Rizzuto Family-Linked Funeral Parlor Burned

A funeral home with known links to the Rizzuto family was hit by an arson attack yesterday.

Picture of Loreto Funeral Complex when Nicolo Rizzuto was waked.

No one was injured, and the damage to the Loreto Funeral Complex on Grandes Prairies Blvd., in St-Léonard, Montreal, appears to be minimal.

A gasoline can was discovered behind the building. Such an open attack would've been unthinkable only a few short years ago.


The Loreto funeral complex was owned by former Montreal Cosa Nostra boss Vito Rizzuto's family.

Rizzuto died of cancer in 2013. Funerals for both Vito and his father, Nicolo, who murdered by an assassin in 2010, were held at Loreto.

The building was previously attacked by arson in 2011. Then the also feeble-seeming attack, part of a years-long wave directed at Italian-owned businesses, was believed to be the work of street gangs sending messages for "hidden" clients. Molotov cocktails were tossed through windows and local firefighters doused the fires before they did much damage.


Ndrangheta boss Frank Cotroni, who died on Aug. 17, 2004, of brain cancer, was laid out at the Loreto funeral home (as well as at the Church of the Madonna della Difesa, on Dante Street in Saint-Léonard.)

Very few members of Montreal’s Sicilian Mafia attended the funeral ceremony. At the time, relations between Sicilian and Calabrian mobsters were strained, to put it mildly.

Vito Rizzuto’s father, Nicolò, however, did pay his respects.

Nicolo himself had six years of living left before a sniper ended him on a cold November's eve in 2010.

Inside his luxurious family mansion in northwest Montreal, Rizzuto likely felt safe and cozy, though who knows. He was eating dinner with his family when quite suddenly he was shot in the head right where he sat at the dinning room table at around 5:40 p.m. ET.

Rizzuto, then considered the most powerful figurehead of Montreal's Sicilian Mafia, was 86.