Alfonso Caruana (born Sicily) was the Canadian head of the Caruana-Cuntrera mafia family.

In 1968 Alfonso Caruana arrived in Canada with 100 dollars in his pocket pretending to be an electrician. Ten years later he was stopped at the international airport of Zürich in Switzerland with 600,000 dollars in a suitcase. He was released after paying a fee.

At the beginning of the 1980s Alfonso established himself near Lugano in a luxurious villa, supervising the laundering of the proceeds of heroin-trafficking. The funds were deposited in Canadian banks and channelled through Swiss bank accounts. Two years later he moved to the stockbrokers belt near London. From his £450,000 mansion, he supervised a heroin pipeline from Thailand, through England, to Canada. He went to Thailand to set up the route. When the pipeline was dismantled in England, he managed to escape arrest, moving to a Montreal suburb where he opened a pizzeria. Alfonso prepared the pizzas while his wife tended the pay-desk.

Meanwhile, Caruana organised a network that smuggled eleven metric tons of cocaine to Italy from 1991-94. Caruana brought together the cocaine producers of the Colombian Cartels with the Italian distributors, six 'ndrangheta families from Calabria. At the time the Cuntrera-Caruana family was labeled as "the fly-wheel of the drug trade and the indispensable link between suppliers and distributors."

The investigation, code-named Operation Cartagine, started when the police seized 5497 kilo's of cocaine (a European record at the time) in March 1994 in Turin. A year later the Turin Prosecutors Office presented the indictment. The operation neutralized the most important supply-line of narcotics to Europe, investigators claimed.

He was sentenced in absentia on July 30, 1997 by the Palermo court of appeal to 21 years and 10 months for Mafia association, conspiracy to traffic narcotics and aggravated importing, possession and sale of large quantities of narcotics.

The Palermo court concluded that the network was "a further indication of the high criminal capability" of Caruana who had "escaped every judicial initiative during the last decades and succeeded in reaching the top of the international drug trade, adjusting his criminal contacts and showing such skill that he is to be considered as one of the most important exponents in this sector."

In 1998 he was arrested in Woodbridge, Ontario in an international police action called Project Omerta . At one time he claimed he was a simple car wash attendant. According to police, he controlled the largest drug dealing network in the world. The officer in charge of the investigation, RCMP Chief Superintendent Ben Soave, said "If organized crime was a hockey game, Mr. Caruana would be [Wayne] Gretzky." Caruana pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to import and traffic some 1,500 kilograms of cocaine.

In November, 2004 a Canadian court ordered that he be extradited to Italy. The decision is being appealed.

Bibliography

Bloodlines: Project Omerta and the fall of the Mafia's Royal Family by Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe

The Rothschilds of the Mafia on Aruba, by Tom Blickman, Transnational Organized Crime, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1997