There was a time, before mob hit man Ken Murdock pointed a gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, when it seemed Johnny (Pops) Papalia was as permanent a fixture of Hamilton as the limestone cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment. The son of a Prohibition-era bootlegger, young Pops apprenticed in Montreal under Carmine Galante in the 1950s. In the 1963 report of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic, Papalia was named as a key Canadian under the wing of the Buffalo mob. Counsel for that subcommittee was future American attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. Back then, Vito hadn’t even dropped out of high school yet and the Rizzutos weren’t anyone’s idea of a crime family.
Less than two months after Pops’s murder on May 31, 1997, his lieutenant Carmen Barillaro was shot dead in the entranceway of his Niagara Falls, Ontario, home on the eve of his fifty-third birthday. Murdock was again the shooter. Neither killing was directly traced to Vito, although his shadow fell over both crimes. Certainly Murdock, a long-time Hamilton rounder, had never met the Montreal godfather. But just as certainly, the murder was orchestrated by forces that supported him.
In the late nineties, Vito was seeking to cut links to the American La Cosa Nostra and create a Canadian-based Mafia that was no longer an appendix of the US organization. On October 22, 1997, four months after the Papalia murder, Vito met with fifteen men he considered loyalists in a Woodbridge restaurant, including Murdock’s one-time boss, Pasquale (Pat) Musitano of Hamilton. Also there was Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto of Toronto, the proprietor of a west Toronto gym and a cut-rate casket business with the motto “Do not make an emotional loss a financial loss.” His merchandise included free caskets for kids, and a country-styled, denim-covered model called the Tucson (also known as the “Bubba Box”).
Musitano and his younger brother Angelo were originally charged with two counts each of first-degree murder for arranging the Papalia and Barillaro hits. Eventually, they pled guilty to one count each of murder conspiracy for Barillaro’s death. Vito’s name was left out of the court proceedings, although Ontario became a much more agreeable place for him to do business after the deaths. Other inconvenient Ontario bodies that fell conventiently dead included that of Papalia’s close friend Enio Mora of Toronto. His remains, with an artificial leg detached, were found stuffed in the trunk of his gold Cadillac just off Highway 400 in Vaughan.
The removal from the scene of Papalia, Barillaro and Mora certainly helped Vito create more space for his own independent crime family in Canada, free from the stumbling Bonanno family of New York. While politicians in Vito’s home province talked for generations about separation from English-speaking Canada, Vito was making his own version of Quebec independence a reality, except he wanted to take Ontario with him. And the Bonannos were in no position to resist his interprovincial power play.
Murdock later told the Toronto Star that he was instructed by senior members of the Musitano crime family to pull the trigger on a half-dozen others, almost all of whom were key members of the Ontario ’Ndrangheta. Most were blood relatives and in-laws of his father’s old rival, Paolo Violi: Jimmy Luppino and Paolo Violi’s two sons, four other family members and in-laws of the late Giacomo Luppino, and also mob enforcer and former professional wrestler Ion (Johnny K-9) Croitoru, who once rode with the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. Murdock chose not to carry out those jobs.
In all of the cases, Murdock said that he wasn’t explicitly told by his superiors to kill someone. He just heard the mention of someone’s name, followed by the comment, “He has to go.” It was a no-brainer to fill in the blanks. There had once been talk that Jimmy Luppino had brokered a truce with the Rizzutos in the early 1980s in order to spare the male children of the murdered Violi brothers. Even if that had once been true, it was safe to say that all deals were now off.
Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto remained Vito’s point man in Toronto, a position that required street sense, toughness, loyalty and a sense of criminal enterprise. His crew included a man nicknamed “Spiderman,” whose mother had an ongoing affair with Vito. Spiderman worked out hard to improve his gymnastic skills so that he could be a better burglar. There was also gym owner Constantine (Big Gus) Alevizos, a former pro football player who stood six foot six, tipped the scales on the portly side of 450 pounds and had “Big Kahuna” tattooed across his back. Panepinto’s crew smuggled marijuana, manufactured ecstasy tablets and peddled the date-rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), anabolic steroids, stolen painkillers and magic mushrooms. They made up bogus credit cards, which they used to buy products for resale on the black market. Common to members of Panepinto’s group was an affection for the gym and steroids, and also a closeness to local biker clubs, including the independent Toronto-based Vagabonds.
Panepinto’s connection to Vito didn’t scare off members of the Ontario ’Ndrangheta, particularly Domenic Napoli, Antonio Oppedisano and Salvatore (Sam) Calautti. Napoli and Oppedisano were both recent arrivals from Siderno, where Napoli had been part of a hit team for boss Cosimo (The Quail) Commisso. For a time in Ontario, Calautti and Napoli were roommates, and even when they found separate places, they remained good friends.
Calautti wasn’t a physical presence like Panepinto, but out-of-shape mobsters are sometimes the most dangerous, as they are the most likely to start shooting when threatened or irritated. Despite his pudgy, short frame, Calautti commanded fear. Restaurant suppliers dreaded dealing with him, as he would often simply refuse to pay his accounts. At least once, he put a gun on the table to intimidate. “You don’t have to be a juice monkey to be a gangster,” said a police officer who knew him. “He loved inflicting pain on people and people knew it.”
Calautti fell under suspicion in January 1996 when someone lured Toronto baker Frank Loiero from a Sunday family dinner. Thirty minutes later, passersby found Loiero’s bullet-riddled body hanging out of a broken side window of his van, which was parked in the deserted Woodbridge Mall. Loiero had been seated in the back and was shot multiple times at close range with a semi-automatic handgun. On the dead man, police found about $5,000 in cash, a $10,000 ring and a Rolex watch estimated to be worth as much as $25,000. He was also wearing a gold bracelet and necklace. Clearly, this was not a robbery. There were whispers that Loiero, who supplied guns and cars for the mob, had been speaking with police.
Oppedisano and Napoli infuriated Panepinto by cutting into what he considered his video-gambling territory in York Region. In March 2000, the ’Ndrangheta men simply vanished. Rumours circulated that they had been cut up and their remains destroyed in the basement of Panepinto’s casket business on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto’s Corso Italia, but the building was too clean for police to pull traces for DNA tests. Meanwhile, Panepinto quietly relocated to Montreal to get away from the heat and closer to Vito.
Within weeks, dour-faced ’Ndrangheta men from southern Italy came calling for Vito in Montreal, asking blunt questions about their missing relatives. Did Vito know anything about them? Had he ordered their murders? The people asking the questions were serious men and they expected satisfaction. Panepinto was now a liability for Vito. When the Calabrians left, Vito summoned him for a meeting, which ended with Vito reassuring Panepinto that it was safe for him to go home. Panepinto apparently trusted his boss with his life, and he returned to Toronto.
Calautti fed off the adrenalin of tough jobs, and the thought of avenging his friend Napoli made the idea of a hit on Panepinto doubly appealing. Aside from the Loiero hit, Calautti was already a suspect in a string of other mob killings and considered a made man in the ’Ndrangheta. He worked for three GTA families, all of whom were considered strongly opposed to Vito’s stranglehold on Montreal and recent moves in Ontario. Shortly before 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 3, 2000, Panepinto was driving his maroon Cadillac on Bloor Street West, just west of Highway 27, when a van pulled alongside with its passenger-side window rolled down. Seconds later, the Cadillac rolled through the intersection with Panepinto slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding from shotgun pellets and six bullets in his shoulder, chest and abdomen. His murder was never officially solved, but it wasn’t considered a mystery. Suspicions stopped at Calautti and a close associate.
Vito appeared at the Toronto funeral home to pay his respects, even though he had sent Panepinto to his death. Perhaps he even felt bad, as he didn’t have a personal grudge against the dead man, who trusted him until the end. Accompanying Vito from Montreal were Paolo Renda, Frank Arcadi and Rocco Sollecito. The murder marked a rare lapse in Vito’s judgment, and a subtle turning point in his fortunes. It would have been far better to take action himself against Panepinto if he needed to sacrifice his lieutenant. By bending to the pressure of the Italian team that visited him, Vito had further legitimized the ’Ndrangheta on the streets and undermined his own security.