Peter Edwards - The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime. From Captain Kidd to Mom Boucher

PETER EDWARDS
Waterfront Warlord (1987)
Blood Brothers (1990)
The Big Sting (1991)
Deadly Silence (with Antonio Nicaso, 1993)
A Mothers Story (with Joyce Milgaard, 1999)
Frres de sang (2002)
One Dead Indian (2001, 2003)
Night Justice (2004)
Northern Connection (2006)
Delusion (2007)
The Bandido Massacre (2010)
The Infiltrator (2010)

MICHEL AUGER
The Heroin Triangle (1978)
The Biker Who Shot Me (translated by Jean-Paul Murray, 2002)

Copyright 2004, 2012 by Peter Edwards and Michel Auger

Revised edition published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, 2012

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Edwards, Peter, 1956
The encyclopedia of Canadian organized crime : from Captain Kidd to Mom Boucher / Peter Edwards and Michel Auger. Updated ed.

Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-688-2

1. Organized crime Canada Encyclopedias. I. Auger, Michel, 1944- II. Title.

HV6453.C3E39 2012 364.1060971 C2012-902398-1

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012937257

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Toronto, Ontario
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v3.1

To Barbara, Sarah, and James; and Winona and Ken Edwards, with love
PETER EDWARDS

To my daughter Guylaine, for your understanding
MICHEL AUGER

What is the Mafia?
Montreal godfather Vincenzo Vic the Egg Cotroni

We would like to thank our agent, Daphne Hart of the Helen Heller Agency, for her cheerful professionalism, editor Pat Kennedy for her care and patience, copy editor Heather Sangster for her attention to detail, and Paul Cherry for fact-checking support. In the new edition, we are grateful to Elizabeth Kribs and Linda Pruessen for bringing the project back to life. Peter Edwards would also like to thank Pauline and Amund Hanson for helping him explore the tunnels of Moose Jaw and the south Saskatchewan caves of The Sundance Kid and other outlaws.

Organized crime is a slippery subject, involving slippery people, and evades an exact definition. In drawing up this list of organized criminals and groups, we have been strongly influenced by new anti-gang laws, which define a criminal organization as a group of three or more people whose main activities include committing crimes for some benefit. We realize that sometimes theres a fine line between terrorism and organized crime, as with the attacks by the Hells Angels on the justice system in Quebec in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Other times, criminals are clearly habitual offenders, but its a generous stretch to call them organized. For the purposes of this book, we have largely focused on criminal activities in which profit was the main motive, as opposed to passion, perversion, mental illness, or politics. We were also interested in criminal activity that was ongoing and which involved planning. Finally, we looked for some specific code of conduct: one existed on the pirate ships of Peter Easton in the early seventeenth century and they can still be found today amongst modern-day biker gangs and Mafia groups.

Also, it should be clear that this is a book about crime and criminals, not ethnic groups. Theres diversity in crime as well as in mainstream Canadian life, and organized criminals make up just a minuscule fraction of any ethnic group mentioned here. For instance, crime analysts have estimated that 0.02 per cent of the Italian-heritage community is involved in Mafia activity in Canada.

We often wondered, Why do some criminals enjoy longevity, while others dont? One common thread shared by the successful organized criminals described in these pages is a vital link to transportation routes. To be effective for any length of time, groups have to be able to move goods and people, whether theyre taking illegal drugs to market or moving themselves speedily out of harms way. Such access to transportation routes was standard amongst the seventeenth-century pirates of the Atlantic coast, the coureurs de bois of pre-Confederation, the bootlegging gangs that followed crews building the Canadian Pacific Railway, criminals like the Sundance Kid on the Outlaw Trail of southern Saskatchewan at the turn of the twentieth century, the bootleggers of Prohibition, and, today, the cocaine cartels and the Hells Angels, with their acute interest in the shipping ports of Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax.

But perhaps the most important central thread connecting the groups described in these pages is control of officials either through corruption or intimidation. They all need to compromise officials in ostensibly legitimate jobs in order to function for any length of time. This was as true in the days of the early seventeenth-century pirates as it is today. Harry Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid) and his associates benefited from the assistance of a corrupt former North-West Mounted Police officer, who helped them hide out in the gullies around Big Beaver in southern Saskatchewan. Montreal mobsters Vincenzo Vic the Egg Cotroni and Willie Obront were called The Untouchables by crusading police officer Pacifique Pax Plante because of their excellent political connections. Maurice Mom Boucher of the Hells Angels took a far more brutal route to attain the same ends, using murder and the threat of violence to try to intimidate members of the judicial, legislative, and journalistic communities.

In a sense, the major criminals described in these pages werent really outlaws at all, since they needed a strong, ongoing connection to the legitimate world to survive, much like a leech or a parasite is dependent upon its host. Many tried to use their loot to buy respectability and a place in the legitimate world, and more than a few succeeded. Eric Cobham, a particularly vicious sea dog who prowled Canadas Atlantic coast in the seventeenth century, purchased a title in the French gentry and became a magistrate, while fellow pirates Peter The Pirate Admiral Easton and Henry Mainwaring each bought pardons, retiring in luxury with the titles of marquis and knight, respectively. While Captain Kidd was immeasurably less violent, and didnt even consider himself a criminal, his life ended on the gallows, as he had fallen from grace in political circles.