Vincenzo Catroni, the man long described as the godfather of the Montreal Mafia, once denied being anyone’s leader. “I am the leader of myself,” he insisted during an interview. That measured denial stands in stark contrast to the life documented in a new short documentary tracing his rise from a small Calabrian village to the top of Canada’s organized crime world. Born in 1911 in Mammola, Calabria, Italy, Catroni immigrated to the United States in 1924 at age fourteen with his parents, Nicodemo and Maria.
The family stopped briefly in New York before settling in Montreal, Quebec, in the Italian neighborhood near the corner of Ontario and Saint Timothy Streets. They moved into a three-story red brick home, and the family grew to eight children: Vincenzo, his brothers Gib, Mike, and Frank, and his sisters Palmina and Margaret. Vincenzo and his parents received Canadian citizenship in 1929. During the 1920s and 1930s, Vincenzo and his father repeatedly clashed with the law over bootlegging offenses.
Nicodemo faced charges related to an altercation with a liquor inspector, illegal possession of alcohol, theft, and possession of stolen goods. Vincenzo never attended school. At eighteen, he was arrested for assaulting a teenage girl named Maria Braniano, but after posting a $1,000 bond, the charges were dropped when she agreed to marry him. The couple remained married for life.
His early criminal record was extensive. Months after his marriage, he served 30 days in jail for illegally selling alcohol. In 1931, he was convicted for writing a bad check. In 1934, he received a six-month sentence for possessing counterfeit currency, later admitting the items were just two fake 50-cent pieces.
Before his criminal career fully took shape, Catroni worked as a carpenter for his father. He later became a professional wrestler under the ring name “Vic Vincent,” trained by wrestler Armand Courville. Courville was more than a trainer; he was allegedly involved in various illegal business ventures and introduced the young Catroni to Montreal’s underworld. The two remained friends and partners for life.
During what was called the “baseball bat elections,” the Liberal Party and the Union Nationale reportedly paid Catroni and Courville to clear polling stations and stuff ballot boxes for their opponents. In 1936, Catroni was convicted of assaulting an election official, his last conviction for nearly four decades. In 1947, Courville and Catroni partnered with brothers Edmond and Marius Martin to open a nightclub called Aux Zerats d’Or, or “The Golden Pancake,” at the corner of Saint Laurent and Sainte Catherine Streets. The club gained fame for its star Jacques Normand and performances by celebrities like Charles Aznavour and Luis Mariano.
Still, Catroni built his real wealth through illicit activities: prostitution, gambling, and bookmaking. Montreal’s proximity to New York, the rise of modern communications technology, and a sudden crackdown on illegal gambling attracted American crime organizations, with Catroni acting as their arm. During the late 1940s, the Luciano network’s drug trafficking operations were vast and complex. Heroin was the main narcotic imported by the network, sourced largely from French underworld gangs that formed the core of the French Mafia.
Antoine D’Agostino, an influential Corsican gang leader who supplied Luciano and his Mafia allies with bulk heroin, used Catroni’s Montreal nightclub as his mailing address. On September 14, 1949, an undercover agent arrested D’Agostino while buying 32 ounces of heroin from him. Officers from the RCMP’s drug branch searched the club’s phone records for information on D’Agostino’s contacts and discovered numerous calls to New York, particularly to Sebastiano Bellanca, a Gambino family member and notorious drug dealer. Another key figure was Harry Ship, known as Montreal’s gambling king, a major bookmaker and manager of secret casinos across the city.
Though he never graduated, he excelled academically, especially in mathematics, and was well-liked. In 1940, he converted several apartments on Sainte Catherine Street into betting offices equipped with telegraph machines that broadcast horse racing results and other sports events live across the U. S. and Canada.
Within six years, police raided the premises 34 times; Ship paid the fines without complaint, and operations resumed. Ship’s lasting legacy in Montreal may have been introducing the New York Cosa Nostra to the city. He appeared to owe money to Frank Erickson, the wealthiest bookmaker on the East Coast, whose hidden partners included Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Lucky Luciano. As a result of his debts, Ship was forced to accept the intervention of New York families in the early 1950s.
American bosses appointed two immigrant mobsters to protect him: Sicilian Luigi Greco and Ukrainian Frank Petrula. Both had previously served as bodyguards for Harry Davis, a Jewish gangster who ran Montreal’s underworld for a year before being shot to death in one of his betting shops in 1946. After Davis’s murder, they joined Vincenzo and his brother Gib Catroni and took over some of Davis’s illegal operations. Meanwhile, in the late 1940s, another mobster named Carmine Galante, known as “Lilo,” began looking north toward Montreal.
After allegedly killing Carlo Tresca, an Italian-American newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer, in 1943, Galante’s reputation in the underworld rose sharply, and he became a soldier in the Bonanno crime family. By the 1950s, Canadian branches of car, radio, and appliance manufacturers were appearing, and Galante wanted to do the same for organized crime on behalf of his boss, Joe Bonanno. Galante arrived in Montreal in 1953 with a very bad reputation, extensive Mafia connections, and a desire to escape the constant scrutiny of the Kefauver hearings on organized crime in the United States. His mission was to expand Bonanno family operations northward.
He saw immense potential in Montreal for the American underworld and sought to make it a hub for drug trafficking. He worked at an electronics company under the protection of Frankie Carbo, a former Murder, Inc. gunman and legendary boxing promoter. Galante soon began collecting protection money from underworld gambling dens and nightclubs known as “blind pigs.
”
At that time, Vincenzo Catroni was considered an important figure, though not the dominant force in Montreal’s underworld. His nightclub in the city’s Tenderloin district attracted judges, lawyers, and politicians. Luigi Greco was known to be close to Galante, and Catroni’s relationship with Galante likely developed from that connection, eventually leading them to become godfathers to each other’s children. Galante soon established the Bonanno crime family in Montreal, swearing in several members, with Luigi Greco and Vincenzo Catroni as his top lieutenants.
In 1954, Galante sent Greco and Petrula to Italy to meet Lucky Luciano. When Frank Petrula returned, police raided his home and found a diary listing local politicians and journalists who had received $100,000 in bribes to defeat mayoral candidate Jean Drapeau, a reformer opposed to the Mafia. Drapeau won the election anyway. Petrula’s carelessness was not forgiven, and some feared he would soon cooperate with authorities.
Petrula disappeared and was presumed dead. Rumors claimed that Greco, who owned a pizza restaurant at the time, disposed of his body. Drapeau’s years in office did not succeed in expelling the Mafia from Montreal. In 1955, the RCMP and immigration authorities summoned Galante to explain his source of income.
Unable to provide any information, he was deported, but he sent his son-in-law, Antonio Morelli, to take over. Morelli was also deported. Joe Bonanno replaced Galante with Salvatore “Little Sal” Catalano, but by 1957 he too was deported after police found 240 abandoned Cuban cigars and 880 American cigarettes in his possession, undeclared to customs. Joe Bonanno then appointed Vincenzo Catroni as his agent in Montreal.
In his book “Blood Brotherhood: How Canada’s Most Powerful Mafia Family Runs Its Business,” Peter Edwards wrote that Catroni was nothing more than a decorated branch manager taking orders from New York, and that the Catroni family was merely a Canadian branch of the New York Bonanno family, not an independent crime family. In 1964, Catroni faced a dilemma when his boss, Joseph Bonanno, challenged the Commission, the governing body of the American Mafia. Allegedly in 1963, Bonanno had plotted to assassinate several of his Commission rivals, bosses Tommy Lucchese, Carlo Gambino, and Stefano Magaddino. Bonanno sought the support of Joseph Magliocco, boss of the Profaci family, who in turn assigned the task to one of the Mafia’s top hitmen, Joseph Colombo.
But the opportunistic Colombo revealed the plot to its targets. Bonanno was summoned before the Commission to explain himself, but instead he fled to Montreal. Catroni was forced to choose between serving his boss, Bonanno, and the Commission, which both demanded his loyalty, when Bonanno arrived unexpectedly. Sam DeCavalcante, the New Jersey boss, was sent north to Montreal to ask Bonanno to return to New York, but Bonanno declared he no longer recognized the Commission’s authority.
Catroni struggled to remain neutral. Magaddino interpreted Bonanno’s presence in Montreal as intent to expand into his territory in southern Ontario, leading Buffalo to threaten Catroni that he must distance himself from Bonanno if he wanted to survive. Fortunately for Catroni, Bonanno was deported from Canada in the summer of 1964. On November 28, 1966, a delegation of New York Mafia bosses, led by Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, accompanied by Carl Simari, Peter Magaddino, Vito DeFilippo, Peter Notaro, and Pat DeFilippo, arrived in Montreal to speak with Catroni about the upcoming Expo 67.
They were stopped near the corner of Jean Talon and Hutchinson Streets, and police found three loaded guns. Salvatore Bonanno was fined only $25 for driving without a valid license. Although each of Magaddino’s associates had their own driver during the arrest process, immigration officers forced the Americans to return to New York. Stefano Magaddino was furious when he learned of the planned meeting between Bonanno and Catroni, prompting Catroni to send a message denying that the meeting was his doing.
After Magaddino offered to meet Catroni in Buffalo to discuss the matter, Catroni refused. Giacomo Luppino of Hamilton, one of the few people Magaddino respected, intervened, telling the Buffalo boss that Catroni was replaceable. Luppino managed to deceive Magaddino and minimize Catroni’s offenses, calming the situation, partly because his daughter Grazia was married to Paolo Violi, a rapidly rising mobster who was then a member of Vincenzo Catroni’s crew. Magaddino viewed Violi as his launching pad in Montreal, which would ultimately allow him to add Quebec to his Canadian territory and weaken his bitter rivals, the Bonanno family.
Violi, for his part, hated both Bonanno and Magaddino. In a 1967 phone call tapped by police, Violi advised Luppino’s son, Jimmy, that the Catroni family should declare its independence and establish itself as a separate crime family. During the “Banana Split” years, Vincenzo Catroni took care to remain neutral. He had risen through the Mafia ranks after Galante’s forced departure to the United States a decade earlier, becoming the sole leader of the Bonanno family’s Montreal faction and demoting the Sicilian Luigi Greco to lieutenant.
But a fire was brewing, and Montreal, like New York, was about to erupt.