Authorities fear an Ontario mafia war
A string of suspicious fires and dozens of unsolved violent attacks this year is stoking fears of an ongoing mob war across southern Ontario.
Most recently, a fire broke out at a home on Mellings Drive in Woodbridge, north of Toronto, early Wednesday morning. It’s the same home that York Regional Police found bullet holes in two other times this summer. Though the home was under guard at the time of the fire, nobody was inside, a police spokesperson told reporters. There were no injuries during the two alleged shootings.
“The way we are investigating each of these incidents is on its own.”These incidents come on the heels of a massive explosion in June at the Caffé Corretto, also in Woodbridge, one of 11 cafés and social clubs in the area raided by organized crime investigators in 2016 who seized 74 illegal gambling machines as part of Project Oeider. And in May, Angelo Musitano, the younger brother of well-known mobster Pasquale who runs a bakery, was fatally gunned down outside of his home, near Hamilton. The pair pleaded guilty in 1997 to conspiring to kill a crime boss in Niagara.
While former Hamilton undercover officer Paul Manning told the Toronto Star in July that the fires and killings likely symbolize a power struggle to fill the void left after the death of Canada’s most top mafia don Vito Rizzuto in 2013, police forces still working on the cases haven’t been making those connections publicly.
“The way we are investigating each of these incidents is on its own,” York Regional Police spokesperson Constable Andy Pattenden told VICE News. “We haven’t put out any links in these cases at this point in time, but I can tell you that our investigators who are looking at all these cases obviously keep an open mind to the fact that there could be links and there could be organized crime involvement.”
Pattenden pointed to recent media reports that show just how confined the recent violent acts have been to certain areas in the Greater Toronto Area, in particular the corridor along Highway 7, since the summer of 2013, when well-known mobster Sam Calautti was gunned down alongside an associate outside a stag party at a Woodbridge banquet hall.
“Our ongoing appeal is for witnesses and people to come forward.”Still, because the recent incidents are being investigated in isolation, Pattenden insists it would be inaccurate to describe what’s going on as a battle among mobsters. “To use the term ‘mob war’ is not something that the police would do,” he said.
“Our ongoing appeal is for witnesses and people to come forward. That’s one of the ongoing challenges we’ve had in a lot of these investigations, people not telling us about what’s going on or what they’ve seen.”
https://news.vice.com/story/ontario-may-be-in-the-midst-of-a-mob-war
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