October 30, 2020 – At the same time he was acting boss of the Montreal mafia, Andrew Scoppa was secretly helping two Quebec crime writers work on the a book about the mob war he was immersed in and feeding information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The 55-year old Scoppa, who was gunned down in a shopping mall parking lot on October 21, 2019, is the subject of the fascinating new book The Source by reporters Felix Seguin and Eric Thibault of the Montreal Journal.
Seguin developed Scoppa as a source in 2014. The appearance-conscious Scoppa felt his days were numbered. He wasn’t far off.
Scoppa’s slaying was part of the ongoing Canada mafia war, a blood-drenched conflict that began within Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family in the late 2000s and spread to Ontario mob enclaves in Toronto and Hamilton in the 2010s. Salvatore Scoppa, 49, Andrew’s little brother, was killed in a brazen attack carried out during a wedding at a suburban Montreal Sheraton hotel on May 4, 2019. The Scoppas headed the Calabrian faction of the Rizzuto organization.
Andrew Scoppa was one of Montreal’s biggest narcotics traffickers and a rising lieutenant in Godfather Vito Rizzuto’s inner circle at the time Rizzuto was shipped off to a U.S. prison in the late 2000s to serve time for a famous triple murder in New York years earlier and his mob empire imploded. Rizzuto came out of prison in 2012, but died just over a year later of cancer.
Per the new book, Scoppa and his brother butted heads with Rizzuto’s successors, Lorenzo (Skunk) Giordano and Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito. RCMP believe the Scoppas had Giordano and Sollecito assassinated in 2016 in a pair of hits that took place two months apart. They died suspects in ordering at least four murders in the war.
According to Seguin and Thibault’s reporting, Andrew Scoppa was a confidential informant for the RCMP at the time he was murdered, as well as other law enforcement agencies. RCMP records, alleges Scoppa became acting don of the Rizzuto crime family in the fall of 2015 and held the title unchallenged until 2017. Over the last two years of his life, Scoppa battled with Leonardo Rizzuto, Vito’s son, and Stephen Sollecito, Sauce Sollecito’s progeny, for power.
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