Canada’s Al Capone

Part 6 - Rocco Perri rose in Hamilton as the boss of all bosses

Hamilton — At the end of last century Platì was little but some mud and brown bread. It was a piece of land, a yellow-gray spot situated at the bottom of a valley, at the foot of the Aspromonte in the Reggio Calabria province, inhabited by men degraded by misery, who spent most of their time sitting on the parapets of bridges or on the doorsteps of houses.
Not yet at the crossroads of kidnapping, but even at that time "crooked caps" were dreaded and respected, like the few notables who, from the beginning of time, lived off the poor.
"Vogghiu fari na casa di duluri — li porti e li franesti di suspiri — e tossicu li mura e i ciaramidi (I want to build a house of pain — with doors and windows made of sighs — and venomous walls and roof tiles)," would sing old peasants, prisoners of resignation. Those poor devils had known nothing but mud and brown bread, all the while dreaming of America, Australia… an escape from misery.
It was in one of those houses, mostly single-floored, uneven, misshapen, blackened by time and eroded by wind, rain, fire, earthquakes, with roofs ill-covered with tiles and every sort of junk, that on December 27, 1887, Rocco Perri was born. He was to become one of the most powerful bosses of the North American underworld.
Perri emigrated to Canada with his family in 1908 after spending five years in the U.S. and worked first in a stone quarry in Coulbert, near Parry Sound, in Ontario, then for the Canadian National Railways, the company that had been awarded the contract for building Canada's railway network. He also did a stint as a construction worker in Trenton, and then worked in Hamilton.
In 1912 he moved to Toronto where he rented a room in a house owned by a Jewish family. Instead of finding a job he fell in love with his landlady, Besha (Bessie) Starkman, who was married to baker Harry Tobins and was the mother of two girls, Lilly and Gertrude. United by a strong passion, Rocco Perri and Bessie ran away together from Toronto in the hopes of finding a new life far away from his past.
After a tumultuous train ride during a time when the Canadian economy was stagnating among the shoals of recession, the couple arrived in St. Catherines, a town 160 km from Toronto.
It was the eve of World War I, and Perri, wearing a pair of gaping shoes, and Bessie, with a tattered dress, found a job in a bakery owned by Calabrian immigrants. At great sacrifice they were soon able to put together a small sum of money and move to Hamilton, where they opened a small grocery shop selling Italian products on Hess Street North. But Perri was hungry… not of the same hunger he craved in Calabria. He was hungry for power, luxury and success.
When, in 1916, Ontario enforced the law on Prohibition, whiskey was already flowing in his store with a glass costing 50 cents. "What's wrong with that?," wondered his patrons. "After all, even in the Bible it is written: Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man?"
By 1920 Rocco Perri was a different man and, to quote Oscar Wilde, he could resist everything except temptation. He always wore shiny shoes, his shirts had starched necks and his pinstriped suits would cost an arm and a leg. That same year he bought a huge house at 166 Bay Street South, in downtown Hamilton that had become (thanks to Perri's frantic activities) the nerve centre of bootlegging in Ontario.
Like Al Capone in Chicago, Rocco Perri had managed to assemble an efficient gang that bypassed any obstacle, bribing police officers, politicians and customs officers. But unlike the bloodthirsty Italian-American boss, Perri, who kept a grip on bootlegging and extortion in Hamilton, proclaimed to hate violence: some kind of dirty-faced Gandhi.
That seemed the case until November of 1924. Bullets began flying like flies, and the police found the body of Joseph Boytovich in Albion Mills, and that of Fred Genesse in Stoney Creek, under a cliff; both were killed in connection to bootlegging. These were two ferocious murders that involved Perri, the powerful Hamilton boss who, in the meantime, had cut for himself the role of peacemaker and righter of wrongs, just like the old patriarchs of the Calabrian Picciotteria had done.
On November 19 of that same year, in an interview to the Daily Star Perri openly confirmed to being the king of bootlegging, but denied any involvement in the deaths of Boytovich and Genesse.
"I've got nothing to do with these murders. To date I only sold some very good booze and bought fast cars for my men. I see no reason why people should object to that." Sensational declarations. The newspaper sold like hot cakes. A copy reached a price of $2, and for days people talked of nothing else in Hamilton.
"He admitted to his involvement in the lucrative business of bootlegging. No other evidence is needed," said a group of politicians, determined to send the Calabrian-Canadian boss back to Italy. Words of abuse, heavy accusations flew around. Nothing happened. Perri was too powerful to be ousted. Protected by very influential circles, somebody said he was even connected with Mickey MacDonald, sworn enemy of organized crime and powerful businessman. The boss’s profits were extraordinary, so much so that he could fund with $30,000 the Drys campaign in favour of Prohibition.
"As long as the laws against the liquor trade will remain in force, my pockets will always be full of money," he said as justification of his prodigality.
Despite his big talk, Perri was not viewed as a criminal: he sold alcohol in blue-collar towns like Hamilton where prohibitionist laws were very unpopular.
On the other hand, in Canada, as in the U.S., the law against alcohol had been passed because of the will of WASPs, and the prohibitionists were mostly Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists.
To the contrary most Catholics and Jews were hostile or, at the least, indifferent to the "noble experiment", as U.S. President Herbert Hoover called it. This was a gamble that immediately proved to be a losing one and that ended up giving organized crime a strong impulse to grow on.
In Ontario, Rocco Perri was one of the first to own a radio set and his lifestyle, which many of his friends and acquaintances still remember, was unique. Generous with tips, he smoked expensive cigars, drove sports cars and was frequently seen at the racetrack with his wife, who was always decked in jewels and elegant dresses, a kind of small-town Gatsby. He always dreamed of going back to Calabria, often recalling the colour of the fields and the songs of birds with the homesickness of a newborn emigrant.
"In all lives, there is a time where destiny makes a fork dividing the road towards a catastrophe or success," said Françoise VI de La Rochefoucauld in a maxim. Soon Perri came to that realization when, in the mid-Twenties he was involved in an investigation promoted by the Royal Commission, which had ascertained the deaths of 35 people in 1925 in Hamilton, Toronto and Oakville due to alcohol.
Under interrogation by the members of the Commission, he said he was only a salesman. "I work in a pasta factory making home deliveries of maccheroni and other types of handmade pasta, in the best Italian tradition," he said, having declared an income in 1926 of just 13 dollars and 30 cents.
The boss was lying through his teeth, having become more cautious in his declarations but no more careful: in eight bank branches, the investigators found as many accounts in his wife's name. In one operation she had deposited $945,000, a mind-boggling figure especially at that time. The day of reckoning was fast approaching.
In 1928, his interview to the Daily Star, the one that had raised so many discussions, garnered him a 6-month conviction for perjury, despite his declaration of never having released it. But that wasn’t enough to stop him.

(Translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=87