The Sixth Family by Lee Lamothe

Author:Lee Lamothe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780470738320
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-01-12T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

NEW YORK AND MONTREAL, 1994

The Sixth Family was unmoved by the failure of the occasional new venture or the lengthy sentence issued against a senior member, even one as close to their core as Domenico Manno, and refused to retreat from the fervent cross-border movement of drugs. Around the same time as Manno’s South Florida escapade, Girolamo Sciortino’s cornwall cocaine blues and the cocaine debacle in Venezuela, another core member of the Sixth Family was similarly busy expanding the franchise. This operation was built on sound economic theory: the law of supply and demand.

Cocaine had become so plentiful in North America that the price was steadily dropping. At the same time, Europe was awash in cheap heroin, thanks to bumper crops in Afghanistan. The Montreal mafiosi saw an easy business model for enhanced profit; all they needed to do was get their cocaine to Europe to sell at a premium and, in return, move their heroin to sell in the United States with a similar markup.

For this scheme, the Sixth Family relied on Emanuele Ragusa, according to U.S. law enforcement and court files. Ragusa worked with the family’s trusted drug intermediary, Sammy Nicolucci. This time, rather than a Hispanic family linked to Colombia or a biker gang or native criminals, the Sixth Family formed an alliance with the Big Circle Boys, an Asia-based crime syndicate, and the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia of Italy’s Calabria region.

For the Sixth Family and the Big Circle Boys to work together was a meeting of two seemingly perfect criminal entities. The organizations are strikingly similar. Both hark back to the tradition of their ethnic criminal roots. The Big Circle Boys, who take their name from the circle of prisons around the Chinese city of Canton, come from the traditions of the Triads of China. Both groups, however, recognize the weaknesses of a rigid hierarchical structure and the vulnerability it creates and adjust their structure accordingly. Like the Sixth Family, the Big Circle Boys’ motive is purely one of profit, and at the root of their power and wealth is the global heroin trade. Like the Sixth Family, the Big Circle Boys are active in dozens of countries around the world, in both legitimate and illicit activities and, like the Sixth Family, they are master networkers. The Big Circle Boys’ chief representatives in their venture with the Sixth Family were Cheung Wai Dai, known by the street name “Ah Wai,” and Chung Wai Hung, known as “Thai Gor Hung.”

Also in on their scheme was Emanuele LoGiudice, a New York- based Sicilian mafioso who was working to distribute whatever heroin the Sixth Family could get him. Ragusa and Nicolucci held several meetings with their Asian heroin connections, according to police. The conspiracy they mapped out was for the Big Circle Boys to bring in heroin from Asia to Canada, which the Sixth Family would buy and ship to New York. Once there, a portion would be sold to LoGiudice for the Mafia to distribute and the remainder sold to the Kung Lok Triad, another Asian crime group with its roots in Hong Kong.

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