The violent Paolo Violi connection

Part 5 - How a boy from Sinopoli in Reggio Calabria became the most feared man in Montreal

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."
Such was Paul Violi, of violent and aggressive nature hidden behind an easy-going and calm facade, who commandeered without actually issuing orders.
Paolo Violi was born in Sinopoli, near Reggio Calabria, on February 6, 1931, to a family suspected of having connections to the 'ndrangheta. A precocious kid, at 14 he was already a patron of the only bar in town: "He was smart, more than many boys of his age," people still remember him in Sinopoli, one of the many agricultural towns in the Gioia Tauro plain.
Repeatedly reported for breach of the peace, a 1947 Carabinieri record describes him as "a dangerous person with an impulsive nature and a violent disposition, capable of anything."
At the age of 20 Violi left Calabria for Canada. His family would follow him a few years later. Following a dangerous Atlantic crossing on a floating wreck, he reached Halifax, Canada's version of Ellis Island, where he was greeted by his cousin Stefano Condina who was immediately impressed by the personality of the future "Paul" Violi: "He would go around with only a quarter in his pockets without losing heart; he knew how to get by and in the end make it."
As Edward Gibbon said, "the winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators." And Violi was one of the ablest in his trade.
He lived for the first few years in Southern Ontario, in Welland, Hamilton and Toronto, where in May 1955 he was accused of murder and then acquitted, for acting in self-defense. "A story about women," was said at the time, "wiped out with blood." Violi obtained Canadian citizenship in 1956 and in 1961 he was again arrested, this time for illegal production of alcohol. In jail he met with other youngsters involved in low-life crimes, thus refining his pedigree.
Violi left Toronto in 1963 to go to Montreal, where he opened a pizzeria. Two years later he took the biggest step in his life, marrying Grazia Luppino, daughter of Giacomo Luppino, a boss born in Castellace di Oppido Mamertina who represented the Buffalo-based Magaddino family in Hamilton and Southern Ontario.
His best man was Vic Cotroni, another mammasantissima, ex-wrestling champion, connected with the Bonanno family.
The marriage with Grazia Luppino and his relationship with his new friends would change his life forever. That life soon took on the bloody face of the fast-moving underworld and its incredible opportunities for making easy money. His contacts with Vic Cotroni became more and more frequent. They would go together to uptown Montreal where they would meet with the emissaries of the Agrigento-based families, and together they would strike a deal in Hamilton, in Giacomo Luppino's house, with Peter Magaddino, the son of La Cosa Nostra's founding father in Buffalo.
They had also the opportunity to make the acquaintance of legendary Jewish gangster Meyer Lanski, whom they met in Acapulco in 1970 while planning their moves in case Quebec legalized gambling. Essentially Violi and Cotroni became one unit, as the Royal Commission on Organized Crime in Quebec would eventually find out.
One impetuous and resolute, the other silent and thoughtful, the duo were the arm and brain of the organization. At the same time the interests and business of the family were growing. Together with his brothers, Paul opened the Violi Importing Distributing Ltd. and the Violi Ice Cream Shop, where (as an ad read) the best ice creams of Quebec could be savoured.
"If he liked you, you became one of his best friends. He was very hard to resist," still remembers Roberto Zangari, owner of a famous restaurant in Montreal's Little Italy.
Three years later, in 1973, however, the police began to suspect Violi. A police officer, Bob Menard, posing as an electrician, succeeded in renting a flat above the "Reggio" bar and creamery from Violi (who was always very wary of non-Italians). Menard’s purpose was to place some electronic bugs to track the boss's business. Menard would conduct one of the longest undercover operations of all time (his cover lasted for over three years, during which he practically broke all contact with his family).
"He was sitting in the far end of a room, with half a dozen henchmen around him," recalls Menard, talking of his first meeting with Violi. "When he raised his gaze, I remember being impressed by his eyes. They were the most penetrating eyes I'd ever seen."
Menard was shadowed for days by Violi's men, and his flat was constantly searched. One day Violi called for him and asked him to check the wiring of the building where the bar, the offices and the same flat where the undercover agent lived were located.
"I tried to buy time, postponing to the following day. I went and attended an accelerated course in electronics, something I was not familiar with," remembered Menard. "The following day I put myself at his disposal. I remember his insistence in holding my ladder. My hands were sweating and shaking, like they had never done before. Somehow I managed to finish the job. Paolo turned the switch on. Nothing, pitch dark. I thought the game was over. Then I checked the bulb. I breathed in relief: it was simply burnt out."
The two men became friends, and Violi often had long chats with this "discreet guy", frequently about politics. "He was extremely intelligent and he knew how to use power," remembers Menard who lived for three years in close proximity to the Montreal boss. When Violi learned of the betrayal, he disguised his anger: "I wouldn't have expected it," he cut short.
In those years Violi found the time to go to Italy for a brief visit. He met Antonino Calderone, then the vice-representative of La Cosa Nostra in Catania, now the great turncoat of the Sicilian Mafia. He, a Calabrian linked to La Cosa Nostra, asked Calderone whether there were ‘men of honour’ in Calabria. He didn't impress Calderone who remembers him as "a braggart, a great big man, apparently short on savvy."
The day of reckoning came in 1975. The Royal Commission on Organized Crime in Quebec obtained Menard's reports, his tapings in Violi's bar, his pictures. What emerged was an interesting cross-section: a bar being used as a cover for a whole series of illicit activities, a most efficient organization that could rely upon a bunch of unprincipled picciotti and an impressive network of alliances.
In a telephone conversation on May 10, 1974 wire-tapped in the "Reggio" bar, Violi repeated to a Sicilian Mafia picciotto, Carmelo ‘Pino’ Cuffaro, born in a small village near Agrigento, the end of the theory of ambivalence, i.e. the idea that Mafia ranks obtained in Italy were also valid in families operating abroad. "Let's suppose you happen to think that you want to do something on your own and you don't tell anybody and something comes to you… tell me, where do you stand then? When somebody comes from Italy he must acquaint himself with us… must spend five years with us."
In 1975 he replaced Vic Cotroni, the old puppetmaster of the Canadian Mafia, who was convicted for not testifying before the Royal Commission on Organized Crime. At the age of 44 Violi was the head of La Cosa Nostra in Quebec, an organization where the Calabrian and Sicilian Mafia lived side-by-side. An unstoppable ascent, only contested by Nick Rizzuto, an Agrigento-born entrepreneur with interests in Venezuela, and connected to the filiere canadienne (Luigi Settecasi, Leonardo Caruana, Pietro Sciara, Carmelo Salemi, Giuseppe Cuffaro).
Precisely in those days Violi would tell Joe Di Maulo, one of his most trusted men, that he now was the new capodecina for Montreal of the Bonanno family, which had always had strong interests in the Francophone city.
In October of that same year the Royal Commission on Organized Crime in Quebec publicized the contents of the wire tapings obtained in Violi's bar. Newspapers began to tell the story of this boss who had become extremely powerful in Montreal. A story made of connivance, alliances that would end up involving many big shots of the organization both in Italy and in the U.S.
But especially the story of a man who was the talk of the town, terminally avid and too arrogant to be discreet.
"His name is like God's own," said a picciotto about Violi on November 28, 1975, testifying in front of the Royal Commission on Organized Crime. "Everybody is afraid of him. He's not one man, he's one thousand." One month later, the former mischievous lad from Sinopoli was sentenced first to one year in jail and a $25,000 fine for fraud in connection to Buffalo Gas Oil Corporation, and then for contempt of the Royal Commission on Organized Crime in Quebec.
While he was being questioned, he had answered in a monotone voice: "I respect the Court, but I have nothing to say."
In jail he was a model convict. "He never asked for a favour, never raised his voice," tells a mate who knew him during those years. His only request was to be allowed to lock his cell from the inside.
Once out of jail, Violi went back to his usual life: the life of a full-time mafioso. But not for long. On January 22, 1978, in the bar in Rue Jean Talon that had been his own for a long time, Violi was playing cards with three friends. Suddenly two men burst into the place and opened fire against him. Two bullets found their mark in the boss' head, and he fell down dead "with open arms like Jesus Christ," said one witness. A shotgun carried out his death sentence. Some people were arrested for this murder, among them Agostino Cuntrera and Domenico Manno, both connected to the Rizzuto family.
(Translated by Emanuele Oriano)


"In Ontario there’s no sign of organized crime"
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.

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=86