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.
Friday, March 30, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Jimmy Giovinazzo
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 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.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
The book is dedicated to the following
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
A comment I wanted to bring forward to the main page
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 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.
Monday, March 19, 2007
A very Interesting Italian Project
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
Libera, click on the English flag for English language
Interesting List
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
http://leonepaziente.blogspot.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
