Legends of the Morgeti

Speech to Third Age Learning, Arboretum Guelph Nov, 2 2011

2011-11-11T18:12:00.002-05:00

One of the main goals in the Legends of the Morgeti books is the context in which

organized crime operates.

Humanity is reaching a critical point in our history, in which it is

becoming impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys without a program, a

program the main stream media refuses to provide.

The truth of how interwoven organized crime is with business, law and government, is

terrifying in ways that the War on Terror doesn't even being to approach. In mafia

terminology, political, business policing and church associates are known as the Third Level.

As for the title of this paper, Legends in Lansky Land, the Lansky referred to is of

course the master money launderer, Meyer Lansky, ally of Lucky Luciano (the Sicilian

American boss of the America mafia from the 1930's until his death in 1962.) Lansky

outlived Luciano by 21 years, but it was it was they, more than anyone else, who

transformed organized crime from old world secret societies into Big Business.

Lansky's longevity ensured that every traditional crime organization in the world made

the same transition, which is why Chinese, Italian, Russian and other family-based crime

groups are all now run from within corporate businesses.

My attempt here will be to provide you with an overview of how that came about, while

offering ways out, through what I believe are genuine solutions to the predicament

humanity now finds itself in across the globe.

The subject families of my own books, who I refer to as the Morgeti, have followed the

same trajectory as the rest of the world's crime families: they began as Calabrian

villagers and over the last century have turned into inhabitants of the global village.

When they first arrived in Guelph at the turn of the century, they came to a town that

could not have been more pro-British Empire in any of its thoughts, words or deeds. The

business classes dominated the economy, workers had few rights an seasonal Italian migrant workers

were being extorted by the Camorra. The Brits loved northern aristocratic Italians; the shorter,

swarthier Calabrian newcomers had to fight to make a hold in the immigrant rich boarding house

world of Guelph's Ward.

The Village of San Giorgio Morgeto is itself named after one of the earliest of the

invasion peoples, the Morgezi, whose Syro-Arklddian king, Morgezia governed 2700 years ago, after

his father and uncle conquered Southern Calabria and eastern Sicily.

The Morgeti, as a mob group, have deep and proud roots in that ancient imperialism,

their secret codes are focused on respect for order, in which a percentage of everything earned by

any member below any other another member, moves up the ladder, never down, in return for

protection. The pursuit of “gold and silver” and the power that comes with it in mafias, as in

business, wicks upwards, while protection rackets trickle down. In a protectorate economy,

democracy is replaced with obedience to those without conscience intent on wicking the wealth out

of as many people as possible.

Leaving aside Guelph for the moment, the most important moment in organized crime

history probably occurred on the streets of New York in 1920 when a Sicilian born

teenager with a gang and who would later become known around the world as Lucky

Luciano, met a Polish Russian Jewish teenager named Meyer Lansky who was with his

gang. Both were having problems with New York City's well-established Irish gangs.

The two gang leaders from two completely different crime cultures bonded, and in doing

so transformed organized crime forever. As far as I am concerned we live in Lansky's

world.

In my first volume, I began with several quotes, one of which is from a speech given

by RCMP inspector, Ben Sauve, the former Superintendent of the Combined Special

Forces Branch, to the Italian Canadian Club in Toronto on Jan 19 2001.

Sauve was himself an Italian-born Canadian.

“I have often said and maintained, “Soave noted, “ that Organized Crime will never be

defeated so long as we have a democracy, and there is opportunity for power, profit and

control.”

I couldn't disagree more: the problem is not democracy but corporatism, and not the

spiritual corporatism of the original conservative Catholic theologians who came up

with the notion of nations in which the Church was one of four estates orchestrating a

balance of power between Rome, workers, nations and businesses.

The Corporatism I fear is more akin to the fascism of Mussolini, which he defined as

the merger of business and the state, and in which the church was reduced to the role of

keeping workers in line. Guelph's most famous political leader, George Drew, son-in-

law of Guelph's most famous singer, Edward Johnson, both thought very highly of

Mussolini and corporatism; it is a strain of conservatism that comes and goes

throughout Canadian history. We are very much in a pro-corporatist phase of

conservatism these days, here and around the world.

The recent occupy movement, which began on Wall Street and now exists in over 80

countries, takes as its core reality, the fact that 1% of the world's population controls as

much wealth as the other 99% combined.

In America, 400 people - 400 indivdiuals - control as much wealth as more than 150

million Americans combined, a fact first noted by documentary film maker Michael

Moore, when addressing 100,000 people who had gathered last March to protest the

agenda of the uber rich being carried out in Wisconsin by the republican governor, who

had campaigned on NONE of the anti-labour measures he was was then enacting.

Moore's 400 people figure was later confirmed by the CATO Institute's Truth O'Meter , a

fact finding service owned by the oil billionaires, David and Charles Koch,

brothers, who also happening to be financing the anti-global warming movement and the

American Tea Party. The truth o'meter noted that Moore was actually being

conservative in his estimate, because by the accounting of Truth O'Meter researchers,

those 400 individuals owned as much as 155 - not 150 - million Americans.

Curiously, the Truth O'Meter was the only main stream media to cover the fact that there

were 100,000 people occupying the capital buildings in Madison, Wisconsin. Given the

fact that the vast majority of main stream media is owned by a handful of corporations,

including oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch, it isn't surprising that mainstream coverage in

America, Canada and around the world was non-existent.

When the 1% don't want you to know something they don't tell you. Presumably the

truth meter thought they were going to disprove the fact, and published the truth by

mistake.

In Canada, over 80% of our media is owned by three corporations. Back in the 1970's

Senator Keith Davies headed up a Royal Commission into media ownership, one of their

chief conclusions was that conglomerate control of Canadian media would be bad for

our democracy. In our last federal election, triggered by contempt of parliament

charges, the Conservatives claimed they were endorsed by scores of media outlets across

the country: they weren't: they were endorsed by three companies. The free press in

North America has been driven to its knees by corporatists.

According to Statscan, before Free Trade, 10% of Canadians owned 40% of the

wealth, now, that same percentage owns over 60%, while half of the population now

owns just 5% of the commonwealth. If that doesn't sound like a racket to you, my guess

is nothing does.

The occupy movement had the same problem in its first two weeks as the protesters in

Wisconsin had, there was almost no coverage of the fact that tens of thousands of people

were marching in New York. It was only on Oct 15 of this year, when there were over

1500 occupy rallies around the world, that corporate media began their coverage, most

of which was, and remains negative, especially companies owned by Rupert Murdoch, a

man known to live outside the law and common morality in the consienceless pursuit of

profit and power. It is perhaps not surprising that when SunTv was being created, they

had a meeting with Rupert Murdoch, the same day Murdoch met with Prime Minister

Harper. The PM said he wasn't there to discuss SunTV. Since both seem to have an

interest in illegal eavesdropping on private citizens, perhaps they discussed that.

So what does this have to do Meyer Lansky ? Well Lansky and Luciano had been

mentored by a gambler named Arnold Rothstein, who advised them in the 1920's to

emulate JP Morgan, John Rockfeller and the Rothschilds, bankers all. Rothstein, who

was known in Jewish circles as the Moses of the Underworld, was primarily a

gambler, but he had realized as soon as the world's governments started making

narcotics illegal from about 1910 on, that there was going to be huge black market

available to anyone able to provide secure supplies to the addicts of the world, a large

portion of whom were former soldiers and their girlfriends trapped in cycles of

despair and criminal survival. Similarly, when Prohibition came along, Rothstein helped

Lansky and Luciano became masters of the trade, which is how they became allied to

Hamilton's King of the Bootleggers Rocco Perri. The RCMP had been investigating

Morgeti gangsters associated with Perri for their role in narcotics as early as

1922.

Probably the best description of what Rothstein's advice about emulating bankers

means, comes from a 1934 book (available through Trellis via the University of

Waterloo and on online via Google books) called War is a Racket by Major General

(ret'd) Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, and a Quaker, who wrote

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I

spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and

the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped

make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect

revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the

benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown

Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American

sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies

in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way

unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he

could do was to operate his rackets in three districts. I operated on three continents."

The wars Butler fought on behalf of American business guaranteed that the people of

the nations he helped subjugate, remained subjugated until well after the second world

war. Castro's revolution in Cuba was a war fought against American sugar companies

whose one crop policies guaranteed the island remained in the hands of racketeers. It

was certainly no accident that Cuba was the place Meyer Lansky chose to build a casino

before the revolution, with the help of the dictator Batista, (originally a communist but

easily corrupted into a gangster capitalist.)

It is also no accident that after the revolution, Lansky became obsessed with killing

Castro, so much so that at one point in the 1970's he decided to hit Prime Minister

Trudeau in Canada because he thought Castro would leave Cuba and attend the funeral,

where Castro himself could be hit. Cooler heads in the mob prevailed and the hit on

Trudeau was abandoned.

When Chilean President Salvatore Allende was murdered by General Pinochet's

CIA trained forces on Sept 11 1973, it was because Allende was planning to

nationalize the American company Anaconda Copper, which supplied IT&T with copper

for American telephone lines.

The death squads that Ronald Reagan's administration helped organize throughout

Central America and the Caribbean, were used to instill terror in populations trying to

define themselves by self-determination instead of by subservience to American Big

Business and its local collaborators.

Again during Reagan's watch, in 1986, Oliver North fell on his sword to protect the

President from a conspiracy to subvert the American constitution. The flaw in the plan ?

Buying drugs to sell in order to buy weapons to use to install a corporatist friendly

dictatorship in Nicaragua. The International Court convicted the US of war crimes for

Iran Contra, though no one went to jail, least of all Reagan.

Colin Powell's second-in-command when he was Secretary of State, Colonel Lawrence

Wilkerson, as recently as last spring, took up Smedley Butler's mantel, and essentially

described his own military career (which began when Reagan was president) as being

muscle for American corporations, and that the Bush-Cheney administration

deserved impeachment for their lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The mainstream media may be deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to corporatist

racketeering, but there is absolutely no doubt in the minds of the occupy movement that

the 1% are global racketeers.

Back in 1934, both Lansky and Luciano were considerably brighter than the

syphilitic Al Capone, who, as Butler noted, controlled only three districts.

The world Lansky envisioned was very much a world in which their rackets

would employ muscle like the American Marines. In fact, that world came into existence

soon after the release of Butler's book.

Nowadays, we live in a world in which gangster capitalism has merged with global

corporatism.

Though crown chartered business enterprises had existed for centuries (think Hudson's

Bay company) corporate law began in earnest in the 1820s with its limited liability

allowances for investors, a developement that caused corporate businesses to spread.

An early court decision, however, ruled that corporations could not sign affidavits in

court because 'they had no conscience to bind them.”

In earlier business models, conscience and responsibility bound individuals to behave

both legally and ethically (within the ethical strictures of the age and places of the

societies in which the individuals operated their businesses.)

That lack of conscience is the fatal flaw of business corporatism, and is in fact the

weakness that allowed gangster capitalism to bond with it.

Before the G20, the largest violation of Canadian Civil Liberties occurred during the

Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The strike was ended by the acting Minister of

Justice, Arthur Meighen who had told the Minister of Labour, Gideon Roberston to end

the strike, using a law not yet on the books, a law that was subsequently invented and

enacted after the Riots caused by the illegal arrests, for the purpose of crushing workers

rights in Canada, under the mantra that Bolsheviks were involved. Since the Communist

Party of Canada was coincidentally founded here in Guelph after the strike, the lack of

Bolsheviks discovered in Winnipeg, or in the movement, was evident in the names of the

founding members, most of whom were British trade unionists, none of whom were

Bolsheviks.

The conscienceless pursuit of profit is always accompanied by the conscienceless use of

political power.

Nowadays, there is so much laundered crime money in our economy that it constitutes a

significant portion of hundreds of industries, concealed rackets in every business

imaginable. The lack of conscience spreads into the entire society. We may have a

school policy of zero tolerance for bullying, but as a policy it is doomed to failure,

because we have a political economy that protects and celebrates bullies.

From the perspective of 'follow the money”, it is more than evident that the real unseen

hand that governs the international economy is that of organized crime, the hand of the

1%.

Corporate law as it is now written operates by the same set of governing principles that

govern secret crime societies, the conscienceless pursuit of profit before all other

motives. Such principles differ from civic responsibilities that individuals in

democracies share, which is why corporatism is always anti-democratic.
So how exacly did we get here ? How did Lansky and Luciano pull off the merger ?

Before America entered WW2 in 1942, Lansky and his Jewish mobsters had gotten

involved in beating up American Nazis and disrupting their rallies, which caught the

attention of the authorities. When it became apparent that America was going to war,

Lansky had Albert Anastasia discretely blow up a ship in NY harbour to encourage the

Navy to seek mob protection against attacks on America's largest port. The American

Navy then came to Lansky for help, not knowing that they were playing into his hand:

Lansky suggested to them that if that if they wanted to keep the harbour safe they would

need Luciano's support, since he controlled the waterfront (through Anastasia's brother

Tony.)

Luciano however, was in jail on trumped up Prostitution charges, and Lucky

wanted out, so the government made a deal. In return for the promise of release,

the mob secured the port from sabotage, after whch, no more attacks occurred.

When America finally entered the war, the Navy moved Luciano to a less regimented

prison, at which time Lucky urged every Sicilian in New York to provide the Navy with

maps and descriptions of towns, villages, ports, beaches etc as data in aid of a possible

invasion of Sicily.

Mussolini and the Sicilian Mafia did not get along, largely because Mussolini

was not a man to share power with a bunch of peasants in Sicily, so he waged war on

the Sicilian mob. No such war was waged on the Calabrian mob – the 'ndrangheta - as far I can tell. As for the third Italian mafia, the Camorra in Naples, they operated in

the most corrupt jurisdiction in the world, for the Camorra had been

born and forged in the Bourbon prisons at the time of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.

British Prime Minister William Gladstone had noted in the late 1800's that the Bourbon

prisons were evidence of “the negation of God elevated into a system of governance.”

When the Allies finally landed in Sicily, intelligence forces were taken inland by

mafioso; by the time the Allies took Rome, the mafia and the American army were

working hand in hand from their base in Naples, where Vito Genovese the NY mobster

was working as translator for the Army as well as organizing the black market, under

a military governor named Poletti, who just happened to be an old pal of Luciano's.

Army intelligence got to Mussolini's papers with the help of the mob, and ferreted

the documents back to Washington, concealing the names of American fascist and nazi

collaborators.

Locally, there were three significant crimes committed in Guelph from

the pre-war period that speak to my theme of gangster capitalism and

corporatism. In the 1920's to 1930's, Mussolini's vice consuls in Canada took over every

Italian Canadian organization and made them into organs of fascism. One of those

clubs was the Sons of Italy, a meme they'd adopted from the Sons of Scotland & the

Sons of Ireland, immigrant aid societies. In 1937, a man named Sam Sorbara/Sam

Labatti was found murdered in ditch. Everyone in the Ward knew the truth, but no one

told it: his murder was never solved. His wife demanded of her children and their

descendants that they never marry Italians, never learn the language, and none of them

have, though they didn't know why until my book came out.

In 1938, Joe Nasso disappeared, his body was never found, the same people

were implicated, but no one came forward with evidence. Rumour has it that his body

was burnt in the furnaces of the forges of International Malleable Iron Co. whose lands

lie vacant and toxic to this day. The only clue to either murder I have is that the Guelph

Chapter of the Sons of Italy opened the day before Joe disappeared. I know that Joe's

son knows who killed his father, though he's never spoken about it to anyone. I also

know the older San Giorgiosi know what the Morgeti know, and that it had something to

do with a lack of respect. Joe Nasso knew his way around the boys in the olden days of

Domenic Sciarrone's time, and when you combine that fact with the reality that there

was no crackdown on the 'ndrangheta by Mussolini, my guess is that Joe Nasso's

disappearance was a political murder. He wouldn't have been the only Italian Canadian

who opposed Mussolini; many did.

In the end, the Guelph/Hamilton/Welland Calabrians who were interred in enemy alien

camps, were almost all Morgeti or Rocco Perri associates, and several of them had been

suspects in Sam Sorbara/Labatti's murder. And for the record, there were only 635

Canadese out of a total of 135,000 Italian Canadians who were interred, so aside from the Calabrian mobsters, over 600 hundred had been active fascists to one degree or

another, and some who have studied the records believe that one young man is

probably due an apology, though the senior, higher placed northern Italian fascists

embraced by the Empire Club in Toronto were not interned.

A third and earlier crime from that period that speaks to gangster capitalism and

corporatism, was a 1935 counterfeiting distribution trial. The arrested were Cutts Carere,

the Guelph boxer; Domenic Belcastro, (who would later be a chief suspect in Sam

Labatti's murder as well being one of the Morgeti internees) was well as a Hamilton

gangster tied to Perri's clan named Domenic Pugliese, a family that was close to the

Papalias and the Italianos. The last man was yet another Guelphite, also

named Sam Sorbara but not the man who would later be murdered.

Sorbara, Pugliese and Carere were convicted. Both Carere and Sorbara were Morgeti.

All of them said nothing about where the money had come from, and all them did the

time and came out with the thanks and respects of their mob bosses. Sam Sorbara moved

to Woodbridge and after the war became the wealthiest, and most powerful Calabrian in

Canada. His son was Greg Sorbara, Provincial Liberal Minister of Finance until the

RCMP investigation of his family holdings after Sam's death. Sam himself had been a

supporter of Mike Harris, and had helped Mulroney craft the apology to Italian

Canadians for their treatment during WW2, which to my mind was an attempt to

bury the role that some Canadese and Canadian politicians played in Canada's

fascist past. The Conservative Empire Club in Toronto had four speakers during the

1930's who promoted fascism as an ideology compatible with empire, the only speaker

they had who thought fascism was an extreme ideology was a man named Count Paul

Ignatieff.

Sam Sorbara died in 2000. His obituary painted a portrait of his jail time as that of a

poor persecuted immigrant jailed for stealing ten dollars, instead of someone put in the

peniteniary for passing counterfeit tens to Jewish merchants in a scam linked to the

Buffalo mafia.

Back in Italy, after Mussolini was beheaded in 1943: it took two more years to topple

Hitler, but when he fell, a lot of Nazis and fascists got to South America & the US,

where they found allies among Business racketeers.

In Italy, the Christian Democrats came to power, and became so corrupted by the

relationship of business, politics and the mafia that the entire society was corrupted.

A covert freemasonic lodge (chartered by the Grand Orient Lodge of Italy) known as the

P2, and which existed from 1945 until 1976 and beyond, was at the heart of the

corruption. The existence of P2 was proven by lists of members names discovered after

a raid on the home of their grand master, Licio Gelli, and its existence was later

confirmed by long time Italian Prime Minster Giuliani Andreotti, (known to some as Uncle Giulio; to others as the Godfather: he is the central character of the Italian film Il

Divo – the Star.)

P2 was created as a 'shadow government' to essentially wage a terrorist war against

unions: the bloodbaths in Italy caused the creation of the Red Brigade, which was

created to defend against the P2, the lodge was allied to the CIA and M1-5 and counted

Silvio Berlusconi, then a businessman and now current PM of Italy as a member.

The P2 also functioned in Brazil, Uraguay and Argentina, where the CIA was also higly

involved in trying to destroy the union movement.

It is no coincidence now that the 1% appear to be intently focused on destroying unions

in their efforts to destroy opposition to their agendas. Our current Prime Minister has

always been opposed to unions and counts Silvio Berlusconi as a friend, Berlusconi is

Italy's Rupert Murdoch, except far more sinister and powerful. Our PM also shares

most of the values of the Koch brothers,s ince the Alberta pteroligarchy is the only real

employers that two generations of Harper males have ever had, so it is perhaps no

accident that former PMO spokesman Dmitri Soudas was implicated during the last

election via an audio tape released by the Bloc Quebecois, as being the Boss of Quebec

in the eyes of the Montreal mafia, in particular Tony Accurso, one of the people now

under investigation by the Province of Quebec.

As a conservative, thePrime Minister's agenda harkens back to that of RB Bennett and

Arthur Meighen, which is to say, anti-labour and corporatist.
In the mafia code adhered to by the Morgeti and their allies, there are traditions

for the practice of False Politics, public faces concealing private agendas. That kind of

tradition is in part a consequence of being an occupied people; in the case of southern

Italy, communities victimized by successive imperial overlords. In fact, some of the

mafia's origins can be traced to brigandry, corruptions of the Robin Hood myths,

resistance movements that become oppresser movements once they seize power.

The mafia codes are all focused on the hording of money, particularly hard

currency: gold and silver. Before coming to Canada the Cuntrera's had been enforcers

for absentee barons and other land owning classes from elsewhere, protecting feudal

holdings, until laws banning absentee land ownership made it possible for them to

become the local barons. The code allows its members to do whatever is needed to

survive and thrive. Which is pretty much the same ethos used by corporatists: the

conscienceless pursuit of profit and power guarantees both their survival and their

'thrival'.

There is a working relationship in 'ndrangheta communities like San Giorgio

Morgeto and Guelph, in which individuals are allowed to choose whether they

join the Secret Society, or remain in the larger community; the price of having a choice

however, is silence about who is a member and who isn't.

The code of silence is as enforced in the Third Level world of politics and business

as it is in the world of mob soldiers, though cracks do appear, in the mob they're known

as pentiti, the repented.

Eisenhower's famous 'beware of the growth of the military industrial complex'

speech in 1960, is an admission by a pentiti: the Cold War proved to be boon for

military industrial racketeers and their enforcers, and bad for democracy around the

world; at the end of his presidency, Eisenhower knew it and had to say so. It didn't

change anything, except perhaps people's perceptions about Eisenhower; his presidency

had been spent creating the circumstances that has since allowed the military industrial

complex to take over America and much of the worl.

The Cold War was essentially a collaboration between big business, the CIA and

the mafia. In places like Burma, War is A Racket warnings not only went unheeded,

but local drug lords were given arms and airplanes to keep peasants in line from

becoming communists, but more accurately the gangsters crushed liberal democratic

influences among desperately poor people.

Needless to say, Wall Street and Corporatist Business once again profited by the

suppression of democracy in the name of fighting communism.

In Europe, the Corsican drug dealers (whose labs had created the purest heroin in the

world before the war) had to flee from DeGaulle's Resistance fighters after the German

occupation ended, because they had run security for the Nazis in the port. The Corsicans

fled to Montreal, where Maurice Duplessis' Unione Nationale was just coming to

power.

While the Corsicans were hiding out in fascist friendly Montreal (the mayor had been

one of those interned for his sympathies during the war) they met Luigi Greco, a

Canadian-born mobster who fortune was favouring as the emerging boss of

the city at a time when Italian/Jewish/French Canadian/Irish Third Level protection

rackets were passing into the hands of the new generation of business gangsters, in a

province that would remain essentially fascist until the Quiet Revolution in 1960.

(It was also in the mid-late 1950's that the Rizzutos of recent Montreal murder stories,

arrived in the city, preceded by the Caruana-Cuntreras their main Sicilian allies in

Canada. The Caruana-Cuntrera's were so successful at marketing cocaine that they used

to show up at a bank of Montreal in a cube van full of hockey bags stuffed with cash,

cash the bank gladly accepted, no questions asked.)

As for the Corsican drug lords, in the early 50's, they left Montreal and went

to New York City where they were arrested, and imprisoned; but then, two years later

they were back in Marseille working for the CIA fighting communists in the French

Trade Unions. It was the same agenda as the P2. Eisenhower was president when all

this was going on, so no wonder the hero of the war against Nazism and fascism wanted

his own Smedley Butler moment.

The Soviet Union, which had staggered out of the Second World War with 6

million dead, was forced by CIA involvement with gangsters working on behalf of

Business racketeers, to close ranks around the psychotic Stalin, and before long, truth

and fanatsy were so entwined, the Cold War went on to last forty years.

All one has to do is follow the money to know who benefitted and who lost, Big

Business and gangsters won, democracy lost, because here we are now, with 1% of the

richest people in the world conducting the same rackets against the less fortunate as they

did before unions and democratic reforms made it possible for the have nots to have a

little. And even then, the union movement in America was infiltrated by the mafia.

American unions had never been communist. Up until the 1950's, Canadian unions had

largely been communist in the British tradition because of Tim Buck, but then the mob

and big business launched a full scale attack on Canadian unions, driving out most of the

communists, and leaving them branch plants (so to speak) of American internationals.

Hal C Banks, who became the boss of the Canadian seamans union in the 1950's had

been brought in from California to crush communism in the union, and he remains the

best example of how the mob was allowed to take over Canadian unions after the war.

And of course, once they were identified in the media as mob unions they were

discredited by the media.

A little closer to home, the most important mob boss in Ontario after the war, was a man

named Tony Silvestro, boss of the local Morgeti, though Tony lived in Hamilton, and

had family in Welland, Guelph, Toronto, Montreal and the Soo. He was a cousin of the

father of Guelph's mob boss in the 1970's, Frank Silvestro.

In the 1950's, plans for the St. Lawrence Seaway project were being introduced, and the

mob had plans for that. Tony Silvestro and the Morgeti controlled Welland and the Soo

where the ships would pass out of Lake Ontario and Lake Huron respectively on their

way to the Lakehead, reaching halfway across the continent, including Chicago, that

great black hole of corruption in the middle of North America. Container ships became

the best friends of smugglers, drug dealers, arms dealers et al.

There was one other major mob event in the 1950's and that was an alliance

between the American Syndicate and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta, or Honoured Society.

It was a deal brokered by Frank Costello the so-called Prime Minister of the Mob, and

Albert Anastasia. Both American mobsters were north Calabrian born, but with the vast

numbers of south-born Calabrians involved with local ndrangheta clans in Canada, the

States and Australia, Lucky Luciano wanted Calabria organized more than it was, so

they helped create the Mafia Calabrese by dividing up south Italy between three port

families, the bosses of Siderno in the East, Reggio Calabria across the Straits of Messina

from Sicily in the south, and Taura Gioia, north of Sicily on the Tyrhennian sea coast.

Guelph's Calabrian mafia comes from the village of San Giorgio Morgeto, which looks

down from the heights of a mountainous ridge known as the Aspromonte onto the plains

of Taura Gioia; so it became part of the Taura Gioia Group.

The boss of Taura Gioia however had been a cattle thief before the war,

when Tony Silvestro and his brother Frank were the most important Calabrian gangsters

in Canada after Rocco Perri, who disappeared in 1944, leaving the Silvestros and the

Morgeti the most important bosses in Ontario. (Frank killed himself in 1947 after a

heroin deal gone wrong.) Taura Gioia is now the largest container port on the

Mediterranean, and the Piromalli clan of the cattle thief remains one of the most

important clans in the Calabrian mafia.

Tony Silvestro died in 1963. Shortly after that a feud started between competing clans

over San Girogio Morgeto, home of the Morgeti but it was bottled up until 1975 when

it finally erupted – along with a series of feuds throughout southern Calabria, in what are

now known as the first and second 'ndrangheta wars. One of those feuds was fought

between the Facchineri clan, allies of the Piromalli, and a clan known as the Raso-

Albanese, who I believe were Morgeti. (the mother of Guelph's Frank Silvestro was a

Raso.) The wars of the 'ndrangheta lasted until 1995. The Morgeti were the most

important Calabrian 'ndrangehta clan groups in Ontario until Frank Silvestro's death in

1978.

The Facchineri now control San Girogio Morgeto, some of their allies there have family

in Guelph.

The Raso-Albanese now control a town south of San Giorgio.

In the mid 1950's, with the creation of The Mafia Calabrese, Quebec passed from the

hands of the Canadian-born Luigi Greco (a son of provincial Naples area parents) into

the more active hands of the Calabrian born Vic Cotrone, making Montreal part of

Siderno territory. Every mob book written about Calabrians in Ontario except mine, are

about the Siderno Group, led by the Toronto-based Commisso family.

Before the war, the centre of Italian crime in Ontario was Hamilton, where Rocco Perri

ruled until he disappeared in 1944. Perri himself had been born in the village of Plati,

which became Siderno turf after the creation of the Mafia Calabrese.

Siderno bosses began showing up in Ontario in the late 1950's early 1960's to

gather up the strands of Rocco Perri's non Morgeti allies, like the Papalias and

Musitanos. Welland, like Guelph and the Soo, remained Morgeti territory, and the

Hamilton Silvestros were subject to no one but Tony Silvestro, though the local families

with Siderno turf origins were sent Giacomo Luppino as their boss. Luppino's daughter

married Paul Violo, who was sent to Montreal to become second in command to Vic

Cotrone.

The Sidernese Commisso's came and splattered the newspapers with blood and

thunder while the Morgeti kept moving towards business-like respectability.

It is also at that point in the mid 50's that Joe Bonnano in NYC, sent Carmine Galante to

Montreal to whip the town into shape. Gallante, who had once murdered a socialist

journalist on behalf of a right wing politician was welcomed in Duplessis' Quebec.

The local Morgeti clans in Guelph, Welland, Woodbridge, Toronto and the

Soo, seemed to have lost some of their legendary status with Tony Silvestro passing,

though Guelph's Frank Silvestro soon became the best known Morgeti in the

province before his suspicious death in 1978, ten months after Paul Violi was gunned

down by the Rizzuto's in Montreal.

By the winter of 1978, the Sicilian Caruana-Cuntrera's for the most part had left

Montreal a few steps ahead of narcotics squads and had fled to Venezuela, leaving the

Rizzutos as the dominant Sicilians in the city, ostensibly still working for the Bonnano

Family in New York, Carmine Gallante having long since been tossed out of Canada,

and gunned down himself in a cafe in New York.

By the early 1980's the last of Violi brothers, Dominic, was shot through a kitchen

window while breakfasting with his sons. It may be no coincidence that the first

Rizzuto killed two years ago was Nicolo, the man who orchestrated the hits on all four

Violi brothers when the Rizzutos seized control of Montreal. Like Dominic Violi,

Nicolo Rizzuto was shot through a kitchen window with his wife and daughter in the

house. It is the job of ndrangheta women to nurture vendetta in their sons. Which is not

to say that Violi's sons joined forces with former Haitian Ton Ton Macquot death squad

members in Montreal to hit the Rizzutos, but the Montreal Rizzutos are now history.

Woodbridge, in Vaughn, the former home of the man I call the counterfeit Sam Sorbara

is very much home to organized crime in Canada; Morgeti clans still live there, and in

the 1990's police discovered that it had become home to Alfonso Caruana, one of the

Montreal clan that had fled the police in the 1970's. One of Canada's formost mob

writers, Antonio Nicaso, wrote a book on the Caruana-Cuntrera's that was called Blood

Lines, in which he refers to Alfonso Caruana as the Rothschild of the Mob. Sometime

after fleeing Montreal, the Caruana-Cuntrera's became students of Meyer Lansky's,

sending tainted money offshore, where it was sent back clean.

Lansky died in 1983.

By the 1990's Alfonso Caruana was not only orchestrating the largest international

cocaine ring in the world, but he was also running the world's largest money laundering

scam. It was, however, purely by accident that the police discovered that the Caruana-

Cuntrera's were once again living in Canada, since Alfonso showed up in some police

photos of a Toronto mob wedding and at first no one knew who he was.

Alfonso and other members of the clan were eventually busted in the first

globally coordinated narcotics operation in history. It also turned out that the

accountant for his car wash was Alfonso Gagliano, a Chretien cabinet minister.

Between Gagliano and Sam Sorbara, it was evident that even in Canada, False Politics

had no party, and that the goal of Third Level rackets was to keep the cash flowing.

The third major crime Italian Crime group, the Camorra from Naples, is also

deeply entrenched in Vaughn/Woodbridge and uses the warehouses of Concord in that

'city' for large scale consumer product imitation rackets.

The merger between gangster capitalism and global corporatism didn't happen over

night, but was negotiated over many decades. In 2008, Wall Street performed a classic '

shakedown of the American treasury, when George Bush Jr. transferred 750 billion

dollars to Wall Street bankers who claimed that the collapse of their cartel would lead to

global economic ruin.

That shakedown concealed the mostly now forgetten fact that the

week before, Dick Cheney had taken 650 billion out of the economy for his arms dealer

friends. When Obama became president Wall Street shook him down for another 750

billion, and gave themselves bonuses for a job well done.

As well, in December of 2008, the UN announced that 352 billion dollars in narcotics

profits had been successfully laundered into the international banking system, although

they didn't say how. My guess is that large parts of it was laundered through Berlusconi's

“no questions asked” Italian wealth repatriation policies, while another portion was

carried out of Afghanistan poppy fields in briefcases stuffed by our drug lord allies there.

The timing of the 352 billion dollar money laundering announcement

couldn't have been better planned to disappear off the media stream, because it occurred

admidst the uproar of the Copenhagen Cimate Change Conference. The uproar itself

had been caused by the billionaire financed Climate Change Denial racket that

climaxed during so-called ClimateGate scandal over an allegedly damaging cache of

just released university emails. Never mind that the contents of those emails were

eventually dismissed as disproving not a line of climate change science, the uproar

guaranteed that Big Oil would face no challenges to the hegemony it had maintained

over global geo-politics for the previous century. Never mind as well, that for the 'gate'

scandal analogy to hold true, then the crime could not have been in the content of the

emails, but in the fact that – like Watergate - a break-in had occurred, in this case the

break in of private emails (something we now know was a specialty of media baron

Rupert Murdoch.) Similarly, when the news was finally announced that the theft itself

had been traced to a server in Siberia, corporatist media buried the story with one

printing.

Climategate has never been identified as a theft (nor has Murdoch ever been

investigated for potential involvement in Climategate) nor has the fact that Koch

brothers have been identified as the financiers of most of the anti-global warming

movement ever been investigated by the main stream media.

So why Siberia ? My guess is because former KGB agents now work for Russian

mafiyas.

Which is all to say that in the midst of all that Climategate noise, it is not surprising to

me that the UN report on the 352 billion narcotics dollars disappeared, and with it, the

knowledge that such an amount had not only been laundered into the world economy,

but, in the words of the UN drug czar had, “helped stabilize the world banking system.”

Other than me, there didn't seem to be anyone else on the planet who had even noticed

the story, certainly no law and order politicians demanded to know where the money

came from or where it went.

In fact, the story would have vanished altogether, except another writer had

seen the article. His name was John LeCarre, and he placed his newest novel, Our Kind

of Traitor, within the context of the narcotics money laundering scam and the Russian

mafiya. It's all about business now. Arnold Rothstein's advice to Meyer Lanksy has

transformed organized crime into a global racket.

Hell, even Hollywood is in on it: according to Wikileaks, five of the biggest action

stars in America are shooting a film in Bulgaria; security for the stars comes courtesy of

connections the president of that nation has with the Bulgarian mafia.

Wikileaks is of course itself an endless supplier of evidence about how much the foreign

policy of most nations in the world is nothing but rackets within rackets. Some of the

most powerful banks in the world are doing their utmost to destroy Wikileaks and its

founders, but to the 99% er's it's all just more evidence of the corruption of the 1%.

American isn't broke, it was robbed by privateers.

Here's one last thought to scare you, back when the mercenary company Blackwater was

being created, it was given the legal right to kill without question, without recourse

for anyone to criminal proceedings such as those that military and the police must face.

Mercenary killers have been placed beyond the law, in a way that surpasses even

America's standoffish attitude to international courts & their actions.

The muscle that Quakers like Smedley Butler once provided, is now being done for a

profit by people without conscience and subject to no law but death.

The Lanksy/Luciano form of syndicated gangster capitalism has been

transformed into global corporatism. It all adds up to where we are now.

So what do we do about it ?

In one sense the doing is already happeneing: the gathering outrage that is the occupy

movement keeps spreading with every police action against peaceful protesters, so that

every day the will to do something is growing. And clearly, since the heart of darkness

for the last century has been American foreign policy - American corporatism - then

nothing short of an American revolution can uproot the corruption that is Wall Street and

its allies around the world.

Recognizing the problem, as they say in AA, is the first step to solving it. But

having recognized it, how do we solve it ? In a general sense, the solutions are already

well established. Canadian politicians like to point to our well regulated banking system

as the cause of our relative stability. I would argue that the fact that 11 million

Canadians are members of credit unions is far more likely the case. The Canadian

cooperative movement not only suffered no damage from the recession, it grew, it hired,

it is doing more than just fine thank you very much. The larger picture solution the

occupy movement is looking for are to be found in cooperative principles. Cooperatives

in the end will simply out compete corporations, because they are rooted in common

good, common cause, and genuine common sense. The power of cooperating consumers

to bring the reprehensible practises of global corporatists and gangster capitalists to heel

will only grow.

At the same time, I make the case in my books that since traditional organized

crime is family crime, we should use family law to solve the problems families cause.

The most successful socio-political proecesses of redress are found in Truth and

Reconciliation. An elder of a crime family would have to confess to the crimes of the

clan, would have to serve prison time; the family's wealth would have

to be placed into two trust funds, one that guarantees a dignified life for the

living generations, while the other trust fund would be used for

community problems related to crime, like drug and gambling addiction, prostitution etc.

Because of the Third Level nature of the larger picture: police, judges, politicians et al, the only solution there is, is the dismantling of corporatism. It's not impossible. In

fact, it's happening as I speak. Democracy is coming.

American military personnel have had enough of being muscle for big business

and they are joing the occupy movement as citizens, they are highly organized, and

decidely determined to make sure no one else goes to war on the strength of lies.

Global reforms would have to be made to corporation law in order to

preserve democracy, to restore ethical responsibility. I came across a book on Ethics in

the world of IT, the author discussed the ideas of John Rawls, who believed that

Greatest Equal Liberty is the essence of political ethics. The cooperative movement will

take care of creating Greatest Equal Liberty, but our democracy itself needs to be not

only restored, but deepened. My own personal belief for Canadian democracy is that the

PMO over the last few decades is becoming increasingly executive and anti-

democractic as a direct result of the re-emergence of corporatism. The lack of ethics that

led to the contempt of parilament charges last spring are a case in point: the PMO now

operates as a cabal. Cabinet governement, which began as the King's Council, has

become nothing more than a rubber stamp for corporatist agendas. Our elected

representatives have so little power now we may as well not send them to Ottawa in the

first place. From my perspective, the solution lies in a form of proportional

representation I call Fair Share cabinet, in which members from all parties become the

government, with cabinet seats based on proportional electoral results, leaving the rest of the members in the House as the Loyal opposition.

The very nature of political parties and power makes parties easily corrupted by Third

Level gangsters from the business world.

We must also change the nature of what a corporation is. To do that we must

reform corporate limited liability to mean shareholders can be fined or jailed for crimes

or 'shady practices' - rackets - committed by company directors and executives.

Non-voting shares should be eliminated, because a share should come with ethical

responsibility, and criminal liability.

The conglomerate control of any industry, but most especially the media needs to

end, and the Rupert Murdochs and Silvio Berlusconi's of the world jailed for criminal

conspiracy. Everyone was surprised when the NDP won so large in Quebec, and yet

NDP voters are among the only people in the country who knew that 100,000 people

were on the streets of Madison Wisconsin three weeks before our election. And they

knew, because they have their own media, they don't buy the corporatist message reeled

out every day in the lame stream media.

The Liberals faltered because they triggered an election based on the need for

democratic renewal and then didn't deliver in their platform, in the end, their support

started to drop only after the release of their platform, because instead of democratic

reform, we got corporate marketing terms like Family packs. Voters wanted democratic

substance and they got political junk food. Non party liberal voters walked away in droves because they get their news online, they don't waste time reading single papers or

watching single newscasts: they scour the internet, they debate issues online, they know

they lame stream media is doing exactly what Senator Keith Davies said it would do

back in his 1971 report on concentration of media ownership: subverting

democracy.

So finally, I come back to Superintendent Ben Soave's 'so long as as we have

democracy, we'll have organized crime' statement: Democracy is not the problem, it is

the solution, we need more of it, not less of it, we need to understand that war really is a

racket, and that most of the 1% are racketeers.

Some say that government should be run as a business, they never say what

business: I say it should be run like a credit union, member owned and based on

cooperative ethics: the seperation of Big Business and the State is essential to the

survival of not just democracy, but of free enterprise, and freedom of association.

Organized crime becomes more difficult to nurture or conceal in cooperative

communities than in the board rooms of Wall Street, the PMO or the White House.

Guelph Mob talk on Apr 7 2011

2011-04-01T07:31:00.000-05:00

I'll be the guest speaker at a Friends of the Guelph Public Library event.

'ndrangheta in Ontario

2011-03-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

more Canadian 'ndrangheta wanted in Italy. The Sidernese still get caught, the Moregti almost never do anymore, they only commit crimes now that are buried deep inside the money stream.

Soccio Correction in Rizzuto article

2011-01-28T13:04:00.000-05:00

Vincenzo "Jimmy" Soccio not Big Joe Soccio was the co owners of the Corso Pizzeria, another small bit of sloppiness, cleaned up.

Before Nicolo Rizzutto

2010-11-14T11:31:00.001-05:00

From: Legends of the Morgeti: Volume 3

Montreal: Luigi Greco, the Sicilian Who Wasn't

While we're discussing Sicilian power in Canada, I should also mention Luigi Greco, who is always referred to as the boss of the Montreal Sicilians, but without anyone ever backing that statement up with a place of birth. Following a 2008 CBC news story on the Rizzutos, in which Greco was mentioned, the following was posted online by a Louis Greco “The Luigi Greco referred to in this article was born on September 19, 1913 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada to non-Sicilian parents. His father, Angelo was accidentally killed in a Canadian Pacific Railway incident in March,1923; his obituary is posted in the Montreal Gazette.” On a genealogy.com thread dated Oct 6 2008, Louis Greco also posted this ”I am Louis Greco (1950) son of Luigi Greco (1913-1972) and Mary Rose Bertha "Pola" Bernard (1920-1953) Paternal grandson of Angelo Greco (1880 - 1923 ) and Giuseppina Fasciano (1878 - 1959) both of Montorio nei Frentani, Italy. Maternal grandson to Alphonse Bernard and Marie Rose Berthe Perrier Bernard, both of Comté L'ascension, Quebec, Canada.”

Montorio nei Frentani sits near the west coast of Italy, most of the way across the 'boot' from Naples, north east of Campobasso: the village looks to be tucked away from all main roads. see Map on left side. It's the same town where Jose Greco, the famous Spanish-dancer came from (“Jose” wasn't Spanish, he just partnered female Spanish dancers, and, according to Louis on another thread, Jose (Giseuppe/Joe) was a cousin of Luigi's.) Thus, Luigi Greco wasn't a Sicilian. He was also Canadian-born, making him one of this country's first “indigenous” multi-ethnic mob bosses: his underboss was a Ukrainian named John Petrulia, and he was heavily involved with Jewish associates, like Harry Ship and Max Shapiro, who he had first met as a driver for Harry Davis, another Jewish gangster who Greco came to know in prison during WWII. Greco was serving a twelve year term for armed robbery, while Davis ended up serving 7 years on a narcotics conviction that came about through evidence provided by Charlie Feigenbaum, who had himself been jailed on a narcotics conviction. Charlie was involved with the Lansky-Luciano Outfit through Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, and had been told that his Montreal rackets would be waiting for him when he got out, only when he did, he had discovered that Davis was taking them over, so Feigenbaum ensured that Davis couldn't, by providing police with enough evidence to send Harry to jail. For his evidence, Charlie was released, only to be gunned down in Montreal in 1934 in front of his son.

Greco also had French Canadian and Irish-Canadian allies, not to mention the Calabrians in the Cotrone gang, who relied on his Third Level connections. In fact, according to an email conversation with his son, Louis Jr in 2009, Luigi not only spoke Italian, French, and English but two other languages as well. Apparently his passion was for competitive Scrabble. When Luigi's father Angelo was killed at work in 1923, Luigi had left school as a ten year old boy and had gone to work to help support the rest of his family. In 1936, when he was 23 years old, he had been jailed for armed robbery and didn't get out until the middle of the war. In fact, there is something about Greco's emergence from jail and into power that seems almost Neapolitan, akin to the way the Camorra began in the prisons of Naples and radiated out into the corridors of power. Modern Montreal is referred to as the Palermo of Canada. It may have been truer in Greco's time to think of it as the Naples of Canada.

The Catholicism of Montreal, while deeply conservative to the point of supporting the fascist Union Nationale until the 1960's, was not as severe as that practiced in Sicily, tempered as it was by the more urbane French character of Montreal. Montreal is the city where Roman Catholicism made peace with High Anglicanism and where commerce made friends where ever they could; Montreal has served as a continental hub for a mercantile fur empire from the 17th century until now. So its inhabitants not only understood the will to power, they had centuries of examples of men who found the means of achieving power, from the lowest level crook to the highest level politicians. The Hudson's Bay Company, which had been run out of Montreal since the early mid 1600's exploited the resources and peoples of the northern portions of the continent aided by force on the ground and by secret society codes in the highest councils of the land for nearly four centuries: it's attitudes to the claims of the various indigenous peoples across its vast 'holdings' was that of a mobster to lesser clans with the help of allies among the lesser clans. The marriage of power and opportunity in that city, thus seems more Neapolitian than Sicilian.
And then there were Jewish black marketeers and toughs. The first Jewish member of a British legislature anywhere in the British Empire had been elected in Trois Riviere, Quebec in the 1830's. However, the province itself, in the pulpits of their church, promoted a stridently anti-Semitic right wing, priests proclaimed Jews as Christ-killers. Nonetheless, a curious Jewish mob occurs, because it had been the British who gave Jews the right to run for office and vote. So there is the overworld corruption and the underworld.
Jews had been relatively well accepted in Britain since they first arrived with William the Conqueror back in 1066. In Quebec however, it wasn't until well after the Second World War that the Catholic Church stopped trying to maintain the fiction that the Jews were to blame for the death of Jesus if the plan was God's. Thus the Jews of Quebec and long been the bridge between the Anglo overworld, and the Franco-Irish-Italian Catholic over and underworlds. (The Quebec Irish are mostly Catholic, compared to Protestant Orange province of Ontario.) Montreal is thus a confluence of outsiders in a world run by an English ruling class, and its prisons, like Naples, represented that order. That estrangement from power by Jewish/Catholic gangsters, when combined among criminals already estranged from their own communities, allowed the gangs of Montreal to develop a distinct mob culture. Ontario's organized crime history is different, root and branch.
Luigi Greco turned 12 in the Montreal of the Sardinian racketeer Tony Frank (who had been married to a New York Cipolla.) Tony Frank and his gang (including a Gambino from New York) were executed in 1925 after a bank robbery in which a guard had been killed. Tony Frank hadn't even been at the bank, but he had been found guilty of having organized the robbery, and thus, was executed for the killing. The trial took place amidst allegations of police corruption...
After the passing of the Sardinian boss, Harry Davis, a Montreal-born Jewish mobster, took over some of the city's rackets, and through his connections to Louis "Lepke" Buchalter in New York, ran Montreal's drug scene. Davis was publicly known, however, as the boss of the city's gambling circles. Davis met Greco in prison, again Camorra like. Davis got out first. Finally, after more than a decade in jail, Luigi Greco found himself free, and found a job as Davis' driver. Within two years, Greco was second-in command.
Davis was murdered in 1946 by Louis Bercowitz, a former Canadian solider, and a gambler in his own right, who had told the court that he had shot Harry because Davis had claimed to have put a hit out on Bercowitz and another gambler, and he was acting before he himself had been killed. The other version is that Davis wouldn't allow Bercowitz to open a gambling joint and so Louis B. got mad and killed Harry. Louis Bercowitz was the cousin of Leo Bercovitch, who, along with Max Shapiro, ran a restaurant and shared their gambling interests. In 1970, Leo Bercovitch would host the so-called Acapulco Conference in his palatial residence in Mexico. (The Summit was chaired by Meyer Lansky, and was focused on discussions of how the mob would respond to the pending legalization of gambling in Quebec.) More on that later. http://www.archive.org/stream/v5hansard1974ontauoft/v5hansard1974ontauoft_djvu.txt)
With Davis gone, the multilingual Greco inherited much of his Franco-Italian-Jewish mob as well as the Montreal heroin trade, although the gambling interests were scooped up by a man named Harry Ship, who had links to Lanksy and to Frank Costello. After the war, but before Davis' death, Domenique Albertini, Francois Spirito and Joseph Orsini, members of the Corse Union (the Corsican mob), the premier heroin producers in the world, had fled Marseille ahead of accusations by the French Underground of Nazi collaboration, and so they took refuge in Duplessis' Quebec, a haven for former and current fascists. It was from Montreal that Albertini and co., hiding under Greco's terzo livello/Third Level political umbrella, planted the origins of what would become known as the French Connection, the heroin ring that would transform international drug trafficking. The Corsicans didn't stay long in Montreal (they were back in Marseille by 1956 working for the CIA) but while in Montreal under Greco's protection, the die of the future was cast.
However statesman-like Greco was within the Montreal mob, it is unlikely that the non-Sicilian Greco could have led a Sicilian gang, so another question that arises is, who were the men in the Sicilian faction that Luigi was supposed to have led ? There were a number of Montreal-born, pre-war children of Italian immigrants who could have been Luigi's Sicilian gang, men like the Soccio brothers (Vincenzo, Giuseppe, Luigi and Michele), Giuseppe Cocoliccio, Nicolo Di Iorio, Diodato Mastracchio etc., except none of them were Sicilians. According to Quebec birth records, Nicolo Di Iorio, may have been the son of a Giovanni Di Iorio and Modesta DeLuca. The Montreal DeLuca's thus may have been related to the murdered Timmins, Ontario gambler and gold smuggler, Frank DeLuca (see Vol. 2.) (Frank DeLuca was murdered in 1948, but he had also been involved with one of the Michael Silvestros in Welland, and had been arrested alongside Matteo Cipolla in 1932, after which he went to Timmins in 1937 and became a runner in one of Annie Newman's gold rackets, for which activities he went to jail from 1939 to 1942; he was also a known associate of Louis Wernick, the Toronto money-launderer and gambler/drug dealer who had been murdered in 1946. Wernick had strong links to Montreal, and had been arrested in a heroin case there in 1938.
In any event, the Montreal Di Iorio's and DeLucas appear to have been from Gallucio, in Campania, just north of Naples, the Niagara-region/Timmins DeLucas, likewise appear to have been from Gallucio. Other members of Greco's Montreal gang, like the Cocolicchios, are likewise not Sicilians, being from Rapolla in the Basilicata region, Potenza province of Italy, about 200 Km due east of Naples. As for the Soccio's, the nearest I can come to figuring out where they were from involves Michele Soccio, because there is a 1944 border crossing record of him traveling from Montreal to his Uncle Mike D'Addario's (his mother Angelina's brother) who lived in Detroit, Michigan A 1907 Ellis Island's record, shows a Michaelangelo D'Addario traveling to Michigan from Limosano, Italy, which is due north of the city of Campobasso in the province of the same name, again east of Naples. The Soccio's seem to had been from Campobasso province east of Naples as well.)
Diodato Mastracchio and Vincenso “Jimmy” Soccio ran the Corso Pizzeria together. Mastracchio was likewise the son of parents from the Campobasso province, a small town called Larino on the road from Naples to the Ionian Sea, east of the Cammorra stronghold. According to a 1945 border crossing record, the Montreal-born Mastracchio was 28 years old in October of that year when he went to New York with his wife (Vittoria Minotti) for a month, which would make his birth circa 1917. On March 1 of 1950, Vittoria sued for a divorce (presumably linked to Mastracchio's narcotics arrest) a suit which was granted by parliament, as was required in those days.(http://www.archive.org/stream/hcc92195000uoft/hcc92195000uoft_djvu.txt)
In this search for the Sicilians who had allegedly been led by the supposed Sicilian Luigi Greco, I have, in fact, yet to find a single Montreal-born or raised Sicilian mobster, prior to the arrival of Pasquale and Liborio Cuntrera in 1951. Although there is no doubt New York Sicilians continued to visit Montreal after a Gambino had been executed along with Tony Frank back in the 20's. It would take the two Cuntrera brothers, with Greco's help, to establish a beachhead for the rest of their clan (Caruana-Cuntrera-Vella) and their allies the Rizzutos) but they launched themselves against the world from Montreal. Nearly sixty years later, the Canadian-based Sicilian clan leaders are more like members of the board of directors in the rarefied worlds of international gangster corporatism, but in 1951, the Caruana's were just beginning to emerge from their recent past as the muscle for the local Siculiana Baron, a noble who had lost his land to agricultural reforms in Italy in 1950 (much of which land then went to his enforcers and their associates.) Thus, when Pasquale and Liborio showed up in Montreal at the start of the 1950's, they found themselves in a much different world than the one they had left behind: at least insofar as Sicilian power and rural poverty was concerned, but they also knew the ropes of mob power and respect, and since Greco was the leader of the largest mob in the city with the best links to the ruling classes, they gravitated his way.
So contrary to statements in almost every Canadian mob book or international mob watcher website, not only was Greco not a Sicilian, but the Italian underworld of Greco's time seems more like a glimspes of the Montreal mob as rooted in a Kingdom of Naples rural Camorra.
It should also be remembered that during the second world war after Mussolini was killed, the black market in Italy came under the control of Vito Genovese, a man himself born in the outskirts of Naples, before his parents moved to New York came to control the post-war black market in Italy in collusion with allies in the American military. Genovese had spent the war in Naples as the drug dealer for Count Ciano, the dictator's son-in-law, and after the Allied occupation and under the seal of the new Military Governor Charles Poletti, a friend of Lucky Luciano's, (Luciano was sent back to Italy after the, banned from the states,but released from prison in thanks from the American Navy for his help with the invasion of Sicily)
In any event, Genovese's base in Naples during the occupation period, was as the boss of the Mafia-Canmorra, so it cannot be merely coincidental that on the routes to and from the nearest Ionian Seaports lay the villages and towns from which Montreal's non-Calabrian mobsters all hated, the most important of whom was Luigi Greco. (It is also not hard to imagine that after several centuries of organized crime in Naples, that the roads from that city to the east coast of Italy. would have been well within the Camorra's field of operations with local allies.)

Mob watchers also speculate about why Greco graciously took a back seat to the Cotrones when the New York mobster Carmine Galante came to Montreal in 1954, but it would now seem, that for one thing, Greco had no Sicilian pride to bury. The creation of the Mafia Calabrese by Frank Genovese and Alberta Anastasia in the 50's also suggests another reason why Vic Cotrone's Calabrians dealt with New York, with Lansky and Luciano, rather than with Genovese before and after he returned to the states and had Anastasia in in '57. Greco may not have been a Genovese ally, though he probably dealt with former solider's who had worked with Vito, so Greco didn't so much step aside as step back from the fray.

There is one other matter that needs to enter the equation of his thoughts when he did become more circumspect than usual, and that was a circumstance that suggests to me that the last thing the already cautious Greco wanted in 1954, was to get caught up in a bloody narcotics war that might engulf the rest of his family. (Luigi had brothers and sisters - Louis Jr.s' aunts and uncles.) Even more important than Luigi's desire to protect his brothers and sisters families, was a series of events that could be said to begin the winter before Louis Jr.'s birth in the spring of 1950. That was the winter that Luigi Greco went to see Lucky Luciano in Italy, with his closest associate, the Ukrainian Frank Petrula, then to New York to talk to Frank Costello. Greco had wanted a cut of some of the profits of Harry Ship's gambling empire, (Ship was an associate of the Outfit in his own right, so Greco had had to make the Outfit an offer in return.)
What they had offered Luciano and Costello was a cut of the profits that could soon be made by using the Port of Montreal to move Corsican heroin and other contraband into the interior of North America, via the soon-to-be-built St. Lawrence Seaway, a project that had been taken off its centuries' old drawing board, and moved into a fast track by CD. Howe, Prime Minister King's Minister of Industry.
And here is where the roots of Luigi Greco's stepping back really lie, I believe. Shortly after the trips to Luciano and Lansky, things began to go wrong in Luigi's personal life, beginning with the narcotics bust of Soccio and Mastracchio while he was away. His name did not expect the papers however. Thus, after a few months of domestic stress and tensions that followed police and public scrutiny, Luigi's wife, Berthe gave birth to their son, Louis Jr. The break was already made perhaps, but, according to Archives Canada records, Berthe started divorce proceedings against Luigi on February 19 1951, which were finalized on May 7. ) On March 1 1952, around the time that Harry Ship's gambling empire was being investigated by a Montreal crime probe, Berthe married again, this time to Raymond Cardis: he was a tool maker, a recent immigrant from France. According to Louis Jr. on a genealogy site “My mother died tragically February 12,1953 in Westmount, Quebec. I became a ward of my biological father Luigi Greco and estranged to my maternal relatives.” Presumably, Berthe Bernard's family had not been too fond of their daughter's involvement with a mobster like Greco, especially once the investigations began, but after her death, they must have blamed Greco for Berthe's tragedy, and thus the boy suffered his lifelong estrangement from them. In email conversations with Louis Greco, he told me that his mother, Marie Rose Berthe Bernard, was the daughter of a Cree father and a French Canadian mother, from just north of Mont Tremblant, which is just north of the Montreal,and that after her death he never saw any of her family again.
The tragedy surrounding his mother's death, can be found in the Montreal Star of February 12 and 20 1953. At the inquest, which had been covered by the Montreal papers, the family maid told the Coroner that Berthe's second husband, Raymond Cardis was jealous over Berthe's contact with 'her first husband' (un-named by the paper.) The maid said that the day she had died, Cardis had demanded that Berthe phone 'him' (again, the un-named Greco) and tell 'him' that she and Cardis would not be separated. When Berthe refused to phone 'him”, Cardis went into another room, came back with a rifle and shot his wife, who was sitting at her dressing table holding the hand of her son (also un-named). Cardis then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide in front of the maid and the 2/1/2 year old boy.
According to Louis Greco in 2009, because his mother was divorced, the Church at first refused to allow her burial in consecrated ground, but his father interceded with friends among the authorities, and thus she was buried in a Church service in holy ground. Luigi was given custody of his son, under court supervision. Assuming (as the coroner did) that the maid's story was true, then it would appear that Greco and Berthe were still in love, certainly his efforts to secure her a decent burial prove as much. By late December 1953, when Carmine Galante showed up in Montreal, the deal between Luciano and Greco - probably sealed during Harry Ship's troubles in 1952 – left Luigi Greco free to slip further out of the limelight, where he became a financier of drug buys rather than a broker of deals. Certainly Galante appears to have drawn all the attention onto himself when he crashed and burned and bullied his way around Montreal, gathering all the city's rackets into one common network until he was finally turfed out of the country by police. Greco eventually remarried and had two daughters. Louis says that while he was”a ward of my biological father” he was also “fostered non-traditionally by my paternal aunts.” Louis Greco's estrangement from the family of the mother who held his hand while she was murdered by his step-father, continues to this day.
The first mob book that had established Greco's identity as a Sicilian, albeit, in passing, was Peter Edwards Blood Brothers (1990), his account of the Cotrone family. I can only assume that because every other major mafioso named Greco was a Sicilian, Edwards thought that Greco was one too. It was also Edwards who established the narrative of the take-over of Montreal by Joe Bonnano through Carmine Galante. According to Jean-Paul Charbonneau in his earlier 1976 magnum opus on the Montreal drug scene The Canadian Connection, no mention is made of Greco being the boss of the Sicilians, Charbonneau also makes clear the series of events that led to the coming of the Americans, clarity which does not seem to appear anywhere else after him.
The transition to the Calabrians begins with three events in 1950, the first was the trip to Naples taken by Greco and Petrula to talk to Lucky Luciano, followed by a trip to New York to talk to Frank Costello. The second event was a February 1950 narcotics-bust of Mastracchio and Soccio at the Corso Pizzeria. (It was around that time that the Corsican, Antoine d'Agostino, disappeared from Montreal.) According to Charbonneau, during the announcement of the arrest of Soccio and Mastracchio, the RCMP had told the public that Greco was known to have just traveled to Naples to talk to Luciano to discuss narcotics. The third event was the creation of American Senate hearings led by Senator Estes Kefauver into racketeering in the States.
The first event shows that Greco was the originator of cooperation between the Canadian and American mobs via the Seaway to the Upper Great Lakes, the deal with New York, was thus between Greco and Luciano/Costello. The role of Joe Bonnano and his underboss Carmine Galante were essentially that of sub-contractors, territorial neighbours, to be handled by the newly minting Mafia Calabrese through Vic Cotrone and later via Paul Violi and the Sidernese. In my opinion it was only after Luciano's death in 1962, that the deal devolved into one between Bonnano and Cotrone.
As for Senator Kefauver's American rackets hearings, he had released his findings and a series of proposals early in 1951. One of his recommendations had been promptly adopted, namely the creation of a federal gambling tax. In his book The Enforcer, Adrian Humphreys says “The tax was seen as a particularly devious trick by bookies in states where gambling was illegal...If they (New York bookies) paid the tax they would be arrested by state police... if they ignored the tax, they risked arrest by the feds. The answer for 100 or so American bookies was to move North.” A May 14 1951 article in the Toronto Star carried the headline that reads “Doubts US Bookies Can Beat Law With Canadian offices” a story about one of committee's former chief counsels explaining how they didn't expect the mob to succeed in their efforts to beat the new nation-wide ban on horse and dog race news transmissions, by establishing receiving points in Canada to which results could be transmitted before being phoned backed into the States. That official doubt aside, the result of the various US laws had been the creation of a pan-continental booking system run by the Outfit and its Canadian, Caribbean and Mexican associates, one of whom was Harry Ship.
There is a Morgeti sidebar to this, and that is that Seaway lakers would come from cargo ports like Gioia Taura on the Tyrhennian Sea Coast.Gioia Tauro, was becoming the largest container centre in Italy, it was controlled by Momo Piromalli, the man in charge of the Mafia Calabrese region in which sat the village of San Giorgio Morgeto. Piromalli had been cattle herder with a gun before the war when Tony Silvestro was one of the most important Calabrian mobsters in Canada. Tony's power increased until his death 1963 after Rocco Perri disappeared in 1944, and Tony's brother Frank, killed himself in 1949.) Thus, in the 1950's, whatever Piromalli's power in Gioia Taura, Silvestro and his people controlled the Welland Canal.
In Appendix C, I discuss the coming to Montreal of Hal. C Banks in 1949, who had been sent by the mob and by right wing union interests from Californiato take over the Canadian Seaman's union, in order to drive the communists from the labour movement. Since Banks was a close ally of Albert Anastasia's brother Tony, who controlled the docks in New York, there can be little doubt that as plans for the building and opening of the Seaway grew and then came to fruition, the Cold War practice of empowering mobsters to combat anti-corporatist forces was in full swing
In July and August of 1950, 15 members of the Corsican Connection – Francois Spirito and Joseph Orsini among them - were busted in New York by America narcotics investigators. Gaetano Lucchese, an old friend of both Buchalter's and Greco's, was linked to the ring, as was Carlo Gambino, whose eldest son was married to Lucchese's daughter. The Corsicans, among others, were sent to prison, but when they showed up in France again in 1956, they were working for the CIA, fighting the presence of communism in French labour unions, while operating what would become known as the French Connection. The CIA had been created in 1947 by Harry Truman, after electoral gains by the French Communist Party and the rise in popularity of communist parties throughout Europe. The price for institutionalizing the mafia is still being paid today.
Back in Montreal in 1952, Harry Ship appeared before a provincial inquiry, and thus was publicly 'outed' as the King of Gamblers. In April of 1952, Soccio and Mastracchio were finally convicted on the 1950 arrest. (Jimmy Soccio had first got involved with the Cotrone clan while Greco was in jail in the 1930's, and he had been busted for gambling twice in the 1940's; after his last bust in 1946, he had decided to sell heroin from the Corso Pizzeria, which he owned with Diadato Mastracciho. The Canadian archives have an internment camp file on either Jimmy's father or his brother Giuseppe Soccio, as well as for Michele Soccio. But since most of the Quebec Italians interned were actual fascist supporters, and since Quebec didn't start to throw off the chains of fascism until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960's, Quebec remained a deeply right wing jurisdiction, which may be why Carmine Galante had been chosen by Luciano to go into Quebec late in 1953: back in the 1930's, Galante had murdered an anti-fascist American journalist on behalf of Vito Genovese (who was then in self-exile in Mussolini's Italy.) Carmine would have been well-received by Quebec's political classes.)
The Canadian-born Luigi Greco died on December 3 1972, when, like his father Angelo before him, he died of a workplace accident, when Gina's Pizzeria was destroyed in a freak fire. (The pizzeria was named after Gina Greco, Luigi's second daughter by his second wife (Doris Gibson.) According to The Canadian Connection, Louis Greco (Jr.) appears to have kept the Greco name alive in Montreal mob circles, at least until 1974, when a hash deal gone wrong left two dealers dead and 24 year old Louis' name in the mouths of police and the papers as the person who had paid for the hit. The bodies of the two men, Eddy Chiquette and Robert De'courzy, were badly burnt when they were discovered in the remains of a torched car, although both men had died of gunshot wounds. The image seems unsettling in the light of Luigi's painful death from the fires of the pizzeria two years earlier. Even still, it's hard not to remember the two and a half year old Louis Jr. holding his mother's hand when she was murdered.

Revised Index Vol 3

2010-08-02T19:49:00.001-05:00

Abruzzi 16, 22
Duke of 35
Agueci
Albert 52, 157
Vito 52, 157
Albanese
Antonio 30
Francesco 168
Rocco 168
Albertini, Domenique 43
Anastasia, Antonio 29
Anastasia, Albert 28, 31
Avignone, John 164
Bandolo, Giovanni 22
Basile, Joseph 56
Baskett, William 131
Bastianalli, Peter 91
Battaglia, Frank 107, 144
Beaver
Louis 69, 71, 81, 84, 86, 88, 91, 115, 145
Max....... 68, 72, 80, 84, 86, 89, 101, 115, 136, 145
Beaver v the Queen 92
Behan, Sam 103
Belanger, Albert 98
Belanger, Freddie 107
Belcastro, Dominic 112
Bello, Frank 102
Bennett, RB 103, 126
Benning, Kenneth 158
Berlinhgieri, Joseph 166
Berton, Pierre 154
Binder, Sam 155
Bluestein
Frank 157
Max 154
Bonnano, Joe 31
boxing 38, 57, 62, 98, 102, 107, 113, 144, 152
Brantford 135, 147
briscola 147
Bromell, Lorraine 123
Brown Derby 115, 140
Bruzzi, Girolamo 164
Buck, Tim 103, 106, 127, 169
Burdell, Alberta 64
Butcher, George (1943) 131
California 134, 156, 161
Campbell
Howard 111
Lloyd 111
Melville 98, 100, 107, 110, 115
Oscar 98, 100, 107, 110, 115
Roy 111
Campobasso 40, 44, 66
Cannata, Vincenzo 165
Cardis, Raymond 47
Carere 68, 161
Catalano, Rocco 164
Chapman, Joanne 20
Chatham, Ont 131
Chernick
Harvey 58, 123, 138, 141, 157
Victor 58, 61, 90
Chesler, Louis 22
Chicago 49, 69, 139
Chicory Inn 93, 96, 99
Chiovitti
Antonio 67
Carmine 67, 91
Liberato 66
Michael 67
Phyliss (Filomena) 67
Sam 65
CIA 9, 64, 79
Cimino 164
Cincinnati 135, 143
Cipolla
Charles 53, 137, 159
Frank 53, 137
Matteo 44
Cittanova 33, 37, 162, 165, 167
Clancy, Doc 125
Cobourg 57
Cocoliccio, Giuseppe 43
Codispodi, Tony 153
Colangelo, Lorenza (Pasquale Volpe) 128
Commisso
Cosimo 148
Cosimo 147
Joseph 148
Contini
Joe 16, 19
Luigi 16
Rocco 16, 18
Victor 16
Cook, Big Bill 93, 100
Corsican 43, 46, 48, 50, 79
Cosentino
J.A. 113
Joe 112
Joseph 112, 118
Joseph (lawyer) 72
Vincenzo 168
Cossman, Max 54
Costello, Frank 31, 37, 43, 46, 48
Cotrone, Vic 46, 48, 150
counterfeit 53, 57, 89, 134, 137
Craig,Leo......78, 80, 87, 93, 115
Craig, Nelson (RCMP) 16, 19, 26, 55
Crystal Beach 59
Cuff, George (report) 19
Cullinan, John 112, 116
Cuntrera, Pasquale & Liborio 45
Curriri, Sam 68
D'Agostino, Angelo 48, 56, 158
Defalco, Tony 74
Delianova 32, 33, 148, 158
Deluca, Frank 43
DeStafanos 34
Detroit ….... 44, 49, 69, 75, 82, 94, 97, 102, 139
Di Iorio, Nicolo 43
DiLeo
Merino 150
Nick 67
Dini, Albert 82
Don Jail 92, 109, 145
Dorland
Albert 114, 145
Charles 114
Dubro, James 36, 69, 73, 93, 97, 114, 128, 141, 154
Edmonton 150
Edwards, Raymond (Don) 47, 108, 110
100, 108, 120, 139, 143, 151, 156, 159, 162
Eisenhower 7
Elder, James 117, 125
Epter, Vern 57, 112, 114, 117
Facchineri
Anna 166
Antonio 162, 165
Carmela 36, 163
Dominic 30
Dominico 163
Giuseppe 163
Joseph 169
Luigi 162, 167
Michael 163
Michele 168
Rocco 163, 169
Salvatore 169
Vincenzo 163, 166
Farbridge, Karen (mayor) 19
Farley, Louisa 122
Fazari, Joseph 166
Fazzari
Frank 88
Michele 88
Fedele, Antonio 168
Ferraro
Dominic (Dee) 55
Ray 20
Fiegle, Jake 95
Fonte, Angelo 60
Fort Erie 121
Frank, Tony 42
Frankfurt, Germany 78
Galante, Carmine 48, 52, 151, 157
Gallo, Louis 125
Gambino, Carlo 31, 50
Gasbarrini
Angelina 63
Dante... 22, 53, 60, 63, 67, 77, 79, 82, 86, 91, 159
Luigi 63
Gauthier, Leo 109, 123
Genovese
Anthony (Fred Genessee) 62
Frank 62, 67, 113
Mike 61
Vito 46
Gentile, Joseph 166
Geraci
Dominic 162
Dominico 30
Gioia Tauro 18, 49
Giovinazzo
Dominic 167
Joseph 147
Goldhar
Frank 76
Jake 22, 60, 65, 68, 29, 72-74, 78, 80, 91, 113, 115
Joseph 73
Max 22, 115
Milton 69, 72, 74, 86
Mitchell 22
Sam 73
Goldman
Sam 76
Greco
Berthe (wife & mother) 46
Louis Jr. 41, 47, 51
Luigi 39, 42, 45 51, 139, 160
Guelph 15, 17, 19, 27, 35, 38, 53, 55, 60, 74, 82, 86, 88, 90, 112, 138, 156, 160
Guerrisi
Carmela 163, 168
Michelle 36
Gullace
Celestino 163
Francesco 167
Hamilton 20, 32, 35, 51, 59, 61, 66, 68, 71, 74, 81, 93, 96, 99, 102, 108, 114, 118, 120, 130, 135, 138, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 158, 160
heroin 22, 32, 39, 43, 46, 50, 53, 56, 59, 61, 63, 66, 78, 83, 86, 89, 91, 101, 128, 138, 146, 150, 157, 159.
Humphreys, Adrian 49, 60, 138, 152, 154
Ienco, Vincenzo and sons 165
Ignatt, William 55
Isenberg, Jack 58, 90
Kefauver, Senator 48
King, William Lyon Mackenzie 106
Kingston 91
Kingston Pen 56, 66, 72, 77, 80, 101, 110, 134, 144, 146, 149, 159
Kuternoga, Anton 153
Labard, James 135, 143
Lakeview Athletic Club 155
Lansky, Meyer 22, 54
Lauzon, Ulysses 134, 143
Legato, Tony 89
Lepkinski, Dominic 136
Little, George (1947) 134
Lodge 98
Lombardo, Antonio 165
Longarino, Antonio 129
Longo
Dominic (California) 156, 161
Frank 83
Vincenzo 165
Lucchese, Gaetano 50
Luciano, Lucky 31, 40, 46, 48, 51, 128
Luppino, Giacomo 146
MacDonald
Alex .56, 108, 118, 121, 124, 135, 138, 144, 146, 150
Donovon, Kay (Margaret ?) 132
Edwin 56, 131, 133, 137, 146, 149
Margaret (Kitty, Kit Kat) 112, 114, 116, 124, 145, 150
Margaret (Peggy, mother) 124
Mary (Wilson) 146
Mickey 56, 93, 99, 102, 105, 108, 112, 121, 127, 130, 134, 137, 144, 149, 159
MacPhail, Agnes 126
Macri, Antonio 31, 37, 146, 160
Magaddino, Stefano ..18, 51, 54, 75, 145, 157, 160
Magnacco
Paul 66
Vincent 66
Mammoliti, Giuseppe 33, 161
Mancuso, Sam 131
Marcovitch, Aaron (Mtl) 142
Marvasa, Romeo 167
Mastracchio, Diodato ..43, 45, 48
Mattis, Gus 143
McDermott, John 122
Meldrum, Jack 159
Miller, Sam 69, 73
Minelli, Nicholas 134
Mobile, Alabama 135
Monteleone
Dominico 168
Saverio 168
Monteleone, Calabria 129
Montone, Carmine
Bush, Joe 97, 98
Montreal 17, 31, 35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 56, 58, 70, 79, 107, 109, 132, 134, 138, 142, 152, 156, 159
Motruk, Sam 75
Mowat, Farley 7
Musitano,Pasquale 158
Mussolini 25, 27, 51, 105, 128
Mutual Arena 99, 102, 107
Naples 9, 22, 27, 34, 41, 44, 48, 62, 82, 128, 160
Napoli, Dominic 169
Nashville, Tennessee 134
Nasso, Frank 137, 141
Joe 26
Neuner, Bernard 53
New York City 54, 58, 128, 134, 145, 156
Newman, Annie... 44, 52, 69, 74
Niagara... 35, 44, 59, 68, 74, 95, 119
Nicafaro, Peter 129
Nicaso, Antonio 27, 38
Nichol, WF 105, 134
Orangeville 111
Orsini, Joseph 43, 50
Oshawa 56, 81, 137
Ottawa... 36, 103, 110, 114, 129, 134, 137
Palermo, Joseph (1926) 130
Palmieri, Albert 145
Papalia,
Dominic 150
Johnny... 31, 52, 60, 64, 78, 91, 138, 141, 150, 152, 154, 157
Paradise Gardens 23
Pascagoula, Mississippi 134
Pasquarella (Lefty) 59
Pearl, Jack 139
Pearson, Keith (Rocky) 142
Peltier, Elaine 135
Joseph 135
Perri, Rocco. 32, 51, 69, 73, 79, 87, 89, 115, 117, 120, 132, 149, 153, 157, 160
Petrulia, Frank 46
Piromalli, Girolamo (Momo) 32, 36, 49
Plaza 97
Plaza Lodge 107
Polito, Tony 97
Polka Dot Gang 91
Porcupine Club 152
Porcupine gold 143, 160
Port Colborne 59
Port Credit 93, 96, 121
Pronesti, Carmelo 167
Pugliese
James 67
Margaret 67
Max 68
Sam 67
Quarrie, Kate (mayor) 20
Racalmuto 160
Raso
Antonio 168
Francesco (1896) 36
Francesco 2 (1896) 36
Reale, Antonio 164, 166
Red Ryan 102, 105, 126
Regan, Frank (lawyer) 124
Roma, Tony 74
Romano/Sanguino Tony 97
Rossi, Louis 97
Rosso
Dominic 129
Frank 129
Raffael 130
Ruffo, Joseph (Russo?) 67
Rumbolt, Philip 93, 96, 99
Russo
Frank 129
Joseph 129
Salvatore 129
Russo-Trombetta
Elizabeth (Vic Volpe) 128
Salli, Salvatore 53
San Giorgio Morgeto 21, 33, 35, 82, 112, 145, 161, 163,
San Luca, Calabria 28, 32, 37
Sauter, James 82, 100
Sciarroni, Dominic 73
Sgambelluri, Francesco 147
Shapiro, Max 70
Ship, Harry 46
Shorting, James 131, 133
Siderno Group 31, 33, 36, 146
Silvestro
Luigi 97
Mary Verni 55
Sam 82
Silvestro (Welland)
Michael 43
Silvestro-Barbera
Mike 30, 82, 129
Silvestro-Capra
Frank 53, 60, 64, 71, 91, 120, 144
Tony 14, 17, 30, 35, 38, 43, 49, 55, 60, 64, 69, 75, 78, 81, 97,
Silvestro-Raso
Frank 17, 31, 33, 38, 61, 64, 152, 161
Sam 17, 64, 152, 156, 161
Silvestro-Sperraze
Frank (Freddie) 61
Sinardello, Michael (1926) 130
Smokler
Frances 86
Frank 60, 65, 68, 77, 91, 127
Jack 60
Jake 86, 91, 102
Walter 86
Soccio, Giuseppe 43, 48, 50
Sorbara
Mary 38
Sorbara (Labatti)
Sam 26, 44
Sorbara-Chirchiglia
Greg 23
Sorbara-Muscatella
Sam 38
Sorbara-Nasso
Sam 22, 161
Spadacini, Louis 66, 67
Spirito, Francois 43, 50, 56
Spizziri, Louis 67
Starkman, Bessie 52, 74, 93, 95, 157
Stefanyk, Ivan
Brown, John (The Bug) 103, 116, 118, 125, 149
Steinberg, Ernest 155
Stone, Jack 87
Stratford 87, 115
taxi 62, 76, 99, 128, 146, 150
Termini Imerese 160
Todaro, Joseph 59
Torino di Sangro 16, 19
Tripodi, Domenic 32, 33, 37
Tropeano, Antonio 165
Vacarri, Dominic 147
Valachi, Joe 52
Vancouver 150
Violi, Paul 31, 38
Volpe
Albert 39, 128, 131, 146
Eugene 112, 116, 123, 128, 139
Frank 114, 128
John 112, 128, 150
Joseph 128
Loretta 128
Mary (Mrs. John) 128
Patsy 113, 128
Paul 31, 39, 113, 128, 140
Volpe-Colangelo
Frank (Vic's brother) 129
Vic (Eliz. Russo) 128
Vito 128
Wagner, Charles (The Kid) 142
Walton St 62, 73, 113, 130, 138, 140
Warner, Edith & Edward 123
Welland 21, 43, 62, 68, 161
Wernick, Louis 44
Windsor 35
Evelyn (McDermott) 122, 125
Jack 122
Louise 122
James 102, 108, 117, 119, 125
Windsor, Ont 69, 72, 74, 108, 111, 115, 135, 158
Wise, William 155
Wolman, Sam 109
Woodbridge 22, 44
Wurtzman, Sam 71
Yugoslavia 39
Zanelli, Benedetto 131, 133
Zaneth, Frank (RCMP) 60, 69, 72, 74, 89, 115
Zaplacinski, Paul 57
Zeldin, Joe 155
Zito, Rocco 36, 162
Zlodinsky, Matthew 53

Index Apologies

2010-05-23T13:21:00.000-05:00

The index for Vol.3 as published is useless. Sooner than later I will be creating a folded set of corrected pages that can either be downloaded or picked up at my booksellers. My apologies. Stay tuned.

Book Launch Volume 3 May 17

2010-04-27T17:17:00.000-05:00

Legends of the Morgeti 1963, will be launched at the E-bar at the Bookshelf on Monday May 17 at 7-9 PM. It's already on sale at the 'Shelf' and Macondo Books, as are Vols 1 and 2. There will be a reading and book signings.

Volume Three

2010-04-06T11:29:00.000-05:00

Sales at the Bookshelf are already brisk.

All in the Family

2010-03-18T07:32:00.000-05:00

Traditional organized crime is Family crime, but needs to be dismantled using family law, not criminal law, which never works for long.

Vol 3 to Bookshelf in a week

2010-03-07T08:46:00.000-05:00

The new volume focuses on Toronto during the 1930's, 40's, 50's and ends with Tony Silvestro's death in 1963. It became apparent while researching, that next to nothing had been written about a great many Toronto gangsters who were part of Rocco Perri's bootlegging empire, as well as the Silvestro brothers' narcotics circles. While few of those men were Morgeti, they form the context in which the stories in V. 2 take place. In particular, by following criminal careers of the men who had been arrested in the 1949 heroin bust with Tony's future son-in-law, Dante Gasbarrini, a detailed picture emerges of Ontario's Jewish mobsters, and their Anglo and Italian allies, setting the stage for more contemporary investgations.
The book begins with more details of the counterfeiting ring that netted Guelph's Cipolla brothers and ends with Charles Cipolla's narcotics arrest in 1963, on the day of Tony Silvestro's funeral. As with Gasbarrini's 1949 associates, by following the men caught up in other, related counterfeit ring investigations, we come back to the same group of mobsters involved with Perri and the Silvestros, including the two brothers of Mickey MacDonold, Canada's first public enemy number 1.
The book is likewise rooted in the creation of the Mafia Calabrese in the post-war period, in which southern Calabria, the home of the 'ndrangheta, divided itself into three territories governed by three bosses. The best known to Canadian mafia readers was Antonio Macri, whose Siderno Group would dominate the mob landscape after Silvestro's death. Unlike every other Calabrian mob family, the Morgeti were not and are not controlled from Siderno. The Morgeti belong to the Taura Gioia Group.
In an appendix, I also detail the Raso-Albanese/Facchineri feud that plagued the municipalities of San Giorgio Morgeto and Cittanova, from the spring after Silvestro died until the mid 1990's.
A book full of interwoven contexts and gangster lives, V. 3 stretches its narrative legs with a cast of characters as lively as those of any North American jurisdiction.
Again, however, the end view of the volumes remains the case, that the only way to curb organized crime, is through family law, which can take a generational view of any given family's extended involvement with criminals and their associates.

Meyer Lansky would have been proud

2009-12-13T16:54:00.002-05:00

The complete collapse of the global economy was apparently staved off by 350 billion in drug profits that got flushed through the system, when the money markets were turned on end and all the honest people fell out: it's the largest money laundering scam in the history of the world.

Guelph Police Book and Iced

2009-12-10T17:28:00.006-05:00

I assume that the authors of the new Guelph Police book Fingerprints Through Time used the new Canadian organized crime book Iced, as the source of their facts about Frank and Sam Silvestro, rather than information provided by the Guelph Police Force or from genealogical sources, because both books list them as sons of Hamilton's Tony Silvestro. They are the sons of Guelph's Michaelangelo Silvestro as proved in both Vol. 1 and Vol 2.

Blow below the belt to pot-crime sydicates ?

2009-12-10T16:38:00.005-05:00

Will the legal possession of five pot plants - a number freed by Liberal Senators from the new Tory crime legislation - mean the end of grow ops despoiling neighbourhoods and signal an end in sight for marijuana gangsterism ? It certainly could become that over time if people simply started growing their own. It is illegal to drive or hunt stoned. Does that mean you are you allowed to own the plants, but not free to dispose of them by burning them in small batches after harvesting ?

Vol. 3,

2009-12-04T16:43:00.001-05:00

Vol 3 will not be ready for Christmas.
It has taken me quite awhile to understand how to write Volume 3. It will be released in two parts in the new year, successively, part two nearer the spring. I will be reprinting Vols. 1 and 2, unrevised before Christmas. It had been my intention to revise them along with the release of 3, but this is as is. I will have an errata bookmark available, especially as regards their being two Domenic Longos, not one as v. 1 and 2 suggest, the two are Frank Longo's brother in Guelph, and Frank's son, who was Papalia's 1980's Californian advisor mentioned in Adrian Humphrey's The Enforcer (my source). Domenic Longo, the so-called third "old Don of Ontario" alongside Tony Silvestro and Giacomo Luppino is a composite person, possibly created by Humphreys or the police. Frank's brother was interned during WWII, Frank's son advised Papalia not to kill Iannuzzelli for running his own rackets in Niagara Falls. Louis Iannuzzelli lived until a few days after that Domenic Longo died in 1985.

Christmas 2009

2009-10-16T08:05:00.000-05:00

I know I keep promising this book, but my intention now is to have Vol 3 ready for Christmas, and to that end I have begun in earnest to break out of may introductory trap and get into the body of the book.

Volume 3 Update

2009-03-06T09:51:00.002-05:00

After considerable research I have finally begun writing volume three. The biggest problem in the research was the fact that I've bitten off nearly sixty years of mob activity to write about. The most difficult aspect of which, was the overview, the context in which the stories of the Morgeti needed to be placed. I seem to now have a reasonable handle on the events in Calabria (the Raso-Albanese/Facchineri feud revolving around Cittanova and San Giorgio Morgeto) from the mid-1960's on, events which can be placed alongside the creation of the Siderno Group, the Reggio Group and the Tyrrhenian Group, as per Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello's Mafia Calabrese alliance with Antonio Macri, Domenico Tripodi and Girolamo Piromalli.
The Siderno Group's role in Montreal and Toronto has been much discussed by other writers, but without any reference to (or understanding of the existence of) the Morgeti.
An actual publishing date has not yet been determined. I will try to update more often.
Anyone have a photograph of Guelph's Frank Silvestro I can use ?

Dominic Longo 2

2009-01-11T22:20:00.002-05:00

Through various internet searches, and the discovery of the obituary of his sister Katherine Ramella (nee Longo), who died in Welland Ontario on Mar 18 2002, it is now obvious that the transplanted Californian Dominic Longo who was one of the men to whom Johnny Papalia showed respect, was the nephew of Guelph's Domenic Longo, the man interned during the war. The Californian was married to a woman named Lena, they had several children, and they created several scholarship funds in that state, as well as contributed to the Republican Party there. That Dominic is the son of Frank Longo, one of Joe Veroni's pallbearers back in 1922. He was probably born in Welland.

Dominic Longo

2009-01-11T12:09:00.004-05:00

I'm working on Volume 3, and it has come to my attention that the Dominic Longo who moved to Calfornia to open what became the largest Toyota dealership there was 65 when he died in 1985, which means that he was born in 1920. Adrian Humphreys in The Enforcer, his book on Johnny Papalia, identified that Domenic Longo as one of the three old dons of Ontario, and an associate of Tony Silvestro's who was interned as an enemy alien along with Tony and Rocco Perri in the 1940's. They are two different men. The Longo who was interned married a Guelph woman named Vittoria Valeriote in 1923 when Dominic was 30, which means he was born in San Giorgio Morgeto in 1893, which makes him a peer of Silvestros. I have yet to figure out when that Dominic Longo died or where.
According to Humphreys, who is quoting from police wiretaps, California's D. Longo had phone conversations with Papalia regarding a Niagara racketeer named Iannuzzelli a purported friend of Longo's, but who disappeared three days after Toronto police learned of Longo's death. Humphreys says that that Longo was an older man, who had Papalia's respect, since had been a friend of his father's. The fact is that Papalia was born on March 18 1924, and was therefor little more than four years younger than the Californian Longo, which doesn't exclude respect, just not for the reasons given by Humphreys. Whoever the police were wire tapping, the D. Longo who was interned was the older man, Frank Longo's brother, both of whom were in Guelph in 1911-12 when Perri was arrested and tried as Rocco Portatelli for the murder of Micahel Fazzari.
Not sure I can clear this all up before Vol. 3 is done, but sorry for the earlier misinformation. What it does of course, is prove to me that the my continuing genealogical searches and efforts to clarify everything I can, whether it was in someone else's book or not, is the right path. My apologies again.

RIP John Lennon

2008-12-09T20:34:00.000-05:00

28 years ago today.

Gangsters in Russian High Places

2008-11-11T21:03:00.002-05:00

Will democracy falter in Moscow or will popular revolution lead to the creation of the Russian equivalent of the newly emerging 2nd American Republic.

Gangster Capitalism versus Obama

2008-11-06T08:55:00.004-05:00

Obama will be defined by the way in which he deals with these realities:
1.) because corporations cannot sign affidavits in court because they "have no conscience to bind them." 2.) because gangsters have no conscience to bind them, 3.) because Reagan, using faux libertarian pretenses of corporate freedom & expansionist national purposes to ensure corporate hegemony in the Caribbean & in the MidEast in the '80's, created his version of neo-corporatism out of what the GOP salvaged & redesigned after the Nixon-Rebezo debacle: Reagonimics reached it's logical conclusion in Noriega-Ollie North: the Iran-Contra 'drugs for arms scandal' 4.) then power dribbled into the hands of Bush-1, GH being the son of a Nazi banker & grandson of an arms dealer, VP-turned-Pres GH was a former CIA boss, whose operatives included Saddam Hussein & Osama Bin Laden 5.) replaced by Clinton neo-liberal (left corporatism) 6.) replaced by Cheney-Bush-2 who developed a virulent strain of gangster capitalism, which was overwhelmingly overthrown 7.) Nov 4. 2008, when the vast majority of Americans voted against the Bush League via Obama-MCain; leaving the Pres.-Elect on the cusp of 8.)the reorganizing of the global economy by right & left corporatists & communists in an age of already organized global gangster capitalists. The solution for Canada should be found in our history: we need to stand for Cooperatve Commonwealth, an expansion of the British Commonwealth based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: into which an individual's rights to water must be enshrined. As for the right & left corporatist union of Harper-Obama it must be met in parliament & in the next election with an environmental opposition united on water rights. It must be the next election issue. Because if the gangster capitalists get hold of the water there will be no conscience to bind them.

Karzi's brother a major heroin dealer

2008-10-05T07:16:00.003-05:00

I suppose some people might be surprised that the brother of former CIA agent and close ally of George W. Bush turned out to be a heroin dealer. But that's the way gangster capitalism works, it's top down and it's why Canada's Afghanistan policy is based on a lie. Which is not to say that Canada's humanitarian goals in that country are unworthy of our involvement. But until people understand just how insidious the agenda of the right wing is, they will never be able to connect the dots.

Montreal mob boss plead guilty

2008-09-18T10:36:00.001-05:00

Nick Rizzuto, the man who started rising to prominence in the Canadian Sicilian mafia shortly after Guelph's Frank Silvestro was murdered in 1978 has just pleaded guilty as charged in the United States.

Frank Veroni went on to better things

2008-09-14T16:06:00.002-05:00

The son of Domenic Sciarrone (Veroni) and Maria Calarco, Frank Veroni transcended his family's tragic past and became a highly respected doctor and philanthropist in Ohio. According to a 1938 Detroit border crossing record, Dr. Frank Veroni was born in Toronto in 1910. They came to Toronto after his parents had left Ottawa, where a previous child, also named Frank had died at the age of 8 months. Both were named after Domenico's father Francesco. Greatness has dark and light aspects to it, and it appears Dr. Veroni sought the light and found it far from Guelph.

Volume 2: Appendix: The Ratking

2008-09-03T11:15:00.002-05:00

"Something wicked this way comes."
The Leduc oil reserves in Alberta were discovered in 1947. Up until that point, Alberta had essentially been a bankrupt province, bailed out by the federal government, and run by the Social Credit government of Ernest Manning (father of Canadian Reform Party founder Preston Manning.) Social Credit was a Christian political ideology that took hold in the West during the 1930's. Social Credit had been conceived by an Englishman named Major CH Douglas, who had believed that the economic hardships endured by workers under capitalism were rooted in the inefficiencies of capitalism itself, since workers lacked the financial resources needed to buy the products they made.
Social Credit recognized that society plays a significant role in the development and maintenance of the capitalist system, and therefore, the government had a role to play in ensuring that workers were able to take advantage of capitalism as consumers. Social Credit also realized that, as in scientific discoveries, the wealth of nation was built on the work of everyone who came before any given entrepreneur, so that any discovery or invention was actually part of society's wealth.
After 1947 however, and the development of the Leduc oil fields, big oil companies rolled into Alberta, and while the Social Credit Party continued to govern until 1971, it's ideology became strictly neo-liberal corporatism (except to the degree that the party sold the province in exchange for oil-financed social credit designed to keep Alberta tax-free for its citizens.) Alberta had originally been established as a province run by large landowners, many of whom were the sons of British peers, they ran the province like a fiefdom. Alberta has been run that way ever since. It is governed by a one party state and considers itself the champion of democracy, when it is really a wholly-owned subsidiary of American and Canadian oilmen, who continue to pay the mortgage on the province by paying Alberta's tax bills. The old Alberta maxim "Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" is based on the fact that Alberta oil goes to America, it doesn't come to the rest of Canada. And the same people are starting to redirect rivers flowing through Canada into the States so that drinking water can be used to keep lawns green in states that are otherwise deserts.
There is one other curiousity in the big oil story, in the American movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, a fantastical treatment of an actual West-Texas frontier hanging-judge made in the 1970's, the movie ends with Bean's return to the town he had founded decades before. The judge discovers that oilmen and their banking friends have over run the town, so he burns it to the ground. While the town is burning, the camera stops on a sign on one of the oil derricks. It reads Oil was discovered in West Texas on September 11 1923.
Made nearly three decades before Fox Television's shock and awe footage played out of New York City airwaves on September 11 2001, Life and Times... depiction of the roots of the relationship between Texas oilmen and bankers and the narrowness of their world view seems starkly prophetic.
Like almost everyone, I was willing to believe the official versions of what happened on 9/11, but the more I came across internet analysis of discrepancies in the TV coverage and the subsequent spinning of the event, the more the Bush family's Nazi roots made sense of the case against the official version.
Here is not the place to go in depth into 9/11 frauds. (Look them up.) The Internet arguments provide a frame by frame; claim by claim, detail by detail deconstruction of every aspect of the tragedy. (Tragedy in the classical sense of a consequence caused by hubris - pride.) Scientists have begun weighing into the debate. Historians are digging around. And just as in Noah's Flood, it didn't just rain for forty days and forty nights, water erupted from 'the foundations of the deep." There were explosions in the basements of the Trade Towers reported by people who are still living, blasts before the towers were even hit.
When it was all over, the ground-zero craters remained molten for weeks after the event, emitting the chemicals used to create thermite, the explosive used by building demolition crews, one of the only things on the planet that would have burned that long and that hot (a lot hotter than jet fuel.)
The building's security company removed all bomb sniffing dogs from the towers in days before the event, the electrics above the fifty story floors were closed for repairs in the days leading up to 9/11. One of the board members of the Kuwaiti-American financed security firm was a cousin of George W's, Marvin Bush. The architects claim that the building was designed to take the impact of several 747 collisions, and that they don't buy the pancake theory of collapsing floors bringing down the towers - all three that fell that day. Of course, only two of the towers are normally discussed because the third one was never hit by anything: Tower 7 fell by itself: it crimped in the middle like its central steel columns had been cut and then blown and the 40 story building came down like a case-perfect demolition job, not causing the slightest damage to the buildings across the street from it.
Hundreds of security cameras fixed on the buildings surrounding the Pentagon, and which would have shown exactly what happened there, were seized immediately after the explosion and have never been shown, even though, presumably they all would have shown aspects of the plane that Bush and Co. allege hit the brain of the military-industrial complex. The only pieces of plane found were small enough to be carried off the grounds by hand, unlike any other jet crash in the history of jet crashes. The whole event may have been nothing but smoke and mirrors. If you thought the 9/11 commission was anything but a place for spinning a story that the extreme right wanted you to believe then you really want to believe it.
It seems that the hardest thing for people to understand, isn't that such a conspiracy could exist, it's how it could act so extensively, with so many loose threads bound to end up showing, and how did the conspirators think they would get away with it. The 'why' has to do with the Bush family's Nazi past, and the covert mercenaries and secret contractors of Cheney's friends in the Carlysle Group and Blackwater Inc. It's ultimately about power as a narcotic, the addiction of power. And however much they deny it in public, the extreme right knows that there is an environmental catastrophe coming, because the science was never in doubt. Before it comes, they need a state of extended Marshal Law in order to seize control of various resources, especially oil, water and high land that will remain arable. Vast tracts are being bought up all over the world, they call them land banks, and you can bet that if the general populace needs something from them some day, there will be a usury fee attached, if the water or food is available at all. And if this all sounds like a movie, it's because movies work when they speak to things that are actual. History is full of precisely these kinds of coups. They've just never this big, never this elaborate, but then the people responsible have been orchestrating right-wing coups around the globe since before the second world war. It's their business.
The 'how do they think they could get away with it," has to do with television. A handful of highly questionable occurrences were made real by TV: images and commentaries played over and over again created a specific effect: earlier versions that showed different facts than those required to terrorize the public were left out and would have disappeared altogether if not for the internet. The goal was to pass the Patriot Act so that an endless war against terror could be triggered, an enemy so fluid and elusive that the war need never end. Even as the cries of 'freedom and democracy" rang out of Bush's mouth and across the airwaves, the reality is that Americans (and Canadians) are now less free than we were, not because of terrorists, but because of our right wing governments. And all this was brought to you by Television. Remember when the Iraqi war ended ? It was when the Americans killed Iraqi TV. TV has become the mind of a nation. As soon as Saddam stopped broadcasting, Bush-Cheney controlled all the information that came out of Iraq and the war was over except for the long, brutal aftermath. The Right don't care that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's have been killed; those 3000 plus 9/11 deaths justify everything.
Between 9/11 2001 and now, however, a communications revolution took place: up until then the internet had been a "read only" environment, that's why the new internet is called version 2.0, because suddenly it became what it was always intended to become: a place where individuals could write to the rest of the world, as well as read what only those with money and expertise could once post there. You-tube didn't exist back then, the ability to produce news other than that produced by a handful of corporate agencies is creating conscious political evolution in the place of revolution.
Originally created by the American military as a way of preserving local sources of information in the event of a nuclear war, the World Wide Web became the most egalitarian platform in history. Official versions of events in the guise of corporate television produce a controlled set of images that now keep slipping out of the control of those who staged the events, because the internet is full of anarchists who don't shock and awe as easily as do middle class Anywhere North Americans. They have less to lose.
Canada would have been an American territory a long time ago if handfuls of individuals hadn't taken on larger American forces. A handful of Internet anarchists are taking on one of the best financed disinformation cabals ever: hundreds of thousands of people a day are going online to look at their evidence and are comparing it to that of Bush-Cheney. Like the movie Wag the Dog, we have Wag the Fox.
If there were really an army of terrorists out there, they could do more harm to a nation's or a neighbourhood's security by performing small, random acts of continuous terror than by one staged, television event in New York City. Just look at life in America to see how much terror Americans inflict on one another on the streets, in shopping malls, in playgrounds and in one another's homes, and on a daily - even an hourly - hell, minute by minute basis. The War on Terror has to be continuously spun by Bush and Cheney in order to stay in focus, because of all the unrealities involved in their TV productions since they first seized the government in that very Third World-like coup in 2000. (The short version of that coup was that George W. Bush was a) the grandson of a former Nazi collaborator and war profiteer b) was also the son of a former president (who was himself the former head of the secret police - the CIA) and c) had won a disputed election in a state run by d) his brother. The election was also won by e) rigging votes that were then declared legal by f) the chairperson of Bush’s state campaign, (who also happened to be the top state law official there.)
Organized crime isn't just sitting back and learning to emulate the respectable, they are participating. In order to defraud the middle class all you need to do is provide services that allow Anywhere North Americans to remain delusional: the fantasy of suburban living as defined by television is the greatest achievement in mind control the world has ever seen, and organized crime has played a major role by laundering the profits of narcotics misery into shopping malls and subdivisions and restaurants and music clubs and water bottling businesses etc.
Their associates around the world have ensured that there are now upwards of 27 million slaves on the planet, a good portion of them prostitutes, but the majority are resource extraction workers, all quartered in Third World countries, all living and dying to serve the insatiable appetite of the West for cheap goods and thrills. Those millions don't even include all the indentured Third World poor living in corporate work compounds whose lives are spent creating the goods used to sustain the delusions of the West. There is no Social Credit there; they can't afford to buy what they make.
Third World gangsters working for the West run the corporate compounds and the resource extraction slave trades, and the slaves aren’t worth a quarter of what a slave in the Old South was once worth: these are disposable people that get dumped on the streets when their use is depleted. A river of blood runs under our economy and few seem to care, as long as they can continue buying things cheap at Walmart. The poor of the Third World may not have social credit, but the poor of Anywhere North America have been co-opted by store-credit.
Social Credit understood that one of the flaws of capitalism were disenfranchised consumers, so the banks and then department stores created credit cards, with usury fees attached, to keep consumers in enough goods and services to make them almost happy for life: and like Watership Down's fattened farm rabbits, they surround themselves with material comfort and don't understand what the wild rabbits are worried about. And yet, they are worried, that's why they ply themselves with prescription drugs by the tonne, in order to stay sane. It's not so much a conspiracy as it is what the late detective novelist Michael Dibdin described as a "Ratking", a natural phenomenon that occurs among dense populations of rats living in close proximity whose tails become so entwined by the excrement, dirt and blood of their common lives that they become self contained organisms.
Organized crime groups in both the legitimate and black markets are ratkings. America is governed by one of the most powerful ratkings in history.
Here in Canada, we have a Conservative government financed by Alberta's oilogarchy and by Toronto and Montreal bankers. And we have a control freak, corporate apologist for Prime Minister, who has an agenda to privatize the commons and thus help turn everything on the planet into a commodity that can be bought and sold to credit-fed consumers at compounding interest rates. And still the environmental crisis is being down played, because if they actually admit they know that it's going to happen then there will be a conflict the ratking doesn't want: they survive on the unwary. That’s the kind of Social Darwinist dominant predator they are.
The fraud that was 9/11 was the easiest thing in the world to conceive of getting away with: even the working class in Anywhere North America are obsessed with their own security before the rights of those who bleed their lives dry in order to keep them in gadgets and comforts.
If the Internet 2.0 hadn't come along, the house of cards that is the real basis of the evidence for the 9/11 "terrorist attack" would have stood forever. That is why the Ratking is trying to control the Internet; why it’s trying to convince the public the web should be tamed.
In the 1970's movie version of the musical Godspell: Jesus and his disciples are dancing on the roof of one of the then uncompleted Trade Towers, and they are singing about the necessity of removing the plank from your own eye before condemning your brother for having a dust mote in his eye. Judas however, ends the song with "Yes it's all for the best, someone needs to be oppressed." The camera pulls back to reveal the Towers as the music plays out.
When the Towers went down that day in 2001, didn't we all feel the weight of an oppression, a heaviness that couldn't be met just by shopping, nor by hiding ourselves in our credit-induced material cocoons, an oppression that could only be met by listening again and again to the official version of events as the news clips were streamlined and finalized and the account was filled with lies told over and over again, until most Anywhere North Americans now feel certain that they live in a community under siege, and that someone halfway across the world (a 'former' CIA agent at that) with a dust mote in his eye was responsible. Anywhere North Americans have willingly sacrificed the freedoms that men and women died to preserve in the 1940's. (How many Canadian's died fighting a war machine financed by men like Prescott Bush and why does no one care ?)
With the plank in our own eyes, we watched the Trade Towers disintegrating at the speed of free fall and couldn't even see the explosions that simultaneously dropped the buildings in one of the most impressive displays of controlled pyrotechnics ever, shocked and awed, what we saw, was what they told us was there. And it was a lie, and most people still believe the lie, because if they don't believe it, they'd have to wake up and do something about the mote in their own eye, in the depths of their rabbit hole, a mote that can barely be seen because of the rose-coloured glasses we wear that were bought on credit. Maybe that's why Zombie movies are becoming so popular again: the living dead are everywhere. "It's all for the best, someone has to be oppressed."
The ratking is as much a consequence of society as it is of individuals, families or even clans. What we need is truth and reconciliation, what we need is a way out before it’s too late.

Some believe that the government should be run like a business, others disagree. I think there’s a Third Way. The critical issues for commonwealth are central banking, ‘legal tender’, and corporations without legal consciences. The banking, paper money and ‘government as business’ problems can be solved through citizen-credit unions. Ie. All levels of Canadian government would become municipally-based, neighbourhood economic centres run by civil servants/credit union employees. All levels of bureaucracy from the local, to the bioregional, to the provincial to the federal state, would serve in pyramid state responsible to elected Councilors & Legislators. The business of the civil credit union would be the governance of Canada through all Departments & Ministries. The business of the government would be to serve the members/citizens: services would be intergovernmental, membership fees/citizenship dues would replace taxes and bank fees. Watershed bio-regions would be created/modified to serve between local communities and the provinces. The streamlined electoral system would see provincial cabinets consisting of bio-regional-chairs working with a lower ‘municipal’ house consisting of heads of local councils; federal MP’s would be provincial cabinet MPP’s. Provincial leaders would serve in the national cabinet, and the PM would be elected directly.
A Free Enterprise Act would solve the corporate problem: only individuals or limited companies of individuals could do business: each company of individuals and each individual would remain liable for their own actions.

Gambling

2008-08-13T20:06:00.002-05:00

Guelph's mobsters were mostly interested in gambling. Old time gangsters like American bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and like Hamilton's Johnny Papalia wanted to control gambling. When he 'died' in the late 1970's Guelph's Frank Silvestro was the province's dominant loan shark, and since loan sharking is a service industry to gambling, it's not hard to suspect that his local associates and relations were well placed to profit with him.

Joe Nasso and IMICO 1938

2008-07-23T20:01:00.005-05:00

It now seems possible that the reason why Joe Nasso's body was never found after he disappeared in 1938 was that Joe went into the furnaces of the International Malleable Iron Company(IMICO). In recent conversation with me, a long-retired RCMP constable, Nelson Craig, who had been posted to Guelph after Joe's disappearance, remembers that he had been told shortly after arriving that a man whose name he no longer recalls (more than sixty years later) was said to have disappeared into the furnaces before he came. The initial police investigation had gone nowhere because, unlike in the Sam Labbati Sorbara case in 1937, Joe's body had never never found. Assuming that the story the RCMP told Craig was both true and that the man was Joe, then Joe Nasso or at least his body was burned in the furnaces. It doesn't explain why he was murdered. It may however explain why - when I pass the abandoned IMICO lands where they sit on the residential edge of the Ward - they seem desolate, toxic, hovering above the redevelopment back burner where at least one ghost awaits a day of reckoning with the Sangiorgiosi and the Morgeti and with the people of Guelph.

The Counterfeit Sam Sorbara

2008-07-12T17:13:00.003-05:00

In Italo-Canadian newspaper obituaries of Woodbridge developer Sam Sorbara, who died in 2002, reference is made to an unjust sentence that Sam served in 1935 over a stolen $10 bill. Sorbara is quoted as saying that it was because he was an Italian immigrant that he spent so long in jail on the strength of a store clerk's evidence. Taking the story at eulogic face value, and accounting for inflation, Sam Sorbara spent three years in jail for a a crime he barely committed.
According to newspaper death report versions, Sam was the son of Domenico, a miner from San Giorgio Morgeto who got a job working the nickel in Sudbury, Ontario in 1924. The eulogists say that in 1927, 16 year old Sam and his mother Pasqualina and other siblings immigrated to join Domenic. Domenic however, was an alcoholic and soon the family's 'gladness turned to despair'. Two years after their arrival, Domenic wass said to have died and the family survived through the kindness of relatives in Guelph.
The eulogic version of Sam Sorbara's life is something of a fairy-tale; certainly, the crime bears only a passing resemblance to what actually happened in 1935 and earlier.
Domenic Sorbara was born in San Giorgio Morgeto around 1886, and first came to Canada in May of 1912 at the age of 26, when he arrived at one of Albert Dini's boarding houses at 116 York Street, Toronto. (His son Sam had been born the previous year.) His wife, Pasqualina Nasso, was the daughter of Angelo Nasso and Angela Fazzari, also of San Giorgio.
Domenic Sorbara had one brother, (Michael, Toronto) and they had three sisters, all of whom either stayed in Italy or went back, Annunziata, Mrs. M.A Nasso, and Mrs. V. Mammoliti. Domenic and his siblings were cousins of the Michael Sorbara who who had been associated with mobsters in both Welland and Guelph since at least 1910.
In 1912, Domenic Sorbara, Greg's grandfather, traveled to Albert Dini's boarding house at 57 York Street Toronto, where he listed his cousins, Michaelangelo and Salvatore as his contacts.
Domenic Sorbara appears to have gone back to Italy, at least once, possibly twice, to see his family (Sam had one younger sibling born before Sam's mother Pasqualina Nasso arrived in Canada with 14 year old Salvatore and 3 1/2 year old Vincenzo in May of 1925.)

There are two major problems with Sam Sorbara's 2002 eulogy, i) while Domenico Sorbara and Pasqualina Nasso were naturalized in Guelph on September 24 1925 there is no record for a Domenic Sorbara in the index to the Records of Deaths for Ontario from 1924 to 1933, there is however, an obituary for an 81 year old Domenic Sorbara of Sandringham St. Toronto, who died on December 5 1965: he had a son named Sam, and he had three other children with the same names as Sam's siblings, Dr Jim (Vincenzo) Sorbara and Violet - Mrs. Michael Simmonetta, and Angela - Mrs Frank Paul.
The Domenic who died in 1965 also had "a loving wife" identified as the late Pasqualina Nasso. And while there may be no Ontario death record for a Domenic Sorbara between 1924 and 1933, there is one for Pasqualina Nasso of Guelph who caught pneumonia in the last days of 1932 and died on December 31st, so that her death was registered on January 2 1933. The family member who officially identified her body was her son, Sam Sorbara of 91 Morris.
Perhaps Domenic, the alcoholic father, like so many other alcoholics, died out of his family long before he died out of time so that by 2002, when Sam died, the old man was just another ghost in the family machine.
The official version of the legend of Sam Sorbara states that after the so-called "loss of his father," Sam, not yet twenty, dutifully helped his mother look after the family. But since it wasn't Sam's father who had died and left him in charge of the family, but his 42 year-old mother, it is probable that Sam spent the next few years dwelling on his father's character and on the role of his father in his family misfortunes. It was a bad time to be an angry young man, even in a town like Guelph, Ontario: between the Depression, the rise of fascism and the allure of the gangster culture that had established itself so strongly in his neighbourhood and among his relations and associates, it was not improbable for him to end up in trouble with the law.
Sam and his father clearly had a longer, more complicated relationship than the "legend" of Domenic's death by drunkenness would suggest. Sam continued to live at 91 Morris, whether Domenic remained there is unclear. Presumably, after his mother's death the year he had turned 21, Sam moved out, or threw his father out, and continued to look after his brother and sisters, with or without Domenic's help. Possibly, there were periods of sobriety, and maybe even periods when the family lived under one roof.
The more serious misrepresentation of Sam Sorbara's life according to his official legend published in the online News of Italy Press, after his death, was that back in 1935 Sam had been thrown into jail for 24 months - an "unjust confinement" - for embezzling $10 from a store clerk because of a misunderstanding based on his poor English. To me it is highly unlikely that a 14 year old boy didn't learn street English aplenty between 1925 and 1935. His "unjust confinement" however, was actually a stay in the federal penitentiary in Kingston, and his crime of ripping off a store clerk for $10 was in reality tied to a counterfeiting ring involving Hamilton friends.
But to finish with the official legend, when Sam got out, he had learned that 'a man does not judge himself by his misfortunes but by the ways in which he is fortunate.'
Sam was certainly fortunate in those who wrote his obituaries and eulogies.
It wasn't his first time in court either, he had had a previous conviction, although for what crime isn't clear.
There was a case on August 21 of 1933 when a Sam Sorbara Jr. was charged with receiving stolen goods and with breaking and entering but the charges against him were withdrawn, so there was no conviction and if that Sam Jr, really was Sam Jr then he was probably the son of Sam and Rosina Sciarrone. Rosina's husband had been naturalized on April 12 1922, when that Sam was listed a storekeeper in Guelph.
It is possible Greg's grandfather had also been arrested in August of 1933, because that month the Mercury had reported that Domenic Sorbara of 91 Morris Street had been convicted of keeping liquor for sale and had been sentenced to 2 months in jail.
On August 4, a Domenic Sorbara Jr. had been in court for breaking, entering and theft of Mr. Borin's store. It is possible that Mike Sorbara's brother Domenic was still living in Guelph and had a son named Domenic but it could have just been the Mercury doing what it did in the 1934 death coverage of the six year old son of Domenic Silvestro, who was at first identified as Domenic, but later correctly identified as Salvatore/Sam.
So perhaps the Borin theft was done by a "Domenic Jr." who was actually Pasqualina's son Sam. Perhaps not. Unfortunately, the case was adjourned while the crown looked into laying a fourth charge under the Excise Act. The court had also wanted clarification on Domenic J.'s naturalization status, since he had also been charged with possession of firearms, which only naturalized citizens had legally been able to do since the First World War. After the initial police court report, the case falls out of the Merc. There is no naturalization record for a Domenic Jr. or for a Sam or Salvatore Sorbara between 1925 and 1932 listed on the federal archives website.

The $10 story began on Saturday April 20 1935, when a 23 year old Sam Sorbara went to Toronto with Guelphites Domenic Belcastro, 27 and Cosmo Carere, 25, along with two friends of theirs from Hamilton, Domenic Pugliese 33 and Sam Romeo, 24.
The Romeos were cousins of Rocco Perri's. Pugliese, the eldest of the $10 group, along with Tony Papalia, father of Johnny Pops, had been a suspect in the murder of Bessie Starkman back in 1930, although no charges had been laid against either man. Pugliese had married Johnny's sister Antoinetta and his Pugliesi heirs are still one of the most important mob families in Hamilton.
Cosmo Carere was identified as "the former heavy weight champion". His cemetery record says that he was born in 1909. He was the son of Giacomo Carere and Catherine (nee Carere). Cosmo was also the nephew of George Carere, the man whom Chief Randall had accused in 1910 of terrorizing the Italian community in the Ward. Cosmo would soon gain and keep a similar reputation in Guelph until his death in 1991.
Carere had one other previous, adult conviction, involving the placing and leaving of a railway hand-car on a train track, which sounds more like an engineering student stunt, albeit a potentially dangerous one, but Cosmo was sentenced for the crime. Perhaps he and his associates were trying to rob a train. It could be that he learned to box in jail. The case was only mentioned in passing within the context of the 1935 counterfeiting story.
Domenic Belcastro we first met blowing up his and Gaspar Nocitra's stores. This is not the last time we'll meet him either, since he appeared to have been the police's chief suspect in the murder of Sam Labatti two years later.
The story carried in the newspapers that April in 1935 is that phony American ten dollar bills had been showing up in Toronto, Hamilton and Guelph for three weeks prior to the arrest.
The five caught that day were so obviously part of something larger that the case can't be seen to have been about “poor Italians” hated by Anglo authorities except by viewing it through off-coloured glasses. The storeowners were small business owners struggling through the Depression and through the shock waves of the political troubles in Europe no less than were Italians. In fact, they were Jewish merchants.
A lifelong Conservative, Sam Sorbara's sympathies were with a Canadian political party in which large portions of it supported fascism in the 1930's, a reality we'll come back to in the chapter on the 1940's.
The fact that Sam and his friends chose a Jewish section of the city to scam during a period of heightened anti-Semitism doesn't sound as good as the biographers' stories of poor, oppressed Italians so perhaps that's why it was left out.
However, since Sam Sorbara was the youngest of the gang that day, and was clearly troubled, arguably he just happened to find himself in bad company at a bad time of his life. The involvement of Pugliese and Romeo was probably the real reason he went to the penitentiary for two years: Pugliese was just too well connected for the scam to have been anything but mob activity, and once the police had someone that the courts could make an example of, they did.
In any event, it seems that Sorbara and Carere had gone into a store on College Street and then tried to pass off a phony $10 American bill to a hatter named Israel Rotman, who took one look at it and handed it back to Carere. The two left angry and went down the street to a bakery, where they managed to pass it off to a clerk named Annie Geary, who worked for a man named Sam Garfinkle.
Rotman watched the two come out of the store and then went to the bakery himself to see if they had passed the bill. They had. When Rotman told Geary she went outside and saw Sorbara and Carere get into a car and drive off. She got the plate number. They must have seen her behind them as they pulled out, and probably saw Rotman too, because a short while later, down on King, near Dufferin, they appear to have come to the conclusion that they were going to get nabbed, so they tossed a parcel out the window, which was noticed by a man on the street. Kenneth O'Neil picked it up and discovered that it contained money, which he took to a nearby cop.
When the car with the five men in it was finally stopped, Carere was found to have a small roll of tied-up bills in his pockets, as did Pugliese. Miss Geary identified Carere from the police line-up, and the five were charged with conspiracy to defraud the public, with uttering counterfeit $10 US Federal Reserve Bills and with the illegal possession of 85 such notes. The legendary $10 scam that sent the founder of an "old style dynasty" to an "unjust confinement" turns out to be a little more significant. It's ironic that Sam's son would eventually become the Minister of Finance for Ontario. Perhaps the real story wouldn't have sounded so good in 2002 when Greg was one of the most powerful figures in the provincial Liberal Party, but I suspect the lie was much older.
In the Star's May 29 1935 report of their sentencing, the judge said to Sam Romeo "There are strong suspicions you were a party to this conspiracy, but I am giving you the benefit of the doubt." He also recommended that any of the men who had been naturalized as Canadian citizens should lose their citizenships; clearly, that didn't happen. Carere had been born in Guelph, but Sorbara had been born in San Giorgio, as had Belcastro.
Their lawyer claimed that the bills had been made in New York in 1932 and that another man had "asked these fellows to circulate the leftover bills in Canada." Their lawyer also pleaded for leniency for Sorbara, whom he claimed didn't have long to live. Considering that Sam died in 2002 at the age of 91, it would appear the lawyer was stretching the truth. Or perhaps it was the Toronto Star that got it wrong, because the Globe had reported that the lawyer asked the judge to allow Carere to go to the jail hospital because Cosmo had consumption. Like Sorbara, Cosmo lived long and prospered much.
Carere, whose previous adult conviction had led to a sentence in which he had been ordered to stay at home for a year and to go to church every Sunday, received the same sentence as the other three, which was three years in the Kingston Pen.
Upon the announcement of the sentences, the lawyer said he was filing an appeal on behalf of Belcastro and Pugliese. On June 15, Sam and Cosmo left the Don Jail for Kingston. By June 27, Belcastro was allowed bail of $10,500 and was let out on his own recognizanc, but it would have cost him another $10,000 if he had failed to show for his September hearing. Who paid that bail isn't mentioned, but presumably, the man who had given them the counterfeit money had a vested interest in Belcastro's loyalty.

While that appeal was pending, trouble was again brewing for the Cipollas, who were still living in Welland. On July 2 1935, the Star reported "the Italian section of Main St. S. dozed peacefully in the warm sunshine. Suddenly thee shots rang out and three or four little children in the line of fire ran screaming to safety. None was hit."
Neither was Matteo Cipolla, the intended target, who ran after his assailant "when the latter turned and fled." The paper went on to say that "A mysterious feature is that Cipolla himself denies the shooting, though witnesses claim to have seen a Crowland youth fire three shots almost point blank."
Who the Crowland youth was doesn't seem to be known, maybe he was related to or was Sam Nicot, the man who had shot at Matteo four years before. Cipolla kept to the code however and continued to act like nothing had happened. Undoubtedly behind closed doors a lot was said, but if anything was done, it doesn't seem to have made the papers in a form anyone recognized.

In the meantime, on September 17 1935, Pugliese and Belcastro won their appeal at Osgoode Hall, although one of the judges dissented where Pugliese was concerned. In both cases, the panel noted that there were 'suspicious circumstances' but not enough evidence to prove guilt. Their lawyer made allusions to the treatment of naturalized citizens in Europe and urged the judges that 'there should be particular care that in the case of this naturalized citizen (Pugliese) there should be no injustice." Apparently none was done him and he was free to return to Railway Street and Papalia family circles for the waning years of Rocco Perri's world, where he and they helped Stefano Magaddino take over crime in Ontario. Belcastro went back to Guelph and his store, his reputation for a certain kind of reliability intact.
According to Sorbara's biographers, Sam only served 24 months of his three-year sentence. Presumably, Carere was also released in 1937. When they got out, both hit the ground running.
After the war, both men did very well for themselves in the construction business. Sam Sorbara would turn the rural village of Woodbridge into one of the ugliest sprawls of surbanity in Ontario.
He married Grace Chirchiglia, whose sister Mary became the wife of Angelo Ferraro, the son of Luigi Ferraro and Rose Carere (Angelo left Guelph for Toronto in 1952) which is where he married Sam Sorbara's sister-in-law. Rosario Sacco of Guelph was also married to a Chirchiglia.
Sam Sorbara wasn't the first mob associate to take notice of the village of Woodbridge. I don't know who was, but Matteo Cipolla would be arrested there later in the 1930's. Paul Volpe would set up shop there much later still. And so eventually did the Caruana-Cuntrera's and their multi-billion dollar Columbian cocaine business. The family took Meyer Lansky's money-laundering dictates to new heights, and helped secure Woodbridge's reputation as one of the most corrupt towns in the province from the 1980's on.
Paul Volpe was murdered in 1983, and the Caruana- Cuntrera's were thrown into disarray in 1998 (Alfonso Caruana - one of the so-called "Mafia's Rothschilds" and others in the clan were arrested in July of that year as part of an international police action known as Project Omerta - which forms the conclusion of Antonio Nicaso's and Lee Lamothe's Bloodlines.) But until his death in 2002, Woodbridge was Sam Sorbara's town.
Perhaps he was just an old style padrone dispensing benevolence and opportunity. His largesse was certainly legendary, and his name is associated with a great deal of charitable work: he seems to have donated a considerable amount of money to various causes. His 1935 arrest also appears to have been the last time he faced a judge somewhere other than over cocktails. or Tory or charity fundraisers.
As Greg said of his father after his death, and undoubtedly in a much different context, "Those who became his friends, stayed his friends." Sam Sorbara is one of the most legendary or the Morgeti-Sangiorgios , but the crime is nothing like the myth of a poor Italian "unjustly confined" by the Anglo state for stealing ten dollars. His full legacy may well have been part of the reason the RCMP delved so deeply into Greg's business affairs, and could well underlie the actual reasons Greg eventually stepped down for good as Minister of Finance, then again, Greg's Dad's old friends may have had nothing to do with that, the RCMP certainly aren't saying much.
Personally, I wouldn't trust a dollar from moneyed Italians (or Columbians) from Woodbridge any more than Israel Rotman trusted the ten-dollar bills carried into his store by Sam Sorbara and Cosmo Carere in 1935.

To All Those Who Suggested it

2008-05-03T20:21:00.002-05:00

Some suggested I lead a "Mafia Walk" during today's public strolls through Guelph's neighbourhoods. I chose not to do so because I do not consider a meander through the griefs of the Ward, pointing out places where people were killed, to be in keeping with the line I am trying to walk through these stories. Contrary to what The Mercury quoted me as saying, I do not think of myself as a true crime writer. It's why I call the books Legends, to me the dead aren't blood spectacles distanced by time, they are ghosts, trapped in death through the silence of their loved ones, spirits yearning to leave Alice Street and its environs in peace.
However, if you feel the need to go past the houses and down the streets where the people in my books were murdered, grant those living in the Ward the same respect for privacy you would hope to receive from them if the dead were yours to grieve and the neighbourhood was yours to live in with your own loved ones for a time.
Walk lightly.

Respect

2008-04-15T06:43:00.005-05:00

I don't really want to sermonize on respect but...
Humans do not bond where they are strong" like all bonding, biochemical or otherwise, it occurs where there is weakness, co-valency it's called: it's how every molecule on the planet is formed, and how water molecules grow into oceans and carbon grows into trees and humans etc: it's the basis of society: it's why we have people cover our backs, without others we have no strength. It's why I regard myself as an Independent Communitarian, I may reserve the right to determine in what way I'll bond with others, but I can't escape bonding altogether. A society has my respect only to the degree that it respects weakness.
I also happen to be someone who was bullied when I was a child, and as a young teenager. The respect required by bullies is the basis of terrorism.
In the cases of the Sangiorgiosi murdered in Guelph before the Second World War, all their deaths may well have been nothing more than the failure to pay the proper respect to the secret society bosses, and while such societies, rooted as they are in complex socio-political histories, may deserve certain degrees of genuine respect, the respect they most require is based on fear, and so to me is not respect at all, except to the degree that we respect gravity near cliff edges, or respect distances around large predators: but that's more a common sense response to peril than it is respect.
What I respect is human suffering, and the degree to which others honour weakness in any given circumstance: it is weakness that makes us strong. And those who join others to make themselves strong in order to force others to respect them, aren't worthy of my respect, or anyone else's, however much they may individually deserve certain kinds of respect for the ways in which they have suffered and responded to the suffering of others.
In that regard, and until further evidence comes in as to the real reasons they were killed, men like Sam Labatti Sorbara and Joe Nasso are legends in my books because they resisted socialized terror.

Legends Readers Write

2008-04-10T07:29:00.003-05:00

That's great. I'll be there. You son-of-a-bitch. "Maybe he deserved to die, you'd almost have to hope so."
Who the hell asked you for your opinion? I'm looking forward to this. You???
See you on Saturday.

Kenneth Keating
Grandson of Sam and Concetta Sorbara

April 9, 2008 9:44 PM
It is precisely this atmosphere of threat that allowed for the circumstances of Sam's death in the first place. The facts are that because silence was allowed to govern the Sangiorgiosi following his murder, his killers went free, and probably murdered Joe Nasso the following year. Maybe he didn't deserve to die. Maybe he did something awful,that's the nature of silence. The truth doesn't come out. Look to the Sangiorgiosi for answers.
Jerry

Legends Reading

2008-04-09T18:47:00.002-05:00

There will be a reading and a book signing at the Bookshelf this Saturday at 2-5pm.
Volume Two is now in the Guelph libraries, and for sale at Macondo Books as well as the Bookshelf.

Legends of the Morgeti: Vol. 2

2008-04-08T18:15:00.001-05:00

is now available at the Bookshelf in Guelph.

Yet another Delay

2008-04-04T09:32:00.001-05:00

Delay at the printers, the book won't be ready until next week.

Volume Two at the printers

2008-03-27T14:51:00.003-05:00

At long last Volume Two has gone to the printers and should be available in early April. On April 5 I'll be doing a book signing at the Bookshelf in Guelph from 2pm -5pm.
Had the curious experience of having a young man utter threats against me with his mother in front of the Cornerstone Cafe in Guelph today. Funny how he reverted to rapper phraseology to threaten me, he even managed to rhyme once: "if my mother wasn't around/you'd be going down." Didn't like my shoes either. It reminded me of an episode of Iron Chef, when a chef from Italy was competing against the Japanese 'Iron Chef Italian', the Italian gushed so much about his mother, that one of the Japanese judges, a woman, scored him low just for being so enthusiastic about 'mama', a thing not done in Japan. I'm somewhat sentimental when it comes to mothers myself, so I found it charming in a threatening sort of way. Don't know who they were, presumably she was the daughter of someone in Volume One. They are convinced everything in my books are lies. I guess the journalists who wrote the stories I use may have been liars, inventing murders and stabbings and drug deals and busts of various kinds. If they were, I'm sorry.

Volume Two is a much more political book than Volume One since it deals with the between-the-war years, with events during the war and those after, until the spring of 1950. I also place the development of organized crime in those years against the backdrop of Establishment crime, in order to detail and describe the way in which gangster capitalism learned to emulate imperial capitalism.

'ndrangheta news

2008-02-22T11:39:00.001-05:00

Italy tackling rise of 'ndrangheta crime syndicate

Updated Thu. Feb. 21 2008 5:17 PM ET

The Associated Press

ROME -- A parliamentary report on a notorious Italian crime syndicate says it spreads its tentacles like al-Qaida and offers evidence that the group has eclipsed the Sicilian Mafia in power and international reach.

The report is the first comprehensive study by parliament's anti-Mafia commission on the 'ndrangheta, which came into the spotlight last summer with the killing of six Italians outside a pizzeria in Germany.

"Today the 'ndrangheta ... is the most modern organization, the most powerful one as far as cocaine trafficking goes,'' according to the 239-page report released Wednesday.

It is "the one able to obtain and offer deadly weapons of war and destruction.''

According to the report, the 'ndrangheta has reached a "basically exclusive'' control over cocaine imports from Colombia, forcing all other criminal organizations, including Sicily's Cosa Nostra, to deal with it if they want the drug.

The report also says the 'ndrangheta has developed "like al-Qaida, with a similar tentacular structure,'' and without a centralized leadership.

Over the decades, the group, originally based in the southern Calabria region, has spread to central and northern Italy, in much of Europe as well as in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Morocco, Canada, the U.S. and Australia, the report said.

"In the same way as great fast-food-chains, it offers -- all over the world, in places very different from one another -- the identical, recognizable, reliable brand and the same criminal product,'' it said.

What sets the 'ndrangheta apart from other crime syndicates is its structure, which is strictly based on close family ties.

This makes the 'ndrangheta less vulnerable to the risk of turncoats, whose testimony has hurt the Mafia.

Feuds between powerful families have proven deadly.

The past summer's slayings of six Italians in Germany were seen as a family vendetta and the latest chapter of a feud between rival clans.

Last week, the boss of what investigators described as a ferocious 'ndrangheta family, Pasquale Condello, was arrested in the regional capital, Reggio Calabria.

He had been on the run for 20 years and was on the police list of Italy's most dangerous fugitives.

Volume Two

2007-12-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

Work on Volume Two is progressing very well and I'm still hoping it will ready for late January early February, it will all depend on the accessibility of the 1940's internment Camp files for many of the Morgeti. Otherwise the first draft is about 8/10ths done. I'm also thinking that since I have now so much genealogical information regarding the Sangiorgiosi in general (ie quite aside from the mobsters)that I would like to post some of it, but I don't really want it to be on the Morgeti site, because it doesn't seem fair to the non-mobsters, so I'll probably make a link some time in the New Year.

Apologies

2007-11-17T16:32:00.000-05:00

Apologies to everyone showing up here looking for an active website. I promise I'll start posting again soon.
Jerry

Volume Two Launch

2007-09-17T06:57:00.000-05:00

I'm moving towards a launch date for Volume Two 1923-1950, but I've been working a lot lately and may have to publish in January.
One story that I will be dealing with is the death of Hamilton's Frank Silvestro (Sylvestro/Sylvester/Ross.) Most writers on the subject appear to believe that he was killed by his brother, Tony, the newspaper evidence of the day however is that Frank killed himself. More on that in November.

Domenic Sciarrone's family

2007-08-13T06:35:00.000-05:00

Domenico Sciarrone,alias Joe Veroni son of Francesco and Giuseppe Calarco
(another branch of Calarco's, ) was born in Calanna January 05, 1881.

Francesco Sciarrone and Giuseppa Calarco had:
Rosa b.1877
Domenico Francesco b.1881 (alias Joe Veroni m. Maria Calarco)
Maria Cristina b. 1883
Leopoldo b.1886
Leopoldo Rosario b.1887
Giuseppe b.1888 -alias (Domenic Veroni - the family hitman)
Teresa b. 1891 - visited her brother in Guelph in 1914, 22 years old
Salvatore b.1895 -(Shot at in Brantford, Ont. fled to California
the summer of 1922 when his brothers were murdered
died in Calanna in 1953.)

Morgeti and his People

2007-08-13T06:32:00.000-05:00

Morgeti and his People
Nearly four thousand years ago the foot of the boot of Italy (modern Calabria) was inhabited by the Aschenazi, descendants of Gomer of the House of Japeth, an elder son of Noah's. The Aschenazi are said to have come to the southern coasts of Italy in the Age of Abraham (who left Ur in Chaldee for the Promised Land) around 1900 BC.
The House of Aschenazi was known in classical times as the House of the Cimmerians - a people that Herodotus believed were the earliest inhabitants of south Russia. The Aschenazi were driven south across the Caucusus mountains by an unknown northern tribe, but when they swept out of the north near the southern shores of the Caspian Sea they arrived once more in the lands of Mount Ararat, only to find a new enemy in the Assyrian Empire.
Near the place where Noah's Ark grounded, the Cimmerian-Aschenazi-Japeth peoples collided with the Empire. They were turned aside and diverted west towards the eastern shores of the Aegaen Sea. They then came to effect the subsequent history of Asia Minor, as well as life on the Armenian coast of the Mediterranean Sea, some 600 years before the city of King Tros (Troy) was built a few miles to the north, and some 700 years before it was destroyed
by the Dorion Greeks.
Upon arriving in the lands south of what would later become Troy, the Aschenazi chose to settle in Cappadocia, and so warred with the Lydians of King Gyges, whom they killed, and whose name re-entered the biblical narrative as Gog, of Gog and Magog fame.
The victorious Aschenazi were left to govern the lands of modern Armenia, (due east across the Aegaen Sea from Greece). In the centuries that preceded their arrival in Calabria, the Aschenazi extended their reach into other lands. The survivors of the Lydian diaspora they created were fleeing away from them into Europe, where pockets of distinctive Lydian-like peoples survived into the historical period. The 8th century BC Etruscans, who would later settle the ankle and lower shin regions of the Italian 'boot' spoke a Lydian-based language.
Long before the Etruscans, but only shortly before the Morgeti, the Aschenazi reached the lands that would become known as Italy.
The pre-historic (ie. pre-written) appearance of the Morgeti in those same lands, occurred some 1500 years before the birth of Christ. About 316 years before Troy was destroyed the rule of the Aschenazi House of Gomer-Japeth in the toe of the 'boot' was overthrown by the Arkaddian princes Enotrio and his brother Paucezio, who were not only sons of the Pelasgian King Licaone of Syria, but their family was also said to have descended from a different line - than the Aschenazi - of Japhet, son of Noah.
It was an age when the religion of the northern Mediterranean was proto-Olympian. It was a time when the cults of Zeus and Hera were just beginning to wage war on the cults of Cronus and Gaea and the Titans, a time when the Aschenazi worshippers of the ancient primordial powers fought for their lives against wild Pan-loving Syro-Arkaddian invaders.
As told in Greek myths, the Titans were being consigned to eternal incarceration in the molten cores of the smouldering volcanoes of southern Italy. That was around the same time as the Aschenazi were being consigned to death by Enotrio and Paucezio in southern Italy. (By the time of the prophet Jeremiah (585 BC) the Aschenazi* once more lived only near Mount Ararat, in the lands of Cappadocia that they had long ago seized from Gog, and where their failing Olympianism began it's last stand against rising Judaism.)
*Nearly two and a half millennia later, the Aschenazi would endure the fires of European history when Adolf Hitler created his anti-Jewish holocaust.

Not much is known about the Morgezi. The website of the modern town of SGM places Enotrio's entry into Calabria 850 years before the fall of Troy (1185 BC) but that seems to precede the date of the encyclopedia's date for the Aschenazi's arrival so I have cobbled together the following.
In San Giorgio Morgeto, there is evidence in the Jerapotamo grotto of an ancient, prehistorical battle like the one that would have been fought by Enotrio and Paucezio against the Aschenazi.
And it is in San Giorgio Morgeto that the ruins of a Magna Greco city known as Morgetum are still awaiting a major archaeological exploration. That ancient Greek city was built near the Morgezian stronghold - the Jerapotamo Grotto, which connects - by bridge - the road from the Ionian Sea ports in the east and the road to the Gulf of Gioia and the Straits of Messina and Sicily in the west,
as well as connections for the roads to the northeast, where Paucezio's people lived.
Both the non-mob San Giorgiosi clans and the organized Morgeti families are, in their hearts and minds, descended from King Morgezi, son of King Enotrio, son of King Licaone a descendant of Noah's through Japhet (who not only preceded the Trojan Aeneas into Italy by several centuries, but whose line arrived in the Promised Land before it had been promised to Abraham.)
After defeating the Aschenazi Enotrio's brother Paucezio took a portion of his people north into the plains of Pugliesi. Enotrio settled his people and their herds in the plains of San Eufemia. When his expansions were done, Enotrio had absorbed the lands of the indigenous clans of the Campani, Lucani and the Chonj. In time his people assimilated the traditions of the original populations.
Enotrio may have died sometime in the 17th century BC after a 7O year reign. Morgezi inherited the lands of southern modern Calabria that his father's people had first named 'Ausone', after a similar fertile valley in Syria, but by the time that Morgezi became king, the land had became known - not as Ausone - but as Vitale, (Vitali) or Italy, a word derived from the name for the yearling bull that was the totem of the Syro-Pelasgian-Arkaddian royal house.
Morgeti would have begun his own fifty year reign around 1630 BC or so. The land however - in King Morgezi's lifetime - became known, not as Vitale-Italy - but as Morgezia, a tribute from his people to his wisdom and his policies, and a tribute from his enemies because Morgezi had the power to keep his lands.
Morgezi was known more for his oratory than his violence, and he re-united the nomadic clans and the indigenous peoples and turned them into agriculturalists, he gave them a common law and constructed cities and villages.
By the end of his reign his territory included a region of eastern Sicily on which stood a citadel that eventually grew into the city known to the Greeks as Morgantina, a second Hellenic city built on a site important to the Morgezi.
According to the San Giorgio Morgeto town website, when Morgezi died it was said that he had been seen in visions by the commoners, but not by the 'forestieri'. Once he was dead what became of his people, the Morgeti-Vitali ?
According to the town website, the historian Strabo, about a thousand years before Christ, the Iapyges (Jaspygio) landed in Italy from Metaponto, or Messapia on the Illyrian coast of the Adriatic. The Iapyges and the Calabri occupied Apulia and Calabria. The Iapygia were said to have descended from Dedalo and Blessa, uncles of Dauno and Paucezio.
The Jaspygio are known to the Greeks as the people of Iapetus, a son of Uranus, the 'grandfather' of Zeus. Iapetus was the father of the Titans Atlas and Prometheus who, by the decree of Zeus, were sentenced to volcanic confinement for their efforts in their war against Olympus. Iapetus himself was consigned to Tarturus, the volcanic core of Mount Etna in Sicily northwest of Morgantina.
The Jaspygio appear to have displaced an earlier Sicilian speaking people in the area around Crotone. With the coming of Magna Greco, the Messapian speaking peoples were absorbed by their Hellenic cousins.
Morgantina was a Sicilian Greek City that arose to its heights in 300 BC, a city that would - six hundred years later - form the basis for one of the legends of the Guelph Morgezi, namely a tale that begins in 300 AD when a Roman Senator named Valerius led the remnant of the Morgeti who lived in the ruins of the fallen Greek fortress of Morgantina back to Calabria and the Jerapotamo grotto and the torrent that crashes through it on the north western edge of the Aspromonte.
In that thousand years before Christ the Jaspygio had been joined on the relatively empty mainland of the northern peninsula shortly thereafter by Sabines and Latins who had also begun moving inland and south towards the northern wastes of the Aspromonte that protected northern Morgezia. The Jaspygio were heirs of the horse and sea cult of Poseidon and so would have had coastal contact with the Morgezi and Paucezio's people in Pugliesi.
And then the North African city of Carthage was founded in 814 BC as a Phoenician trade centre in the western Mediterranean, 100 miles south across the Sea from Sicily and southern Calabria. The Carthaginians soon began crossing to Sicily, where they impacted on the lives of not only the Siculi-Sicani of the islands, but on the coasts of Jaspygion-Morgezia.
At the same time as the Carthaginians arrived in Sicily in the 800's BC, the Jaspygions began losing their northern territories to the Etruscans, (a people, as noted, whose language was akin to that of the Lydians of Gog who had been displaced by the Aschenazi 1100 years earlier.)
The Etruscans, like the Jaspygions before them, began to press inland. By the 6th century BC the Etruscans controlled Rome and Tuscany, but in 509 BC the Romans aided the Latins in throwing off Etruscan overrule. Thus, at the same time as Magna Greco began to arise in the south, the Latin-Roman alliance arose in the north.
The process was a gradual one, and there is no clear picture of what life was like for Morgezi-Vitalian peasants whose new Greek overseers had no more qualms about slavery than had Morgezi or his father.
The ruins of Morgantina in Sicily are associated with the Morgezi, who appear to have inhabited a citadel on the site of the future city, around the 13th century BC. There is nothing left of Morgezi religion on the site, since the religion of the city appears to have centred around the cult of Persephone, goddess of the harvest, a cult which governed the rest of Magna Greco, alongside the cult of Demeter, goddess of planting. Greco-Morgantinans seem not to have worshipped Demeter.
Persephone, married to Hades, god of the underworld, was also the goddess of the shades of men, and as such was the overseer of their curses. The role of the curse in vendetta would one day cause grief to the San Giorgio Morgeto clans who settled in Guelph: a number of murders and disappearances still haunt the oldest memories here. Persephone was not one of Morgezi's pantheon (although she may have been known to the Vitali as Kore, an early manifestation of the goddess that was probably in vogue when Enotrio first turned his nomads into agriculturalists
Morgantina in Sicily had a temple to Persephone but the city had no temple to Demeter. The city was also home to a shrine to Venus, who, before she too became associated with gardening was an ancient spirit of beauty. Venus only became Demeter-like in her attributes during Roman times.
The House of Ganymede* can also be found in Morgantina. Ganymede was a boy who was stolen from his father, Tros - the king who gave his name to Troy - sometime in the 1200's. (Ganymede's brother Ilus was the father of Priam, and Priam was lord of Troy at the time of its destruction in 1184 BC.) Ganymede as a boy lived a hundred years or so after the death of King Morgezi.
*Some legends say Ganymede was carried off to Crete, where Minos, the high king of the greatest civilization of the age, is said to have ravaged him. Others say Ganymede was beloved of Zeus and was carried off by an eagle to Olympus. In the house of Ganymede in Morgantina, mosaics discovered in the 1950's depict events in the Zeus-eagle version of the story.
In Morgantina an ancient cult of beauty, a harvest cult without a planting cult, and a house built in remembrance of the fact that the sons of Troy were loved by Zeus, take precedence over the Morgezi cults of Pan, Hermes and Artemis. Which suggests that whatever Morgezi there were in Morgantina they survived outside their own milieu.
Certainly the Siculi and Sicani fared poorly under Greek tyrants who governed the various city-states of the island, so there is no reason to assume that the Morgezi fared any better, in Sicily, or in back in Morgetum. By the 3rd and 2nd centuries before Christ, Morgantina was at the apex of its development and is mentioned in the writings of Strabo and Livy.
The Morgezi nonetheless survived nearly 600 years of Greek rule; they kept their own society, and only by marriage and blood were their secrets transmitted, their wild magic and ancient ways clothed in new civilities, while the Greeks gave way to the Romans.
For most of pre-Christian Roman history Morgezia remained in Greek hands because most Roman conflicts were centred on their own neighbours, the Latins, on Etruscan expansionists, and only in the hundred years before Christ did they set about overthrowing the hegemony of Greece in the northern Mediterranean.
At yet, even as Rome consolidated its own imperial power over all of Italy, there were major rebellions against Rome between 90-87 BC, in which the symbol of the Vitali yearling bull was used by the rebels in their fight. To the Vitali rallied the Marsi, the Sannititi and the Lucani against Rome. To the Romans the province of the Morgezia was known as Brutium, because the Brutti had come down from the north through Lucania and founded a federation of peoples that extended from Laos of the Lucania to the Aspromonte. The populist social rebellions of the century before Christ caused the whole of the Peninsula, the whole of the 'boot', to become known as Italy, after Enotrio's totem. The Vitalians had become Italians. Soon after Rome consolidated its position as the capitol of a new empire, its new emperors began instituting the worship of emperors.
Into this mix of pre-Olympian and post-Olympian worship, a legend began to circulate about a Jew who had been born of a miraculous birth and who had died on a cross before rising from the dead. It was a legend from a few hundred miles southwest across the Sea, mere miles from the Syrian home of Morgezi's father.
And, needless to say, during the course of such things, the new religion of Christ overthrew the cult of emperor worship. There is a legend that says that when Jesus was born the great Pan sailed into the harbour of Athens, played a farewell on his pipes and sailed away never to be seen again.
In event, around 300 AD, not only did Valerius the senator lead the Morgezi out of Sicily and back to the ruins of Morgetum, but Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The home of the Morgeti looks westward out over the lowlands to the south western coast of Calabria and the straits where Mount Etna on Sicily can be seen on a clear day. Aspromonte itself is the last mountain in the Apennines and stretches to the Ionian Sea which lies south of Calabria. The Aspromonte is not unlike the Niagara Escarpment that runs just east of Guelph and south around the western end of Lake Ontario through Hamilton where it continues down the shore to Niagara and the falls. But where the escarpment has only an eastern face, the Aspromonte slopes east and west and south.
Valerius established a village beside the ruins of the ancient Hellenic city of Morgetum. The story resonates in Guelph today because it was 'Mike' Valerioti who is said to have led the Morgeti to Guelph Ontario in the early 190O's.
In the first decade of the 300's AD a Roman soldier named Giorgio the son of a Cappadocian father but raised by his widowed mother (in her native home of Lydda, Palestine) rose to the rank of a count and served in the personal guard of the Emperor Diocletian. The emperor ordered a persecution of all Christians in his empire, but Giorgio, being a Christian, refused, and thus, ended up martyred. Diocletian died and the emperor Constantine built a shrine to Giorgio in Lydda, where the veneration for him spread throughout Palestine. Some time between 492 and 496 AD Pope Gelasius I canonized him as San Giorgio.
The village of the Morgeti on the edge of the vanishing ruins of Morgetum became known as San Giorgio in 1075 AD. It was renamed after the Morgezi were spared from the devastation caused to the rest of the region by invaders (Pope Leo III refers to the invaders as Moors, Agareni and Saracens) who had occupied parts of Sicily since 842 AD. The Morgeti villagers believed that San Giorgio had interceded with the Moors on their behalf because San Giorgio had been revered by Muslims. San Giorgio was believed by the Muslims to be the Palestinian companion of Mohammed, known as al-Khadr, and so they named their village San Giorgio and lost the Morgeto name until 1864.
Soon after Giorgio was martyred by Diocletian, the rise of the first Christian Roman Empire began. The region then passed into the hands of the Lombards, until it was taken into the Byzantine Empire in the 600's.
A hundred years or so later the Italian peoples became subject to the Frankish Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who annexed not only Lombardy but much of Europe. Over the next 500 years Italy and thus ancient Morgezia continued to be divided and subdivided between various competing interests.
Morgezia became part of a barony in 1324, and then in 1343, it passed to the Cararciolo's who were given control of the barony by the Anjou Queen Giovanna, when southern Italy was controlled by the French. In 1458 it came under the rule of the di Sorrentino's, then in 1501 it was ruled by the Marquises of the Milan family.
After that, the Spanish took over. The barony went to Consalvo de Cordova who had defeated the French near Seminara. but then the barony was reconquered by the Milan, whose family held onto it until 1806 when Giuseppe Bonaparte seized control of southern Italy and abolished feudalism. While it was still in the Milans' hands back in 1783 the village was rocked by an earthquake so devastating that San Giorgio became a "Sacred Case" and the people were allowed access to Church incomes, properties and even access to the convents.
Until the rule of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the region had been run by Greeks, Slavs, Goths, Swiss, Vandals, Franks, Arabs, North Africans, Normans, Norwegians, and Danes. For our purposes, led it be said however that when Calabria became subject to the Hapsburg Spaniards in the early 1500's something changed forever. That change would take another 400 years and a completely different world to come into being before it brought the Morgeti anything resembling power, but in the early 1500's the seed that would one day turn into Calabrian organized crime was planted by the creation of a secret society.

Enemies Within

2007-07-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

The best book I've read so far on the subject of internment of Italians in Canada during WW2 is a collection of essays edited by Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin and Angelo Principe (U of T Press). They effectively demolish the case put forward by Antonino Mazza in his introduction to Duliani's "The City Without Women", in which Mazza claims that the Canadian State essentially created a crime against humanity by interning Italians during the war (Duliani in the "Women" justifies the action and goes out of his way to show how decently the internees were treated.)
Of the approximately 135,000 Italians in Canada during the War only 600 or so were interned, a few of whom were communists, 21 of whom were gangsters. Apparently the Vice-Consuls of Italy, acting on the behest of Mussolini had been actively promoting Fascism in Canada since about 1934 and found a number of true believers, among them a great many reactionaries in the Catholic Church and not all of whom were locked up in 1940.
Duliani himself worked in an editorial office with the head of the Canadian Fascist Party, Adriene Arcand. Of course, Quebec itself was opposed to the war against Fascism, since it was run by reactionary elements in the Church and the state (Maurice Duplessis's reactionary Unione Nationale Party would run that province through his coaltiion of businessmen and churchmen unitl the Quiet Revolution in the 1960's. Just as Spanish fascist dictator General Franco would run Spain for decades after WW2.)
There is no doubt whatsoever that Italian Fascism was alive and well and being nurtured by not only the Catholic Church and the Italian Vice-Consuls, but by the Toronto-based British-Canadian "Empire Club" and people like Lady Eaton and Guelph's internation opera star Edward Johnson and his son-in-law and future right wing premier of Ontario George Drew.
The internment of less than six hundred Italian fascists was far from the extreme measure described by Mazzo, and the redress campaign that led to an apology from Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to the Italian community at large a few decades ago was entirely a Tory propaganda move and buried the role conservatives and Italians played in the nurturing of fascism.
Farley Mowat, the Canadian author, who fought in the Canadian Infantry during the two years it took to liberate Italy, wrote in his searing indictment of the glorification of war And No Birds Sang, pg 4 "French British and US politicians and industrialist...connived at the growth and spread of fascism, concealing their real admiration for it beneath the public explanation that it was the only trust worthy "bulwark against communism."
In Canada the support for fascism was not only the policy of Quebec and much of the conservative party and right wing "Liberals" linked to the Empire Club, but is the one area of hypocrisy Mulroney should have apologized to Italian-Canadians for, since, besides a few moderate liberals, the only people who publicly opposed fascism in Canada were the communists and CCF.
It was only when Mussolini linked his future to Hitler's in June of 1940 that he fell out of favour with conservatives (except in Quebec, where fascism and anti-Semitism were still the order of the day.)
And as Mowat makes abundantly clear in his book My Father's Son, Canadians as a whole thought the war was a great thing because it put an end to the poverty of the Depression: their interest in fighting fascism was extremely limited, which accounts for some of the bizarre positions taken by then Prime Minister MacKenzie King, whose profoundly astute, pre-polling ability to straddle the centre of Canadian politics and then ride his national coalition of moderate and reactionary elements through thick and thin.
And let's face it, Nazism lost the war, fascism is alive and well to his day, and being used as a bulwark against terrorism. The lies go on.

Calarco Family

2007-07-18T07:22:00.000-05:00

I was passed this geneaology info regarding Domenic Sciaronne's (Joe Veroni's) wife - Maria Calarco's - family.

Her father:
DOMENICO CALARCO was born in Laganadi, and died in Seneca Falls NY.
He married DOMENICA CATALANO; she was born in Calanna,(4 miles from Laganadi) and died in Seneca Falls.
Domenico moved from Laganadi to S.Alessio (2 miles) abt 1888.

Domenico arrived in USA with ship “Burgundia” in 1898 to work on Lattimer mines (PA) with his son Francesco and others people from Laganadi.
In 1902-1908 he arrived in USA with his sons Antonino , Fortunato, Guglielmo and daughter Mary - who was to married Francesco Lazzaro at the time.

After Great Calabrian Earthquake of 1908 arrived his wife Domenica with latest sons

These are children of DOMENICO CALARCO and DOMENICA CATALANO:

1. MARIA "MARY" CALARCO, born 1879, Laganadi; died Aft. 1940, ? Guelph CDN.
She married 1897 in S.Alessio Francesco Lazzaro from Calanna . (They had a son named Domenic- Dommy - Tommy - Tom Veroni of Guelph.) After (unknow date and place) she was married with "your" Domenico Sciarrone from Calanna. They had Rosina Sciarrone, married on Guelph with Salvatore Sorbara from S.Giorgio (Their daughter Mary married Frank Silvestro, nephew of Tony Silvestro, one of "the old dons of Ontario".) and Eugenia “Jennie” Sciarrone, born in Guelph 1914 and died in Orilla 2002; she married Martin Zamin on 1947. THEY ALSO HAD TWO SONS NAMED FRANK, one of whom was born in Ottawa in 1910 and died there a few months later. The other Frank (Veroni) became a doctor and moved to Ohio. They also had a son named Joseph Domenic (Veroni)who became well known in Guelph sports circles. Several other children died in childhood.

2. GIUSEPPE "JOSEPH" CALARCO, born in Laganadi; died in Seneca Falls. He married in Seneca Falls Francesca Corigliano from Laganadi
3. FRANCESCO CALARCO, born in Laganadi; died 1918 in Seneca Falls for Spanish influenza. He married Giulia Caputo
4. FORTUNATO "CHARLES" CALARCO, born in Laganadi; died ? Toronto. Married Anna Colella in Toronto. (Charles was one of the men who sued Rocco Perri after the death of Bessie Starkman.)
5. ANTONINO "ANTHONY" CALARCO, born 1889, S.Alessio; died Aft. 1940, ? Canada. He married on Rochester FLORA CORIGLIANO. She was born in, Laganadi and died 1918 in Seneca Falls for Spanish Influenza. After FLORA, ANTONINO moved to Canada and he married in Toronto ROSA GATTUSO, born in Varapodio (CALABRIA)
6. GUGLIELMO "WILLIAM" CALARCO, born in S.Alessio; died ? Canada
7. ELISABETTA "ELIZABETH" CALARCO, she was born in S.Alessio and she died in Seneca Falls; She married in America RAFFAELE "RALPH" SINICROPI, from S.Alessio.
8. DOMENICO CALARCO, born in, S.Alessio; died Aft. 1940, ? Seneca Falls.

Some reading

2007-07-01T09:11:00.000-05:00

Sorry for not posting in a while, I work as a landscaper, and the season is in full swing, and it's not been easy to want to post, especially given how brutally hot it has been getting. Anyway. Vol. Two is in progress... I have sold over 500 copies of Vol One since February, mostly through the Bookshelf in Guelph, and my own sales.

I have just read Mario Duliani's The City Without Women, his account of being interred during the Second World War in Petawawa Ont. He makes a few references to the gangsters in the camp, of whom Rocco Perri was the most powerful,but by and large he concerns himself with other issues.
There is some controversy over Duliani's book, and over his real or imagined fascist sympathies (not present in the book), but by and large, it is the work of a gifted writer, with a genuine eye for the human condition. I highly recommend it. And it has just been re-released by Mosaic Press. (It was written during the forty months of his internment from 1940 on, and published after the War.)
Volume Two of Legends, will delve into the reasons and the lives of the Morgeti who were interred. Most notable of those was Tony Silvestro, who, after the death/disappearance of Rocco Perri in 1944 emerged as one of the three dons of Ontario.
A number of other Morgeti were also interred, as well as some other non-mob Guelphites.
Duliani's book is a very human look at life in a camp of nothing but men.
The other book I just read was The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, a book that the father of modern organized crime in North America created through a series of interviews. Quite revealing in the breadth and depth of the details, Luciano's rise, along with his partnership with Meyer Lansky, the master money-launderer, coincides with the events of Vol Two of Legends, and help explain the reasons for the rise of Jewish-Sicilian organized crime, and the conflict with heroin dealer Vito Genovese, an early member of the 'outfit" whom Luciano clearly despised.
Since Silvestro became one of the largest heroin dealers in Canada through his alliance with Buffalo's 'outfit' boss Stefano Maggadino, The Last Testament is particularly valuable in providing some of that background.

The Code of the 'ndrangheta, analysed

2007-05-30T07:12:00.000-05:00

The following appears in the book as an appendix.
This is not the Code of San Giorgio Morgeto however, but a Sidernese code found in Toronto. If anyone has a copy of the code of San Giorgio that Italian caribinieri discovered in the home of Giuseppe Mammomliti in Taura Nova in 1963 I'd be happy to receive it. The following is an attempt to understand the references in the code, and to make sense of the allusions. There are certainly strong elements of legend and fable inter-mixed in this. The version I am using here was published in Deadly Silence by Antonio Nicasso and Peter Edwards.

Three Spanish Knights
The story of the three Spanish knights is told in the Code of the Honoured
Society, a handful of which codes have been discovered over the years in
Calabria. This version is one that was discovered in Toronto 1972 in the home
of one of the Siderno Racco family's associates, Francesco Caccomo. As
mentioned earlier, one of the documents found in Calabria is known as the
Code of San Giorgio Morgeti, but a copy is not available.
According to the legend of the brothers as outlined in the Toronto Code, the
three were brothers who feld Spain after killing a nobleman who had
dishonoured their sister. The three self-exiled knights made their way to Italy.
Osso settled in Sicily and is regarded as the founder of the Sicilian Mafia (Cosa
Nostra,) Mastrosso settled in Naples and founded the Neapolitan Camorra, and
Carcagnosso settled in Calabria, where he founded the Picciotteria, precursor to
the Honoured Society, the 'ndrangheta.
The legend says that the three agreed to spend the rest of their lives
defending the weak against the arrogant and the overbearing. According to the
code Carcagnosso organized his Calabrian society in greater detail than did his
brothers and thus he elaborated both an extensive set of rules to govern the
society, and developed a mythopoeic language to describe it, ie. the society is a
flowering garden under a guiding star, governed by a capo bastone, the trunk of
the tree, while its treasurer or contibile represents its bark, its senior members
or camorristi are its branches, the piccioti/soldiers its twigs, and the young men
of honour, the giovanottini d'onore, the flowers.
For several centuries the society of the piccioti functioned in the
desperately poor lands of southern Calabria, operating as the arbiters of civil
society in a province governed by the agents of landlords from elsewhere,
especially after the Spanish Hapsburgs lost the region.
Allegorically Catholic, they declared themselves under the protection of the
archangel Gabriel. The morality of the Honoured Society appears to have more
in common with paganism than with Christianity, for it is culture of vendetta
and curse more rooted in the cult of Persephone as practiced in Morgantina,
than in the cult of Jesus as practised by St. Paul. A picture of the Virgin Mary
is in fact burnt during initiation ceremonies.
The Society's code gives its members 'Humility, Loyalty, Politics, False
Political Power, Paper, the Knife and the Razor'. Their sense of humility is not
spiritual humility but humbleness towards the Society. Likewise 'Loyalty' is to
the Society and not to the community. ' Politics' is the power politics of
Machiavelli, not the ideals of social equality. "False Politics" is the freedom to
lie to everyone but members of the Society.
The 'paper' is for counting money, 'the knife' is for punishment, and the
'razor' for the disfigurement of the Society's enemies. It is interesting to note
65 that the Ellis Island immigration records show that scores of Morgeti had scars
on their faces.
It is clear from the code that for members of the Society, Catholicism's
virtues are ceremonial rather than spiritual, while devotion to the society
governs every action. And so, as the centuries passed the Society kept a low
profile but seems to have taken root to greater and lesser degrees in the
villages, towns and cities of south Calabria. With their particular sense of
ancient rights, the clans of the Morgeti found power in the society.
The society's code ranges from the poetic to the historically explicit, at
least insofar as numerous real people and places are mentioned. For instance
the three Spanish brothers are said to have created their societies on the island
of Faviganna, off the coast of Sicily, where the knights are allegedly buried, "
in an honoured tomb covered with a door of finest white marble". It sounds like
an episode from the Discovery channel or an A&E Ancient Mystery episode.
Mention is also made in the code of the "ancient Duke of Faenza" who
possesses the keys " found at the ends of Spain." Faenza is an Italian city in the
province of Ravenna in the episcopal see of Emilia-Romagna. The Duke is
probably the young man whose people rallied around him when Cesar Borgia,
acting on behalf of his father, Pope Alexander I, was besieging ducal cities as
he moved inland from the Adriatic Coast with his corrupt papal armies. Borgia
forced the cities one by one under Borgia/papal command, breaking the hold of
the Hapsburgs of Spain who still commanded the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.
(Naples and Sicily) The Duke of Faenza stood firm, and so the keys "were not
lost".
The text goes on to say that the keys aren't lost between comrades "because
with a word of humility one forms and with a word of humility one dissolves."
But one key is gold, and the other silver, one to open one to close.
In the early years of Spanish rule in Italy, Amerigo Vespuci sailed from
Seville, and soon after he did, Spain became immersed in pillaged gold and
silver from the New World. There is 'a tower of Gold in Seville', but silver
from the New World also turned Seville into one of the most important cities in
Europe. Not surprisingly North and South America are the source of most of
the Society's gold and silver even today, only now it flows from cocaine sales.
Ravenna, Italy, home of the ancient Duke of Faenza, is where the Medici
fortunes were revived in the 1500's after the Spanish removed the French from
Italy, and destroyed the republic of Florence. Cardinal Giovanni Medici
became Pope Leo X, whom Machiavelli counselled in his book, The Prince.
The Spanish themselves came to be governed by Austrian Hapsburgs after
1516. Three years later the Hapsburg King Charles of Spain was elected
emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and from 1522 on Naples was ruled by a
Spanish viceroy. Which is around the time that the three brothers are said to
have come to Italy.
Whatever the code is talking about, one thing is clear, and that is that Italy,
divided among popes and dukes and kings and emperors and three Spanish
knights, was the spoil of many wars. The people themselves were no more than
cannon fodder for successive conquerors, unless they defended themselves.
By 1707 the Spanish, now themselves governed by the French, lost Naples
to the Austrians. Then they lost Sicily, although they got it back in 1713, after
which it flipped hands for a while until a son of the Spanish king claimed both
66 Sicily and Naples for the French Bourbons in 1738, which was not a happy
time for Italian patriots.
In 1783 southern Calabria was rocked by an earthquake so devastating that
San Giorgio was among the only places still standing. The village became a
"Sacred Case" and the people were allowed access to Church incomes,
properties and even access to the convents.
By Jan. of 1799, southern Italy was being run by the French Republic under
Napoleon Bonaparte. The Spanish court at Palermo Sicily sent a Cardinal to
Calabria to organize resistance and the whole population arose, including
brigands, convicts, soldiers and peasants, who entered Naples after a bloody
battle at the Ponte de Maddalena, after which they drove out the French
republicans and their Italian allies. Carcagnosso's society undoubtedly played a
role in reviving the fortunes of its Neapolitan and Sicilian brethren.
The Bourbon court returned to Naples from Palermo, Sicily in 1802,
although by 1805 they had to flee back to Sicily, after which Joseph Bonaparte
took over Naples, although his rule was contested outside the city by brigands.
The now 'Emperor' Napoleon Bonaparte made Joseph king of Spain after
Joseph was defeated by the British in Calabria.
Joachim Murat who was married to Caroline Bonaparte, was installed as
King of Naples, and filled his administration with Neapolitans, By 1814 he
declared himself separated from Napoleon and when Bonaparte was
incarcerated on Elbe, Murat allied himself to the British. When Napoleon
escaped from Elbe, Murat went back to his old allegiance, but after the
emperor's defeat at Waterloo the Austrians marched into Naples and once more
restored the Bourbons, who again crossed over from Sicily.
And through it all the secret societies fought their own causes for their own
reasons, and carried their various peoples with them.
In the meantime the Bourbon King Ferdinand and his wife had so alienated
the population of Sicily with their extravagance and police spy networks that
the British were able to force Ferdinand to abdicate in favour of his son. The
British also secured the creation of a new constitution for Sicily, although
Ferdinand came back into power in Naples, with the support of the Austrians
who commanded him not to give the Neapolitans a constitutional government.
Murat, making the mistake of thinking he had support in Calabria went
there only to find himself trapped by peasants, court martialed by police and
shot.
Ferdinand Bourbon proclaimed himself King of the Two Sicilys and by
1816 abolished the British-created constitution.
Meanwhile various members of the king's army were secretly being
organized into Carbineri lodges. The carbineri were a freemasonic
revolutionary society committed to forcing the king into granting a
constitutional government. Nobles, army officers, small landlords, government
officials, peasants and priests made up the ranks of the Carbineri.
King Ferdinand created his own secret society to destroy the Carbineri, the
Calderai del Contrappesso, which recruited its members from the brigands and
the lower classes of Naples. He was committed to the destruction of liberalism.
The Carbineri however flourished and spread throughout Italy. Lord Byron
joined their ranks. The Carbineri triggered the Neapolitan revolution of 1820,
which brought constitutional government to Naples and Sicily, although a year
67 later the Austrians marched in and put an end to parliament, leaving Ferdinand
free to hunt down the surviving Carbineri. Which in turn led to a reactionary
pan-European accord that allowed any European power to step in and quell
revolution in any other European nation. Only France and Britain were
uncomfortable with the Austrian-orchestrated accord.
Mastrosso's Camorra in Naples first became publicly known in 1820, when
it rose out of the Neapolitan prisons and struck at Bourbon misrule. The society
was originally a means for released prisoners to protect one another from
patrols, but they quickly turned into street gangs, and then they turned to
smuggling and blackmail, eventually infiltrating the entire social structure of
Naples. The Camorra made their profits from brothels, and from running
protection rackets on Neapolitan merchants.
By 1831 Carbineri revolutions were breaking out all over Italy, but the
Austrian army again suppressed them. The movement, having taking the brunt
of Austrian force, soon dwindled, only to be replaced by the Young Italy
movement of Giuseppe Mazzini. By 1836 independent members of the Young
Italy movement landed in Calabria thinking the population would rise to
support a revolution in support of constitutional reform, but they were captured
and shot instead.
And then came the revolutions of 1848, first in Sicily, then in Naples. The
Camorra became political. After the granting of a constitution in 1860, the
Camorra became all-powerful at elections, but Naples was soon in chaos and
by 1862 repressive measures were being taken to restore order.
At the same time the Carbineri, as constitutional revolutionaries, turned to
assist the Lombards against the Austrians. The Italian unification movement
began to gain momentum, but then parliamentary problems turned into a
reactionary response from the king leading to an end to constitutional
monarchy and the call for the army to return from assisting the Lombards
against Austria.
In Sicily however, the revolutionaries disavowed the court of Naples, and
declared themselves committed to a united Italy. Ferdinand sent an army,
which ravaged the island. With Sicilian freemasonry broken, the society of
Osso was the only game in town. The Bourbon king turned his attention to
Naples, and soon filled the prisons. Future British Prime Minister W.E.
Gladstone, who saw the conditions of the Neapolitan prisons, described them
as "the negation of God erected into a system of government."
The Toronto 'ndrangheta document also has this to say, "...let me know
where the Camorra was discovered.... In 1848 it was discovered. In 1852 they
wished to destroy it. Who was it that wanted to destroy it? Carlo Misiano and
Salvatore Imbalsamo."
Just who those two were I don't know, but the secret societies were, and
remained, defenders of an anti-constitutional movement.
The document also states that "Beautiful humility taught me, with roses and
flowers you covered me; in 1848 a war broke out in Calabria, Sicily, Spain and
the Neapolitan State. The blood lost by the Society was collected in a chalice
of finest silver and brought to Montalbano." The War in Spain in those years
was a civil war fought over succession to the crown.
In 1857, Calabrian peasants, along with local police put down yet another
constitutionalist landing in southern Italy, and only a intervention by Britain
68 saw the release of some of the many political prisoners, who then went into
exile. The Duke of Calabria in those days was the second son of the Bourbon
King, Ferdinand.
In 1859 King Ferdinand died, and his son Francesco II took over, but by
then Garibaldi had begun to wage a long and bitter battle for unification
throughout southern Italy. Garibaldi's small force fought the King's supporters
for nearly two years. By May of 1860, the forces for Italian unity landed in
Sicily. Garibaldi proclaimed the Sardinian king Victor Emmanuel king of all
Italy and a few battles later the Sicilians rallied to his cause. By August he had
landed in Reggio Calabria where he forced Italian unity on the reluctant heirs
of Carcagnossa. Garibaldi was wounded during that conflict.
By September of 1860 Francesco II and his queen sailed out of Naples. The
Sardinian King, Victor Emmanuel, now afraid of Garibaldi's purposes, met him
with a large army two weeks later, but Garibaldi's veteran troops defeated the
king's army. Garibaldi once more proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of all
Italy, which was later confirmed by plebiscite after Garibaldi went home,
seemingly sick of Italian politics.
Following the establishment of the Sardinian supremacy in 1860, more than
two hundred and sixty arrests were made over the next months among the
Calabrian Picciotteria.
The secret societies rooted as they were in their loyalty to the ideologies of
three Spanish Hapsburg knights, remained outside the middle class and their
unification movement, and remained opposed to Sardinian control of southern
Italy. Historians regard the decades that followed the unification of Italy as a
period in which southern Italy paid for its opposition by paying off Sardinian
war debts.
King Victor Emmanuel renamed the village of San Giorgio, San Giorgio
Morgeto in 1864, to reconnect the village with its ancestry. Perhaps it was an
effort to make peace with its citizens. When the exiled Francesco died, his
brother Alphonso, still calling himself the Duke of Calabria, became King in
exile. There is a Bourbon Duke of Calabria alive in 2006. Those first thirty
years of Sardinian occupation of southern Italy were bitter ones.
On March 30 1911 while another Camorra trial was being held in Italy, the
Globe contained an editorial that began:
"For a variety of reasons, mainly political and historical,
Italy has been honeycombed with secret societies. Among
these the most notable have been the Carbonari, the Mafia
and the Camorra. They have to an extent a common origin:
the lawless condition of Italy during the middle ages,
which was perpetuated into modern times by the
subdivision of the country into Petty States - some under
independent rulers, some under the temporal jurisdiction of
the Papacy, some comprised in the Bourbon Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies, and some under Austrian rule through
military subjugation."
The editor goes on to say that unity would not have been accomplished
without the 'adroit and effective use of the societies" by political leaders. The
column continues by suggesting that the Carbineri, which had
69 "degenerated into an association of assassins, was by
Mazzini, who became a member of it, elevated into a
society with 'liberty, equality and humanity' for its motto
and the term 'assassination' was erased from its statutes.
The Carbonari had Northern Italy for its field of operations:
the mafia and Camorra were mostly confined to Naples and
Sicily."
Later the editorial notes that
"The municipal administration of Naples became so
scandalous under their sinister influence and operations
that the constitution of the city was suspended a dozen
years ago by the Italian Government, and a Royal
Commission was appointed to investigate the operation of
the Camorra."
On July 21 The Globe was reporting that the Camorra trial had degenerated
into "a violent scene" in which "in the tumult the lawyers fled the room" and
that "President Bianchi, helpless to maintain order, declared the session
adjourned."
While the Globe focused on the Camorra and Mafia in that editorial, they
were clearly aware of the Picciotteria in others.
The Honoured Society's ceremonial document concludes with the statement
that "A great swearing (occurred) which included the Knight of Russia and
Duke of Abruzzi who legally made of it (the society) their sister." Fiorentino of
Spain was also present, in fact he was in charge of the ceremony for the two
new arrivals into the Society.
The Duke of Abruzzi (1873-1933) was an Italian vice-admiral and explorer,
born Luigi Amadeo di Savoie at Madrid. He was the son of the Spanish King
Amadeus who abdicated his throne soon after Luigi was born and who became
the Duke of Aosta in Italy. Luigi was also a cousin of the Sardinian king of
Italy, Victor Emmanuel III.
Luigi Amadeo had a distinguished naval career, was a world traveller, and
mountaineer, with several climbed firsts to his name. He published a book
called The Climbing of Mount Elias, a peak in Alaska, which he was the first
to climb.
In WWI he commanded the Italian naval forces in the Adriatic. Later, in
the 1920's he carried out an Italian colonization scheme of Somaliland. It
seems significant however that the deed for which he is most remembered was
evacuating 100,000 Yugoslav refugees from Albania in 1916.
Who the Russian Knight might have been who took part in the ceremony
with the Duke of Abruzzi isn't clear, but the relationship between modern
Italian organized crime, Serbian crime groups and Russian mobsters is very
clear to modern mob watchers. Toronto mobster Paul Volpe had a brother
named Albert who ran casinos in Yugoslavia in the mid-1960's and again in the
1970's, and, according to James Dubro in Mob Rule, Albert was attempting to
get one going again in the mid-1980's.
In 2002, a conference held in London, England noted that pressure on Italian
mobsters had led them to form strong financial ties with the Russians, to the
point that Moscow was being called the "New Palermo." Both groups were
using the relationship to strengthen one another.
70 The connection between Italian crime groups, Spanish-speaking drug cartels
from South America and Russian and Serbian gangsters has a ritualistic unity
to it that is best accounted for through the evolving ceremonies of the
'ndrangheta.
While the ritual that brought the Russian Knight and the Duke of Abruzzi to
the society's protection refers to the high mountains of Spain where the family
of Montalbano and Fiorentino lives, the name Montalbano doesn't appear in
lists of Spanish mountains. Montalbano however does happen to be the name
of the ridge near Florence Italy, home of the Florentines. Which would suggest
that the meeting at which the Duke of Abruzzi and the Russian Knight made
the Society its sister may have occurred on the ridge of Montalbano and was
attended by someone representing Florence, the 'Fiorentino'. Curiously,
Veroni/Varone was originally a Florentine clan name.

The Rocco Perri Excerpt: 1912 Murder trial

2007-05-20T10:22:00.000-05:00

1912: The Veronis and Rocco Perri

"Death follows Shooting in Guelph's Little Italy."
Shot in Joe Carere's Alice St. home on Oct. 26, Michael Fazzari, 28 lay dying in hospital for four days. Joe Veroni (known then as Varoni) had been shot by the dying man, as was treated for cheek and arm wounds. Robbery was the alleged motive.
In King of the Mob, James Dubro and Robin Rowland note that after a 1926 arrest
"The Hamilton Police records show no further arrests of
Rocco Perri in that city, but a covering letter from Chief
of Police, William R. Whatley, attached to Perri's record, notes 'information was received that he had been in some serious trouble at Guelph under some other name, and that he had a criminal record prior to that."
The 'other name' was Giuseppe Rocco Portatelli; the serious trouble was the murder of Michael Fazzari. A photo published in the Guelph Mercury April 13 1913 proves it was Perri when compared with a 1926 photo of him.
After Fazzari died the chief crown witness was Fazzari's 49 year-old uncle. Uncle Michele boarded at George Carere's on Alice St. In the census of 1911 he is listed as a "father-in-law" living at Joe and Marie Carere's next door. The evening of the shooting Uncle Michele, Michael, Peppino Rasso, Joe Morabito and Rocco Portatelli walked uptown.
Uncle and nephew came back to the Ward at 7. They went to 'Jockimo" Carere's, where Uncle Michele stayed indoors drinking until 10. Returning home to George Carere's he went out at 11:30 to find his nephew. He found Michael quarreling with Joe Varone at Joseph Carere's, Rocco was with them.
Uncle Michele put his nephew in the next room and tried to intercede but 'Varoni' called the nephew a coward and told him to come out of the room. Michael did, firing as he came. Uncle Michele said six or seven shots were fired; his nephew escaped to the street.
When Uncle Michele got outside Michael was running down Alice and
Rocco was firing at him. Or least that was Uncle Michele’s story at the inquest and trial. Originally, he told the police that he’d been too drunk to remember what had happened. He later denied being drunk, and claimed the reason he’d lied was he was afraid. He was still afraid at the trial, six months later.
Joseph Carere was the first witness. He told the court that he'd known Michael Fazzari since he'd come to Guelph. He’d heard hollering on the street near morning and went out to see what was going on. He met 'Mr. Varoni" between his house and 'Jockimo's'. Varoni had been shot, he helped him over to Mike Valerioti's store to phone an ambulance. He said he’d heard no shooting the night before, although the police found a bullet hole in his door. He claimed the first he'd heard that Fazzari had been shot was when an 'Englishman' told him.
Matthew Adams found Michael groaning on a porch on Morris St., but couldn't understand what Fazzari was saying other than 'his stomach hurt'. Adams took Fazzari’s revolver from him, then went to Joseph Carere's and then to Frank Longo's; neither man seemed to understand what he was saying. No one went to Fazzari's aid.
Adams then met three young Italians and he gave them Fazzari's revolver. The man he gave the gun to was Joseph Morabito, who lived at Longo's. Morabito had heard shots the night before. It was Morabito who went with Adams to look at Fazzari, and together they took him to George Carere's. When they got there, Michael asked for his revolver and Morabito gave it to him. Morabito went for Uncle Michele.
Constable Greenaway, got to the Ward at 5 am, found a trail of blood leading away from Joseph Carere's and a bullet hole in the door from a .32 calibre revolver. Later, he returned to the house, the blood on the street had been cleaned up and the bullet hole filled with plaster.
Greenaway received a pistol from Mrs. Veroni in her house; it was the only gun he found. He couldn’t find Fazzari's. Apparently, Morabito had accompanied Fazzari in the ambulance, and had been given the gun again by the dying man. Morabito took it to Welland, then eventually gave it to Frank Longo who gave it to Charles Dunbar, a lawyer. Dunbar brought it to the trial.
Joe Varoni appeared in court as an innocent shop keeper/baker. He said he had returned to the bakery at about ten in the evening to put coal in the oven, after then started for home. When he reached the street, there were two men he didn't know, one shot him in the mouth. While he fell he saw the men take off down Morris Street; they fired two more shots as they went. He’d last seen Fazzari at his house at about six in the evening. He last seen Portatelli about nine that night, when Rocco was 'feeling pretty happy'.
Varoni says he sent Rocco to bed and swore that Rocco didn't go out again that night. Varoni also swore that he not only had not fired a pistol that night, but had never carried one. He also said that Peppino Rasso had gone to Toronto with him when Joe was trying to decide if he should sell a mine he owned. (The object of the defense was to present the missing Rasso as the shooter, despite the evidence of Uncle Michele.) Rasso, whom Joe had known ‘three or four years’ stayed at Varoni’s when they returned. He says he told Rasso that Michael Fazzari from 'his home town" was in Guelph, but Rasso said the Fazzaris they drank too much, bolstering the argument that Uncle Michele was too drunk to know what had happened.
Tommy Varoni and a baker named Domenic Cuccinatti were Rocco Perri's alibis, since they both claimed that Rocco had slept in their room that night. Cuccinatti originally told the police that Frank Cordi, another Italian boarder of Varoni’s, shared the room with him that night. (Cordi, along with Frank Longo was one of Rocco Perri's most important allies in later years. Cordi was also one of Veroni's 1922 pallbearers.) Cuccinatti claims he first lied about Cordi because the police chief pulled his hair and threatened to hit him. Chief Randall later claimed not to have even been at the house.
Cordi appeared and supported Cuccinatti's story, although he too originally told Greenaway that the only people home were Mrs. Varone, Cuccinatti, and the children.
Mrs. Varoni (Maria Calarco) then took the stand, she insisted Rocco had been drunk and she had got her husband to get him to bed, which is where he stayed. She also claimed that a few days after the death of his nephew Uncle Michelle told her he wanted to apologize to Rocco for the oath he had taken in court.
A 'missionary to the foreigners' named Alexander Salson says he spoke to Fazzari in the hospital but Michael didn't know who’d shot him.
And then a smiling Rocco Portatelli took the stand. Rocco, who’d known Varoni for a 'couple of years' came to Guelph a few days before the shooting. He testified he’d been drunk and woke up in Cordi's bed, and only then learned of the shooting.
Rocco first spoke to the police about the shooting when he and Mike Sorbara were at the post office. He claimed not to have owned a gun in two years.
A 'crack shot' named John Ogg testified that the bullet hole in Joe Carere's door was fired from inside the house, not outside.
In the closing statements, the gist of the Defense was that Uncle Michele was trying to protect Peppino Rasso.
Crown Prosecutor H.C. Gwynn, KC claimed that 'a veritable reign of terror existed in St. Patrick's Ward and that Varoni was the king." He also noted that Fazzari had been shot in the back. He said that while Varoni had claimed he was found on the sidewalk in front of the lane, Joe Carere said he’d found him outside his house. The blood patterns on the ground also contradicted Varoni's claim, since they showed a man had walked westward spitting blood.
The jury returned a not guilty verdict. Rocco was met outside the courtroom by "50 of his fellow countrymen… there was a great jubilation..." Presumably, the Fazzaris were not among the celebrants.

The winter before coming to Guelph Perri had boarded in Toronto
with Bessie Starkman and her husband Harry Tobin. Perri was jailed from early November 1912 until the trial in April 1913. Rocco then returned to Toronto to get Bessie, since he reappeared with her in St. Catherines later in 1913. In 1916 they moved to Hamilton, where they began their rise into legendry.

Desert Inn Stories: the tunnels

2007-05-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

There is an urban legend in Guelph regarding tunnels and the old Desert Inn (originally the Paradise Gardens.) The Inn was built in 1946, right after WWW2 and the takeover of Ontario organized crime by the American Sicilian La Cosa Nostra. Guelph came under the sway of Buffalo's LCN boss Stefano "The Undertaker" Magaddino through the help of Guelph's Calabrian 'ndrangheta boss Tony Sylvestro and the Sicilian-Canadian Cipollas.
The Desert Inn/Paradise Gardens hosted some of the most important American jazz acts, many of whose careers were controlled by New York mobsters. The legendary tunnels were said to have run between the Inn and Imperial Tobacco, and between the Inn and the Woodlawn Cemetery mausoleum.
Magaddino was known as The Undertaker because he owned a funeral parlour in Lewistown, New York, and is credited with having invented the double decker casket as a way of getting rid of unwanted bodies that would never resurface.
The alleged Imperial Tobacco tunnel would have obviously been used for smuggling cigarettes, a completely feasible scenario given how much we now know about the role of Big Tobacco in recent cigarette smuggling activities, while the tunnel into the mausoleum would have allegedly been used to transfer bodies into one of Magaddino's caskets, desecrating the cemetery in the process.
Guelph Hydro crews are rumoured to have come across the tunnels in the mid 1960's; at which time the City Council allegedly ordered them closed. Since Tony Sylvestro died in 1963, the same year that Charles Cipolla went to jail on a heroin trafficking charge (he died in the Kingston Pen in 1969) the shift in the local balance of mob power would have occurred around the same time. Certainly the tunnel-rumours are known around Guelph, I've heard them mentioned in several quarters.
Presumably the recent road work would have turned up evidence of their existence.
The question is, did the tunnels actually exist ? Anyone who has stories or proofs is welcome to contact me privately via my gmail account above, or by commenting on this post.

Tony Silvestro/Sylvestro

2007-05-05T17:14:00.000-05:00

Because Volume Two will have Tony Sylvestro as one of its main characters I am particularly interested in hearing from people who have stories about the man known to other mob writers as the Don Of Guelph. Anyone who would like to contact me via the email address at the top of the blog may do so, in complete confidence and privacy.
Thanks. Jerry

Google Mania - Raso-Albanese and Calabrian Land swindles

2007-04-30T18:55:00.000-05:00

Calabrian Morgeti

The doctor Liliana Frascà, in charge of the CGIL for the comprensorio of Reggio Calabria, has said: “by now from years to Reggio Calabria we make a war with the companies of pulizie or the companies that manage the caterings in the jails or other centers for the respect of the laws and contracts. It has become a wearying war and we do not succeed to make to respect the laws neanche from the contracting out agencies, than a lot often they are Ministries, for which we find ourselves in the event of forehead to greatest difficulties of some companies”.
Also the world of agriculture perceives the symptoms of one aggression from part of the gangs. The presence of mafia elements has been marked in many agricultural and food- markets. Also the land property are object of particular attention from part of the gangs that in existence put one oculata strategy of “mafia expropriation” of some lands. Meant there are the case of the baroness Teresa Cordopatri who has had to fight in order to prevent that to the lands of property of its family from many centuries finissero in the hands of the Mammoliti and the case of mrs. Maria Giuseppina Cordopatri whose lands have been object of the appetites of the Raso-Albanese.
The provincial Federation of Reggio Calabria of the National Confederation of Small Farmers has sended a famous one to the Commission signaling that in the flat one of Tauro Joy and the Locride 'ndrangheta the “protection” has tax to the agriculturists on the cultivations, the harvest and the business patrimony generally. They are often taken place, to the aim to impose the “protection” to riottosi, fires, cuts of the plants, thefts, damagings, ruberie of varied type in the coloniche houses and the campaigns. The regional director of the Confagricoltura, dottor Lacquaniti, has remembered that the insurance agencies do not assure more the reserviors of the oil, the silos and often neanche he blots some to them agricultural. The cultivators come tax to you also in the period of collection of the commodities.
The presence of the mafia families comes perceived talora in the production and the confection of the olive oil. The mafia families have found the way to make to perceive their presence also in the field of the swindles in damage of the AIMA and the European Community.

La Cosa Nostra in Guelph

2007-04-26T08:01:00.000-05:00

During the 1963 US Senate hearings into the American mafia, Joe Valachi named Guelph residents Charles and Frank Cipolla as two made-men of Buffalo's La Cosa Nostra. Charles and Frank were sons of Matteo Cipolla and Rosa Monreale. Wed in Hamilton on January 22 1910, their marriage record lists Matteo’s parents as Calagero Cipolla and Antonia Curta. April 23 1910 Ellis Island records show a Calagero Cipolla, husband of Antonia Curto, traveling from Racalmuto, Sicily to his son Matteo’s home at 280 Terrace St., Buffalo. By the 1911 census, Matteo and Rose lived in Hamilton. Their three sons, Antonio, Charles and Frank all played significant roles in Sicilian mob activities in Ontario. Antonio killed himself blowing a house up in an insurance fraud scheme in 1934 in Port Colborne, although he is buried in Guelph.
In 1969, Charles would die in the Kingston Pen of a brain hemorrhage while serving time for a 1963 sentence for large scale heroin trafficking. Three of Matteo’s children, Charles, Mary and Connie would marry Guelph Ferraros descended from San Giorgiosi.

Silvestro/Durso

2007-04-21T16:46:00.000-05:00

Click on Photo to Enlarge
copyright Archives of Ontario

The Marriage record of Giovanni (John Durso) and Maria Teresa Grazia Silvestro, sister of Rocco Perri allies, Tony and Frank Silvestro, who in turn were cousins of Guelph's Michaelangelo Silvestro - the father of 1970's Guelph mob boss Frank Silvestro.

Maria Silvestro was born in San Giorgio Morgeto, Tony and Frank were born there, Michaelangelo was born there, although his own son Frank was born in Guelph.

An Ellis Island ship manifests notes that Maria and her 17 year old brother and another sister came to Canada with their mother Pasqualina Capra in 1914. Their father, also named Frank was dead, because Pasqualina is listed as being a widow.
They four were on their way to Maria's brother Angelo's home in Sault Saint Marie, which is where Durso marrried Maria the following year.

John Durso's car was pulled from the Welland canal in 1944, the day before his daughter was to be married. His body was never found.

Open Letter to Frank Valeriote (REVISED)

2007-04-16T14:41:00.000-05:00

As the new Liberal Party federal candidate for Guelph, and as a descendent of Michaelangelo Valeriote, the first resident of San Giorgio Morgeto to establish himself in Guelph, I am calling on you to continue your family's legendary relationship with the Morgeti. As you know better than I, it was your ancient ancestor, the Roman Senator Valerius, who led the Morgeti out of the ruins of their Grecian captivity in Sicily and returned them to their homeland in Calabria.
The only Valeriote I've met is Puss and I liked him.

(REVISION) In talking to one of your liberal opponents, John Williams who appears to think highly of you, and upon learning that you left your lucrative criminal law practice fifteen years ago because you couldn't take having to tell anymore lies, I'm beginning to develop the feeling that if you have a sense of calling, you might well be the one to lead the Morgeti in Guelph and Ontario and throughout Canada out of the 'ndrangheta, and to help redeem alot of Italian-Canadians trapped in organized crime. Needless to say I have a proposal on how you might do that.

I also think you can redeem the Liberal party in the process. I'm not one of those who think the Liberals are the only party with links to organized crime, the Conservatives have all kinds of right wing gangsters as friends, just like Giuliano Andreotti did, whose Christian Democrats ruled Italy for decades with policies that were only a few degrees closer to the centre than Mussolini's positions, and whose links to crime groups were extensive.

Right wing Eastern European mafiyas are conservative. And of course labour racketeering gangsters have poisoned the NDP well more than once.

You can ignore me of course, I'm just one vote, but here's my suggestion on how to become the third pillar of the Valeriote legend, it's a proposal which you may have seen since it is the last appendix in my book.

CRIME FAMILY LAW

Under contemporary rights and freedoms the police must adhere to strict 'rules of evidence', and rightly so, which means that the police are incapable of stopping gangster capitalists. Equally, Royal Commissions which are created to investigate narrowly defined aspects of criminal activity like the construction industry et al, may shed light into a field of crime but they do little else than cause the darkness to retreat elsewhere, while creating problems for ongoing police investigations. I tend to agree with St. Paul that, "There is no salvation in law." The law cannot save society from the sins of its members, least of all from gangsters. All the law can do is to define right and wrong and create penalties for doing wrong.

A third way is required, one that makes use of generations of police work to support evidential trails that will allow communities to redeem families from criminal societies. My book traces the history of organized crime in Guelph via specific clans because I want to make the case that we need to create a legal definition of a Criminal Family. The designation would enable us to use the more pro-active tools of Family and Civil law, and combine them with the power of the Criminal Court. Public accessibility to court-administered Crime Family databases could be secured in Public and University Libraries, Archives and Museums and be available in hard copy and online. That way consumers would have the ability to know where there money is going to, and citizens could understand the way their communities have been run.

A Criminal Family designation would combine generations of investigations and convictions with the sweeping power of Royal Commissions to shed light on crime activities in not just Guelph or Canada, but in a system that could extend to Italy itself.

Italy has been begging for action from Canada lawmakers, because gangsters so easily hijack our rights and freedoms, and have turned us into a conduit for the global drug trade. We need a way out of the 'revolutionary/gangster' revenge cycle in which drugs are sold to buy guns to fight battles so that political issues can be addressed in places where democracy has little traction, like Afghanistan. Those vendetta cycles not only lead to the corruption of the global democracy movement but they ensure the vitality of gangster capitalism.

A Crime Family designation would allow communities to seize the assets of such families and put the seized properties and monies into two trusts. One trust would be designed to ensure the survival of future generations of the families as they attempt to redeem themselves from their pasts. The other trust would be used to restore the integrity of local economies while preventing opportunities for other criminal groups to step into vacuums left by dismantled crime families. Some of that second Trust's money must also go into drug rehab programs, both for users, and for the farmers in various parts of the world who make their hard-scrabble livings growing coca for cocaine, opium for heroin/morphine, marijuana etc. If you go to www.Libera.it, you can see some of the extraordinary things they are doing in Italy in this regard. (For any non-Italian speakers who want to go there click on the English flag and you will get the site in translation.)

Appeals processes would be available to ensure that innocent households of any given family can defend their innocence. A moratorium on prosecution, based on the confessions of any elder of any given Crime Family would also be made available. It is not condemnation but redemption we're after here, grace not law. Of course there are always the unrepentant who will not only choose to always live by the sword but to die by it, and for them we cannot pretend that grace or law will have much effect.

In recent years Italy has been redeeming itself from its criminal societies by the use of peniti - penitents who, for one reason or another, confess to the various crimes of their clans. Those confessions tend to be made on the basis of personal survival, but just as often, there is an undercurrent of genuine confession involved, rooted as it so often is in the horrific consequences of vendetta, the shedding of the blood of the innocent and guilty alike, often family members.

A Criminal Family designation is not designed to crush crime families; it is designed to free them, not without consequences, but responsibly, whenever possible.

So that's my challenge, but I only have one vote. So you don't have much to lose.

Hands Over the City

2007-04-14T20:28:00.000-05:00

In 1963 Francesco Rosi, an Italian film maker, released Hands Over the City, starring Rod Steiger speaking Italian. It's the story of municipal corruption in the the land development industry in Naples. In 1992, Rosi released Neapolitan Diary, a documentary about going back to Naples and confronting the issues of Camorra control of that city.
These movies make explicit the role between politics and corruption.
The 1992 film was shot just weeks after two Italian judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borselino were murdered by mafioso in Palermo Sicily. The tone of the Diary is angry and defiant: a kind of we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. It is also part travelogue from the heights of Mount Vesuvius through old Naples, and among the hideous modern Camorra-built suburbs.
It is a superb primer for anyone who wants to understand just how money-laundering, construction, land development and mobs work (for themselves) and don't work (for everyone else.)
Both films and some other features were released on the Criterion Collection as DVD's, get them from your library, get them from your favourite movie rental spot, but get them.

More Fun with Google Translation search "Morgeto 'ndrangheta"

2007-04-13T09:14:00.000-05:00

Raid anti `ndrangheta
Reggio Calabria, 12 estorsori in throttles

of Mario Bonino
REGGIO CALABRIA
Twelve arrests, tens of searchs, seizure of thought material “interesting”. Practically it has been sgominato the mafia clan that, second the enquirers, reigned indisturbato from decades. The main result of an immense operation is this the antiMafia completed yesterday from the police, and that it has had like objective the gang Facchineri di Cittanova (Reggio Calabria). The accusations for the persons ended in jail, deductions affiliated to the clan, go from the crimes of mafia association to the racketeering, to the drug traffic. The raid, to which they have taken part beyond centocinquanta policemen of the police headquarters of Reggio Calabria, has made followed the emission of guard provisions to secure in jail emitted from the Jeep Alberto Cisterna, upon request of the district power of attorney the antiMafia. Between it arrests it to you figure also various young people members of the Facchineri family, Giuseppe, of 29 years, Salvatore Facchineri (to he the provision has been notified in jail) of 25 years. They have been locked up in prison also Franco Carere of 22 years, Small Andrea of 24,(PICCOLO TRANSLATES AS SMALL) Luigi Fazari of 23, Girolamo Fazari of 25, Gaetano Zangrà of 23, Donated Avati of 31, Giuseppe 30 Muscatello of and Domenico Naples of 40 years. It is escaped once again to the capture instead Luigi Facchineri, 32 years, chased from sends you of capture from 11 years, “record” that has made it to insert in the directory of the 30 more dangerous fugitives in Italy. Still searched also Andrea Sorbara, 22 years, of Saint George Morgeto (Rc). According to how much emerged from surveyings, one of the “specialties” of the gang was the racketeering to traders put into effect with a system that succeeded terrorizzare the victims. True and macabro a just rituale one. Before the demand for the money, in fact, it came placed the head stumped of a dog dinanzi to the room of the trader. Such violence to succeed to induce to Hush the all the victims. No denunciation, no story to the enquirers. “Nobody of the victims - the quaestor of Reggio Calabria Franco Malvano has said in the course of a press conference - has never introduced denunciation for the endured intimidazioni, to testimony of the climate of established terror”. Beyond to the racketeerings, the enquirers have contested to inquire also the commerce to you of crews, the cultivation of Indiana hemp, thefts and holdups. The Facchineri gang moreover would have been protagonist, in last the twenty years, to Cittanova, of one of cruenti faide of the mafia history. A war of being able, for the predominion on the comprensorio of the common one of Saint George Morgeto, against the adverse faction of the Shave-Albanian-Gullace, RASO-TRANSLATES AS SHAVE AS IN RAZOR) marked from tens of dead men kills to you, ambushes and woundings in true and just a climate from Make. Appreciation for the operation of the police has been expressed to the quaestor Franco Malvano from the president of the Commission the Antimafia Ottaviano Of the Turk.

Slightly off Topic ? Wayne Greavette

2007-04-11T08:29:00.000-05:00

I went to the Wellington Water Watchers event last night, to help organize a fight against the extraction of billions of litres of irreplaceable water from the local acquifer in rural Puslinch. Every time I think about spring water in Puslinch I think about the 1996 murder of Wayne Greavette.

I'm not saying the stories are related, or that the Morgeti are involved, or that Nestle was involved (It was five years before they bought the Arberfoyle Springs) but both stories are circumstantially linked to the control of a multi-billion dollar water resource.

I urge you to go to the unsolved murder site linked above and think for yourself.
It may have nothing to do with water, but here's a bit of the site contents.

...Wayne and his wife started a small business of their own, in the same field, (the packaging machinery equipment industry ed.) which they ran out of their home in the rural Acton area until June 1996. In June 1996 they moved to a farm, located in Moffat (Puslinch Township), Ontario, just a half hour away from their previous home. From there, they continued to run their business, as well as developing a spring site located next to their property, until the time of Wayne's death in December 1996.

What is known about the murder:

A package addressed to Wayne was delivered to his home via Canada Post. When he opened the package, he was killed by the flashlight bomb contained inside. The package came with a letter, the details of which follow:

The letter was typed with a Smith-Corona typewriter using a daisy wheel font model 10/12 #59543. The daisy wheel used in this typewriter left a distinct anomaly in the letter, a slash after each period.

This anomaly is uncommon, and if you can remember seeing it in any of your correspondence at work or at home, you should contact the police. Please, check out the anomaly carefully.

It was clearly a hit of some kind, for some reason, and he did have enemies, but people have known for a long time how precious water was becoming to the world.

It just makes me think.

Speaking of Legends and Language

2007-04-09T08:36:00.000-05:00

This site goes into some detail about linguistic origins and the interconnectedness of various Italian languages.
These are some of the selections that mention the ancient Morgeti to which my title alludes.

I would indeed distinguish between a Western Italic branch, which gave the Latins the Siculi and the Ausones/Opici, and this "Liguro-Sicanian" which I think included in the South the branch of the Oenotri (Morgeti, Sicani, Choni).

Peoples
The Sicani are reported by ancient authors to have been the first inhabitants of Sicily, at least among the historical ethnic groups. Thucydides and Diodorus say that the Sicani came from Iberia. Dionysus, quoting Hellanicus, says the Elymi (but likely he meant Sicani, since Elymi and Sicani merged later) were the first wave of Italian people to settle in Sicily. The second wave was that of the Siculi, which were Ausones escaping from the Iapygi. The same Dionysus says that among the Oenotri there were Siculi (possibly Sicani) and Morgeti.

Since King Morgezio's father was Enotrio, the Oenotri would refer to him, and the land that Morgezio's father conquered from the Ashkenazi, became known as Ausone during the father's reign, and then known as Morgezia in the son's reign. When the Iapygi invaded, the Siculi/Morgeti would have taken refuge near the site of the later Greek city of Morgantia, near Mount Etna in Sicily.

The Joys of Google Translation

2007-04-08T17:08:00.001-05:00

This is what reading Italian is like for a non Italian speaker/reader
it's from a 2005 article on the arrest of Rocco Facchineri

Rocco Facchineri

REGGIO CALABRIA - Rocco Facchineri, 47 years, searched from 1989 and inserted in the list of the 500 more dangerous fugitives of Italy, have been arrested from the Police officers yesterday evening to Saint George Morgeto, in the reggino: it was participating to a banquet for the communion of the son of a its faithful, Francisco Corradino.

Facchineri carried with himself a stick of chestnut tree with one head of Aquila inlaid on the top, symbol of the commando. To the soldiers it has said: “You have been good. Just E' that pays my debit with the justice”.

Facchineri, thought “capobastone” of an operating clan to Cittanova, was fugitive in 1989 during a permission prize while she was in jail for the seizure of the manufacturer perugino Vittorio Garinei, happened in May 1983 to City of Castle. Against of he there is an execution order pain of 12 years and 4 months of confinement emitted from the Attorney General's Office of Perugia.

“The arrest - the provincial commander of the police officers of Reggio Calabria has explained, Antonio Fiano - has been the fruit of certosino a job of control of the territory”. According to the investigators, the fugitive had a prominent role in the within of the gang and maintained contacts with relatives and affiliates to you operating in Umbria and Goes them of Aosta.

In the period of the furtiveness, Facchineri has been married in church and has had four regularly recognized sons. The wedding was celebrated in the 1992 in one church of Saint George Morgeto. The priest asserted not to know that the spouse was searched.

In the February 2003 Facchineri was successful to escape to a raid of the police officers in Aspromonte. Put in guard barking of a dog, the man had thrown itself in a dirupo making to lose the own traces during one snow storm. In I brood, a hut of wood with the sheet roof hidden between the rovi, came found again of all: a pump gun Maverick 12 magnum, one scanner radio syntonized on the frequency of the police enforcements, giubboto a antibullet, but also spaghetti, schedine of the Superenalotto, specialized witnesses of criminal proceedings and legal reviews.

“To have captured Facchineri while he participated to a baptism - the vice president of the Commission has commented parliamentarian the antiMafia, Angela Naples - he demonstrates as the men of 'ndrangheta not only live the furtiveness in it accustom them territory of belongings, but also with the certainty of impunity”. “The fact that the furtiveness of Facchineri is begun during a permission prize - has added - the necessity evidences see again the norm in matter”.

(22 August 2005)

CSIS on Transnational Crime

2007-04-06T11:09:00.000-05:00

"UN estimates place the cost of this transnational criminal activity in developed states at two per cent of annual gross national product (GNP). The potential transnational crime-related losses for Canada in 1995 would have been about $14.8 billion, based on a GNP of $742 billion. Figures like this led the 1998 G8 summit in the UK to label transnational criminal activity one of the three major challenges facing the world today."
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has this to say about transnational crime.

RCMP Money laundering Prevention Guide

2007-04-03T22:24:00.001-05:00

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have a book too.

Money Laundering - A Preventive Guide

A Preventive Guide for Small Business & Currency Exchanges in Canada

FINTRAC
The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada

One of the RCMP's roles within Canada's Initiative to Combat Money Laundering is to inform the public. To most businesses, money laundering is something that happens somewhere else, involving only criminals. The truth is, it can happen anywhere, anytime, and you may not even be aware that you have been involved.

Money laundering is the process whereby criminals conceal illicit funds by converting them into seemingly legitimate income. While the term refers to the monetary proceeds of all criminal activity it is most often associated with the financial activities of drug traffickers who seek to launder large amounts of cash generated from the sale of narcotics.

The RCMP Proceeds of Crime (POC) program's mandate is to identify, assess, restrain and forfeit illicit and/or unreported wealth accumulated through criminal activities. Most of the POC sections work under an integrated model. These Integrated Proceeds of Crime (IPOC) Units bring together the skills, knowledge, and abilities of a diverse group of experts, including RCMP, provincial and municipal police investigators, lawyers from the Department of Justice, forensic accountants, representatives from Canada Revenue Agency, and customs officers from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

It is important for businesses of every kind to be informed about how they can be used to launder money, and how they can help to make it more difficult for criminals to prosper. We recommend you review this booklet to ensure that you are aware of the problem.

Index

* Foreword
* Why criminals want to "launder" money?
* Money Laundering Methods
* What is "wilful blindness"
* Preventive strategies for small and medium businesses
* Record keeping requirements for small and medium businesses
* Impact of money laundering on society
* If you suspect money laundering
* What we need from you
* Partners in identifying the proceeds of crime
* RCMP Proceeds of Crime Units

Mexico, Narco States and drug law

2007-03-30T13:43:00.000-05:00

On the CBC's The Current today (March 30 2007) they interviewed Charles Bowden, author of Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family. (Bowden lives in Tucson, Arizona.)
After discussing the fact that Mexico is essential a narco state governed by drug cartels supported by the military, he suggests that the only solution to the problem is the legalization of the sale of drugs. Making them illegal has turned a health issue into a legal issue, created an enormous burden on the state, and made the cartels rich.
I tend to agree with him. As I have said before, "there is no salvation in law". The Ontario Temperance Act of the 'nineteen teens' helped turn secret Italian socio-political extortion societies into modern organized crime in this Province. Money sent back to the old country helped the development of Crime in Calabria and Sicily.
Drug laws aid and abet organized crime at home and abroad the ensure the creation of narco states run by people with drug money they use to buy off badly paid police, soldiers etc.
Since America is the largest consumer of illegal drugs in the world, American anti-drug laws are especially useful to international organized crime.
If the drugs were made legal, and the regulated and taxed, the prices would remain considerably lower, the tax money could go directly to the health care system to deal with drug abuse, the budgets of police and national security now being focused on fighting organized drug dealers could be refocused, the connection between arms dealers and drug dealers could be dissolved.
Sure problems would still exist, and murky ethical issues would have to be addressed, but not only is what we're doing not working, the only people it benefits are organized criminals. Without their drug profits, their toxic influence on local economies is considerably lessened, which limits the damage they can do elsewhere. Illegal drugs are expensive because they are illegal, make them legal and the margins shrink, leaving more money for the legiti8mate economy: qualities of life for the non-users in the family will improve, especially if drug abuse becomes a health/mental health issue, in which an open an honest policy of concern is made central to our drug policies.
The only people who benefit by attempts to legislate morality are those without any morality.

Another Reason I Wrote this Book

2007-03-30T07:36:00.000-05:00

Guelph is a small city, not much more than a town surrounded by sprawl.
Rumours abound here about the city's Italians and which of them are mobsters and which aren't. The longer you live here the more rumours you hear, the more facts you hear, the more hypocrisy you sense, the more uneasy the whole mess makes you.
The police know who the gangsters are, and I don't just mean the local police. In fact the local police for the most part consist of recruits who come and go. It's a university town, Guelph's police force is a kind of Police Academy graduate school-practicuum campus. The Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Combined Special Forces Units, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Services all know who the gangsters are, they've been following their activities for decades. However, Canadian rules of evidence are necessarily strict about bringing cases to court.
And so next to nothing happens. Especially now that money-laundering is the favoured activity of Canadian mobsters. The veneer of business respectability and the depth of local rumour and unease over the town's mobsters combine (in this case) to cast a shadow over business in Guelph. Consumers aid and abet criminal organizations in laundering the proceeds of crime every day, making us accessories during the fact.
I already find it hard to buy products from companies that treat third world sweat shop workers like slaves, and so avoid shopping in places like WalMart. Helping businesses that are laundering the proceeds of drug misery money makes me equally uneasy.
The only way I can help is by trying to distinguish rumour from fact, cause from effect, context from events, individuals from communities, secret society members from non-members.
If enough people become aware of the need to do the same, something can be done.
The world is headed for an environmental cataclysm, I don't want to get there and discover that the water and the food and every aspect of our surviving economy is controlled by gangsters, by extortionists and bullies who have friends in high places and friends among the arms dealers and the prostitute makers and the Third world resource sector slave trader, people who will be fully prepared to put me and my loved ones into their 'business plan.'
It's not that gangsters are immoral, it's that they are amoral, they may have a code of behaviour, but whatever it has in common with community standards of what is right and what is wrong arises only from the fact that they have amoral allies in all walks of life.
And what about the ethical Italians whose honesty and integrity is tainted by the existence of gangsters in their midst, in their families. They need community support, we need to give them our business, and stop giving it to their corrupt 'cousins'.
In order to do that we need to separate rumour from fact. And one of those facts is that it is not just Italians who are involved in organized crime.
In a way the truth is the smallest part of the process, the point of the fulcrum on which this whole edifice can be levered off its foundation once there is a community will to do so, a national will to do so.
But this is more like a Truth and Reconciliation process. This is not a witch hunt, this is about redeeming society, not condemning families or individuals.

Jimmy Giovinazzo

2007-03-24T16:34:00.000-05:00

I suspect one of the areas where I'm being accused of authoring false information relates to the execution of Jimmy Giovinazzo. Back in December of 2006, the Mercury carried an article that essentially suggested that Jimmy was executed for a crime he didn't commit, a crime that his relatives have always maintained that Jimmy did not commit. Their case is based on a letter that Jimmy sent to his mother in San Giorgio in which he told his mother that he didn't kill anyone.
The following letter is one that I retrieved from the archives of Ontario, and is in fact the witness statement of John Zezare taken by the police and used at Jimmy's trial. The pencil notes on the letter appear to be those of the crown attorney written during the actual trial. In the statement Zezare explicitly states that he saw Jimmy shoot Alex Dutki.
Click on Photo to Enlarge

The last hand written words refer to Constable Greenaway pointing out where Dutki stood in relation to Giovinazzo.

Archives of Ontario Series RG 22 392
Box 172 Giovinnazo, James

Jimmy (Vincenzo) Giovinazzo was hung on John Zezare's sworn testimony, not on my falsification of history 81 years later.

The book is dedicated to the following

2007-03-22T16:25:00.000-05:00

These volumes are therefor written in honour of:
Antonio Silvestro, who was knifed in Sudbury in 1905;
and to Michael Fazzari, murdered on Alice Street in 1912;
to Big John Barr hit over the head with a rock on Essex Street in 1914,
Giorgio Verni, killed by a shotgun in 1915 behind his Alice St. home,
Tony Legato, who took his own life in 1916 on the morning he was to
have been executed,
Domenico Luberto, a former resident of Guelph who was gunned down in Welland in 1916 a day before he was to have married the daughter of Guelph's Joseph Tedesco,
Domenic Paprone, who was shot on the streets of Hamilton in 1919 after having killed a mobster who was an ally of Guelph mob boss Domencio Sciarroni,
Fortunato (Fred) Tedesco, son of Joseph Tedesco who was murdered outside his parents' house on Morris Street in 1919,
Alex Dutki shot on Alice Street in 1919,
Jimmy Giovinazzo executed for Dutki's murder in 1919,
Nunzio Corruzzo, Domenico Sciarroni's driver who was murdered near Welland in 1921, Tony Leili, a Sicilian who was blood kin to Sciarroni, and who was found in ditch near Oakville in 1922;
Mike Lobosco, who was murdered in the front door of his Welland barbershop in
1922,
Domenic and Joe Sciarroni, both murdered in 1922,
Welland police constable John Trueman, murdered while investigating Joe Sciarroni's murder that same year,
David Ray, who died of bootlegged alcohol poisoning in the Ward in 1928,
Anthony Cipolla who blew himself up in 1934;
Sam Sorbara, who was found in a culvert outside of Guelph in 1938;
Joe Nasso, who disappeared in 1939 and whose body has never been recovered;
Giovanni Durso, who disappeared in 1944,
Angelo Fonti, who was found in a ditch in Etobicoke in 1947;
Frank Silvestro, who killed himself in Hamilton in 1949;
Charles Cipolla, who died of a brain hemorraghe in the Kingston Pen in 1969
and many others, known and unknown.

A comment I wanted to bring forward to the main page

2007-03-20T21:41:00.000-05:00

Anonymous said...

a question that few have regarding your work is why would you want to rehash guelph's mafia history and exploit many family names? why anyone would want to read this book on things that happened over 70 years ago just baffels me. why you would want to publish these things in a book is completly disrespectful to the families of the people mentioned in your book. The things that happened 70 years ago should stay 70 years ago, the families of the people written in the book do not want to have to deal with the backlash that they may face and have to deal with the deaths and shady history of their families. this book is a disgrace to all italians and guelphites, its completely biased, not to mention HALF of your information IS FASLE. if your going to publish a book, get your facts straight. shame on you and mind you own business.

My reply
Certainly you raise important questions. The simple answer to those who question the writing of history is of course that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, and clearly that has been going on in Guelph. I can certainly understand that families are discomfited by the actions of their ancestors, the only problem is, without knowing the history and those who were involved there is no way to know what is going on in the present, or what events mean that occur in the present.
The feud in San Giorgio Morgeto between the Facchineri and the Raso-Albanese has claimed 100 lives since 1963, the Guelph Morgeti cannot be unaffected by that war, and therefore neither can public life in Guelph. At the same time, this is not just about Italians. There are other ethnic organized crime groups at work in Guelph in 2007, and what happened once, is happening again, in different ways, but for similar reasons.
I'm not sure in what way this book is a disgrace to Italians, from my perspective what was dis-graceful - what was without grace - was the way that certain individuals from certain families behaved towards certain other individuals and certain other families. How it is a disgrace to Guelphites in general is even less clear to me. The disgrace to Guelphites is that they refused to tell the story of their community for so long.
If there are FALSE facts in the book I would certainly like to know what they are and what your evidence is that proves your facts to be true.
I actually have no axe to grind in this, I am not anti-Italian, and I refer you to my post on the Italians involved in the Libera project to help assure you that there are a great many Italians who know all too well that historically, their fellow countrymen were their worst enemies.
Mob apologists have a long history of crying racism, and in some case racism is real, but you have to understand as well that the over riding sense of pride that British-Canadians took - and take - was and is in their institutions: they firmly believed that however badly Italians had been treated by the many foreign rulers who had governed them, that British law would actually prove itself superior to all others in its capacity to deliver justice. The fact that Italian Canadians are now among some of the most respected communities in the country proves the case for British-Canadian law. The secret Italian societys may have been semi-legitimate protection rackets defending peasants in the old country and in the old days, but they became nothing but extortion rings victimizing other Italians in Canada.
That's why so many Italian Catholics joined Pope John Paul in his call for an end to the mafias.
As for my sense of shame, I actually have an over-developed sense of shame in general, and felt the only way to avoid it while writing this book was to do as much to honour the dead as I could. This book is dedicated to their memory, to all their memories, the good and the bad, because they were as much victims of their times as they were of their own choices or the choices of others.
As for minding my business, as a citizen of Guelph I listen to the business of Guelph on a daily basis, and since a portion of that business is founded on secrets and murders and lies, then it is the business of all citizens to discover as much of the truth as they can.
So, again, if you have proof that HALF the book is false, what is your evidence, prove it to me and I will print it.

You chose to post your comment anonymously, obviously people would recognize you if you gave your name, and they would be able to develop an opinion of your real purposes for themselves. Presumably that's why you chose to post anonymously. For my part I suspect I know who you are, I even think we've met. I could be wrong.
Your one concern, however, that of a backlash because of the actions of ancestors, I do share. If my book is about nothing else, it is about finding a new way forward. Vendetta and the cycles of revenge breed tragedy for everyone, and that is the lesson of Guelph's mafia history.

A very Interesting Italian Project

2007-03-19T17:29:00.000-05:00

This is quite a fascinating idea. Libera appears to be an Italian anti-mafia organization that is using education, economic development on seized mob lands, and sports as a means of transforming Italy's organized crime culture.

Libera, click on the English flag for English language

Interesting List

2007-03-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

I can't read the site because I don't read Italian but there is an interesting list of feud victims dated by year, that includes some of the Facchineri, who have been fight a war against the Raso-Albanese for control of San Giorgio Morgeto since 1963.

http://leonepaziente.blogspot.com

San Giorgio Morgeto families who settled in Guelph

2007-03-15T21:36:00.000-05:00

According to Pat Bowley's Guelph Historical Society essay The Italian
Community, in St. Patrick's Ward, Guelph Ontario, 1900-1939, a Mrs. C
Ferraro had a photograph of the village of San Giorgio Morgeto, beneath which
she had made a list of the families who had settled in Guelph. It is that list I use
when I speak of the Morgeti and the San Giorgiosi who moved to Guelph.

Those clans according Mrs. C. Ferraro's are:
Addario Agostino Albanese Alviano Ammendolia Belcastro Bellantoni Anselmini Bombino Cacciatore Capra Cassone Collura Cardillo Consiglio DeMaria Fazzari Furfaro Giovinazzo Carere Consentino Ferraro Cotrone Fonte Leo Luccisano Macri Magnoli Longo Lieto Mammoliti Marchesano Morabito Muscatello Raco Maugeri Monteleone Nasso Pezzano Raso Rao Scarfo Seminara Sorbara Sorrenti Silvestro Simonetta Tedesco Varamo Valerioti

The names are not a complete list of San Giorgiosi and Morgeti who came
to Guelph, Tony Legato for instance, who was executed for a murder
committed in 1915 was from San Giorgio, Domenic Luberto is another
instance, as are the Spataros, the Zezares, the Vernis and the Varone's.

Guelph Mercury

2007-03-12T19:10:00.000-05:00

Rocco Perri Excerpt
Current Posts!

This item is now available only by subscribing to the Mercury sorry.At some point I'll post the article.

Bestselling Author

2007-03-12T12:13:00.000-05:00

I've never been a best selling author before, but now I'm just that at the Bookshelf in Guelph, I'm a one store hit. It's lonely at the top, waiting for the next Harry Potter Book to come along and topple me.
Jerry

Current Posts!

Newspaper Editorial - see Previous Post below

2007-03-11T23:08:00.000-05:00

It is hard not to appreciate the enthusiasm with which the editor of the Guelph Mercury embraced my work and the efforts it took me to research the book.

There is however an intensity that I'm not entirely certain I share, or at least, my own intensity is tempered by the tragedies in the stories I recount in the book.

It could be that journalists in Guelph have for years found themselves frustrated by knowing pieces of the truth about this city but not being able to write about it because all the evidence available to them was anecdotal, rumours with substance but no seeming entry point for an 'objective' story. That frustration may have found an outlet in my book, like an opened door through which the journalists now seem prepared to enter.

And in some ways I can't blame them. I began with a similar emotion, but my emotions got subjugated to spiritual necessities even more than socio-political ones the longer I worried my way into the subject.

In the book I constantly make a distinction between the mobsters from San Giorgio Morgeto - whom I call Morgeti, and the non-mobsters, the majority of the villagers and their Guelph descendants, the Sangiorgiosi.

The spiritual necessity that informed the book and resonated into the tone of the work, is that the two distinctions nonetheless constitute one people. What Northrup Frye through Coleridge explained as the necessity for distingiushing that which cannot be divided. These aren't just stories about crime families, they're stories about families, uncles, brothers, cousins. The book is dedicated to the victims of vendetta. It's for their loved ones in some ways.

But decide for yourself what you think of the editorial, it follows this post below, and the online original can be accessed through a direct link by clicking on that post's title.

Jerry

Current Posts!

2007-03-11T22:50:00.000-05:00

Editorial in the Guelph Mercury

Editorials

We need to remember all the history

(Mar 10, 2007)

Guelph's Jerry Prager may well agitate some local residents with a book he's just released. Good on him.

Prager has dared to revisit in minute detail some of the most sordid tales and times in Guelph's past in his Legends of the Morgeti, Volume One 1900-1922. It's a book described by its publishing house as one that confronts some "uncomfortable" truths about Guelph and delivers on that promise.

Prager's book was officially released this week with a public reading at a downtown Guelph church. The affair sparked animated discussion. Most who attended are connected to family trees that have maintained through oral tradition some of the tales Prager dissects in the book. So vigorous was the discussion about this infamous aspect of Guelph's past Prager subsequently established a blog to continue the forum. It's at morgeti.blogspot.com.

An excerpt of Prager's book appears in today's newspaper as the cover of our Here section. We hope to contribute to the review of Guelph's yesteryear that the book is inspiring.

Many -- but not all -- Guelph residents are aware of the community's mob town reputation. This effort explores the validity and the roots of that reputation. It revives knifings, shootings and other crimes that some would wish left as closed cases. But doing so would be to lose something valuable. This community -- any community -- is a product of its history. And, history books do an injustice when they only celebrate great moments, people and hallowed accomplishments.

If you're unaware or under-aware of the story of how clans of Calabrian mafia arrived here from the Village of San Giorio Moregto and helped establish organized crime in Guelph and elsewhere, consider becoming a student of the subject as Prager has -- or through Prager. This work is the result of three years of digging through decades-old newspaper accounts, obscure genealogical records and other documents.

Prager is seeking to teach and perhaps also to provoke in this effort. We applaud him for trying to do both. A citizenry is richer when it is informed about its roots. Legends hold the potential to enrich us about local heritage -- albeit one several locals might want muted.

copyright Guelph Mercury

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Crime Family Law

2007-03-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

Under contemporary rights and freedoms the police must adhere to strict 'rules of evidence', and rightly so, which means that the police are incapable of stopping gangster capitalists. Equally, Royal Commissions which are created to investigate narrowly defined aspects of criminal activity like the construction industry et al, may shed light into a field of crime but they do little else than cause the darkness to retreat elsewhere, while creating problems for ongoing police investigations. I tend to agree with St. Paul that, "There is no salvation in law." The law cannot save society from the sins of its members, least of all from gangsters. All the law can do is to define right and wrong and create penalties for doing wrong.

What this book is designed to show is that a third way is required, one that makes use of generations of police work to support evidential trails that will allow communities to redeem families from criminal societies. This book traces the history of organized crime in Guelph via specific clans because I want to make the case that we need to create a legal definition of a Criminal Family. The designation would enable us to use the more pro-active tools of Family and Civil law, and combine them with the power of the Criminal Court. Public accessibility to court-administered Crime Family databases could be secured in Public and University Libraries, Archives and Museums and be available in hard copy and online.

A Criminal Family designation would combine generations of investigations and convictions with the sweeping power of Royal Commissions to shed light on crime activities in not just Guelph or Canada, but in a system that could extend to Italy itself.

Italy has been begging for action from Canada lawmakers, because gangsters so easily hijack our rights and freedoms, and have turned us into a conduit for the global drug trade. We need a way out of the 'revolutionary/gangster' revenge cycle in which drugs are sold to buy guns to fight battles so that political issues can be addressed in places where democracy has little traction. Those vendetta cycles not only lead to the corruption of the global democracy movement but they ensure the vitality of gangster capitalism.

A Crime Family designation would allow communities to seize the assets of such families and put the seized properties and monies into two trusts. One trust would be designed to ensure the survival of future generations of the families as they attempt to redeem themselves from their pasts. The other trust would be used to restore the integrity of local economies while preventing opportunities for other criminal groups to step into vacuums left by dismantled crime families. Some of that second Trust's money must also go into drug rehab programs, both for users, and for the farmers in various parts of the world who make their hard-scrabble livings growing coca for cocaine, opium for heroin/morphine, marijuana etc.

Appeals processes would be available to ensure that innocent households of any given family can defend their innocence. A moratorium on prosecution, based on the confessions of any elder of any given Crime Family would also be made available. It is not condemnation but redemption we're after here, grace not law. Of course there are always the unrepentant who will not only choose to always live by the sword but to die by it, and for them we cannot pretend that grace or law will have much effect on them.

In recent years Italy has been redeeming itself from its criminal societies by the use of peniti - penitents who, for one reason or another, confess to the various crimes of their clans. Those confessions tend to be made on the basis of personal survival, but just as often, there is an undercurrent of genuine confession involved, rooted as it so often is in the horrific consequences of vendetta, the shedding of the blood of the innocent and guilty alike, often family members. A Criminal Family designation therefor is not designed to crush crime families; it is designed to free them, not without consequences, but responsibly, whenever possible.

It should also be stated for the record that just because a family was involved in criminal activities during the period covered by Volume One (1900-1922) does not mean those families are still involved in organized crime. Vendetta itself has a way of demoralizing a family and that leads them to seek their own redemption.

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Reading Launch

2007-03-07T21:54:00.000-05:00

Just had a launch reading at the Dublin Street United Church, wasn't sure anyone was going to be there but twenty or so came, majority were San Giorgiosi. This is the second reading I've done with similar material from the book. And something curious always seems to happen when I end the reading with the dedication to the dead, with the reading of their names. I've done it at both readings and at both, a solemnity seems to take over, and a natural moment of silence ensues.
I wrote a play once called the Wake of the Asia about the worst marine disaster in Georgian Bay history, 120 people lost their lives (in 1882.) We actually performed the play in a tent alongside the Bay in Collingwood and the run coincided with the date of the tragedy so we invited descendants of the lost to attend a wreath ceremony, at which we read out the names of the 120 people who had died. Their names hadn't been spoken aloud in generations it seemed. There is something about memorializing the forgotten that opens the sacred into the ordinary.
The great difficulty of writing this book was to get the tone right, to make it something other than a True Crime book, to make it about family, to honour the survivors of vendetta, to show respect to the dead whose stories I can only tell as fragments, whether those men were cold blooded killers, or passionate unfortunates or unlucky opportunists.
I talked about how I hoped healing would come to the community by telling the stories but at the end of the evening two Sangiorgiosi asked me about that, about how some they've talked to felt that healing had already come about through forgetting. It's certainly one way to do it, and it's not a way I can condemn, and yet, I guess I believe that redemptive healing requires light to reach into the darkness in order to separate the shadows of human action from the darkness itself. So I suppose I'm talking about spiritual healing rather than just emotional scarring over. I think forgetfulness leads to a certain kind of hardness maybe, whereas spiritual healing is more like being released from prison, like the Orpheus story where he rescues his wife from Hades, only to lose her in the shadow of the rock opening to the outer world because she couldn't separate herself from her past.

Anyway,
To the man who left his scarf, I have it. Contact me via the gmail address above and I'll arrange to get it back to you. To everyone else thanks for coming. And thanks for buying the book.

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The Source of my Research

2007-03-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

Bibliography

Blood Brothers:
How Canada's Most Powerful Mafia Family Runs its Business
Peter Edwards, Toronto, Key Porter Books 1990

Bloodlines: The Rise and Fall of the Mafia's Royal Family
Antonio Nicaso, Lee Lamothe

The Canadian Connection: An Expose of the Mafia in Canada
and its International Ramifications by Jean Pierre Charboneau,
translation James Stewart ,Optimum Publishing 1976

Deadly Silence: Canadian Mafia Murders
Peter Edwards, Antonio Nicaso, Toronto: MacMillan Canada 1993

Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wm. Benton Publisher, 1962

The Enforcer: Johnny Pops Papalia A Life and Death in the Mafia
Adrian Humphreys, Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. 1989

King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets
James Dubro, Robin F. Rowland, Penguin Books 1987

Mafia Assassin:
The Inside Story of a Canadian Biker, Hitman and Police Informer
Cecil Kirby, Thomas C. Renner, Toronto: Methuen 1986

Mob Rule: Inside the Canadian Mafia
James Dubro, A Totem Book, MacMillan Canada 1985

Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Bootlegger
Antonio Nicaso, John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd. 2004

Yours in the Struggle: reminiscences of Tim Buck NC Press, Toronto 1977

The Lucky Immigrant: the Public Life of Fortunato Rao
Nichaolas DeMaria Harney & Frank Sturino
Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Toronto 2001

The Mafia in Canada, a Five Part Series
Alan Phillips MacLeans Magazine, Aug. 24 1963 to Mar. 7 1964

The Guelph Mercury on microfilm, 1905-2006

The Toronto Star, Pages of the Past website

The Globe and Mail, Canada's Heritage from 1844, wesbite

Palmers London Times Online

Proquest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times

Senato della Republica Camera dei Deputati (commisiion Parliamentare D'Inchiesta
Sul Fenomneo dell Criminalita Organizzata Docv. XXIII n.8)

http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/ Canadian Intelligence Security Service

www.oldlapdania.com mob watcher website

www.Ancestry.com genealogy

http://www.wikipedia.com/ Saint George

http://www.sicilia.idettaglio.it/ Morgantina ruins

http://www.ellisisland.org/ ship manifests

http://www.sgiorgiomorgeto.it/ San Giorgio Morgeto village website

http://www.carabinieri.it/ Italian paramilitary/ Giuseppe Musolino

Archives of Ontario series RG 22 392

Box 172 Giovinazza, James

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Allies of the Morgeti

2007-03-06T08:34:00.000-05:00

As the first commentator on my posts observed, Rocco Perri was from Plati, the same village that the Papalias of Hamilton were from... a fact I was not unaware of, but should have clarified in my post (clauses within subclauses within parentheses et al.) I was focused on Perri's allies not on Perri himself, however, but Plati born he was.
It is my contention that the three main Calabrian 'locales' ('ndrinas) at work in Ontario are those from Plati, Siderno, and San Giorgio Morgeto. The Sidernese factions don't seem to have arrived in force until the 1950's. While the Morgeti were here at the turn of 20th century and the Plati immediately after. I mentioned the Raso-Albanese because the Silvestro's of both Hamilton and Guelph were closely related to the Rasos.
Domenic Sciarroni was from Calanna, his wife, Maria Calarco was from San Alessio, both villages a few miles west of the Grand Captain's hometown of San Stefano d'Aspromonte.

My book (Volume One) covers the arrival of the Morgeti in Guelph and ends with the death of Domenic Sciarroni (known as Joe Veroni in Guelph) in 1922. I cover events inside this city, which are placed in the context of events in the province and in Calabria. The death of Fred (Fortunato) Tedesco mentioned in other works on the mafia in Ontario (Dubro and Rowlands, Antonio Nicaso) is gone into in some depth, as are the related murders and attempted murders of more than half dozen other Morgeti and their associates. The Morgeti spread from Guelph to the Niagara frontier, settling in Welland, and moving east of Guelph to Woodbridge and of course to Toronto. I use extensive newspaper sources (the old Globe and Mails, Toronto Stars, and the Guelph Mercury) as well as Ancestry. com; the Ellis Island immigration & transit records, and the Canadian census of 1911.
I think you will find that I've done my home work.

Jerry

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Meet the Morgeti

2007-03-05T23:36:00.000-05:00

The people of the Calabrian village of San Giorgio Morgeto call themselves Sangiorgiosi, I call the criminal element of that village Morgeti. Morgezio was an ancient king of southern Italy. There is currently a mob war going on for control of that village between the Facchineri clans of nearby Cittanova and the Raso-Albanese. More than one hundred people have been killed since 1963.
1963 is also the year in which the so-called Code of San Giorgio Morgeto was discovered in the home of the boss of Taura Nova, Giuseppe Mammoliti.
Most of the Calabrians who settled in Guelph, Ontario are Sangiorgiosi; a significant number are Morgeti. Many of the allies of both Domenic Sciarrone (the first Calabrain don of Ontario circa 1911-1922) and the King of the Bottleggers (Rocco Perri - boss from about 1922-1944) were Morgeti. Tony Silvestro, one of the 'three old dons of Ontario' was a Morgeti, as was Domenic Longo, also know as one of the 'three old dons.' (The third was Giacomo Luppino from Hamilton.)

Visit My Current Blog!

welcome

2007-03-05T14:56:00.000-05:00

I have set up this blog to give those who have read my book on organized crime in Guelph somewhere to contact me. At the moment the books is only onsale at the Bookshelf in Guelph, or through me personally. If you want to buy a buy or order several you can order them from by via jerryprag@gmail.com. I would also urge people who might wish to discuss rumours and anecdotal history to email me first. If I find the material pertinent and can confirm your facts I will be happy to include it on the blog, with whatever personal credit you desire.
I will be checking into the site regularly.
Thank you for joining me.

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