In tune with the Mafia

Antonio Nicaso has a passion for writing about organized crime

By Mike Strobell / The Toronto Sun

You read about some fellow expiring in the trunk of his car and you know right away he was not of your world.
Aha! Mafia! you say, vaguely, perhaps humming The Godfather theme.
But that world is mystifying to most of us. As it was this week when Operation RIP busted 32 people, seized piles of cash, drugs and dynamite, and foiled an alleged mob hit.
So, to shed some light, I call Antonio Nicaso, maybe Canada's top expert on organized crime. Nicaso, 38, has written 10 books on the subject.
He slides his stocky, 5-foot-7 frame into a chair at the classy Ristorante Boccaccio in the Columbus Centre, Lawrence Ave. and Dufferin.
A mandolin tune wafts past rows of fine wine and murals of fruit and country scenes.
Antonio Nicaso takes me back three decades, to the village of Caulonia, in Calabria, southern Italy. Mafia central.
Antonio's first day of school, aged 6. His dad had died (natural causes) two years earlier. He discovered the kid next to him had lost his father, too. "What happened to him, Cosimo?" little Antonio asked. "I don't know," Cosimo replied. So Antonio asked around.
"The man was victim of a Mafia feud," he tells me now. "Six years old and the Mafia had already entered my life." It stuck.
Nicaso is co-editor of Corriere Canadese, Toronto's Italian daily. He helped found the Anti-Mafia Committee in Toronto 10 years ago. He has testified to Commons committees and pushed for new laws on money laundering and such. He will speak about organized crime to more than 30 audiences this year.
"For years Canadians didn't realize the mafia and other criminal organizations could affect the lives of each and every one of them.
"But, with drugs, they are merchants of death and many things they do poison our economy."
Back to Caulonia. Sometimes a schoolmate would disappear. Sometimes a bomb would go off in the distance. "Where I grew up," he says, "the sign of the Mafia was everywhere. In the streets, in the air, in the spirit of the people."
Writing about it became his passion.
He covered the Mafia for Sicily's biggest paper. He didn't tell his mother. He got a few threats and someone stole his first car, a 126 Fiat. He found its burned-out hulk on a riverbank.
He wrote his first book. In it he included a version of the Mafia code. This did not go over well in some quarters.
One night he awoke at home to chase two men from his second Fiat. Police found wiring and traces of dynamite.
Worse, he had to tell his mother. "She did not think being a journalist in Calabria and writing about the Mafia was a good career."
Shortly after, he moved to the U.S., as a crime consultant.
Then to Canada, in 1990. His eyes light up at the memory. Every kind of organized crime group -- 18 of 'em.
"Here they were, all in one country," he says. Mafia-types love lax laws.
And we have tradition. The Markham Gang were arsonists and frauds with a code and hierarchy just like modern mobsters. They terrorized farmers around Toronto in the 1840s.
They were truer to the mafia mould than The Godfather or Tony Soprano, says Nicaso, though The Sopranos at least show mobsters as humans with problems like the rest of us. Pavarotti sings from a restaurant speaker. Nicaso has mild tics in his neck and an arm.
He still gets threats. But it's when he doesn't get them, after writing something provocative, that he worries.
Bikers are scarier still, he says. "The Mafia don't like the limelight and they know murders draw media and police." The Hells Angels don't really care.
The bikers already have moved beyond being just drug pushers for the mob. They have direct links to Colombia and Nicaso fears a clash between bikers and mobsters. That, and the fact Toronto's crime factions have learned to cross language barriers and work together for bigger profits.
(Toronto, by the way, doesn't have a godfather. We're a branch of the Montreal Mafia.)
Nicaso meets mobsters now and then, sounds them out on stories he's working on.  Anyone I might know? "It's best not to publicize these kinds of meetings," he says, with a hint of a smile.
Ah, yes. The code.

09/20/2002