Canadian Encyclopedia of Organized Crime

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 wEdwards, Peter is the author of 'Canadian Encyclopedia of Organized Crime', published 2004 under ISBN 9780771030444 and ISBN 0771030444.