Canada’s Mafia godfather is back.

On Friday morning, Vito Rizzuto walked past the barbed wire fence of a Colorado prison that has contained him for more than five years, punishment for his involvement in a 1981 triple murder in New York.

By early evening, he was stepping onto a plane at Denver International Airport heading north to Canada.

His return to Canadian soil comes amid swirling controversy over Mafia influence in Ontario and Quebec.

Over the past two weeks, politically charged testimony at a Quebec corruption probe produced sensational allegations of political corruption there.

Meanwhile, a Toronto Star/Radio-Canada investigation has documented the growing and largely unchallenged power of a GTA-based Mafia faction called ‘Ndrangheta. Premier Dalton McGuinty and some police officials have downplayed that threat.

Friday was both a day of rebirth and death for the Rizzuto clan.

As Vito was inhaling his first breaths of freedom, his family was attending a Montreal funeral service for his father-in-law, Leonardo Cammalleri of Woodbridge.

Cammalleri, convicted in absentia in Italy of murdering leftist politician Giuseppe Spagnolo in 1955, died in Montreal last week of natural causes at age 93.

Speculation held that Rizzuto would mark his high-profile return to Canada at Cammalleri’s funeral service. The family’s conspicuous timing for the ceremony prevented that spectacle from unfolding.

There wasn’t even a funeral notice posted in the newspaper or funeral home website.

Antonio Nicaso, who has lectured police forces on organized crime and written several books on the Canadian Mafia, said the Rizzuto family likely made a last-minute decision to proceed with the funeral Friday to avoid a media and police crush of attention.

“It’s a precautionary reason,” Nicaso said. “Otherwise, the first day of his release would be at a funeral under the public eye.”

The tension between Rizzuto’s celebrity and his quest for anonymity now moves to the matter of his permanent address.

The 66-year-old head of a once powerful Montreal-based Mafia empire could be drawn back to his hometown.

But much has changed in the five years he’s been imprisoned.

In 2009, his son Nick, 42, was gunned down on a west-end Montreal street.

Within a year, Rizzuto’s father, Nicolo, 86, would fall to an assassin’s bullet in his home and his brother-in-law was abducted from his car, never to be seen again.

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Former colleagues and friends were arrested in the wake of a 2006 RCMP investigation into drug trafficking and money laundering.

And his five-bedroom, $1.5-million home in Montreal is up for sale on an upscale street nicknamed “Mafia Row.”

Its walk-in closet boasts dimensions similar to Rizzuto’s prison cell.

Coming to Toronto is seen by some police as a “gutsy” move for Rizzuto, surrounding himself with close family and allies but also walking right into the “lion’s den” since this is also the home turf of many of his powerful rivals.

There has long been tension — at times violent warfare — between Rizzuto’s Sicilian empire and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta based in Ontario, although Rizzuto has strategically built solid alliances with several leading GTA mob figures.

“It is safe to assume his life is in jeopardy,” said one Ontario law enforcement source who closely monitors organized crime.

At the same time, police say, Rizzuto cannot let the killing of his family members and close associates go unpunished if he is to maintain any credibility in the organized crime world.

“He can’t walk away,” one police investigator said. “If he does, it’s over for him.”

More than five years in prison garb represents a dramatic contrast with Rizzuto’s former life of golf courses and corner tables at fine restaurants.

Flashy and debonair, the dandy gangster more closely resembled a corporate CEO at the peak of his power, playing twice-weekly rounds of golf on the best courses in York Region, Montreal and in the Caribbean.

When he did jet south, he made a point of never stopping over in the U.S. for fear he would be scooped up by American officials and charged with the triple murders of 1981.

His fall from grace after his arrest was perhaps most clearly captured in a photograph of Rizzuto wearing an uneven coiffeur and orange jail jumpsuit while awaiting trial.