The sums of money are massive, the crime connections impeccable. Few underworld networks have ever built an empire to match that of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, whose worth in 1990 was conservatively estimated to be about $500-million (U.S.)
So big was the operation that in 1993 the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera gauged that Cuntrera-Caruana owned 60 per cent of the Dutch-owned, semi-independent island of Aruba off the coast of Venezuela, chiefly through investments and casinos.
Other holdings were scattered around the world.
At the top of the conspiracy, police say, or close to it, was Alfonso Caruana, who at the time of his 1998 arrest described himself as a car-wash worker.
The roots of the Cuntrera-Caruana alliance, welded through marriage between the two families, were humble, found in the small Mafia-ruled Sicilian village of Siculiana, in the province of Agrigento.
In the early 1960s, after a police crackdown there, the group made its first foray to the Americas, North and South, led by patriarchs Pasquale Cuntrera and Leonardo Caruana, who moved to Montreal in 1963. There the two men quickly developed a partnership with the city's Cotroni crime family.
Alfonso, who was later to marry Giuseppina Caruana, arrived in Canada in 1968 with just $100 in his pocket, saying he was an electrician.
He too lived at first in Montreal, acquiring Canadian citizenship, but soon became a world traveller. Among other adventures, he was arrested in Zurich in 1978 when he and a friend were found to be carrying $600,000 in a suitcase, in violation of currency regulations. (He was fined.)
After stints in Europe, Asia and Britain, where he lived in a mansion in the London-area stockbroker belt, Mr. Caruana returned to Montreal in the early 1980s.
His source of income was always vague, but after police in Thailand dismantled a huge heroin pipeline in 1985 and Mr. Caruana's name surfaced, he came under investigation by the RCMP.
No charges were laid, but it was learned that in 1981 alone, an estimated $21-million had flowed through his Montreal bank account.
Then Mr. Caruana sank from view, at least in Canada.
In Sicily, his mob connections had in the meantime led to a prison sentence, imposed in absentia, of 20 years, 10 months.
But until the Toronto police intelligence unit spotted him at his daughter's wedding at the downtown Sutton Place Hotel in April, 1995, he had not been seen in this country for years. It was learned he had slipped back into the country, an Italian arrest warrant notwithstanding, and had been living in Woodbridge, Ont., north of Toronto, for two or three years.
In 1997, Mr. Caruana filed for bankruptcy, alleging he was broke. Revenue Canada, mindful of the fat bank account in Montreal, disagreed, demanding $28.5-million in unpaid interest and fines, and a tax court ordered him to pay $900,000 over the next three years.
How much of that he has paid is unclear.
But with the 18-year penitentiary term just imposed, and at least two other bits of unfinished police business in Italy, the prospect of future payments appears slim.
So how much of the Cuntrera-Caruana operation has survived?
Not much, hopes RCMP Staff Sergeant Larry Tronstad, lead investigator in Mr. Caruana's downfall.
"This [investigation]has always been about the family, not necessarily about the drugs," he said.