'Nice guy next door' is alleged Mafia don
Voice picked up on phone calls to family in
Sicily

 

By Peter Edwards / The Toronto Star

For a reputed Mafia boss, the man living in the semi-detached
bungalow on tiny
Burtonwood Cres. in Etobicoke didn't seem
threatening at all.

If anything, Salvatore Ferraro, 47, alleged Number 2 man in the
Sicilian Mafia, seemed a little lonely to folks on the quiet street
in the Martin Grove and Albion Rds. area.

Italian authorities have a far different view, as heavily armed
police tactical squads greeted his airplane yesterday at
Fiumicino
Airport
in Rome after Ferraro was deported at the request of Italian
officials.

"He was just a quiet, nice guy next door,'' said a neighbor, who
declined to give her name. "I just hope the next guy to live there
is someone as nice as him.''

His accent also didn't make him stand out in the culturally
diverse, suburban neighborhood.

"I bragged that I have nice neighbors - a German on one side and
an Italian on the other side,'' said the woman, who lived in the
other half of the home where Ferraro lived.

In the end, it was probably loneliness that led the law to the
reputed don, as his voice was picked up on police wiretaps calling
home to
Sicily, where he had left a wife and children.

"It was probably nostalgia and wanting to talk to relatives,''
said Antonio Nicaso, an Italian author living in Metro who has
written widely on the Mafia.

Ferraro was said to have risen to the top post in the Caltanisetta
crime family after the 1992 arrest of Giuseppe Vito Madonia.

Madonia's arrest, and a warrant against Ferraro and 200 others in
his area, came in the wave of an anti-Mafia fervor following the
murder of crusading judge Giovanni Falcone in May 1992.

In Italy, Ferraro's occupation was officially listed as cattle
rancher.

Here in Metro, no bodyguards lived with Ferraro, although he
sometimes travelled in the company of two other men.

His only live-in company was a white Great Pyrenees dog, but it was
seemed to be more for companionship than protection.

Ferraro would walk the dog in the morning, wearing, as he always
did, an immaculately cut business suit and neatly knotted tie.

His social life seemed to consist of frequent barbecues in his
small backyard. He would drive out and pick up an Italian-speaking
visitor in his dark blue Audi 5000, then take him to his home for
conversation by the grill.

Just last Saturday, he gave two visitors a hug and slap on the back
on his front porch on what would prove to be perhaps his last social
event as a free man.

In a garden in his small backyard, he grew carrots, cauliflowers
and red cabbages. On his back porch, he kept two tiny living
Christmas trees, with jolly little Santas on the fading $19.95 price
tags.

Ferraro wasn't observed by police consorting with any of the city's
known mobsters or hanging around any of their known haunts.

He pined for wider expanses than Metro and told people how he loved
horses - a hobby that's incongruous for the
Blaney Cres. address in
the Jane-Finch corridor that appears on his driver's licence.

The resident of that Blaney Cres. house is a Sicilian immigrant who
has lived in
Canada for more than 30 years.

True to form, Ferraro was polite even when arrested without
incident in the Keele St.-Highway 7 area earlier this week. With him
was his nephew and two visitors, all from
Sicily, none of whom had
criminal records.

While Ferraro had been unemployed for his three years in Canada, he
carried with him the equivalent of $8,000 in Italian currency and
about another $1,000 Canadian. He carried no weapon.

"He claimed he didn't know anything,'' a police officer said.

Ferraro had originally entered Canada in 1991, then re-entered on
Nov. 15, 1992, about two months after the arrest of Madonia.

He apparently travelled back and forth between Canada and Italy,
and had runners carrying messages and money between the two
countries.

Nicaso said the vastness of Canada and relatively easy entry make
the country appealing for mobsters on the run.

Nicaso wasn't surprised that Ferraro fit easily into his suburban
home.

"That's the new face of organized crime - with a nice suit and a
businesslike face,'' Nicaso said.

Nov. 10, 1994