They've been dubbed the Rothschilds of the Mafia, the brains behind a multinational octopus whose tentacles reached around the world from its lair in quiet Woodbridge, north of Toronto.
Yesterday, however, the ringleaders of a gangster clan responsible for shipping tonnes of cocaine and heroin to North America and Europe over the past 30 years became penitentiary inmates.
The drugs smuggled into Canada by the Cuntrera-Caruana organization, a vast global enterprise that originated in a small Sicilian village more than 60 years ago, were of "near-staggering proportions," Mr. Justice David Watt of the Ontario Superior Court said in handing lengthy prison terms to Alfonso Caruana, 54, and his two brothers, Pasquale, 51, and Gerlando, 56.
Mr. Caruana -- by every estimate the group leader -- and Gerlando each drew concurrent 18-year terms for conspiracy to import and traffic in cocaine.
Pasquale got 10 years on the same charges. And Gerlando's son, Giuseppe Caruana, 29, received four years on a related charge of transferring drug-payment money from Toronto to Montreal and eventually to Miami.
Aided by an Italian translator, all four men entered guilty pleas under a deal struck with prosecutors. They displayed no emotion.
Police, by contrast, were jubilant.
"This is a significant blow to so-called untouchables -- organizations like this one, which was a multibillion-dollar enterprise," said RCMP Superintendent Ben Soave, who heads the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, which dismantled the operation.
"This encompasses everything we're trying to do -- going after the heads of the organizations," RCMP deputy Commissioner Giuliani Zaccardelli said. "And I hope the message is clear. The borders aren't going to stop us. Organized crime took a big hit here."
Mob expert Antonio Nicasso, author of numerous books on organized crime, said the same.
"I believe this is a significant blow for the old guard of Cuntrera-Caruana," he said. "Especially Alfonso, because he escaped [imprisonment]in Italy. When Alfonso used the phone, when he called around the world, someone always answered."
Under an agreed statement of facts, the Caruana brothers admitted to successfully smuggling approximately 1.5 tonnes of cocaine into Canada in the two-year period before their arrests in July, 1998.
But that was just part of the picture, Supt. Soave said.
"There's been in excess of 7,000 kilos of cocaine we're aware of that were trafficked by this group," he said. "Not just in Canada but in Europe and South America."
Linked by strong marriage and business ties, the Cuntrera and Caruana families first surfaced years ago in connection with the heroin trade, notably the French Connection case of the 1970s and the Pizza Connection arrests a decade later.
Rooted in Venezuela and Sicily, stretching from the Americas to Western Europe and Asia, the Cuntreras and the Caruanas have also been long regarded as kingpins in the high-tech money-laundering industry, providing a sluice box for numerous other organized-crime groups.
"Almost all the money of the Sicilian Mafia in North America to purchase heroin and the resulting proceeds went through their hands," a top Italian economic-crime expert remarked a few years ago.
Money-laundering charges against the Caruana brothers are still pending. So too are related charges, which are still outstanding against, three of the group, netted in a multinational police sweep christened Project Omerta.
Nor will that end the troubles facing Mr. Caruana, who at the time of his arrest described himself as a car-wash employee, earning a few hundred dollars a week. (He offered no explanation for cash and jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars seized at his home and at a nightclub he often visited.)
In 1995, he was sentenced in absentia by a Sicilian court to almost 21 years in prison for his Mafia activities. Italian authorities have been anxious to get their hands on him ever since.
As well, Mr. Caruana faces the resurrection of a case in Turin, Italy, for importation of five tonnes of Colombian cocaine.
That Turin case will largely hinge on testimony from turncoat fellow Mafioso Oreste Pagano, who acted as middleman between the Caruanas and their Colombian cocaine suppliers.
Project Omerta lasted more than three years, relied on intelligence from more than 20 law-enforcement agencies abroad, and used wiretaps extensively. In the Toronto area alone, scores of pay phones were bugged, in what often proved to be an exercise in frustration.
Then came a breakthrough in the way the wiretaps were done. "That changed everything," the investigator said.
Equally critical, however, was Mr. Pagano's postarrest decision last year to co-operate with police and incriminate the others. In exchange, he received a one-day jail term, tacked on to the 17 months already spent in custody.
Mr. Pagano was then immediately extradited to Italy to begin serving a 28-year prison sentence on drug, assault and conspiracy charges.
"What made Pagano roll over?" asked Staff Sergeant Larry Tronstad, who headed Project Omerta. "Self-interest, self-preservation. The man is well into his 60s, and he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in jail, he's got a wife and young children."