Chapter Twelve #2
“I haven’t yet, either,” I say to ease his tension.
When the server returns, I order a steak sandwich. Mr. Buchanan is stressed again, so I tell him to order whatever he likes.
“I’d like the braised beef,” he says, surprising me. It’s a substantial meal. The man likes to eat. Not for the first time, I notice the width of his shoulders beneath the jacket, a hidden strength in his hands. The close shave that hints at golden blond in the restaurant’s lighting.
“Anything else to drink?”
Mr. Buchanan and I exchange a glance.
“You know, that beef would go well with a glass of red wine,” I suggest. “With my sandwich, too.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “At lunch?”
“It’s a working lunch,” I say, wondering what it will take to loosen him up. I’d rather not lead him by the hand the entire meal. “And I work best over a glass of wine, don’t you?”
He seems a bit scandalized, but also pleased.
When the wine arrives at our table mere seconds later, we toast our new research project, take a sip, then he dives eagerly into his briefcase.
He has brought copies of typed pages, photos, and newspaper articles, and as he lays them out, I see his confidence resume.
“We sort of breezed over that conversation about ghosts,” he begins, “and I kept thinking about whose voices might have travelled through those pipes. From an academic perspective, it seems obvious that they came from the living, not the dead, and I had read something a while ago about possible criminal activities at the time, including some interesting but undesirable characters who could have been guests at the hotel. As soon as I began to research it, I discovered a gold mine. These days, the country is filled with gangs. Those emerged a few decades after the age of the real gangster. We have the Bloods and the Crips—”
“We do? I had no idea.”
“Canada has a lot of different kinds of gangs. Biker clubs, Mafias, Indigenous gangs, cartel affiliates, race-based groups, and street-level gangbangers, like the Bloods, the Crips, the Asian Assassinz, and the biggest biker gang of all, the Hells Angels. There’s another very violent gang in Toronto these days called XYZ.
You’ll never guess their biggest competitor. ”
I lean in.
“ABC,” he exclaims.
With every word, he’s getting more comfortable. It’s surprising, hearing this somewhat meek archivist talking about violent offenders as if they are little more than statistics, but I like it.
“Gangs started getting organized in the 1970s. Before then, the Mafia bosses ran everything, but we didn’t hear too much about them up here.
The best-known gangster in Canadian history is Rocco Perri.
When he came to Toronto from Italy, he lived in The Ward.
A lot of immigrants lived there before they were able to make a real living.
Perri was what they called an enforcer. Collecting on debts, breaking legs, that kind of thing.
His troubles started when he fell in love with a woman named Bessie Starkman, who was almost as tough as he was.
They married and moved to Hamilton, where they ran a brothel.
They had their hands in a lot of things, like gambling.
Funny thing about those two: people kept showing up dead around them. ”
The meal arrives, and Mr. Buchanan leans back, eyeing the meat with anticipation. After I start, he takes a big bite of his lunch, quietly sighs with appreciation, then swallows and continues the story.
“In the 1920s, Toronto had a reputation as a gambling town. Ernest Hemingway even wrote an article about it when he wrote for The Toronto Star Weekly. It was estimated that in Toronto, ten thousand wagers were placed on horse races every single day. The Perris were getting very rich off those, but the best was yet to come for them: Prohibition. The law said it was legal to make alcohol in Ontario, but illegal to sell it here, so the Perris hired men to bribe officials, fake paperwork, and buy large quantities of booze. They packed it into their fleet of fifty ships, then they pretended to ship it across to the US. In reality, they turned the boats around at night and sold everything to the speakeasies in Ontario.”
I’m rapt. I think I learned something about Perri back in university, but I had no idea his story was this intriguing.
Mr. Buchanan can see my interest. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Like I’m watching a movie. Keep going.”
He takes another bite, and I continue with my sandwich, which isn’t really a “sandwich” but a beautifully grilled piece of steak on a perfectly toasted slice of garlic bread. It smells divine and tastes even better.
“Good, huh?” I ask after a few bites.
“Delicious.” I’m treated unexpectedly to a soft blue gaze. “Thank you for this lunch, Ms. Kelly. I can’t remember the last time I did something like this.”
“The food and the conversation,” I agree, feeling my cheeks warm. “Please, tell me more about the Perris.”
He dabs the corners of his mouth with his napkin, then sets it beside his plate.
“The Perris actually had a lot to do with ending Prohibition here. In October 1923, Rocco and Bessie bought twenty-five hundred bottles from a distillery in Belleville, but after it was loaded onto their boat by hired men, somebody snitched. The police fired on the boat, killed one unarmed man, wounded another, then apprehended all of them in one of the largest booze busts in Ontario history. Trouble was, the public turned it around, saying the cops never should have fired on unarmed men. Instead of the bootleggers, the four police officers were put on trial, and they got off with a hung jury.”
He takes another bite, and the whole time he’s chewing, I can see he’s impatient to tell me more.
“After that, the government started banning anything that wasn’t industrial-level alcohol, because anything less was basically poison.
Well, then the Perris figured out how to somehow treat the cheap alcohol so it was drinkable.
It was all going well for them until one night when they rushed and didn’t treat the poisonous liquor properly.
Forty-five people died. Prohibition ended shortly after, and the government-run Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the LCBO, was introduced. ”
He waves a hand as if to dismiss everything he’s just said. “Sorry. That was just some side research. I couldn’t help it.”
“You can’t stop there! What happened to him? Rocco.”
“That’s the big mystery. In 1944, he stepped out of his house to go for a walk, and he vanished. No one knows what happened to him. Maybe he took off to Mexico. Maybe someone killed him.”
I think he can see the “Wow” in my expression.
“Anyway,” he says, taking a sip of wine, “you wanted to know about the Dominion in particular. There are no records of Perri being around much after the Dominion went up, so I don’t know if he was ever here. But there was another guy. He’s the one I wanted to talk about.”
He sets a black-and-white newspaper photo before me. I’m pretty sure it’s a mug shot. I see a thickset man, probably mid-forties, with black hair, dark features, and a nose that’s been busted a few times.
“Marco Carboni,” Mr. Buchanan says. “Very smart. Split his time between Montreal and Toronto. Lived half his life in the Dominion Hotel. He did well with smuggling and numbers before the Crash in 1929, but his big successes came after. That man knew how to plan ahead.”
“He must have had insider information.”
“From what I have found on this guy, he had insiders everywhere. He was the kingpin when it came to gambling rings, drug trafficking, and prostitution.”
“What happened to him?”
“I couldn’t find anything about that. He was briefly implicated in a murder but was never charged. I can keep searching, if you want.”
“No, no. That’s interesting, though. He’s like Perri, disappearing in the end. I suppose back then it would have been easier to disappear off the radar. Not so much government-issued ID or surveillance around to keep track.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” he asks thoughtfully. He lifts the bottle and pours the last of the wine into my glass. “To be less ‘seen’ in this digital age. Then again, the shortage of identification would make things a lot harder for archivists to trace.”
“True. Mr. Buchanan—”
“Matthew,” he says, and his cheeks flush. “You can call me Matthew, if you’d like.”
I’m so glad to be stepping out of the Mr. and Ms. phase. “And I’m Bridget, but you already know that.” I hesitate, then add, “And it’s Miss.”