Mobsters settle in the burbs At least 12 underworld fugitives are thought to be living in 905 area Police, prosecutors say Ottawa must 'expedite' deportation process By Peter Edwards

In the 1960s and 1970s, Michele (Mike the Baker) Racco dished out ice cream to customers and underworld advice to mobsters from his bakery/ice cream shop at the corner of Nairn Ave. and St. Clair Ave. W. in Toronto.

When Racco died of cancer in 1980, he was escorted to his grave at Mount Hope Cemetery by a virtual who's who of the southern Ontario underworld, including heroin traffickers, extortionists and old Mafia don Giacomo Luppino of Hamilton, who was believed to have the ear of a rival in his wallet.

That was the last of the great downtown Mafia funerals, says author Antonio Nicaso, who has written several books on organized crime.

"I think Mike Racco was the last big downtown mobster in traditional organized crime," Nicaso says.

Shortly afterwards, the Great Mafia Migration to the Greater Toronto Area began, as dozens of criminals as well as tens of thousands of law-abiding Ontario residents with Italian heritage moved into new subdivisions outside Toronto's crowded downtown.

Nicaso and Ron Sandelli, former head of intelligence for Toronto police, say it's natural that mobsters were included in the explosion of growth in York Region over the past two decades.

In that time, the population of Vaughan, which includes the community of Woodbridge, shot up from 65,060 in 1986 to 244,462 today, according to Statistics Canada.

Nicaso and Sandelli say that the vast majority of new arrivals to the region with Italian heritage are honest and hard-working, but that it would be naive to ignore the region's Mafia element, many of whom are from the southern Italian province of Calabria.

"It's about criminals," Nicaso says. "It's not about Calabrians."

York Regional Police Chief Armand La Barge says at least a dozen underworld fugitives now live in or regularly visit his region, but that his force is powerless to move against them until the Canadian and Italian governments move for extradition or deportation.

Italian prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, who has prosecuted the Calabrian Mafia (called the 'Ndranghetta) for almost 20 years, says there needs to be more high-level, government-to-government co- operation to bring criminals from areas like York Region to justice in Italy.

"I wish that the Canadian and Italian authorities would work more closely together to expedite the process of extradition, the same way that we managed to work with several countries within Europe," Gratteri said in a telephone interview from Italy, through an interpreter.

The mob exodus to Toronto's outer regions was led by Paul Volpe, who grew up downtown on Elm St., but eventually settled northwest of Toronto, in a flood-lit Tudor mansion with a turret that he had bought from a country court judge.

Volpe continued to commute from the town of Schomberg to Toronto until his murder in 1983, a crime that remains unsolved.

Many others involved in the mob flight to the GTA suburbs have arrived from overseas, escaping pressures from rival mobsters and police, blending into what city residents might consider anonymous subdivisions and mundane architecture.

Organized crime expert Nicaso says Canada is particularly inviting for foreign mobsters because of a lack of laws to effectively combat the Mafia and their money laundering.

Since mobsters began their push into the 905 areas outside Toronto, police in the GTA have discovered a multi-million dollar financier, numerous hitmen, a fugitive "boss of bosses" and trails to several unsolved gangland murders.

Perhaps the biggest catch for police was Antonio (the Black One, the Lawyer) Commisso, who was considered a "boss of bosses" in Calabria and who organized "hit teams" or murder squads. He spent much of his time at a private social club in Woodbridge, where he lived, before he was extradited in July 2005 to Italy, where he remains in prison.

Some of the new arrivals, like Salvatore Ferraro, the reputed No. 2 man in the Sicilian Mafia, were driven here by police crackdowns on organized crime in Italy.

Ferraro, the reputed don of the Caltanisetta crime family of Sicily, was one of the six most powerful Mafia leaders in the world when he was arrested without incident while driving in the Keele St.- Highway 7 area, according to the RCMP.

He had lived quietly for three years in Etobicoke in a semi- detached bungalow on tiny Burtonwood Cres., in the Martin Grove and Albion Rds. area, after entering Canada on a visitor's permit.

He drove an Audi and dressed like a gentleman, not a Sopranos- style mobster. His suit was always crisply pressed and his tie neatly knotted.

Much of his GTA time was spent in the company of his Great Pyrenees dog, which seemed more a companion than protector.

Sometimes he travelled with two other men, but generally he appeared alone, and even seemed lonely. In the end, it may have been this loneliness that led the law to the fugitive don.

While Ferraro had been named in a warrant along with 200 others in a wave of an anti-Mafia fervour following the murder of crusading judge Giovanni Falcone in May 1992, he wasn't observed by police consorting with known mobsters or in any of their haunts.

However, his voice was picked up on wiretaps, calling home to Sicily to speak with his wife and two children.

Not long afterwards, he was deported to Italy on a warrant for racketeering, arms and drug trafficking and was later convicted.

Police said he had functioned as a long-distance Mafia don, travelling back and forth between Canada and Italy, and sometimes using runners to carry money and messages.

An early wake-up call that the GTA was becoming a safe haven for Mafia fugitives came in 1991 - the year Ferraro arrived in Canada - when recent immigrant Giovanni Costa was shot to death in a drive- by shooting near his home.

Costa, who moved here from the southern Italian city of Siderno, wasn't a criminal, but he was related to mobsters involved in a feud with the Commisso crime family over heroin and cocaine trafficking routes.

As the feud intensified, Mafia members lashed out at innocent members of rival families, and gangsters went into hiding.

Just a month before Costa's murder, his brother Vincenzo was murdered in Siderno, Italy. There were no suspicions that Vincenzo Costa was a mobster, since he was deaf and mute.

Riccardo Rumbo, who lived in York Region and Siderno, was eventually convicted of the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison in Italy.

When Rumbo lived in Woodbridge, his associates included Domenic (Mico) Napoli, Antonio Oppedisano and Antonio Commisso, all of whom were recent arrivals from the southern Italian province of Calabria.

Napoli and Oppedisano were often seen in York Region restaurants, collecting money from video-gambling machines. In the illegal video- gambling business, players play for money and not for free games that are the legal reward.

Then, in March 2000, Napoli and Oppedisano fell off the radar.

Shortly after they vanished, there were rumours that they would never be found alive. There were even rumours that they had been chopped to pieces and burned.

Associates recalled how they'd had harsh words with another local mobster, Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto, shortly before their disappearance.

Panepinto, 41, operated a cut-rate casket business and a west Toronto gym, where he enjoyed lifting weights. Most importantly, he was considered a tough local representative for reputed Montreal mob boss Vito Rizzuto.

Unfazed by Panepinto's harsh words, Napoli and Oppedisano carried on as usual with their video-gambling business. Then they suddenly vanished.

Within weeks of Napoli and Oppedisano's disappearances, police later heard, their associates from southern Italy were in Montreal, asking Rizzuto blunt questions.

Did he know anything about the missing mobsters? Had he ordered their murders?

Word filtered back to police that Rizzuto said he knew nothing about the men who had disappeared from York Region.

In October 2000, Panepinto was driving his maroon Cadillac on Bloor St. W., just west of Highway 27, when a van pulled alongside with its passenger-side window rolled down.

Seconds later, his Cadillac rolled through the intersection with Panepinto slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding from six bullets to his shoulder, chest and abdomen.

Panepinto's murder remains unsolved.

Since the hit, Rizzuto has been deported from Canada to face charges relating to three gangland murders in New York in 1981.

The man believed to be Rizzuto's replacement at the top of the Montreal mob was seen earlier this year, arriving in business class from Montreal and being escorted to meetings with several known mobsters in York Region.

Meanwhile, police in York continue to monitor mobsters, and occasionally deport them.

One of the recent deportees was Rumbo's nephew, Riccardo Gattuso, 35, formerly of Fonteselva Ave., Woodbridge, who was deported to Italy last December to face murder charges, including the murder in Calabria of Vincenzo Costa.

Sandelli, who retired from Toronto police 11 years ago, says many of the current mobsters in York Region are the sons of criminals he once investigated in downtown Toronto, and who attended Racco's funeral a quarter century ago.

Since then, they have followed both their fathers into crime and joined the larger, non-criminal Italian community in the migration to the suburbs.

"I guess it's a natural progression," Sandelli says.

Toronto Star, September 25, 2006