For the love of Bessie

Part 7 - The end of Rocco Perri’s reign as boss of Hamilton

With the end of Prohibition in Ontario, Rocco Perri turned his strength and his men towards the United States following his intuition concerning the drug business. Troubles, real troubles, began in 1930. Four Perri men were convicted of manslaughter in relation to their deaths by alcoholism, and he was forbidden from entering Toronto harbour, the strategic centre of his operations. But something was already happening in Canada's underworld. He figured that out on August 13, 1930.
That night he had gone with his wife to visit a cousin of his who lived north of Hamilton, Joe Sergi. He did so frequently, especially in the summertime. He came home at 11pm. While he was parking his car, a rainfall of bullets hit his wife. During those terrible moments, the Hamilton boss ran for his life. Once he realized the danger was over, he went back to see Bessie, the woman who had been by his side for years, lying dead in a pool of blood. Not far from there the police found a license plate and nine rifle buckshots. A clear message: the Mafia, which would dominate the following years, was taking its first steps.
Rocco Perri foamed at the mouth for several days: he even promised a $5,000 reward for the head of the person responsible for Bessie's murder, but nobody could give useful information and the murder went unpunished. Some suspicion fell on Tony Papalia, long-time friend and fellow townsman of the Calabrian boss, but nothing more. He was detained by the police and released after several hours of intense, but fruitless, interrogation.
Several hypotheses were made on that act of violence. Somebody said that the killers had missed their target that was to be Rocco Perri and that the murder would settle some scores within the Calabrian boss' clan. Others said that the killers had not failed at all, and that the "contract" bore Bessie's name.
The story of this woman, who silently conquered the love of a rough man, testifies how much this theory could be right.
Bessie was, in a sense, the natural counter-attraction of her husband, an "alter ego" who gave a decisive contribution to Perri's fortune. It was not by chance that her death marked the beginning of his descending parable that nobody had foreseen.
A relationship born within the walls of an unsightly uptown house, among whining babies and the smell of kosher food, first with a greeting and then with longer and longer discussions about a world and a way of life that Rocco Perri still hadn't completely understood and that Bessie, brought up — as a practicing Jew — under her husband's shadow, could stand no more.
When their relationship became a desperate passion, the only way open to Rocco and Bessie was to escape, from their present, but more so from their past. When Perri quickly climbed the pyramid of criminal supremacy, his acquaintances were at a loss to understand his transformation, how a man who based his actions on impetuousness could transform into a man able to make plans, wait, and move only when he was certain to hit hard.
Always in the shadows, always ostentatiously in the background, Bessie was perhaps the element who gave solidity to her husband's ambition. And when Rocco Perri became "number one" it was also a triumph for that minute woman with delicate traits and a pale complexion. A slender body that hid an iron will, ready, like a she-wolf, to die rather than to see her mate succumb.
The most wonderful party halls, the Toronto and Hamilton racing courses, always saw them together, most elegant. Him, a cigarette between his lips, in faultless tuxedos, wearing shining shoes, when in his youth he had conquered his square metre by hitting opponents with bare feet; and her, most of the time wearing white or pink dresses, with a string of pearls around her long neck and her shoulders covered with immaculate furs. A woman who never remained in an enclosed world, a mate but also advisor of her husband.
For Bessie, Rocco Perri ordered an imposing funeral. The car that drove the coffin along Hamilton streets was covered with white flowers, in accordance with the will of the boss. Behind it, he was the only passenger of a chauffeur-driven black car with tinted windows. Behind him, dozens of cars with women dressed in mourning and men in black suits to show Perri their sorrow. Never seen so many people in Hamilton, newspapers wrote.
Bessie's death marked the beginning of Perri's end.
In 1932 the police arrested two men from his clan accusing them of distilling 26,000 gallons of liquor to the U.S. market in the house of an ex-judge on Concession Street. And Perri himself ended up in jail for not paying a $20 bill to a mechanic who had repaired the engine of his car.
He was by now adrift, as if his wife's death had drained him of all the impetuousness and determination that had made him the king of Hamilton. He found some consolation in the arms of Anne Newman, who tried in vain to follow in Bessie's steps.
In 1938 he suffered two attempts on his life. The first, on March 20, when some dynamite sticks exploded under his porch, and the second, on November 23, when a bomb blew his car up, catapulting him out of the compartment with no consequence and seriously wounding two people he had been talking with, some steps from his home.
When World War II erupted, Rocco Perri was interned along with a thousand other Italian Canadians in a concentration camp in Petawawa, as an enemy of Canada. It was a particularly hard experience, efficaciously described by journalist Mario Duliani, who lived it personally, in his book The City Without Women. Resentment among Italian Canadians, interned for political reasons, was high and continued for a long time after the conflict.
Perri, who was caught almost by chance during the RCMP raid, was freed in 1943, after which he moved to Toronto and was hired as an usher in a theatre: sort of covering his tracks.
His legacy was coming to an end. He wanted to regain the lost ground, at all costs.
On April 23, 1944, he visited a cousin in Hamilton. After dinner he complained o f a violent headache. "I'll go out and get some fresh air," he said. Nobody saw him alive after that. He was swallowed by nothingness, like many of his men, victims of the "lupara bianca" (murder with no corpse).
During the next two years violence erupted among several factions that vied for control of illicit activities in the area of Hamilton, Toronto and Buffalo (U.S.).
An informer told the RCMP that Rocco Perri had been killed and thrown into the Hamilton Bay with a concrete block tied to his feet. Somebody else said that Perri had run away to Mexico, but nobody believed this.
New criminal characters began to occupy what had been his kingdom for many years: Giacomo Luppino, Tony Silvestro and John Papalia, the son of Tony Papalia, the longtime friend of Perri's who had begun to take his first steps in Hamilton's underworld with him.
John Papalia started to collaborate with Vincent Mauro in drug dealing and some years later became the representative of the Buffalo-based Magaddino family.
Albert Agueci, a baker connected to the Sicilian Mafia, immediately joined forces with Papalia. Since then, many murders bloodied Ontario with no one ending up in jail for them. Dozens of ambushes, disappearances, vendettas, treasons, in accordance with a grand script that paled to that of the Thirties, when in Hamilton and around it blood flowed freely and entire Families, like the Basiles, disappeared because of the "lupara bianca".
In Toronto, in 1967, Salvatore Triumbari was killed; two years later it was Filippo Vendemini’s turn; both were born in Siderno, Calabria. In those same years, the police had uncovered the presence of an organization connected to the 'ndrangheta, headed by Michele Racco. The police concentrated on this organization and lost sight of others, who were maybe more important.
In the Sixties even Tommaso Buscetta spent some time in Toronto. He was the guest of some families connected to the Sicilian Mafia. Perhaps it was him who laid the foundations for the drug trade with Sicily, but Canadian police discovered his stay only many years later.
Other Calabrian names began to emerge, like the Commisso brothers and the son of Michele Racco. The former were convicted of attempted murder, following the confession of a biker they had hired to kill Paul Volpe, an emerging boss.
Racco was first arrested for a fight that ended with four people his age wounded, and then murdered, maybe for an unpaid debt with drug dealers. Domenic Musitano, a boss born in Delianova who had moved to Hamilton, was convicted of the murder.
Many years earlier Albert Agueci had died, guilty of threatening a U.S. boss. He ended up in jail for drug dealing and on several occasions had complained of being deserted by his friends: maybe those he had covered. Agueci had gone too far, threatening to call them in if they hadn't obtained his freedom. Rash messages. Agueci was tortured and burnt alive near Rochester, New York. An atrocious death that served as a warning: kill one to teach one hundred.
Paul Volpe, the boss that the Commisso brothers wanted to kill, ended his run in the trunk of his Mercedes parked at Pearson Airport in Toronto, with two shots to the head. The son of a tailor, married to a model, Volpe, who was born in Puglia, had begun to move in the underworld with some authoritativeness.
He had surrounded himself with Russians and Jews and had started to act like a boss. He proposed some business to La Cosa Nostra bosses, until he went too far, invading the area of some big shot.
He invested money in the Caribbean, he made powerful friends, but all this didn't help to save his skin. One of the men he had disturbed most was John Papalia.
Maybe the killers came from the U.S. He said to a friend who last saw him: "I have an appointment at the airport." It was a one way trip.
Among other things, bosses had taken badly to Volpe's strange decision to collaborate with the police for the arrest of the men who wanted him dead. Under the advice of the RCMP Volpe gave his wallet to Cecil Kirby, the repentant biker who was to murder him.
Kirby brought it to the Commisso brothers, as evidence of the boss’ death: this allowed the police to arrest the Calabrian brothers, subsequently convicting them as principals of the attempted murder.
"A rash gesture," a friend of his said many years after the murder. "In Mafia circles, when one collaborates with the police he's a dead man walking."

(Translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=88