Another Reason I Wrote this Book

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.