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Dec 31,2006 - Jan7,2006 |
The violent Paolo Violi connection
Part 5 - How a boy from Sinopoli in Reggio Calabria became the most feared man in Montreal
By Antonio Nicaso
Originally Published: 2001-06-24
A frightening delay in the understanding of the phenomenon had to be recovered": this was written by an RCMP detective in a report about mafiosi in Canada where he tried to reconstruct the story of the Fifties.
In March, 1963, Justice W.D. Roach, after a long inquiry, reached a scornful conclusion: "There's no corruption at the government level, nor any trace of organized crime nor of any activity, except gambling, that could be connected with Mafia."
Nothing new in comparison with the report delivered some years earlier by then Ontario's Attorney General, Kelso Roberts, who portrayed Canada as a happy country, with neither Mafia nor mafiosi.
"In Canada," he had written, "there's nothing that can be likened to the Mafia, an organization that in Italy was dismantled long ago by Mussolini." Neither Roach, nor Roberts had hinted at drug dealing in their reports. And yet it was drug dealing, heroin to be precise, that opened the doors of Ontario to American Mafia. It happened at the Apalachin summit in 1957, when La Cosa Nostra decided that production and sale of heroin would become the business of the future. On that occasion Toronto was also mentioned, and it was decided to make it one of the North American entry ports for this new and profitable business.
Tons of opium grown in the two Golden Triangles (Laos, Burma and Thailand on the one side; Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran on the other) were being refined in Europe and sent to North America. Most of that precious commodity passed through Toronto.
Cosa Nostra sent Vince Mauro, a boss who grew up in the Greenwich Village slums in New York City, to Ontario. He was a tough man who frightened his interlocutors by staring into their eyes and scrunching his eyebrows. His reference was the Magaddino family which managed a funeral home in Buffalo. After Quebec, Ontario was also taken over.
Montreal — "What does ‘man of respect’ mean? He's a man who is listened to, worth more than others, who knows what he says and can give advice."
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