Two murders and a fall guy
ONTARIO MAN BLAMED FOR TWO MAFIA MURDERS THAT HE DIDN’T COMMIT
TWO MOB-RELATED MURDERS IN ONTARIO ZEROED IN ON THREE SUSPECTS. ONE ENDED UP DEAD AND THE OTHER IS MISSING. THE THIRD SAID HE DIDN’T DO IT. IT TOOK THREE YEARS, BUT NOW THE PROSECUTORS AND JUDGE AGREE.
THERE WERE A FEW GUYS THAT TRIED TO REALLY POKE AT ME AND SEE WHAT WAS GOING ON AND SEE WHO I KNEW. IT BLEW MY MIND. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WAS GOING ON. KEEP IN MIND, I’VE NEVER BEEN TO JAIL BEFORE. AND IT WAS OVERWHELMING. — JABRIL ABDALLA
Settling in at the behemoth brick jail in Hamilton, Ont., Jabril Abdalla realized the depth of his dark, surreal situation when guards came just to look at him. You got some big cojones, they would say, or, you must know some real heavy hitters.
They worried he might cause a riot if inmates knew he was there.
Inmates did find out. They Googled him and they wanted to look at him too. When they met him, they congratulated him, or tried to network; how much was he paid, who was backing him?
“Random inmates started knowing who I was,” Abdalla says. “There were a few guys that tried to really poke at me and see what was going on and see who I knew. It blew my mind. I didn’t know what was going on. Keep in mind, I’ve never been to jail before. And it was overwhelming.”
The curiosity of guards and inmates matched that of most everyone who knew about the two high-profile Mafia murders in 2017 Abdalla was accused of, and the sprawling underworld war surrounding them.
In 2018, a joint, multijurisdictional police task force had gathered in Hamilton to tell a crowded news conference they had cracked the worrisome cases.
Solving Mafia murders in Canada is something of a rarity, so this was a big deal. Police officials with Hamilton Police, York Regional Police and the RCMP accused three men of being a hit team relentlessly stalking Angelo Musitano and Saverio Serrano — both sons of two different mob figures. They successfully gunned down Musitano in a hit in Hamilton, police said, but managed only to wound Serrano in an attack in Vaughan, but in the process carelessly killed his innocent girlfriend, Mila Barberi.
By the time of their announcement, however, two of the alleged hitmen had fled Canada. One, Michael Cudmore, was later found murdered at the side of a road in Mexico, and the other, Daniel Tomassetti, has vanished. Investigators had hoped their probe would lead them to top Mafia bosses, the controlling minds who ordered or approved the hits.
So far, it hasn’t.
At the end, only one person was in police hands.
Jabril Abdalla was left holding the bag — as the fall guy, the patsy — by both his friends and by police. He stood alone, looking like a mob hitman at the sharp edge of a vast, deadly underworld war. That’s why the guards and the inmates and the media were interested in him.
The thing is, he wasn’t. “I knew nothing about what was going on. I’m just driving, driving, driving them around. I didn’t know what their intentions were,” Abdalla, now 30, says in an exclusive interview with National Post.
“That was sort of our relationship, just kind of doing favours. I was driving them around, and it was sort of, go do this, do that. I wasn’t cliqued up or anything, there’s no mob ties with me.
“It was just sort of, kind of accidental.”
Abdalla faced an arduous legal battle over three years, championed by his lawyer, Leora Shemesh. That battle ended in June when all charges for the murders were dropped and he pleaded guilty to participating in a criminal organization; he was released that same day.
“Now I’m innocent but my name has been slaughtered and probably forever will be tied to these murder charges,” Abdalla says.
Hamilton jail, like every jail, is filled with people saying they didn’t do it, and Abdalla hasn’t been an angel, however he isn’t the only one saying he is innocent of the murders and murder conspiracy.
“Abdalla in no way had direct involvement in those murders,” says a statement of facts presented by the prosecution and accepted by a judge. “He was not on scene when they were committed nor was he aware of their planning or execution. Some of the steps taken by Abdalla ultimately served to assist the organization in its purpose to commit murder, however Abdalla had no knowledge that his actions were related to murder or any other violent crime.”
Abdalla is a free man and talks with some ease about his strange experience. He
wants to warn young men circling the edges of the world he fell into.
The twists of his legal fight, meanwhile, also provided a detailed inside look — through interviews, testimony, police files, videos and documents filed in court — at two insolent murders and how police worked to solve them.
Even though he suspected he was under surveillance, on May 2, 2017, the day of his murder, Angelo Musitano, 39, stuck to his taut routine. He rose early, climbing into his white Ford F-150 pickup truck at 4:35 a.m., one minute earlier than he had the day before.
Throughout that day, while he was out and his wife and their three young sons remained home, two different cars prowled past his modern house in a residential suburb of Hamilton’s Waterdown community, 65 kilometres west of Toronto.
Someone was stalking him.
Musitano was the son of a notorious Mafia boss in Ontario, one of the best-known names in the history of Hamilton’s vibrant underworld. In a moment of reflection before he died, Musitano admitted he was born into a crime family, and was an energetic member of it until, a couple of years before, he became a Christian.
His spiritual change couldn’t alter his fate, at least not in this world.
Fourteen minutes before Musitano returned to his home at 3:52 p.m., a burgundy Ford Fusion, stolen one month before in Gatineau, Que., once again cruised past his home, this time stopping next door.
As Musitano pulled his white pickup into his driveway, a man dressed in dark clothing hopped out of the Fusion.
Security cameras at Musitano’s home captured the gunman striding across the double driveway.
Lifting a pistol with his right hand and steadying it with his left, the gunman extended his arms ramrod straight, squared his feet, and started firing a .45-calibre pistol into the driver’s side window where Musitano sat. After two shots, the gun jammed and Musitano struggled to open his door, but his assassin quickly cleared the barrel and shot three more times.
The hitman scurried to the Fusion and drove off just seconds before Musitano’s wife walked outside and saw bullet holes in the truck’s window. While calling 911, she climbed in to help him. Nothing could be done. For the Musitanos, it meant he was buried on what would have been his fifth wedding anniversary, in the same church he was married. For police, it meant the start of a complicated murder probe.
Detectives soon learned the extent of the gunman’s preparations. When examining Musitano’s truck, investigators found a black box mounted inside its back bumper, about the size of a cellphone. It was a GPS tracker.
In a stack of business cards he had been carrying, detectives also found a folded Post-it note with a handwritten message: “Gray Mazda CBFN740.” It seems Musitano had noticed, at some point, he had a tail.
The licence plate number wasn’t for a grey Mazda, but a similar sedan, a light blue Infiniti, registered in the name of Jabril Abdalla.
It was one of two cars Abdalla registered as a favour for a longtime friend from high school.
MY HOBBIES AND HOW MUCH I WAS MAKING WEREN’T ADDING UP. I LIKE BUYING CLOTHES, EXPENSIVE STUFF. AND IT NEVER REALLY COVERED MY COST WORKING A REGULAR JOB. I MADE SOME POOR DECISIONS. — JABRIL ABDALLA
Abdalla transferred to St. Jean de Brébeuf Catholic Secondary School in Hamilton in grade 11 because of its strong basketball program. Basketball was his dream. One of the first friends he made there was a boy in the same grade who shared that interest: Daniel Tomassetti.
Attending a high-performing suburban Catholic school on the city’s Mountain, surrounded by large homes, sports fields and parks, was a change for Abdalla.
Born in Kuwait to a Somali father and Filipina mother, Abdalla was raised Muslim and arrived in Canada with his family as refugees when he was 10. The family first lived in community housing, and he attended Sir John A. Macdonald high school, the largest, most diverse school in the city, right downtown.
“Basketball was my passion and that’s what kept me out of trouble at a young age,” Abdalla says. Instead of mischief after school, he volunteered at a community drop-in youth centre.
Abdalla and Tomassetti hung out in rec centres and parks shooting hoops.
“He was one of the rich kids, at least to me,” Abdalla says of his old friend. “He was one of the first ones to have a car — it was a soupedup Honda Civic.” The students’ stereotypes classified Tomassetti — who lived in the wealthy community of Ancaster — as “the bougie guy.”
His nickname was “Dancer,” a play on his first name.
When Abdalla graduated and moved away to study business at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., he lost touch with Tomassetti, but after a couple of years dropped out and returned to Hamilton.
“I came back home and wanted to work and make some money,” he says. Abdalla worked retail jobs in local malls but it felt inadequate. “I was greedy. I wanted more. I wanted to make more money.” He found a way. He started selling cocaine to friends in university.
“My hobbies and how much I was making weren’t adding up. I like buying clothes, expensive stuff. And it never really covered my cost working a regular job. I made some poor decisions.
“I had friends that are into the party life, you know, and I was willing to go out and about, and I thought it was easy. I can make more money doing this. So that’s sort of where I steered away.”
Abdalla also reconnected with Tomassetti but instead of rec centres it was now in bars. Their dreams had changed too. No longer hoops, it was business, travel, and wealth. Tomassetti wanted a yacht, Abdalla wanted money. They went on island vacations together.
“He was very ambitious. We started, you know, brainstorming ideas,” Abdalla says. “He loved to travel, and he had this idea of starting a company, so he pitched this idea to me and it was really neat.”
Tomassetti ended up starting that business, called WAYV, short for Welcome Aboard Yacht Vacations, offering private yacht charters in the Caribbean and Mexico. Abdalla and a couple of others worked there, at least on paper. Abdalla’s business card read “sales manager.” The business didn’t flourish, but their friendship did.
“That’s sort of where the relationship sprung. And then opportunities started arising from there,” Abdalla says. He says he started running errands for Tomassetti to make extra money.
“I didn’t question what he was doing or what he was involved in.
“He was doing something and he kind of pawned it off on me to sort of help him. I don’t know who or what, you know. It was an opportunity where I said, Okay, I can make this much money doing less work.”
It was mostly drop offs and pickups. He assumes it was drugs and money.
Abdalla and Tomassetti used encrypted text messaging in the summer of 2016. One day, Abdalla was asked in a text to register a car in his name, a black 2006 Honda Civic EX, according to evidence filed in court.
“Put it in yours,” Abdalla texted back.
“Bro u have no f--kin car in Ur name, there’s 3 in my family and I’m not on the policy bc the insurance company saw me as high risk,” was the reply.
“I do trust you, but no offence at the end of the day its business for you,” was Abdalla’s reply. He says he was told it was easy money so he agreed, putting two cars that weren’t his in his name, a Honda and an Infiniti.
Abdalla met Cudmore around then. They both worked out in the same gym and Cudmore and Tomassetti were already friends.
“He had a big physique, he was into working out, and so that’s sort of how the conversation started,” Abdalla says. They began training together at the gym, Abdalla for basketball and Cudmore for boxing.
Abdalla says he didn’t know it, but Cudmore had a long criminal past. He was a founding member of a Hamilton street gang and had ties to members of the Hells Angels and the Mafia.
Cudmore was such a hot head the last time he went to prison he beat up three inmates before his intake assessment was even done. When he got out, he kept his prison ID card like a trophy and registered his phone in the address of Hamilton’s jail.
“I didn’t do research on this guy,” says Abdalla. “I went solely on trust in Dan because we grew up together. I didn’t think I was going to be put in a position where I’m at today.”
Cudmore didn’t have a driver’s licence when they met, and Abdalla started driving him around as well. When Cudmore did drive, he used his brother’s licence. The two looked enough alike.
There were already signs of animosity with the Musitano family in the spring of 2016. According to records entered in court, Tomassetti’s phone received messages from an account police couldn’t trace.
“If it’s musitano tell them to play with us wouldn’t want pats car to blow-up again hahahaha,” one read, an apparent reference to Pat Musitano, Angelo’s older brother, who had taken over as boss of their father’s Mafia fiefdom when the patriarch died. “F--k the musitanos bro all f--king eat those clowns see if u can scoop there players.”
At the time of Musitano’s murder, of course, Hamilton police didn’t yet know about the emerging relationships between Abdalla, Tomassetti and Cudmore, or even about this apparent realignment of street allegiance.
These three men, though, and their interactions, would soon be scoured and scrutinized by a police task force, not only probing Musitano’s murder, but also a different murder that, in many ways, was even more alarming.
At 4 p.m. on March 14, 2017, the day she was killed, Barberi, 28, drove her boyfriend’s black BMW X5 into a parking lot outside Teknika Group, the lighting store her boyfriend owned
in Vaughan, just north of Toronto.
She often dropped him at his store in the mornings and picked him up after work. Surrounded by icy cold from a late winter storm that day, she waited in the car for Serrano to join her.
Serrano, 40, left his store with a large, black dog. He jogged through the snowy lot just as a man in dark clothing bounced out of the passenger’s side of a stolen Jeep arriving next door. From opposite directions they both headed for the BMW.
Barberi stepped out to greet Serrano, and the dog. As the couple embraced, the gunman reached the passenger’s side and with a ramrod straight right arm fired through the tinted glass into the empty seat.
Security video from the store shows Barberi, Serrano and the dog startle at the sound and the gunman dashing around the car, then firing at the couple standing by the open door. Serrano turns and runs.
Within a minute of the Jeep pulling in, it was peeling away.
When police arrived, Barberi was on the ground by the BMW and Serrano inside his store, now splashed with blood from a bullet wound in his arm.
Barberi was not the target of the hit. The veterinary technician had no connection to the mob other than through her boyfriend. The bullets were meant for Serrano, or a member of his family. His father, Diego Serrano, was one of Canada’s “cocaine cowboys” with a long history as a drug importer; and a brother, Francesco, also had criminal ties.
As the shooting unfolded, according to allegations in
court documents, a phone number registered to Tomassetti — drawing a signal off a cell tower near Serrano’s store — called a New York City phone number. The call lasted 53 seconds.
A few minutes after the botched hit, the same phone called the New York number again, police allege. That call was almost twice as long.
The sad end to the plot — the maddening death of an innocent woman — was in keeping with ham-fisted screw-ups along the way.
When someone had tried to sneak a tracker onto Serrano’s BMW while it was parked outside of an Italian restaurant, they stuck it on the wrong car. Imagine being that diner, unwittingly driving for six weeks with a hitman tracking him.
Two days after the shooting, when York police found the stolen Jeep, someone had tried to set it ablaze to destroy evidence, but the fire had sputtered out.
Precisely seven weeks after York police started hunting Barberi’s killers, Hamilton police began looking for whoever killed Angelo Musitano. They eventually realized they were looking for the same people.
Investigators of both crimes were culling thousands of hours of video from security cameras at businesses and homes around each crime scene.
“Quite frankly, I don’t think they counted on there being a great deal of video of surveillance,” York police Det. Sgt. Jim Killby said at the time.
Investigators had remarkable luck knowing what to look for because Musitano’s suburban neighbours keep a careful eye on their street.
A few days after the shooting, police found the Ford Fusion the gunman used after a neighbour reported an unknown parked car.
Forensic investigators swabbed its steering wheel and sun visor. They found a match for a repeat offender whose DNA was in the national data bank: Michael Cudmore.
Other neighbours told police about shady men and cars spotted days before the shooting — sometimes in the middle of the night. One woman told detectives a white male with a muscular build arrived in a black Honda Civic, switched into a burgundy Ford Fusion, drove away, returned, and then left in the Honda. She was so spooked she took photos, even a close-up of the licence plates.
When police ran the Honda’s plate, and the plate written on Musitano’s Post-it note, both cars were registered to Jabril Abdalla.
Police now had two suspects. Looking into the pair soon gave them a third, Daniel Tomassetti.
Detectives also had the tracker found in Musitano’s pickup.
They traced it to a spy store north of Toronto. Police say Cudmore and Tomassetti bought several trackers there. During one purchase, phone records showed Abdalla was with Cudmore near the spy shop communicating with Tomassetti’s phone about price, police allege.
“350 each always been dude said,” reads a text from Abdalla’s phone.
“I didn’t know what their intentions were,” Abdalla says now. “Cudmore didn’t have his licence. For me to drive the guy where he needs to go wasn’t anything crazy.”
For detectives, the trackers were key to the plot. Not only was one on Musitano’s pickup, but they found one on his wife’s minivan, on his mother’s car, and traced others monitoring his brother Pat, his cousin Giuseppe (Pino) Avignone, and a friend, Joseph Cafagna, a member of the Hells Angels in Hamilton, police allege.
But two steps forward, one step back: 18 days after Musitano was shot, Cudmore boarded a plane and flew to Mexico.
Detectives broke into Cudmore’s empty apartment looking for evidence, with a judge’s permission. Among items there were documents for the Honda that was registered to Abdalla and a newspaper clipping about the RCMP cracking encrypted messages to solve a Montreal Mafia murder. Bits about police techniques had been highlighted.
In July 2017, Abdalla’s side hustle of selling cocaine allowed police to arrest him. They seized three cellphones and Abdalla was released on bail.
It’s uncertain how much it advanced their drug case, as the charges were dropped, but it did push their murder probe.
There were good reasons for detectives to suspect Abdalla was linked in some way to the Musitano hit. Along with texts and calls with Tomassetti and Cudmore, they found Google Maps images in his phone’s cache of the houses of Musitano’s brother and mother. What they didn’t find was evidence he knew what any of it was about.
Mirroring the hitman’s technique, police put trackers on Abdalla’s and Tomassetti’s cars and later, wiretaps on their phones.
While the drug arrest invigorated the probe, it also gave Abdalla a jolt.
“That’s when the light bulb kind of went off and I said, I need to change my life around. It was a big deal to me,” he says.
He returned to school as a full-time business student at Hamilton’s Mohawk College and worked at the school’s rec centre.
His epiphany came too late.