Over the last year several Rizzuto clan members and associates – including patriarch Nicolo Rizzuto and his grandson Nick Rizzuto Jr. – have been slain in Montreal, QC Canada, and the odds are that police investigators won’t solve the crimes. It’s not because the police are corrupt or inept but simply because organized crime murders are notoriously difficult to solve – it’s called “organized crime” for a reason – according to a study by Professor Tanya Trussler which will be published next month in the International Criminal Justice Review as reported by Douglas Quan for The National Post: “If the killer has little or no connection to the victim – sometimes killers are hired from outside the province – that can make it a tough case to solve. * * * Members of crime groups also make concerted efforts to know police tactics and have become adept at not leaving behind clues, such as getting rid of a BlackBerry after using it. The reluctance of witnesses to come forward is also a problem.”
Typically, a mob hit is solved only after a member within the responsible organization flips as reported by Jessica Murphy for The Toronto Sun: “Steve Roberts, a retired Montreal police investigators, recalled how hard it was to close a case during the city’s biker wars of the 1990s. ‘When you’re dealing with the Mafia or a group like the Hells Angels it takes longer to solve these murders,’ he said. ‘Normally, you have to wait until somebody gets arrested for something and then he wants to make a deal.’”
U.S. law enforcement long has encountered the same difficulties as their Canadian counterparts in solving Mafia murders, and literally thousands of mob hits over the decades throughout America have not been cleared. For example, “when Chicago’s deadliest hit man, Harry Aleman, was brought to trial in the late 1970s, not a single one of the city’s more than 1,000 mob-related murders had been solved” according to authors Maurice Possley and Rick Kogan in Everybody Pays. Indeed, even some of the most notorious high profile hits in the country – say, the 1975 “disappearance” of Jimmy Hoffa following his 1971 pardon by President Nixon – still cry out for justice. Notwithstanding the best good faith efforts of dedicated law enforcement, the Mafia pretty much gets away with murder.
