The twisted code of silence

Part 4 - Murder, extortion and drug dealing exemplified organized crime in Toronto

Toronto — "Omertà", the Mafia code of silence, was not a widespread attitude. Most of the time, Italians either in Italy or in Italian communities around the world would keep their mouths shut not as part of a conspiracy of silence but rather because they were afraid. This had little to do with a supposed connection with the Mafia. But not everybody can understand this climate of fear that can be found in every corner of the world. In Canada, for instance, no serious effort was made to analyze it and police officers and judges alike dismissed it only as "immigrant stuff".
A case in point occurred during the first part of this century, and it involved an early crime boss known as Joe Musolino (a cousin of the famous Calabrian bandit). He controlled the Toronto waterfront and was behind a successful extortion racket directed at his fellow Italian immigrants.
At the time, he was believed to be responsible for many unsolved murders. Years later, after Musolino was arrested and following dozens of anonymous telephone calls to the police, it was discovered that some of these murders had been dismissed by investigators as being mere accidents. It seems that nobody took the pain to search for the evidence. But a greater problem was the lack of evidence until Frank Griro, an Italian immigrant — fed up with having to pay protection for his business — killed one of Musolino’s extortionists in 1911. He was arrested, tried and in the end charges against him were dismissed. He was the only person to point at Musolino's gang, while his fellow countrymen hid in fear behind anonymity.
"Musolino is the head of the ‘Picciotteria’ [a forerunner of the current ‘ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia]," Griro told the courts. "He tried to involve me, proposed that I enter his organization, but I always refused."
The man managed to avoid jail time, but not to convince the judge about the existence of a criminal organization. "Immigrant stuff," judges and lawyers would say. Nothing became known of the consequences of his courageous testimony, and all trace of the exasperated businessman who shot and killed one of Musolino's extortionists has been lost. Perhaps he began a new life somewhere else, far away from Toronto.
Yet it was precisely that set of rules introduced by Musolino, unwritten but rigid and frightening, which with time became the steel heart of a different and even more dangerous criminal organization that had chosen Canada as the place to prosper. This situation, which had seemed a poor immigrant's nonsense to Toronto judges, created confusion between honest and dishonest, between who had chosen Canada as a future for his family and who did it to bring destabilizing ideas and designs to this side of the ocean.
No one tried to shed some light on that inextricable network of complicity that had found in Canada one of its threads. On the contrary, some openly negated the existence of the Mafia, including the National Congress of Italian Canadians and the FACI, the Federation of Italian Canadian Associations.
The latter, backed by Ontario Minister of Justice Allan Lawrence in the 1970s, went all out in denying the allegations made by some English-language newspapers about some murders that could be traced back to the presence in Canada of the 'ndrangheta. The sole voice was that of Benito Frammarin, a courageous Italian priest living in Canada: "Rather than flaring up against that news," he wrote some years later in a book published in Italy, "the need was to clarify the phenomenon, distinguish the Italian community in Canada from the jailbirds of Italian origin."
Police officers in those years lacked the tools needed to break the thick-meshed net of the Mafia and to analyze the financial accounts of suspicious entrepreneurs. People who got rich by exploiting low-cost labour like many thugs that ran the so-called padrone system, the immigrants’ illegal undercost hiring organization.
The Mafia laid its hands in the 60’s on the construction unions and the Mafia nouvelle vogue got into full swing. One of the first middlemen in the construction industry in Quebec was J. Aldeo Leo Remillard, known for his political connections. He was a "faiseur d'elections", one who guaranteed votes and money which, in electoral campaigns, would often make a difference. He was also a land developer: he bought agricultural land that he later inserted in the town planning as housing areas. In exchange for these operations, he gave 10 percent to complacent politicians and bureaucrats.
Something similar to that happens today with supposedly contaminated land: a million-dollar business managed by few people. Remillard created a veritable organization in order to control rural areas in Quebec, which he entrusted to Keith "Rocky" Pearson. The Mafia, it is known, is an organization that prefers urban areas, and the middleman did not pass this occasion up. When Remillard became the mayor of Ville Jacques Cartier, he had already been in jail three times and had been arrested at least 15 times.
In 1962 the Quebec Provincial Government passed a law for the demotion from office of all administrators with previous criminal records. It was Remillard whom the Quebec Government had targeted, but he did everything he could to prove he had changed. He even asked the Federal Government that his criminal record be cleared. His cause was supported by many, including the former State Secretary Noel Dorvon and the Deputy Defense Minister in the Diefenbaker cabinet, Pierre Sevigny.

Vic Cotroni and Louis Greco

When the RCMP forced American mobster Tony Marulli to leave Canada, it took Carmine Galante, the underboss of the Bonanno Family, almost two years to replace him. The task of managing drug dealing in Montreal was entrusted to Salvatore Giglio, one of the leaders of the organization that was headed by La Cosa Nostra bosses in Brooklyn. In order to do this, Giglio immediately relied on Peppe and Vic Cotroni, two brothers recruited by the U.S. Mafia. It was Giglio and Peppe Cotroni who reopened the drug trade with the Marseilles mob and who established a direct connection with Joseph Cesari, the only French drug dealer then able to refine heroin by 98 percent purity. Drug dealing wasn't yet the main source of income for the Sicilian Mafia, and dealing with Marseilles or with the Corsicans was unavoidable.
Peppe Cotroni was among the first in Quebec to realize the importance of heroin in the Mafia economy, as verified by his presence alongside Greco at the Appalachin summit in 1957, the first important Mafia summit in North America. But he wasn't so smart as to figure out that the RCMP was keeping its eye on him. In 1959 he was arrested, together with his partner Giglio and dozens of other people dealing in drugs in Canada and the U.S.
The RCMP succeeded in obtaining a confession from one of those arrested and, thanks to some wire-tapping, in proving the charges against the suspects.
Peppe Cotroni was sentenced on November 9, 1959, to 10 years in jail and a $88,000 fine. The owners of the Cittadino Canadese, a Montreal weekly, were threatened: "No news on the Cotroni trial must be published." Thus it was: a silence which was not a cultural aspect of Italians in concert with Mafia attitudes, but rather the result of a climate of fear.
The second trial, the one against U.S. dealers, ended in the summer of 1962 with the conviction, among others, of Carmine Galante, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail. From his jail cell Galante kept controlling Montreal. Giglio, on the other hand, covered up his tracks and was thought dead. In 1972 he resurfaced in Los Angeles, where he was arrested for the 1959 charges. With Cotroni in jail and Giglio at large, the reins of the Montreal organization were taken by Vic Cotroni, Peppe’s brother who had operated behind the scenes until then. He entrusted the East End to Giuseppe Coccolicchio and the West End to his old friend Louis Greco. He also expanded the circle to include Conrad Bouchard, Jimmy Soccio and his brother Frank. These were people he trusted, of diverse ethnic origin, but of similar mind.
Moonshining began to flourish again, and the police was forced to cope with an activity that had been thought linked to the Mafia of the Thirties. In November of 1959 Paul Petrolo was arrested in Toronto, and two years later Domenic Procopio was handcuffed. In both cases the liquor came from Montreal. In one of Procopio’s pockets the police found the telephone number of Albert Agueci, a Sicilian mafioso who had recently moved to Toronto with the ‘blessing’ of Rosario Mancino, one of the biggest drug dealers of the time.
In 1960 in Toronto, Paul Violi was arrested; he was to be the man who, along with Vic Cotroni, would create in Montreal one of the strongholds of the Bonanno family, one of the five La Cosa Nostra crime families based in New York City.
Vic Cotroni lived the life of the Mafia don often portrayed in movies. He traveled in a limousine, he had a chauffeur, some bodyguards, a duplex in Rosemount — one of Montreal's most exclusive neighbourhoods — and a house with six garages and a pool in Lavaltrie where he would escape the summer heat.
He was born in Mammola, in Calabria, and with his family immigrated first to the U.S. then to Canada. His first job was that of a carpenter, then he became a wrestler. His mafioso vocation arrived with the passing of time, when he understood that in certain places respect is measured by strength. He couldn't content himself with a hard life, a lot of work, a loan for a house and a nestful of children to raise. None of this. Vic wanted everything at once. And he needed little persuasion. He told the Bonannos only one thing: "You can trust me." And so it was, for over 30 years. Never a conviction. He went to jail only once for refusing to answer the questions of a commission created in Quebec with the purpose of investigating his organization and his financial empire.
In Toronto Cotroni was charged with fraud, but he was acquitted. None of his brothers could replace him and in 1973 his place as a Bonanno subordinate was taken by Paul Violi, the former booze smuggler who had become powerful in the shadow of Vic Cotroni.
The old padrino from Mammola died in his own bed and his funeral was attended by bosses from around the world. Nobody ever dared challenge his power. In Montreal Vic was a godfather who commanded fear as well as respect.
(translation by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=85