Organized crime: Stefano Sollecito, one of the leaders of the mafia and suspect of several murders, died of cancer

Suspected of several murders, the co-leader of the Montreal mafia, Stefano Sollecito, will not be able to face justice since he has just died after losing a long battle with cancer.

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The 57-year-old man died today at his home in Blainville, our Bureau of Investigation learned.

He was hospitalized in the summer of 2023 due to this illness that he had been fighting for ten years. According to police sources, it was believed that his days were numbered.

But the man nicknamed “Steve Sauce” in the criminal world survived another year and a half. Long enough to know that the police were leading a major investigation aimed at catching him and other big names in Quebec organized crime for allegedly being involved in several assassinations committed over the last two decades.

According to our information, Sollecito was indeed among the main suspects in Project Alliance, the largest criminal investigation underway in the country.

This investigation is being carried out by the Sûreté du Québec and the Montreal police with the collaboration of hitman Frédérick Silva, who has been unpacking his bag for them since the summer of 2022 and could help them elucidate around sixty murder plots.

In addition to having ordered them, Sollecito himself would have participated in at least one of these assassinations, according to Silva’s allegations, the QMI Agency and our Bureau of Investigation were able to learn.

On July 27, 2023, investigators assigned to this investigation also conducted a search of Sollecito’s home, in Blainville, in search of evidence. This was the first police search in this case.

Six other suspects were also visited by the police during the same investigation, in December 2023. They are the mafiosi Pietro D’Adamo, Vito Salvaggio and Davide Barberio, as well as the kingpins Jean-Philippe Célestin, Dany Sprinces Cadet and Emmanuel Zéphyr.

A seventh suspect, gang leader Gregory Woolley, would also have had his residence searched if he had not been shot and killed in November 2023.

Stefano Sollecito, whose father Rocco was assassinated in 2016 after also leading the Rizzuto clan, was forced to use a wheelchair due to a stroke that left him partially paralyzed in 2022.

His health problems have forced him to become more discreet in organized crime in recent years.

His title as co-leader of the mafia, which he shared with Leonardo Rizzuto, son of the late godfather Vito Rizzuto, had also lost luster after his indictment for gangsterism in November 2015 in the Magot investigation project.

Despite his acquittal in 2018, after the court concluded that the investigation was based on evidence of illegal wiretapping, Sollecito has received little attention since.

Quite the opposite from the start of his reign, following the death of godfather Rizzuto who also died of cancer in December 2013.

Coming from a new generation of mafiosi, more flamboyant than the previous one, Stefano Sollecito attracted the attention of the police while driving a gleaming white Lamborghini with gold rims to meet other big names in organized crime in downtown Montreal .

“I hurt…”

On November 19, 2015, Stefano Sollecito was arrested for gangsterism and cocaine trafficking conspiracy, following Project Magot.

The pain caused by the illness could already be seen on his face during his video interrogation conducted by investigator Stéphane Robin at the headquarters of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the recording of which our Bureau of Investigation obtained.

“I’m in pain,” the mafia leader told him, grimacing, already knowing he was doomed by a cancerous tumor on his sciatic nerve which had spread to his lungs.

“For now, it’s stable. But the lungs can’t play there. We can’t repair them,” he said, resigned, adding that chemotherapy had “done nothing” and that he still had radiotherapy.

Suspicions of murder

During this interrogation, Sergeant Robin questioned him about half a dozen murders that the police suspected him of having authorized, although Sollecito, who remained silent, was never accused of such crimes.

Police documents also allege that Sollecito was involved in deadly clan wars, among others with the boss Raynald Desjardins, a former confidant of the Rizzuto clan.

“A smart little one”

Likewise, the police have already established that the clan of the late brothers Salvatore and Andrew Scoppa had attempted to take control of the mafia by attacking big names from the Rizzuto clan.

One of them was Stefano Sollecito’s father, Rocco, shot dead at the wheel of his SUV after making his obligatory stop in front of a bus shelter where the shooter was waiting for him, in Laval, in 2016.

But in 2019, Salvatore Scoppa was riddled with bullets in the lobby of a Laval hotel during a family party, while his older brother suffered the same fate in front of a gym in Pierrefonds.

“Steve (Sollecito) is a smart guy. It’s a viper. But he’s brilliant. He thinks several moves ahead, as if he were playing chess,” Andrew Scoppa told our Bureau of Investigation a few months before his death, as recounted in the book The source.

Sollecito’s influence also came from his role as one of the bookkeepers of illegal sports betting under the control of the Rizzuto clan, commonly known as the Bookwhich generates annual profits of around $30 million.