Christie Blatchford: Jury in murder trial hears how a password scribbled on a sticky note led police to evidence

TORONTO — Alleged gangsters aren’t immune to the perils of oversharing on social media, a jury heard Wednesday.

This was at the trial of four men accused of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder — and the alleged murder itself — in the execution-style death of Johnnie Raposo almost five years ago.

In calls and texts legally intercepted by police, prosecutors say some of the four discussed “the job” and that the alleged actual shooter bragged that his business was contract killing, that he then had a contract and that he charged $100,000 a pop.

As the 35-year-old Raposo sat on the crowded patio of the Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe in Toronto’s Little Italy on June 18, 2012, he was approached by a man who appeared to be a construction worker and shot four times in the head.

Raposo was watching a European Cup soccer match at the time, the middle of an early summer’s day.

Prosecutor Maurice Gillezeau told Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Clark in his opening statement that it’s the Crown theory that the hired shooter was Dean Wiwchar, the driving force Nick Nero, and that they conspired with two others, Martino Caputo
and Rabih Alkhalil.

All were involved in the cocaine-importing business, Gillezeau told the jurors, as indeed was Raposo himself.

In fact, the prosecutor said that Nero was pretending to be willing to move 200 kilograms of Raposo’s cocaine across the border, but that “there was never any intention of actually delivering Raposo’s cocaine to him.

“Instead the plan discussed was to steal the cocaine, worth millions of dollars, split the profit three ways (the shooter presumably having been paid separately) between Nero, Caputo and Alkhalil, and kill Raposo,” Gillezeau said.

Nero, who then lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, was the target of a Niagara Regional Police cocaine investigation called Project Ink. Police got judicial authority to wiretap Nero’s cellphone and had “probes” or listening devices in his home and one of his vehicles.

Police also got authority to wiretap Caputo’s phone and on two occasions were allowed to covertly enter Nero’s home.
Among the things they saw and photographed was a sticky note with Nero’s email and password, which later let them bypass the data encryption program called PGP.

The initials stand for Pretty Good Privacy; alas, when the user thoughtfully provides his secret password on a sticky, it’s easily defeated.

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