant and was subsequently described as a police suspect in Rizzuto's death, but he was never arrested or charged in connection with the murder.
Calautti himself was assassinated on July 12, 2013, outside the Terrace Banquet Hall in Vaughan, Ontario. He and an associate were shot to death as they were getting into Calautti's vehicle after attending a gathering. His death ended any possibility of prosecuting him for Rizzuto's murder unless evidence implicated other surviving participants. Despite speculation that Calautti's killing might have been connected to retaliation by people loyal to the Rizzuto organization, no court ever established such a connection, and Calautti was never judicially determined to have killed Rizzuto.
Years later, another glimpse into the unsolved killing emerged from statements attributed to former Montreal Mafia figure Andrew Scoppa. Before Scoppa was himself murdered in 2019, he told journalists that he knew the identity of the person who had shot Rizzuto. Scoppa claimed the assassin had fired from roughly 25 feet away using a. 308-calibre rifle equipped with a telescopic sight and laser. Those assertions came from Scoppa rather than a publicly proven police finding, and the person he claimed was responsible was not publicly identified in the account. Scoppa specifically indicated that the killer had never been arrested.
No one has been convicted of Nicolo Rizzuto's murder. Despite the intensive organized-crime investigation, the identification of Calautti as a suspect and later claims from figures within Montreal's underworld, prosecutors never brought a murder charge against anyone for the shooting. The assassination therefore remains officially unsolved, with the single shot fired from the darkness behind Rizzuto's home standing as one of the most dramatic killings of Montreal's long-running organized-crime conflict.
