CHAPTER
3
If they’d had racy, sensational tabloid weeklies in the Crowsnest Pass in the early 1920s, it would have been splashed across the front pages: “Gun-totin’, bootleggin’, raven-haired Italian beauty shoots cop in back. Gets hanged.”
In reality, rather more responsible journals recorded the historical significance of the case with the headline: ALBERTA HANGS ITS FIRST WOMAN MURDERER. And of course, they had political commentators who expounded at length about the significance of the police officer’s murder as it related to prohibition, the question of “foreigners” in Alberta’s population and the whole debate on capital punishment. It was one hell of a story.
What led to a day of bullets and police bloodshed on a Coleman village street in the Crowsnest Pass in 1922 really had its beginnings years earlier. When the whole world was embroiled in the First World War, the women of Alberta were also involved in a battle of their own. They were after two things—the vote and prohibition. They achieved both, winning the right to vote on April 19, 1916, and getting booze outlawed in Alberta on July 1, 1916, with full prohibition descending on the province on April Fool’s Day, 1918.
You can’t have prohibition in any society without a bootlegging industry being set up to defeat it. The number of thirsty throats doesn’t dry up just because the law changes. And as bosses of every bootlegging operation quickly discover, you can’t run an illicit booze industry without having a police force trying to dismantle your empire at every turn.
In the Crowsnest Pass in the 1920s, the Alberta Hotel in the village of Blairmore became “booze central.” It was owned and run by the most notorious bootlegging baron of the whole Wild West, Emilio Picariello, a Sicilian known to everyone as Emperor Pic.
Look at Blairmore on a map of Alberta. It is tucked away in the southwest corner, almost off the map. But look at Blairmore in the big picture. It is centrally located if you are planning to run your bootleg booze north to Edmonton, west into British Columbia, east to Medicine Hat and south into Montana and Idaho. Which is exactly what Emperor Pic was doing, and doing very effectively, too. He acquired a fleet of big, powerful motor cars, McLaughlin Buicks, known as his “whisky specials,” which could outrun most things on four wheels. His chief mechanic, who kept the fleet in raring-to-go condition, was Carlo Sanfidele, an Italian immigrant.
Among the growing wave of Italian immigrants who flooded into the Crowsnest Pass drawn by the promise of work in the coal mines, came the Constanzo family. They settled just over the British Columbia border in Fernie with their daughter, Filumena. The father ordered his 15-year-old girl to marry the much older Sanfidele, and the couple went south into the United States where Sanfidele tried and failed with various schemes to get rich quick. Upon encountering an immigration problem when trying to get back into Canada, he adeptly changed his name to Charles Lassandro. And when he encountered a constant problem with the pronunciation of Filumena’s name, he ordered she be known instead as Florence. When they returned to Blairmore in the Crowsnest Pass, Charles Lassandro got his old job back as “wheel man” for Emperor Pic. His wife, who had started out as Filumena Sanfidele, was now known as Florence Lassandro.
Florence thrived on the exciting world of rum- running, fast cars, danger and adventure that the bootlegging runs through the Crowsnest Pass brought. She loved nothing better than to ride as the passenger on a booze run with the Emperor, revelling in the knowledge that she had a .38 revolver nestled in her purse. Guns were commonplace among the Italians running the booze. In the two previous years, two Alberta Provincial Police (APP) officers had already been shot dead in the ongoing war against prohibition. The Emperor’s bootleggers took Florence along as built-in insurance—they reckoned no cop would open fire on them with a woman in the car.
September 21, 1922, was to be a big day for the Emperor. He was personally escorting a convoy carrying a major consignment of his contraband liquor from Fernie, British Columbia, through the Crowsnest Pass to his hotel in Blairmore. He was in the lead McLaughlin Buick, with his son, Steve, behind him in the convoy driving the second whisky special. Unknown to Emperor Pic, word of his big booze run had spread. Such a juicy tip would earn a police informant a lucrative reward, and a well-placed rat had tipped off the cops. As the convoy approached the Alberta Hotel, officers of the APP force were already waiting to pounce.
But the ever-wary Emperor spotted the ambush waiting for his bootleggers and blasted the horn on his whisky special, the prearranged signal for his son in the next vehicle to spin on a dime and head his big McLaughlin back west, at least as far as the Alberta–British Columbia border, to safe ground. Meanwhile, the Emperor slewed his car across the road to block an immediate chase. Between Steve Picariello and the border, as he fled west, was the village of Coleman, but he’d soon be through there and into the pass. Back in Blairmore, Sergeant James Scott of the APP realized there was one last hope of intercepting the fugitive. He put through a telephone call to Constable Stephen Lawson in Coleman, warning him that the McLaughlin Buick was racing towards him and that it had to be stopped.
Lawson went out onto the highway and minutes later saw the whisky special barrelling straight at him. He put up his arm to stop it. But Steve Picariello had no intention of being taken and came close to knocking Lawson down as he raced through Coleman at breakneck speed. Lawson reacted instantly, firing at the tires of the speeding car as it fled west. A bullet hit the driver in the hand, but it didn’t stop him. Determined, Lawson grabbed another officer. They sped after the Buick in a police car, only to suffer the frustration of a flat tire. That stopped them dead in their tracks. The Emperor’s son reached the border and safety.
Only a panicky, garbled account of the shootout in Coleman reached the Emperor. He was told his son had been shot by a cop, but no one knew if Steve was alive or dead. Emperor Pic didn’t know if his son had been captured by police or if he was lying bleeding to death beside the highway. What should have been a good rum-running day had been soured by a rat. The cops, especially the Coleman cop, had no damn business shooting his son. They were to blame, and they would pay. The Emperor, armed with his revolver, set off from Blairmore to Coleman to confront the police and find out what had happened to his son. Florence, who by this time had separated from her husband and was living as a housekeeper with the Emperor and his wife, Maria, insisted on going along—with her trusty, loaded .38 in her purse.
For the second time that day, Constable Lawson was confronted by a McLaughlin Buick. Just before 7 p.m., the Emperor pulled up outside the little cottage that served as the police station in Coleman. Lawson, who lived in the police house with his wife and five children, walked out to meet the car with his nine-year-old daughter, Pearl, not far behind.
As Lawson leaned against the car, the Emperor’s frustration and anger boiled over. He screamed at the officer for shooting his son. Then the Sicilian bootlegger pulled his gun and waved it at the cop. Unarmed, Lawson tried to get the Emperor in a headlock by reaching into the car, and they wrestled for control of the revolver. The gun went off several times, though neither man was hit.
Suddenly, Florence pulled out her .38 and shot Lawson in full view of his wide-eyed little girl. He had just turned from the car and was running back towards his house. He instantly dropped to the ground. Neighbours quickly ran out and carried Lawson into the little hospital next door to the police station, but he was beyond help. Before the doctors reached him, he was dead.
Eyewitnesses soon identified the Emperor as one of the shooters, and the next day the APP flooded the Blairmore and Coleman areas of the Crowsnest Pass to hunt the killers who had gunned down one of their own in cold blood. They soon captured Emperor Pic, who had fled to the hills behind Blairmore to hide. It wasn’t long before the police were at Florence’s door. Sergeant Scott, who’d telephoned to warn Lawson what was coming his way when the ambush failed, confronted Florence. She said simply, “He’s dead and I’m alive, and that is all there is to it.”
Florence later gave a lengthier statement and said they hadn’t intended to kill the police officer. She claimed that when the Emperor and the cop were wrestling for the gun in the car, the barrel swung towards her and she panicked and fired, fearing for her life. Police seized her .38 revolver and ballistics experts matched the fatal bullet to her gun.
It was impossible to find a neutral jury in the Crowsnest Pass, so the attorney general of the day, John Edward Brownlee, had the trial moved to Calgary. He attended the trial, though he left the prosecution itself to the distinguished Crown prosecutor Alexander A. McGillivray. The celebrated Calgary criminal lawyer, John McKinley Cameron, defended the two accused murderers.
It was an open-and-shut case from the beginning. McGillivray called on eyewitnesses who described the shooting of Lawson. He already had Florence’s verbal statement to police, confessing that she shot the officer in the back. So much for her self-defence plea, which was as dead as Lawson by the time McGillivray had finished with it. And McGillivray brought on witnesses who’d heard the Emperor urging Florence to open fire. That made the Emperor as guilty as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. The jury came back with two guilty verdicts. There was no mention of mercy. Both Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro were sentenced to be hanged on February 21, 1923, at the Fort Saskatchewan Prison near Edmonton. The sentence of hanging came as a particularly nasty shock to Florence; nevertheless, she began to bide her time in jail with a secure inner feeling that society would never hang a woman. After all, no woman had been hanged anywhere in Canada that century, let alone a woman from a small town in the Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.
Defence lawyer John McKinley Cameron, who had precious little ammunition to fight with during the trial, fired off appeal after appeal in his battle to save the lives of the two condemned prisoners. He succeeded in getting their execution date put back by nearly three months to May, but the Supreme Court of Canada finally rejected his submissions. The gallows went up in the prison for the double hanging at 5 a.m. on May 2, 1923.
The Emperor went first, hanged promptly at 5 a.m. But this still didn’t dent Florence’s inner confidence that she would be spared at the last minute. Only when she was standing on the trap waiting for the hangman to fix the hood and noose did it suddenly seem to hit her that it really was going to happen.
There are various reports of what she said as that last-second realization sank in. In his book A Dance with Death, historian Frank W. Anderson records her words as, “Why do you hang me when I didn’t do anything? Is there no one here who has any pity?” In her book The Bootlegger’s Bride, Jock Carpenter has her saying, “I didn’t hurt anyone ever. I will not forgive any of you for doing this to me.” But after a few words from a priest who was providing her with spiritual strength in her final hours, she then said, “Father, I forgive . . . ” It doesn’t make much difference what she said; she was efficiently dispatched by Wakefield, the hangman, and just before 6 a.m. she was pronounced dead at the age of 22 years.
Now the case was in the realm of the commentators, analysts, armchair critics and historians who reflected on its meaning and interpreted its significance. Rumour mongers soon attached all manner of romantic notions to the plot. For instance, if this beautiful young woman was living in the Emperor’s home, was she his secret mistress? And if she was, could it have been a romantically motivated expression of self-sacrifice that had made her confess, so the police would charge her and spare her man? Or were her affections aimed at the Emperor’s son, Steve, who was more her own age? The trial threw no light on her romantic intentions towards either man, but that didn’t stop the tongues from wagging.
Social commentators added their weighty analysis to the aftermath of the case by concentrating not on the cold-blooded gunning down of an unarmed police officer, but instead focussing on the hanged couple being Italian immigrants. During this turbulent period of the province’s history, many Albertans had a perception that “foreigners” and immigrants, especially Italians, were a cause for distrust. They were seen as inherent lawbreakers. A great number of Albertans considered it no accident that the province’s major hotbed for bootlegging and rum-running was down in the Crowsnest Pass, where the greatest concentration of Italian immigrants was centred. Discrimination was so widespread that John McKinley Cameron, in defending Florence and Emperor Pic during the trial, reminded the jury that they must keep any such “anti-Italian” feelings out of their minds when considering whether the two were guilty or innocent.
One fact is without doubt. The whole case had an enormous impact on the prohibition debate in Alberta. Enforcing the prohibition law was next to impossible for the APP. Three of their officers had been killed in the last three years of the booze war. The cost was too high, and the results not rewarding enough. The anti-prohibition lobby, already strong in the southwest corner of Alberta, found more support from all over the province. In late 1923, the prohibition law was rescinded and booze flowed freely and legally through the province again. Who knows what the women of the temperance movement must have thought of the irony—a bullet from the gun of a woman had wiped out all their hard work.
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For decades, the case attracted historical authors, among them Frank Anderson, who visited the drama twice in The Rum Runners and A Dance with Death: Canadian Women on the Gallows; Jock Carpenter, in her book The Bootlegger’s Bride; and James H. Gray, in his anthology Talk to My Lawyer! Great Stories of Southern Alberta’s Bar and Bench.
More recently, the fate of Florence and the Emperor translated perfectly onto the Internet. The case is featured as one of Alberta’s four biggest-ever trials on the Great Alberta Law Cases website, which is compiled by the Heritage Community Foundation and funded by the Alberta Law Foundation. It was even turned into a radio drama. Finally, in 2003, the case spawned a highly acclaimed new opera called Filumena by John Estacio and John Murrell, staged by the Calgary Opera in association with the Banff Centre.
But of all the historians who have researched the case for posterity, the man who must have been closer to the feelings of both Florence and the Emperor than any other is Frank W. Anderson. Remarkably, he too had heard a judge sentence him to death and had spent time in the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Frank was orphaned as a baby, grew up in foster homes, reform schools and jails, and when he was a teenager he was convicted of killing a prison guard and sentenced to death. But in his case, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he spent 15 years behind bars.
How poignant a moment it must have been for Frank, who received the pity of the court in commuting his sentence, to record among the last words Florence said in those final seconds before the hangman’s noose was put round her neck, “Is there no one here who has any pity?”