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

479 Pages·2012·10.01 MB·English

by  Peter Edwards

ALSO BY:
PETER EDWARDS
Waterfront Warlord (1987)
Blood Brothers (1990)
The Big Sting (1991)
Deadly Silence (with Antonio Nicaso, 1993)
A Mother’s Story (with Joyce Milgaard, 1999)
Frères 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: 978-1-55199688-2
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
Corporation’s 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.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
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
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Selected Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
INTRODUCTION
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 there’s 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 it’s 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. There’s 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 don’t? 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 they’re taking illegal drugs to market or
moving themselves – speedily – out of harm’s 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 weren’t 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 Canada’s 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 didn’t even consider himself a
criminal, his life ended on the gallows, as he had fallen from grace in
political circles.
Organized crime is nothing new in Canada, and it was thriving 250
years before Confederation. It fuelled the adventures of fur-trading
pioneers like Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Sieur des Groseilliers, known to