From July 1961 to February 1962 I continued to organize non-union workers until at 5 a.m. on February 13 my roommate, Ed Boyer, woke me up and joked: “Time to go to jail!” My lawyer was going to argue my appeal in court and the process required that I surrender myself into custody before court opened. The arguments seemed to go on forever as I waited in the cells. Then, about 5 p.m., a guard came down and told me I would now go to prison for three months instead of six. I was shocked and bewildered. Although three was better than six, I had expected more clemency from the court since things had settled down. We were not able to present any new evidence or arguments because in an appeal we could only argue the defence we had already made and show that the original trial judge had made an error. My original case had been poorly prepared and that hurt me. My friend Mike Reilly from Local 183 sat in the courtroom during the appeal and said one of the three judges on the panel seemed determined to send a message. “This case reminds me of what happened in Argentina recently [when a brawl broke out during a soccer game],” the judge said. “These people have to learn that we have laws here that have to be respected.”
It was a sad day for me. I wanted to cry but my pride held me back. I noticed, however, that not too far from me another prisoner was crying. He was about thirty-five years old and, as I discovered, Italian. He, too, had been picked up in a mass arrest during the strike of 1961. By coincidence, his hearing was on the same day as my appeal. He had been given a month in jail and was crying because he was worried about his family. They would have no money coming in. He poured out his emotions: “Who is going to feed my family?”
It was a tough moment for both of us. Coincidentally, twenty years later I hired the man’s son, John Colacci, as a trade union representative. John had graduated from Ryerson and worked in construction. I also promoted him as the director of the Local 183 Training Centre which I established years later. Though his hiring was a complete coincidence, I would never forget the tears of a father who was worried about his family. We all struggled to provide for our families. Being denied work, losing money due to a work-related injury, or being sent to jail for trying to stand up for your rights: these are injustices to all workers.
A few days after the hearing, I was moved from the Don Jail in Toronto to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph. This was where young men with no previous criminal records and sentenced to less than two years of jail time were sent for rehabilitation. Those given more than six months were segregated in individual cells and subjected to aptitude tests before they were assigned to a skills-training program. The administration thought I had been given a nine-month sentence instead of three on appeal. I can only assume that they added three months to the original six instead of deducting. Before they figured out their mistake, I was examined by a psychologist who congratulated me for my intelligence quotient which he found to be above average. Once it was clear that I was only there for three months, I was moved to a dormitory where I learned the ropes.
I had been issued a new uniform of denim pants and jacket. Another detainee wanted to me to trade it to him for cigarettes and chocolate. I declined. He turned nasty and said, “I’ll beat you up and take it off of you.” I made the mistake of telling him that I would report him the guards. Being a northern Italian, it was what we did. Our culture reported any wrongdoing to the police. But I had no idea what I had triggered. Telling a guard was the worst thing that could be done in prison. Worse, I was vulnerable and exposed as I had been assigned to the kitchen because the threat of deportation was still hanging over me and the guards wanted to keep an eye on me. Unfortunately, the kitchen was also where the nastiest juvenile detainees were assigned. It was large with a three-storey ceiling. An observation tower rose from the centre with a guard perched inside to keep an eye on us. At one point, I noticed the detainees in the kitchen had formed a kind of human circle. Slowly, they were huddling around me. Some of them had knives, which were easy to come by in the kitchen. They had organized themselves so that the guard observing from above would not notice anything strange. When I realized what was going on I quickly jumped over to the observation tower’s staircase and climbed up. The guard ordered me to go down but I refused, saying that I needed to be put into protective custody. He asked my name and called his bosses. After a while, two other guards arrived and transferred me to the infirmary where I felt safe.
My new job at the infirmary was nice. It was clean and calm and required little work. I learned to play chess and read a lot of books, including The Conquest of Happiness by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. I also won my first chess game, provoking anger in the man who taught me how to play. The majority of the guards had served in the British Army and leaned left, towards the Labour Party, so they were good to me. They knew why I was jailed and would secretly slip me new razor blades and other basic essential items. The prison chaplain even asked me to assist him as an altar boy during the Mass and it reminded me of my time as a young boy in Italy. At one point, I remembered all the excuses that I had made up for my parish priest who wanted me to be an altar boy. I almost burst out laughing at the thought of it. I had come all the way to a Canadian jail to be an altar boy.
During my sentence, an official from the Department of Immigration came to see me. He was much more cordial than the first man I had encountered. Still, he made me understand that I was at risk of being deported. That same week, Reilly also came to visit and I told him about the deportation threat. He told Gallagher. By coincidence, the Canadian Labour Congress convention, which occurred every two years, was to be held in Vancouver a week or so after my Immigration encounter. Gallagher went to the convention and spoke with the president of the CLC, Claude Jodoin, about my situation. Jodoin set up a meeting with Michael Starr, who was then the federal Labour minister, and who was at the convention representing his government. Starr promised Gallagher that he would look into my case but asked that the matter remain confidential.
The next day, just before Starr’s speech to the convention, Jodoin asked Gallagher to bring up my case on the floor of the assembly in front of more than 2,000 delegates. Gallagher was reluctant because he had promised to keep the matter private. But Jodoin insisted and Gallagher relented. He was a great speaker. He used simple but human terms to portray my plight: “This poor Italian boy who looks like a student is in jail only for having defended the rights of Italian immigrants. He now risks being deported.” Gallagher’s words heated up the assembly. They gave him a standing ovation peppered with shouts of protest. At this point Jodoin called out Starr and demanded to know what he intended to do about this terrible situation. Starr was on the spot. He had no choice but to take a stand and so he publicly committed himself to preventing my deportation. Just like that, the threat was gone. A few years later, my criminal record was also erased.
I met Michael Starr when he became the chairman of the Ontario Workmen’s Compensation Board and personally thanked him for having intervened in my favour.