The shot heard around the underworld
The shooting of Mafia boss Johnny Papalia is like a mystery novel where every character might have pulled the trigger, writes Adrian Humphreys.
HAMILTON - Johnny "Pops'' Papalia was a creature of habit.
On the last day of spring 1997, Hamilton's homegrown Mafia
chieftain started his weekend as he did almost every other Saturday
morning.
He left his Market Street penthouse apartment and travelled the
five blocks to Railway Street, a squat, dead-end road running off
Cannon Street West, across from Sir John A. Macdonald High School.
Inside a plain brick building at number 20 Railway, Mr. Papalia
settled into his routine -- taking care of business.
It is a street where Mr. Papalia felt safe. The office, according
to government documents and the current phone book, is the business
address for eight companies, and sits where the house in which Mr.
Papalia was born once stood.
He grew up on this street, and friends and family have lived there
for three generations.
It is a street where most of the nine brick buildings are owned by
a real estate firm, with Rocco and Frank Papalia, John's brothers,
listed as sole directors. It's a place where family friends keep an
eye on traffic.
Mr. Papalia was working his way though an uneventful day inside
this home base when a man came to visit, police say.
It must have been someone Mr. Papalia knew, or knew of, for the
clever mafioso to be drawn outside alone.
It was warm but cloudy, and children played and adults strolled in
the park nearby. Witnesses saw Mr. Papalia and a younger man talking
as they walked through the parking lot at about 1:30 p.m.
It was a common sight. The top boss of Ontario's Mafia didn't talk
"business'' with walls nearby. An ongoing target of police
surveillance, Mr. Papalia knew the walls had ears.
Then this typical day took a decidedly unusual turn.
Without warning, the younger man pulled a gun and shot Mr. Papalia
once in the head. The gunman then ran to a green pickup parked
nearby.
Mr. Papalia fell backwards, clutching his glasses in one hand.
A woman, who saw the shooting, ran to help the unconscious and
bleeding Mr. Papalia, holding his hand, taking his pulse and waiting
for help to arrive. But it was too late for the 73-year-old man. He
was rushed to Hamilton General Hospital and pronounced dead one hour
later.
If the year-old unsolved shooting of Mr. Papalia was a mystery
novel, it would be one of those cliffhangers where every character
might have done the deed.
"The trouble with something like Papalia is, really, there are
hundreds of reasons why he might be killed,'' says organized crime
author James Dubro.
"When you're a professional criminal for 50 or 60 years, every
single deal you do, everyone you have killed ... could give enough
reason.''
But as a real-life crime of violence it is far more than an idle
whodunit.
Within the underworld, what is at stake is control of Ontario's
huge profit from illicit activities. To the wider community it is
about Mob violence and other negative impacts from organized crime
-- including the cost of tracking down the killers.
The importance of the case is not lost on Detective-Inspector Don
Birrell, the Ontario Provincial Police officer now in charge of
Project Expiate, the task force probing the Papalia murder.
Neither is the difficulty still facing his 20 investigators from
the OPP, RCMP, and the Hamilton-Wentworth, Halton and Niagara police
forces.
"With investigations of this nature, obviously it's really
complex. Nothing moves along very fast,'' says Det. Birrell. "There
are all kinds of details that need to be followed up on and new
information is coming in every day.''
Many feel the task force is charged with solving the unsolvable.
Mafia murders are rarely punished in the courts.
Is progress really being made?
"I don't see anything popping up tomorrow, but we feel fairly
confident we're drawing ever closer to a conclusion,'' says Det.
Birrell.
Hamilton-Wentworth police chief Ken Robertson says if he didn't
think Project Expiate was making progress he wouldn't keeping
footing his share of the considerable bill.
Are there specific suspects?
Says Det. Birrell: "We have a direction that includes a number of
people. As we collect evidence that number fluctuates.''
But Det. Birrell is circumspect about almost all specifics of the
three shooting deaths Project Expiate is probing; those of Mr.
Papalia, his Niagara lieutenant Carman Barillaro two months later,
and the 1985 death of Salvatore (Sam) Alaimo.
He fears the task force is subject to counter-intelligence efforts
by criminal elements interested in how the investigation is
progressing.
He keeps the location of the task force office secret. But he does
say more than 300 people have been interviewed.
Given John Papalia's extraordinary life, some Mafia experts say the
surprise isn't so much that he was killed, but that he survived so
long.
Mr. Papalia was never far from death -- either his own or of people
close to him. He dodged a lot of bullets, some figuratively and some
very literally.
Mr. Papalia was wounded in a shootout in Montreal in June 1955,
three months after his 31st birthday.
But Mr. Papalia acknowledged his own mortality in 1974 when
Montreal Godfather Vic Cotroni made a credible threat. Mr. Papalia
had unwittingly become the victim of a swindle while he was pulling
a swindle.
He was essentially a prop to convince a businessman his life was in
danger from powerful Montreal mobsters. The victim paid to remove
the alleged threat but started asking around Montreal about the
situation.
When Vic Cotroni and his right-hand man, former Hamilton resident
Paolo Violi, caught wind their names were used to pull a swindle --
but not offered a cut of the profits -- they were incensed.
They met Mr. Papalia in a Montreal bar to settle accounts.
Listening in were Quebec police officers who had wired the place for
sound.
Mr. Violi to Mr. Papalia: "You, Johnny, know these things, that we
have to work together but instead you did it alone. You used our
names. Don't you want us to be friends? Bring $150,000 and no one
will know anything ... Be aware that we don't like crooked things
... and we respect each other but with us you have to come
straight.''
Mr. Cotroni then said if Mr. Papalia didn't come clean, "we'll
kill you.''
Mr. Papalia: "I know you'll kill me Vic. I believe you'll kill
me.''
A decade later, Vic Cotroni's brother, Frank was at the top of the
Montreal Mafia. And an associate of his also spoke of Mr. Papalia's
death.
Ral Simard, a close underling and hitman for Frank Cotroni had come
to Ontario to set things up for the Montreal Mob. One of the first
orders of business was to smooth Mr. Papalia's ruffled feathers.
Mr. Simard said in his autobiography that Mr. Papalia made some
noise about Mr. Simard's moves. Later, Frank Cotroni and his
lieutenant, Claude Faber, checked in with Mr. Simard to make sure
all was well.
"Have you run into Johnny Papalia?'' Mr. Cotroni asked.
"Everything's fine,'' Mr. Simard said.
"If he makes trouble, kill the f--ker -- he's old enough to die,''
said Mr. Faber.
But in the end, Mr. Papalia helped Mr. Simard, as the Montreal man
pushed into strip clubs. In return, Mr. Simard let Mr. Papalia put
his pinball machines in his clubs.
Another potential bullet dodged.
Mr. Papalia's chosen path to the top of organized crime was clearly
one fraught with danger. He saw dozens of friends and foes die or
disappear.
The very year he was born, 1924, there were at least five Mob
murders around Hamilton and Niagara, the result of an escalating
bootlegging feud.
His own father, Antonio Papalia, was suspected of having a hand in
the gruesome 1930 shotgun slaying of Bessie Perri, wife of Mr.
Papalia's boss, the bootlegging king Rocco Perri.
And Johnny Papalia's early mob mentor, New York underboss Carmine
Galante, was also gunned down by four hooded men as he settled in
for lunch in a New York City restaurant in 1979.
Mr. Papalia also suffered from -- or complained of -- severe health
problems. As early as 1962, Mr. Papalia was said to be ailing.
At his trial for his role in the French Connection heroin smuggling
ring, press reports said he was coughing up blood due to
tuberculosis.
He was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years despite his
condition. But in 1968, after serving less than half the sentence,
he was released from a U.S. prison and sent back to Canada. At the
border he told reporters he wasn't well.
"Look fellows, I'm a sick man. I'm nothing now. I'm not even a
spit in the ocean.'' And in his only full interview with the media,
Mr. Papalia told reporter Peter Moon in 1986: "Listen, I'm 62 and
I'm tired and I have to crawl out of bed every morning.''
Three months before his murder, he was said to look shaky and
required surgery to readjust his pacemaker. He had made repeated
trips to the hospital.
Mr. Papalia is believed to have got in a little gunplay of his own.
His name has been linked closely to well over a dozen slayings,
including rumours he helped make Rocco Perri disappear.
Mr. Papalia was named in the press in relation to the murder of
Tony Coposodi, a driver for Mr. Papalia's short-lived taxi company
on James Street North. And he was a leading suspect in the deadly
hail of bullets that hit Stanley Bader, a Toronto loan shark and
stock promoter who was the key witness against Mr. Papalia in the
same extortion case that got Mr. Papalia threatened by the Montreal
mob.
Mr. Bader's slaying came on the heels of Mr. Papalia's release from
prison and was preceded by threatening calls. "This is in revenge
for five years ago,'' said one.
In the book Deadly Silence, an exploration of Canadian Mafia
murders written by Antonio Nicaso and Peter Edwards, the pair of
investigative journalists strongly suggest Mr. Papalia was the
triggerman in the 1983 killing of Toronto mob boss Paul Volpe.
Although Mr. Papalia had read the book, he never took issue with
the theory, despite a brief conversation with Mr. Nicaso after its
publication. But during Mr. Moon's 1986 interview, Mr. Papalia
angrily denied he was a killer.
"Whatever you write,'' he said, "don't say I ever killed anyone.
I've never murdered anyone.''
The other Mafia murder that sparked the formation of Project
Expiate, that of Carman Barillaro, is no less of a whodunit. Mr.
Barillaro ran a criminal organization in the Niagara peninsula, but
like a dozen other Ontario crime bosses, answered to Mr. Papalia.
Mr. Barillaro was interviewed by police soon after Mr. Papalia's
slaying, but police will not say whether it was as a witness or
suspect.
Two months later, Mr. Barillaro was the subject of his own murder
investigation. He had been talking on the telephone on July 23,
1997, when there was a knock at the door. He told the person on the
other end of the phone to wait. The sound of a gunshot was heard
over the line and Mr. Barillaro never returned to the call.
It was the eve of his 53rd birthday.
In 1988, Reginald King, an RCMP corporal and expert on organized
crime, testified in court that Mr. Papalia and Mr. Barillaro were
tight.
He showed police surveillance photographs of the two meeting, and
said while Mr. Papalia was the top Mob boss in Ontario, Mr.
Barillaro was pegged at "about seventh or eighth.''
With true Mafia panache, Mr. Barillaro juggled legitimate
businesses with criminal activity. He ran a variety of companies --
from hair salons to a crafts store. He also seemed a generous man.
While claiming severe financial difficulty -- he filed bankruptcy
papers on Christmas Eve 1986 -- he let a friend use his credit card
at will.
His bankruptcy came two years after serving two years in jail, and
a year before he ordered the execution of a drug dealer who owed him
money.
A police informant got Mr. Barillaro on tape arranging the hit. A
month later, Mr. Barillaro was charged with conspiracy to commit
murder.
At a preliminary hearing in Welland, Ont., it was heard that Mr.
Barillaro wanted the killing done at the busiest street corner in
the city as a public statement about the consequences of not paying
debts to the Mob.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years. A year and a
half later, Mr. Barillaro was out on parole, but his freedom didn't
last long.
Two months later, on Sept. 6, 1990, Mr. Barillaro was one of eight
men arrested after police from Ontario and New York State seized
cocaine and marijuana with a street value of $2.2 million. All were
charged with conspiracy to import narcotics.
Drugs, contract killing, money.
Like Mr. Papalia, Mr. Barillaro provided many reasons why he might
be a target. But it is in the context of Mr. Papalia's slaying that
the Niagara mafioso's death is of significance.
"Barillaro's murder proves the murder of Papalia was part of a
bigger plan which is changing the face of the Mob in Ontario,'' says
Mr. Nicaso.
Mr. Nicaso says the killing shows the Papalia murder was unlikely
the work of a lone crackpot, as some theorized after the slaying.
Mr. Nicaso suggests the murders were part of a plan by the Montreal
Mob to seize control of Ontario's underworld.
The Mafia murders have spawned many theories and rumours.
It is rumoured that Mr. Papalia's killer is now known to both
police and the underworld and is actually currently in jail on
unrelated charges.
Another rumour involves the mysterious inclusion of the 1985 murder
of Stelco janitor Sam Alaimo into Project Expiate's mandate. Mr.
Alaimo was shot in a drive-by shooting.
It is also rumoured the Alaimo slaying was added for financial
reasons. Including the case in the Expiate mandate may make the task
force eligible for additional government funding.
The task force's head remains tightlipped on all of the rumours --
neither confirming nor denying any of them. But on the funding
issue, Det. Birrell becomes animated.
"I have to be conscious of fiscal restraints, but I don't try to
pad the investigation to get more money.''
So, one year after the shots heard around the underworld, police
are still trying to catch the killer or killers.
"As time passes, any case becomes more difficult to investigate,''
says Det. Birrell. "How long will it take? As long as we have
information coming in and leads to follow we're not going to stop.''
Ottawa Citizen, Hamilton Spectator, June 7, 1998
