Police crack down on an alleged drug ring that they say was run by the "Rothschilds of the Mafia"

By TIM PADGETT

ffixed to the front pew of the Chiesa Madre in the village of Siculiana, Sicily, is a plaque thanking Alfonso Caruana for the tens of thousands of dollars he sent to his hometown each year from Canada. It is one of the few public signs that contradicted Caruana's pose as a $400-a-week immigrant car washer who rented a two-story house with his wife Giuseppina in the upper-middle-class Toronto bedroom suburb of Woodbridge. The gray-haired Caruana, 52, is so discreet that the only figure many neighbors have seen in his doorway this year is the plastic Santa Claus he failed to put back in his attic after Christmas.

That anonymity ended last week when Caruana's face was plastered across newspapers and television screens after his arrest as the alleged kingpin of a global drug-trafficking empire. Police descended on Caruana's house in a dawn raid. At the same time scores of antidrug agents, representing police agencies from three countries, collared nine other alleged members of the group in Toronto, Montreal and Cancun. Two other alleged associates had been arrested weeks before in Houston, and two more are at large. All are charged with importing and trafficking drugs. (Caruana's attorney says he will plead not guilty.) One of those arrested in Cancun was Alberto Minelli, described by Italian police as the group's financial brains. He and the other alleged associate picked up in Mexico were sent to Canada, pending extradition requests from Italy for the entire group.

Even after the arrests, the group that police have dubbed the Cuntrera-Caruana crime family remains an obscure organization--that trait, officials say, made it highly effective. Canadian and Italian authorities dubbed the tight-knit clan the "Rothschilds of the Mafia," and claim that the group shipped billions of dollars' worth of drugs across three continents and laundered the proceeds through a labyrinth of bank accounts and businesses.

Caruana and his brother-in-law Pasquale Cuntrera, 63, went to Canada in 1968. Within 10 years, they allegedly became "the most formidable machine the Cosa Nostra has ever had," wrote the Milan daily Corriere della Sera last week. While the drugs they allegedly bought and sold flowed through Venezuela, Aruba, Mexico, the U.S. and Canada to Italy and Europe, the money authorities say they earned filtered from Italy through Switzerland, Miami, Caracas, Mexico and back to Canada. As Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Ben Soave put it, "If organized crime were a hockey game, Mr. Caruana would be Wayne Gretzky."

It took impressive playmaking to put Caruana and his lieutenants in the penalty box. Canadian officials have had run-ins with Caruana since the 1980s over tax delinquency; despite his claims of poverty, they estimate the value of the family business in the billions of dollars. Brother-in-law Cuntrera was arrested last May in Spain after an Italian court upheld his conviction and that of two siblings for drug trafficking. (He is in jail in Italy.)

But it wasn't until Caruana returned to Canada in 1995, after a decade in Venezuela, that police took hard aim at his group. Ontario's Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit soon found itself "in bed," says R.C.M.P. Staff Sergeant Larry Tronstad, with police from Italy, the U.S. and Mexico. They tracked the clan's cross-border operations electronically, wire-tapping more than 100 public phones in Canada alone. They made a big step forward last May when they arrested two couriers who were ferrying 200 ill-concealed kilograms of cocaine in a flatbed truck outside Houston.

There were some glitches. When information from the Canadian investigators helped nab Cuntrera in Spain, for example, the Italian press publicly took note--and blew some of Ottawa's cover. Finally the police moved in when they feared that Caruana was poised to leave Canada again.

Will the Cuntrera-Caruana bust do much to crimp global drug trafficking and money laundering? Not as much as officials hope, say experts like Eduardo Gamarra of Florida International University in Miami. Because narco-operations have become so vastly decentralized, he says, "this, sadly, is a drop in a sea of drug organizations."

Last week's arrests were also a wake-up call for Canada, where members of organized crime have apparently been flocking of late, in part because of liberal immigration rules and more lenient jail sentences than in the U.S. But if there are fears that organized, multinational crime has come to quiet places like Woodbridge, Ontario, the international coordination that netted Caruana is encouraging. Even so, it remains to be seen whether, as Soave puts it, "borders no longer represent an opportunity for organized crime."

--With Reporting by Greg Burke /Rome, Moira Daly /Woodbridge, Linda Gyulai /Montreal and Nicole Nolan /Toronto