Embattled Montreal Mafia clings to underworld power amid setbacks

After nearly two decades of intermittent unrest in the Montreal Mafia, the Rizzuto dynasty is once again on the ropes. In the spring of 2026, the Canadian government launched a sweeping assault on the Rizzuto crime family. In the wake of the crackdown, rival gangs moved aggressively to exploit the Mafia’s weakened state and unleashed a wave of attacks. In the coming months, several Rizzuto Mob barons are preparing to fight for their freedom in court.

Last June, Canadian authorities, collectively called “The Crown,” dropped the sprawling “Project Alliance” indictment, the biggest Mafia prosecution in the country’s history. It charged nearly the entire leadership of the Montreal Mafia with a half-dozen underworld homicides, gangsterism—Canada’s equivalent to racketeering—and money laundering.

Mayhem in Montreal

While the headline-grabbing bust was rocking the Rizzutos, the upstart street gangs Arab Power and the Rap Pack Mob, made up mainly of Haitians and East Africans, moved in. Connected to international drug kingpin Ryan Wedding’s Sinaloa Cartel-backed organization, the two street gangs declared war on the embattled Sicilian mobsters, firebombing Rizzuto-owned businesses and demanding money to stop. The attacks have carried into 2026.

Many of the Montreal mobsters have been declared flight risks and currently sit behind bars, including boss Leonardo “Leo the Lawyer” Rizzuto, street boss David “Baldy” Barberio, underbosses Stefano “Little Sauce” Sollecito and Pietro “Black Pete” D’Adamo, and top capos Vito Salvaggio and Nicky Spagmolo. The set of trials is scheduled to begin in September. If convicted, they all face life sentences.

Most of the Crown’s case is built on the testimony of former Montreal Mafia hit man Freddy Silva, suspected of committing 65 contract murders for several different criminal groups. Silva, 44, worked directly for the Sollecito crew in the Rizzuto organization. While in prison, he became aware that the Rizzutos put money on his head, concerned that he knew too much. To save himself, he made a deal with prosecutors in May 2022.

Despite their legal predicament, the Montreal Mafia is continuing business as usual. Polished, poised and formally educated as an attorney, the 56-year-old Rizzuto and his crime-family cabinet reportedly are still maintaining day-to-day control of the organization. Allegedly, they even hold “making” ceremonies and meetings with their troops via smuggled iPhones. The jailed Rizzuto contingent is suspected of ordering the murders of three loyalists-turned-rivals since their summer 2025 takedown, including the prison killing of a high-ranking Arab Power Gang member last June.

Both the Arab Power Gang and the Rap Pack Mob (then known as the “Black Mafia Click”) began their respective rises in the Montreal underworld as hired muscle for the Rizzuto family in more stable times and allegedly have formed an alliance.

“These new groups, these new crime lords, they show zero regard for the way things used to be when the Rizzuto Mob was the Roman Empire. They don’t care about that one bit. In fact, it motivates them to go after the Rizzutos so they can stake their own claim, establish their own legacy by taking out the street superstars of past eras,” one-time Montreal labor union boss and Mafia whistleblower Ken Pereira remarked on the changing landscape. “Back in the 1990s, 2000s, young crews like Arab Power or Rap Pack would have done anything to be underneath that Montreal Mafia flag. Those days are long gone. This era is all about disruption.”

Establishing the Rizzuto dynasty

The Rizzutos are a resilient Mob family. The organization and the Rizzuto lineage itself still hold the immense sway and cash-churning ability of their 2000s glory days. Montreal’s underworld destabilized in the late 2000s when Vito Rizzuto, Leonardo’s father and predecessor, was extradited to the United States. There he pleaded guilty for his role in the infamous 1981 “three captains” hit for the Bonanno crime family, depicted in the 1997 film Donnie Brasco.

The elder Rizzuto was the most revered and powerful organized crime figure Canada had ever seen. Vito oversaw three decades of peace and Rizzuto supremacy until a betrayal by his right-hand man, Raynald Desjardins, and deported Bonanno Mob boss Salvatore “Sal the Ironworker” Montagna. The pair teamed up for an ultimately unsuccessful palace coup, but not before taking out Vito’s father, oldest son and brother-in-law via Mafia-style executions. The much-vaunted rebel union proved short-lived—Desjardins went on to kill Montagna in November 2011.

In the late 1970s, Nicolo “Uncle Nick” Rizzuto, Vito’s father, returned from exile in Venezuela and assumed control of the Montreal Mafia. He staged a hostile takeover by killing the Bonanno-aligned Calabrian Violi brothers and establishing the family’s gangland stronghold—and eventual criminal dynasty—on three continents: North America, South America and Europe. Vito grabbed the reins from his father in the 1980s and broke off from the Bonannos. The younger Rizzuto grew the Canadian Sicilian Mafia to new heights, gaining considerable influence in the global drug, stolen goods and gambling economies.

‘Leo the Lawyer’ ascends to power

The blows to the Rizzutos continued into the 2010s. On November 10, 2010, Nicolo was assassinated in his kitchen by a sniper. Shortly following his release from prison and return to Montreal, Vito died suddenly in December 2013. Before succumbing to an aggressive form of cancer, he initiated a massive purge of dissidents and traitors from within the crime family. His death prompted a second insurrection effort launched by the Montreal Mafia’s Calabrian wing, but it too failed to wrangle the throne away from the Rizzuto bloodline.

Leonardo became the family boss following the assassinations of his father’s first two successors over an eight-week span in 2016. Emboldened by beating a gangsterism and drug-distribution case because of prosecutorial misconduct, he has refused to relinquish the crown. But he has had to duck.

In March 2023, Rizzuto survived an assassination attempt as he drove his Mercedes on a Montreal expressway during evening rush-hour traffic. The shots came during the peak of tensions in a two-year war against the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. That conflict came to an end in December 2024 at a peace summit hosted in the basement of a swanky Montreal Italian bistro.

“The Rizzutos have lost some stature. The ramifications of that [are] felt well beyond Montreal and Quebec. It’s felt in Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and B.C., too,” former Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover officer Paul Manning said. “It’s a tale as old as time. The natives get restless; the snakes start slithering. I wouldn’t write off those feisty Sicilians, though, just yet. The kid Rizzuto [Leo] seems to have nine lives.”

Scott Burnstein, a member of The Mob Museum’s Advisory Council, is an investigative reporter, author, executive producer and podcaster from Detroit. He runs the web magazine The Gangster Report, hosts the Original Gangsters podcast and is the author of six books on organized crime, including Mafia Prince.