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  Almost as soon he started selling heroin, Johnny got caught. A cop spotted him making a deal in front of Toronto’s busy Union Station and took him in. But Papalia was, above all, resourceful. At his trial, he told the judge that he wasn’t selling a drug, but buying one. In the days before sophisticated forensics, he convinced the judge that the white power he had wasn’t heroin, but a patent medicine cooked up by a friend. It was the only thing, he said, that helped relieve the pain of his syphilis.

  The judge — apparently believing nobody would admit in a public forum to having syphilis unless he really had it — bought the story and gave him two years less a day if he promised to see a doctor when he was released.

  Papalia did his time and was rewarded for keeping his mouth shut with an apprenticeship in Montreal with some friends of Sylvestro’s — Luigi Greco and Carmine Galante. Both were big-time mobsters, who had met with the likes of Lucky Luciano and had strong ties with the Manhattan-based Bonanno crime family. In fact, Galante had been Joseph Bonanno’s personal driver and had been sent to Montreal by him specifically in an attempt to dominate the city’s drug trade.

  After he had learned the ropes, Papalia went back to Hamilton where he bought a taxi company on the city’s heavily Italian James Street North. The cops believed that the cabs were just a front for a gambling ring. When one of the drivers, Tony Coposodi, was executed with two bullets to the back of the head, suspicions that the bootlegger’s boy was up to no good increased.

  Throughout the ’50s, Papalia played the part of the area Godfather with great gusto. He had big, fancy cars, wore expensive suits, squired around lots of pretty women and always carried at least $1,000 in cash with him. He always liked to flash what he called “reds and browns” ($50 and $100 bills) wherever he went.

  He had protection-racket money coming in from Montreal and extortion-racket money and gambling-house money coming in from Toronto, in addition to what he made in Hamilton. Although he had many slices of many different pies there, the bulk of his money came from an ingenious loan-sharking scheme. He would lend money to anyone, especially business owners. They would agree to pay back $6 for every $5 borrowed. If it wasn’t repaid in a week, every $5 of the new balance would require a $6 repayment the following week. Few could afford this outrageous 1,040 percent annual interest. Traditionally when a debtor defaults to the Mafia, they take what they can from him and then kill or severely injure him. And there’s little doubt that Papalia and his men did plenty of that, but he gave some business owners another option. They could just put in his vending machines — he had since set up a company at his old Railway Street headquarters called Monarch Vending Machines — with all the profits going back to him. Of course, the debt wouldn’t be forgiven, just some of the interest knocked off. It was incredibly lucrative — because much of what they sold in the vending machines was stolen through truck hijackings or warehouse burglaries — and it even gave him the veneer of a legitimate business.

  Papalia made the big time in 1959. He was the only Canadian invited to a meeting in New York that set up what was later to be known as “the French Connection.” Joe Valachi, the minor-league gangster who later turned world-famous informant, was in attendance and testified that he knew of Papalia as a capo (boss) who ran much of Southern Ontario under the auspices of the Buffalo-based Magaddino Family.

  The plan was to source high-grade heroin from the Middle East, funnel it through France and then ship it to New York, the distribution point for North America.

  Papalia worked extensively with the Sicilian Agueci brothers until 1961, when Vito Agueci was arrested and the Magaddinos had Alberto Agueci murdered. But that didn’t slow Papalia down. He found new European connections — including Sicilians working out of France — to keep the heroin supply steady. And he understood that it was just business. There were no hard feelings between him and the Magaddinos over the dismissal of the Aguecis.

  Back home, Papalia became a victim of his own ambition. For years he had been involved in an extortion racket with a group of mostly Jewish bar owners, but he decided he wanted it all. One man, Max Bluestein, refused to play ball, so Papalia and his men showed up at his Yonge Street jazz club, the Town Tavern. When Bluestein exited the bar, Papalia and his men beat him nearly to death with a metal pipe. No less a celebrity than Pierre Berton referred to it as a “semi-execution,” and made it the focus of a personal anti-organized crime campaign in his newspaper column.

  But not a single one of the literally hundreds of people who witnessed the beating outside the popular nightclub on the country’s busiest stretch of pavement came forward to testify against Papalia. Even Bluestein claimed not to know who did it to him.

  But a marked increase of police raids on his and his associates’ businesses convinced Papalia — or, more likely his boss, Magaddino — that he should turn himself in. He got 18 months.

  After almost a year in prison, Papalia was indicted by the Americans for his involvement in the French Connection. As he was being led to the airplane to take him south of the border, a couple of reporters caught his eye. “I’m being kidnapped! Help me!” he screamed at them. “They’re taking me someplace I don’t want to go!”

  Indeed they were. Papalia was sentenced to ten years in a West Pennsylvania prison. But, just as he had convinced a Toronto judge he needed heroin for his syphilis, Papalia fooled the U.S. Justice Department into thinking he had tuberculosis. They let him out after less than five years on compassionate grounds. When a group of American reporters met him at the gate on his release, he refused to talk with them, claiming not to be important enough to warrant their time. “Look, fellows, I’m a sick man,” he told them. “I’m not even a spit in the ocean; I’m a nothing.”

  Back in Hamilton, he was greeted with a big party and great a show of fealty from his old crew. But he also received some bad news. While Papalia was in prison, the Magaddinos had turned over some of his interests in Toronto to his much-hated rival from Woodbridge, Paul Volpe. It enraged Johnny Pops. Not only was Volpe young and loud-mouthed, representing the new generation of gangsters Papalia had no use for, but he also freely admitted to having a homosexual relationship when he was younger. Papalia considered him to be an absolute abomination.

  Humiliated over the ascension of Volpe, Papalia met with acting Ontario boss Giacomo Luppino (also from Hamilton) to see if he could get his Toronto businesses back. He didn’t, but he appeared to have a new job.

  On June 6, 1969, police saw Papalia visit Luppino at a restaurant on College Street in Toronto. The next day, the bullet-riddled body of Filippo Vendemini was discovered in the parking lot behind his small Bloor Street West shoe store. When his wife, Giuseppina, found him, her screaming was so loud that a couple of neighbors called police to report a woman was being assaulted.

  The police determined that the former extortionist and smuggler was said to have owed money to the wrong people. Under questioning, Giuseppina (who was pregnant with the couple’s sixth child) provided little of value other than the fact that Filippo had been on the phone frequently with a man named Vincenzo. And she described a man she’d seen him with the day before he died.

  The police soon tracked down Vincenzo Sicari, a Montreal pizzeria owner who had worked for Salvatore “Sammy” Triumbari, an extortionist whose murder two years earlier had gone unsolved. Sicari told them that he and Vendemini had gone to Hamilton to visit a mutual friend. Then Vendemini drove him to Toronto International Airport. The next thing he heard, Vendemini was dead.

  On July 28, 1969, Papalia was again seen with Luppino in Toronto. Later that day, Sicari’s body was found in the same neighborhood as Vendemini’s.

  It was at about this time that many started referring to Papalia as “the Enforcer” in reverent tones. Although respected by everyone who knew him, Papalia was far from well liked. He had a habit of stealing his friends’ wives and girlfriends and then dumping them. He had little tolerance for young wannabes and would viciously taunt and punish them f
or minor mistakes and transgressions. “We had to respect him because of his role,” said one Hamilton man who worked with him. “But he got on everybody’s nerves.”

  Over the years, Papalia maintained his control over Hamilton and most of Southern Ontario, but his interests in Toronto dwindled as Volpe’s star rose. Papalia ruled Hamilton like a sultan, establishing the Gold Key Club in the mid-1970s. No storefront hole where old men would quietly sip espressos, this ostentatious nightclub boasted a luxurious lounge, private rooms and an elaborate discotheque. Only members and their guests — usually dates and local celebrities — could get in. “There wasn’t actually any gold key,” said Sergeant John Harris of the Hamilton police. “They used a password that changed from time to time, just like in gangster movies.”

  It had a huge illuminated sign that hung over Main Street. Across Wentworth Avenue was Cathedral High School, where the next generation of members was expected to come from. And across Main was a 24-hour coffee shop. There was always at least one cop in the front window. “Nobody ever went in or out of there without us knowing about it,” one retired cop who pulled Gold Key duty told me. “We knew who they all were, but they didn’t care.”

  Not everyone in the Gold Key Club could trace their roots back to Sicily or Calabria. A lot of non-Italians worked at the club or with the members. Papalia himself married a woman of Irish descent he met at the club. Shirley Ryce was a bartender there when she caught Johnny’s eye. A tall blonde, her dad had been a bookie with close ties to Papalia’s sphere of influence.

  He declared bankruptcy in 1982, but somehow managed to be chauffeured around town and show off his still-thick wad of bills. Things got immeasurably better for him on November 13, 1983 when Paul Volpe’s body was found curled up in the trunk of his wife’s BMW in a long-term parking lot at the Toronto airport. With him out of the way, and Luppino a doddering 84-year-old, the Magaddinos had no choice but to put Papalia in charge of Ontario.

  He expanded everywhere. A joint task force arrested 10 men in Toronto’s Greektown on Danforth Avenue, including two they knew were friends of Papalia’s, in December 1985. But they couldn’t get anything to stick to Johnny Pops. “Yeah, I know the people they charged — they’re friends of mine,” he told a reporter. “But that doesn’t mean I was involved; I wasn’t, because I wouldn’t have anything to do with Greeks — I don’t like them, I don’t like their restaurants, I don’t like their food.”

  Well into the ’90s, Papalia was the undisputed Godfather in Hamilton, especially after Luppino died in 1987. He owned an entire city block among his vast real estate holdings. His companies were the biggest vending-machine and liquor-dispensing equipment firms in Canada. He made millions, and laughed about it in the media.

  But eventually ill health — particularly his troublesome gallstones — did what his enemies and law enforcement never could, it slowed him down. The old man didn’t get out much after about 1994 or so. He’d make the short trip from his easy chair in his 14th-floor Market Street penthouse apartment to the black leather couch at Monarch Vending. At the penthouse, he spent most of his time in his big leather chair watching old movies on his big-screen TV. And at the business, he generally chatted with the old guard or dozed off. He lived that way until the day he was shot and killed on the way to Monarch from his home.

  At the time, some speculated that he was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. But everybody still did what the old man said. And one of his rules was that his men were never to deal with the Hells Angels. He’d seen what they’d done in Montreal, and he didn’t trust them. And it was probably that pronouncement that kept Hells Angels out of Ontario for so very long. While Hells Angels could probably have taken on the Outlaws and every other biker gang in the province, they would not have picked a fight with Papalia and his boys. Because then they’d also be looking at war with the Magaddinos, Cotronis, Violis, Musitanos and potentially even the Rizzutos. It was not a good plan.

  And, although it would have been in their best interest to do so, the Hells Angels did not kill Papalia.

  It was one his own. Sort of. Papalia and his old friend Dominic Musitano both operated out of headquarters on Railway Street. Compared to Papalia, who by this time ruled all of Ontario and answered only to the Magaddinos, the Musitanos were small-time. “They were not at the same level of Papalia,” said Canadian organized-crime expert Antonio Nicaso. “For many years, the Musitano family lived in the shadow of Papalia.”

  Their relationship was grudging at best, with paranoid, willful Papalia not always trusting the short-tempered and secretive Musitano. And they had one consistent bone of contention — whom they’d hire.

  Johnny was dead set against bikers of any stripe, but Dominic (and his brother Antonio) used them all the time for all kinds of jobs. They sold his coke, they bombed businesses that fell behind in their payments and they made witnesses’ minds change about testifying.

  Dominic, the only potential threat among the Italians to Papalia’s power structure, suffered a massive coronary in 1985, and his ability to lead diminished consistently until he died of a stroke in 1991. Antonio, also known as Tony, didn’t have Dominic’s leadership ability and, in any case, he wasn’t able to act in any significant way with so many parole restrictions stemming from convictions for conspiracy to commit murder, six bombings, two attempted bombings and two arsons.

  So the Musitanos’ business fell to Dominic’s two sons: Pasquale (better known as Pat) and Angelo (better known as Ang). They represented a different breed; they were, according to many who knew them, North American kids who learned about the Mafia from movies and TV, rather than from the old Sicilian or Calabrian traditions. “They were totally different in terms of character than Papalia; he always tried to keep a low profile — he was a very old-fashioned boss in that sense,” said Nicaso. “They are the new face of organized crime — they like to show off.”

  Both Ang, who was a heavy man, and Pat, who was truly obese, liked to wear expensive tailor-made suits and lots and lots of jewelry. And they liked to, as one cop told me, “play at being gangsters.” They got in contact with a lowlife named Kenny Murdock. They had known him since they were both young children because he used to drive their dad around. They also remembered that, back in 1985, just before his heart attack, their dad had hired Murdock to kill a man named Salvatore Alaimo.

  It was typical of how Dominic did business. Alaimo had no beef with the Musitanos; he was just a janitor at the now-defunct but then-enormous Stelco steel plant. It was Alaimo’s brother, Gianni, who was in deep to the Musitanos with gambling debts. Dominic’s logic was that a dead man won’t pay his debts, so it was pointless to kill Gianni. But there are other ways to get a man to pay.

  When the Musitano boys got in touch with Murdock in 1997, he was delighted. Without much else positive in his life, he had developed a great deal of fondness for and dedication to the family, and thought of the boys kind of like nephews. The boys didn’t know it at the time, but Murdock had met Dominic in Collins Bay Institution in Kingston and Dominic asked him to take care of his boys if anything ever happened to him. In effect, that made Murdock the Godfather’s godfather. The Musitanos gave Murdock a list of four names and indicated they wanted them all killed. They promised him $10,000 cash and a nice big bag of cocaine.

  Kenny Murdock

  The first name on the list was Johnny Pops. And on May 31, 1997, Murdock shot him dead on Railway Street.

  The next name on the list was Carmen Barillaro. Johnny Pops was a secretive, paranoid man who left no clear line of succession. But it was obvious to anyone who knew the situation that, with Johnny Pops dead, the crown would be hoisted by his right-hand man, Barillaro, who ran the Niagara Falls family.

  Barillaro was an old friend of Papalia’s, and the two moved seamlessly from running heroin to cocaine as fashions changed. He’d gotten in some trouble over the years, too. Caught trafficking in 1979, he was also arrested in 1989 for hiring a woman to kill a debtor �
� she chickened out and turned informant — and again in 1992 after getting caught with seven kilograms of cocaine and 900 kilograms of weed.

  By 1997, though, he was free and clearly the successor to Papalia. His reign lasted less than two months. On July 23, 1997, Ang drove Murdock to Barillaro’s house. He parked around the corner so he would not be recognized. Murdock walked up to the house and knocked on the door. When Barillaro answered, he made something up about wanting to know if the Corvette in the driveway was for sale. Suspicious, or perhaps recognizing him, Barillaro tried to shut the door on him. Murdock burst in and killed the older man then fled back to Ang’s still-running car.

  With Papalia and Barillaro gone, there were no Mafiosi left in Ontario of any merit other than the Musitano brothers. They were now in charge.

  And they weren’t finished. Although the Musitanos had long hired and dealt with bikers, they didn’t like the idea of any major competition in their hometown. Third on Murdock’s list was former wrestler and biker Johnny K-9.

  Although the Satan’s Choice chapter had been slowed down significantly in Hamilton and had kicked K-9 out of the club, K-9 was still active in the city and, sources say, still selling cocaine he bought from Hells Angels. He was small-time, to be sure, but he was competition and he had connections the Musitanos did not want to deal with. Sure they ran the Hamilton Mafia now, but — with suspicions rapidly growing over their involvement with the deaths of Papalia and Barillaro — they didn’t have many friends to call on if they had a war with Hells Angels.

  On August 20, 1997, with a gun in his pocket, Murdock knocked on K-9’s door. The big man answered and invited him in. Murdock shook his head. “John, I’ve been sent here to kill you,” he said. “But I’m not going to do it.” Stunned, all K-9 could do was thank him. Murdock told him to be careful and left.

  There was a fourth name on the list, but it was never made public. At least three sources have told me that they believed the fourth name was that of Outlaws president Mario Parente.