Adrian Humphreys | April 7, 2015
Montreal PoliceGiuseppe “Joe” Renda, who would now be 56, vanished after leaving his Westmount home at lunchtime on May 4, 2012, Montreal police say. His car was later found in Montreal’s Little Italy.
The strange disappearance in 2012 of a Montreal man who was a quiet part of important moments in the history of the Mafia in Canada took an odd twist Tuesday when police suddenly released a public appeal to help solve the mystery.
Giuseppe “Joe” Renda, who would now be 56, vanished after leaving his Westmount home at lunchtime on May 4, 2012, Montreal police say. His car was later found in Montreal’s Little Italy. He spoke English and had a beard and a scar on his right ear.
At the time of his disappearance, a fierce feud for control of the Montreal Mafia led to several murders and kidnappings. Likely in response to that, Renda rarely left his house.
At the time of his disappearance police said little and his family said nothing. On Tuesday, Montreal police issued a photo and a public appeal for information on the case.
“The family didn’t want any press release regarding this missing person case at the time,” said Constable Manuel Couture, a police spokesman. “Now the family agreed to put the disappearance to the public,” he said.
“Every angle is part of the investigation — his criminal past, his friends, his family, everything.”
Renda was linked to the powerful Mafia group in Montreal led at the time by Vito Rizzuto.
Renda shared a name with the more notorious and criminally powerful Renda family, that of Paolo Renda, who was Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto’s brother-in-law and consigliore, the third most powerful position in a mob clan.
His involvement in the family was far less than his distant relative, but he nonetheless played a role in three gangland events that marked the Mafia’s development in Canada.
Renda was named as the representative of the Rizzuto family at an important gangland funeral in New York in 1999. The funeral — or, more precisely, the murder that prompted it — marked a milestone as it led to the virtual breaking of the Montreal Mafia’s close ties to the New York crime family it had long been subservient to.
On March 18, 1999, the bullet-ridden body of Gerlando Sciascia was tossed from a truck into a Bronx street.
Sciascia was known in New York as “George from Canada,” a nickname noting his position as the Montreal mob’s man in New York’s Bonanno Family, one of the famed Five Mafia Families of New York.
Sciascia’s murder, at the time, was a mystery, and police scrutinized his wake and funeral as dozens of ranking mafiosi paid respects to the Montreal gangster.
Renda was among the mourners, according to testimony from Salvatore “Good-Looking Sal” Vitale, who was the Bonanno Family’s underboss at the time (but who since became a government witness.)
He described Renda as a “goodfellow in our family.” He was also a relative of Sciascia’s.
The significance of the murder, however, as would later be revealed, was that it was secretly ordered by Bonanno boss Joseph “Big Joey” Massino, who asked his inner circle to never let Rizzuto know as he did not want to alienate the powerful clan of mobsters in Montreal.
The murder severed Rizzuto’s link to New York. He largely turned his back on the American gangsters from then on. The regular flow of “tribute” money from Canada to New York also ended.
“He was very hurt by what happened to George,” Vitale said of Rizzuto.
Years later, Renda again was pointed to as a gangster linked to Rizzuto, this time in Ontario.
Police say Renda was sent by Rizzuto to Ontario to help forge a large-scale gambling network in 2001. It signaled the encroachment of the Montreal Mafia into the underworld of Ontario. The gangsters of both provinces had largely remained independent from each other.
Renda was accused of building a sports betting enterprise that used Internet connections and BlackBerries to register bets, an innovation at the time. Police said about $200 million in bets were placed in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton. At the time, police said it was one of the largest betting rings in Canada. Police made 54 arrests, including of Renda, in Project Oltre.
While some accused accepted guilty pleas, charges were dropped against Renda in return for asset forfeiture, including his expensive Lincoln Navigator.
The case was the strongest evidence at the time that Rizzuto was expanding his influence across Canada and that other mob clans in Ontario, who had resisted such expansion in the past, seemed accepting of his underworld hegemony.
And most recently, Renda was linked to Salvatore “Sal the Ironworker” Montagna, who was the acting boss of the Bonanno Family when he was deported from the United States to Canada in 2009.
Montagna was part of a coalition that then tried to seize control of the Montreal Mafia while Rizzuto was in prison. The move split the crime group in two, with mobsters being asked to chose a side in the gang war. Montagna was shot and killed in 2011.
The timing of late Tuesday’s news release on Renda’s cold case was not explained by Montreal police.
“I don’t know what prompted the release,” said Couture. “Why now? I just don’t know why.”
In other cases, such renewed investigation came prior to a court being asked to officially declare a missing person to be deceased. A judge would want to know that all avenues of finding the person had been exhausted.
National Post
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