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♪

♪

Cosimo Commisso, nice guy, family man, but...

if you got on the wrong side of him, he'd kill you.

He said to me, you are the only guy that's ever come

to my house, met my wife, met my family.

I wouldn't let anybody else in this house

or even know where I live.

He says, we trust you.

If they thought for a second

they couldn't trust me they will kill me.

♪

The mob is what controls the world.

Drug Lord is one thing.

Bikers are another thing...

but the mob controls banks, lawyers, policemen,

money laundering, drugs.

Worldwide, you're talking about $80 billion a year.

It's like an octopus.

They have their fingers everywhere, every country,

it's never ending.

Most people are completely swamped by the American

mythology of organized crime.

The reasons for the mob's success are clear,

organization and discipline, vows of secrecy and loyalty,

insulation of its leaders from direct criminal involvement.

It's a very nasty world, very violent.

There's not only Sicilians, there are those from Calabria,

the southern part of Italy, the Calabrese called the 'Ndrangheta

The 'Ndrangheta basically morphed from something in Italy,

to the new world.

It's a very different situation here in Canada.

Remo Commisso runs the Commisso clan in Toronto, Canada.

If you wanted to draw a picture of a mafia leader,

he would be it.

They're organized crime, murder incorporated.

They kill people and get away with it.

The Commisso were new Canadians who were more aggressive.

There was a lot of money in getting people shot or scared

or blown up.

[explosion]

I've known violence all my life.

Ever since grade school, was in kindergarten

Fighting, fighting and fighting, never stopped.

My name is Cecil Kirby.

I worked as an enforcer for the Commisso crime family

from 1975 to 1981.

Their reputation was very well-known.

You have to think of Remo and Cosimo as a unit really.

If you put a dartboard up on the wall

and each square was a certain particular crime,

just keep throwing darts at it

and if they could make money on it, they did it.

All the Commissos, Cosimo, Remo, Michael,

were all born in Calabria Italy.

They left Italy to come to Canada

where they wouldn't get assassinated

because there was a vendetta and a family feud

with another mafia family there.

And I believe their father was killed because of it.

Remo got into international drug trafficking.

He quickly became the brains of the Commisso crime family.

Any report that I ever got on the Commissos,

Remo was always identified as the leader.

He is the boss of that clan. There's nobody else.

I think I described it as the guy that could put on

a hundred dollars Walmart suit

and looked like it was an Armani.

Always dressed to the max.

If you wanted to draw a picture of a mafia leader,

he would be it.

Cosimo, his brother is what you would call the maid.

He'll do all the street cleaning.

If Remo tells him something that this guy needs to go

or this needs to be delivered, he does the dirty work.

They were doing a distribution and making counterfeit money.

They were doing extortion and then they branched out

into contract hits and getting people shot

or scared or blown up.

He would rely on the likes of a Cecil Kirby,

it was Cosimo dealing with Cecil to do the dirty work.

He's not going to do it.

He gets the instructions on what to do and he goes and does it.

I was introduced to them in 1975.

A friend of mine took me over to the Casa Commisso

on Lawrence Avenue and introduced me

to Cosimo and Remo Commisso.

And they explained to me,

we need you to do some work for us.

Just collections, enforcing,

beating people up... and killing people.

I said, yeah, I got nothing else to do.

Might as well.

Cecil Kirby had quite a reputation as an enforcer.

He had no conscience, no empathy.

He loved the science of beating up people and he knew exactly

how to break a leg to make sure he could hear the crack.

Trust was the number one thing.

They had to trust me

and they knew from my reputation

and other people that knew me that were friends of theirs,

that they knew they could trust me.

It was a wild period, the '70's.

Paul Volpe was the closest thing to a mafia Don in Toronto

at the time.

Volpe was expanding in the construction industry.

Paul Volpe was a really commanding figure.

Volpe was known to be tied in with organized crime

in the United States.

Had his own organization.

Paul Volpe came from a non-mafia family, didn't speak Italian.

He was born in Toronto, made these friends in the mafia

families in New York and Vito DeFillipo

was one of his partners, one of the Bonanno family people.

But Paul Volpe had done what a lot of them do over the years.

He'd gotten slightly respectable.

He lived in a very suburban area where lawyers, doctors,

and dentists would live in.

He had just bought this huge estate called Fox Hill.

Volpe means fox in English.

He was involved in the construction industry.

He was getting bribes.

He was involved in Atlantic City.

He was involved in many land deals in Toronto.

The Commissos were the new kids on the block.

They had none of the veneer that Volpe had.

The Commissos were new Canadians who were more aggressive.

Commissos were expanding in the criminal underworld

and then they decided to kill Paul Volpe.

My name is Charlie Yanover and I'm the last of the Volpe mob.

I've been charged with everything from conspiracy

to murder to possession of drugs.

I was in middle management.

We'd say in Godfather terms, I would've been a capo.

I had my own people.

We did things for the boss.

I'm trying to make it as simple as I can

to make you understand

because everybody's preconceived with this godfather bullshit

and we were just a crew that went out and make a living.

Chucky Yanover,

he grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family.

He had everything.

He didn't have to be an organized crime.

He just wanted some excitement in his life.

That was the heyday.

We made money, drove fancy cars, had nice women.

Paul looked after all the gambling in the city.

We had our lone shark office on Spadina.

There was lots of heat around.

The coppers were on us all the time, had 24-hour surveillance.

It was a six to five operation.

They put money out in the street

and they expect to get paid every week,

at least the interest on the money,

which was 20 percent a week.

If you have to borrow money that way,

it's very difficult to make the payments

and people like Chuck would go out and threaten coerce.

We went and collected money for services rendered

or not rendered.

Mostly not rendered.

Toronto was a wide open city.

Usually an organized crime faction takes its territory,

but what you had in Toronto was Paul Volpe

did what he wanted to do.

The Commissos did what they wanted to do.

It was pretty loose, but then things

start to rock and roll and people say, well, wait a minute,

maybe this is my territory.

Cecil Kirby, he's a creature of habit,

didn't look like a gangster at all.

He was short, maybe about 5'7", 5' 8", red hair.

If you look into his eyes.

Dead. Dead eyes.

The eyes of a psychopathic killer.

Cecil Kirby was hired by the Commissos in the '70's

to essentially be a thug.

He was a street enforcer.

If the Commissos were in a feud with someone

or someone owed them money,

they sent out their guy, Cecil Kirby.

I knew when I started working for 'em, I thought,

how long could I last before they try and kill me?

First bombing I did was a pop truck,

blew the back off the pickup truck.

Cosimo, he was just overjoyed with that one.

He just loved that.

He says, just keep up the good work.

So next bombing was King's Cross Estate

where I put two sticks of dynamite in the mailbox...

[explosion]

That went over good.

Next bombing was Hamilton, John Ryan.

There was a Camaro there one night

and I put four sticks of dynamite

on top of the rear tire.

Lit It. Took off and I heard it go off.

[explosion]

Sounded like two freight trains hitting together,

ripped the back of that car to pieces.

Dennis Mason, Cosimo wanted him killed.

He was supposedly a witness against one of Cosimo's friends.

I put three sticks of dynamite in his car,

wired to the wiper fuse.

[explosion]

I heard the next day the bomb went off,

but it just smoked the inside of the car.

Bad, dynamite.

Lucky kid.

That I heard later on from the police, that wrong guy,

this is not the right Dennis Mason.

I think about a quarter of them were mistaken.

They got the wrong person.

He did occasionally get the right person.

And then there was the Chinese restaurant

out Elizabeth Street in Chinatown.

The owner owed a gambling debt.

Now that was 100 sticks of dynamite in two cases.

I went in the restaurant, ordered a meal to go,

went in the bathroom, lifted up the ceiling tiles

and put those two cases in there.

I was told that nobody would be in that restaurant

and I phoned it at 1:00 in the morning, never got an answer.

[phone rings]

[explosion]

I was awakened by this horrible explosion.

It sounded as if it happened right in the hotel

and I thought probably the whole hotel was blowing up

or something.

The explosion started in the back kitchen

and it followed a shaft over to the north side of the building

and went up and through the washroom

and it was quite extensive.

The bomb went off and blew the owner across the restaurant

and killed the cook.

That was the worst thing right there.

Innocent bystander.

They blew up the cars of people they didn't like.

There were bombings under beds in hotels.

There were bombings at businesses

not paying the extortion fees they were supposed to pay

or there was a grudge against somebody just to send a message.

Don't mess with us.

Next bombing.

Well, I met Cosimo and he said to me,

his wife and her mother were at this restaurant

called Napoleon's

and he says they threw them out of the restaurant.

They told him to leave and get the hell out

and he says, I need some revenge.

Read about it the next day in a newspaper,

the wrought iron bars that were on the outside of the window,

one went right through the window

and missed the one woman by about a foot with her head.

Almost took her head off.

They got cut with a lot of glass.

They were hurt, but they survived.

Cosimo, I talked to him about it.

I told him, I said, understand that people got hurt

and he says, so what?

He says, we got the point across.

You just didn't bad mouth these people

because they were violent.

They take their status sincerely.

Cosimo was a ballroom dancer,

professional ballroom dancer of all things.

That sort of shocked me.

That's where he met his wife.

Cecil Kirby had a great job with the Commissos for a few years,

blowing up cars, frightening people,

but they never paid him his full salary.

He was offered $500, he would get $200.

He was offered $2000, he would get $500

and even for hits, he wasn't paid the full amount.

It's like they always had to owe me money,

sort of like keeping me on the hook, keeping me around.

Always owe somebody money. Don't ever pay them in full.

The Commissos, they never knew anything but the mob.

I know a lot of sons and grandsons of mafia people,

particularly if they're from a name Mafia family

like the Commissos, they almost don't have a choice

and if they decide not to be in the mob, it's very hard.

and if they decide not to be in the mob, it's very hard.

I was born into a mafia family that came from Italy.

I would always say like Jesus,

my father's got a lot of friends.

Wow, that's nice. They give him money.

My father bought a Cadillac once and he said to me,

when you grow up, you can have one of these.

If you do the right thing, I could get you in,

but you have to prove to me who you are.

Downstairs at the Casa Commisso there was the cellar.

You go downstairs and there was five superior main men.

They make a circle.

You go in the middle of the circle.

Once they fold their arms, the first main guy speaks

and you'll have a little card in your hand.

The second guy starts speaking.

Then they burn the card in your hand

and they tell you the way this card is burning,

so shall you and your body burn

if you ever, ever betray this organization.

They say (speaks Italian).

That means we hand you a loaded gun

in your left hand and in the right hand you have the world.

If they say to you, you got to go hit this guy,

well, that's what the gun represents.

You're going to do it.

The world means to behave, to never betray us.

Whatever you do for us, you shut your mouth,

take your lumps, whatever it is, you take it.

You never betray this organization.

When people came into the city, they would go

to the Casa Commisso, let the Commissos know we're in town.

It was like going to the Vatican and paying homage to the Pope.

They're coming in to kiss the ring and not cause any problems.

The Casa Commisso, walk in the front door

and off to the right side

there's about four or five tables there and they're always

playing cards or some Italian game at that table.

I'd always go in the back door, not the front door

because the RCMP or metro cops were always watching it.

The cook inside the kitchen would open up the door for me

and let me in and she'd always make me something to eat too

while I was there.

The cops said to me years later, we never, ever

got a picture of you going into this place.

I said, well, next time you want to watch the back door too.

We had a dedicated surveillance team that was called Special O,

and Special O would do a lot of the work on the day-to-day

surveillance of the Casa Commisso.

They would have Italian weddings there.

They would have stags for the weddings.

So it would be a who's who of the local mafia

showing up to these things.

So it was valuable information for us.

One of the ripest target situations

that you could come up with was a mob funeral.

All the mobsters would be there.

They would all be pallbearers or walking in and out.

Great surveillance footage.

To do surveillance, you needed this beaten up old van,

which you would slap a sign on saying

so and so's gardening service

or Ontario Hydro, and you would drive the van up

and there would be a two-way window in there,

and you'd have a cameraman inside.

Martin Burke had a reputation

as a gung-ho investigative reporter.

He'd been in Vietnam.

And you have to remember back in the '70's

when we were doing this,

there were only a couple of channels on television.

So when connections was on in June of '77,

everyone stopped what they were doing and watched it.

There was this series called Connections that CBC had aired

back in the '70's and it was the most unbelievable exposé

of organized crime.

Even still to this day when I watch it I'm in awe,

I can't believe the balls that these journalists had

to go after these mobsters like this.

To put together undercover scenarios,

the techniques they used which at the time were revolutionary.

There was no footage of any of these people.

If you're doing a film about politics,

you can always get tons of footage there.

If you're doing film about sports, there's tons of footage.

This, there was zero footage,

so we had to create our own footage

And it was pretty dramatic stuff.

We had Johnny Papalia saying, I'll eat your eyes out

you motherfucking, cocksucking prick,

and we had Volpe explaining how he would,

you can only kill a stool pigeon,

can't leave them alive.

They had stool pigeons all over the world,

and the minute the stool pigeon gets killed, someone kills them,

which to me is rightly so.

You got to kill them, you got to get them out of the way.

Anybody's an informer, only looking to hurt people.

One day we had heard that there was some big meeting happening

and it would happen at the Casa Commisso.

Our thing was we would go up there

and we would park with all the cars

in front of the Casa Commisso

and see if anybody came and went.

So we did that, but there was a little problem.

There were no cars.

It was the middle of the week

and like 2:00 in the afternoon or something,

and we stuck out like a sore thumb.

And so I get out of the van and I go into the Casa Commisso,

open the door, and it was an opening of a door

right into a major meeting hall

And Martin Burke, our director, went to interview Remo.

He asked for him at the door.

The trick was to get him to stay at the door long enough.

We had our cameraman in the parking lot of the Casa Commisso

shooting this, and he was wearing a hidden mic.

There was no vestibule, there was no other door.

You just opened the door and there you were

right in the middle.

And there was a meeting going on.

Remo was at the head of the table

commanding all these other guys,

and I looked around the table and recognized

several of the faces from surveillance footage

that we had gotten from various cops.

I realized I had blundered right into the meeting

that was rumored to happen,

which was not a very smart thing to do.

He said, are you Remo Commisso?

And he said, who wants to know who Remo Commisso -

you know the usual.

And they had this banter, but he kept it going for a while.

Then finally Remo said, get in here.

And he said, mmhmm, I'm not going in there.

So he decided to get out of there as fast as he could.

Remo was indignant, furious, racing after me

out into the parking lot and I quietly backpedalled out.

And he's really yelling, he's really indignant

and you didn't know where that was going to go.

The van was sitting there in the middle of a huge parking lot

and I could not get back to it without attracting

enormous attention.

[phone rings]

I got the call

and he was worried because he had left Francis

the intrepid cameraman in the parking lot.

So he said to me, get the cops.

And a couple of police cars escorted me back to the van.

We were very lucky to be able to get back to that van.

And they'd never realized that they were being filmed

until they saw it on television, on June, 1977.

Remo Commisso has established

contacts with organized criminals across the country.

He now operates from the Casa Commisso banquet hall

on Lawrence Avenue.

A location often frequented by those with criminal records.

In 1979 when they had the Connection show

and they outed me as a gangster, things changed.

And that was from my good friend Jim Dubro who wrote the book.

There are other less fashionable addresses in Paul Volpe's life,

such as suite 201 on the second floor of a dingy office building

at College and Spadina in Toronto.

According to police, Volpe, his brother Frank and Nate Clagerman

operate huge loan sharking operations from this location.

We were in the real estate business.

We had all the buildings down at Parliament

and King and Queen Street.

They owned the city TV building

and all the warehouses in Berkeley Street.

And the night after the Connection show,

the banks called all our loans and cost us a $100 million.

So...

-[barking] - You guys behave yourself. In the garage.

The cops used to come in and tap your phones and wire your houses

whenever they could.

Just, you had to be alert. You don't talk.

You have to know what you're doing 24 hours a day.

We were posted to Toronto drug section.

We were on what they call the international team,

international squad.

Primarily what we did was pursue heroin prosecutions.

Heroin was fondly referred to as the mounty drug.

We all started working the street

and working our way up to different levels.

Ounce dealers, half-pound deal, that type of thing.

The heroin would come in various methods,

but mostly it was body packed.

There was a constant flow of Italians back and forth

between here and Italy.

Two 747s arriving every day, Alitalia and Air Canada.

So at 4:00 every afternoon

you would have 800-900 Italian folks

arriving at the airport in Toronto

and some of them were bad guys.

So we started a dialogue with the Italian authorities

and inch by inch,

we worked our way up into these organizations

and we followed every instinct we could.

But it was like you know, baking a cake right?

You had to be prepared to sit there and watch it cook.

And the conspiracies developing took weeks, months.

The idea was making money how fast and how much.

So the way it works is you've got

the people on the street level, the mafia, the soldiers,

they're the ones committing the crime.

Whatever crime they commit, however they generate the money,

part of that money, it's bubbled up

to their immediate supervisor, so to speak.

Then it goes up the chain and eventually it ends up

in Cosimo and Remo's hands.

It's almost like I guess a pyramid scheme.

We were certainly satisfied that we knew who was behind it all,

but convicting him was no easy task.

We got a significant number of these guys

both here and in Vancouver.

We had a guy from Italy, came over,

did a deal with us right in a hotel in Toronto.

It was almost a kilo.

It was 94 or 96 percent pure.

We charged 30 people.

We convicted every one of them,

which is really rare with Commissos.

The reality is they're the focus

and boy, would it be nice to charge these guys,

but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

As they say, sometimes you get the bear,

sometimes the bear gets you.

The bosses rarely, if ever, touched the drugs,

and unfortunately in our case,

that was specifically what happened to us.

They just never went near the stuff

and we never had enough to charge them.

If you don't have informants,

you're not going to last very long doing this job.

Around '78 or '79,

a meeting I had with Cosimo at the Casa Commisso,

he said to me,

I need this Italian mob boss in Italy killed, Momo Piromali

Italian courts were looking into his wealth

and his mafia activities.

They made international headlines when they kidnapped

John Paul Getty III,

the nephew of American Oil billionaire John Paul Getty.

They cut off his ear in order to get $3.2 million in ransom.

He said, they'll fly me there, pay for all my expenses,

and he said, somebody there will take me

and show me where the guy lives.

And after that, it's in my hands.

It made me suspicious.

I'm a Irish guy, not, I'm not Italian.

I can't speak Italian.

I said, I'm going to stand out everywhere I'm at.

Good place to get rid of me, in Italy.

Dig a go hole on the ground, bury me.

That's the end of it, period.

I said, no, it ain't going to happen.

I know for a fact I would've never came back.

I would've killed him and one of Cossimmo's men over there

would've killed me.

It's the first time I actually refused and I thought,

well, I just have to keep my wits about me

when I'm dealing with these people.

I knew what I started working for 'em.

I thought, how long could I last working for these guys?

Because the reputation with the mob guy is

they only last three to five years,

and this was getting close to the end of the fifth year,

and I thought, where am I going to have to go,

where am I going to retire to get away from these guys.

Being a enforcer, a hit man, you know too much.

Sooner or later, there's a bullet for you

right around the corner.

Cecil reached the stage where he realizes and rightfully so,

he knows too much.

I mean it's history, it's everywhere.

It happened in New York with Gotti

when his right-hand man turned on him

because he knew his days were numbered.

Cecil, he's nothing to the Commissos, he knows that.

They could drop him on a dime

and there'll be another Cecil Kirby come along.

And people like that, they come forward.

Well, like I took about two weeks to think about this.

At the time I was up on some criminal charges and I thought,

well, let's see what I can do with the charges,

because sometimes you give an offer to the cops, you can walk.

So I phoned the RCMP and CIS.

I said to them, I said, I got some information

that you guys might want to know about.

The guy who answered the phone there was Corporal Mark Murphy.

Kirby said he had to meet him in half an hour

to find out everything about organized crime in Toronto

from the inside.

I said, why don't you meet me at Casa Loma?

So the RCMP corporal showed up there.

I'm in the car talking to him and I said, look,

I got some information on members of organized crime

if we can do a deal.

So I gave him some names and he just sat there

just sort of silently

like bells going off in his head and I said, think about it,

but I'm not just going to hand these guys over to you.

He was really hot in a trot to get these guys arrested.

He wanted me to become police informant

and I was taking my time about it, really thinking about it.

It's a real difference between a police informant

and the police agent.

Police informant just gives information,

may or may not ever testify.

An agent actually goes out and does stuff for the police.

And I said, I want your assurance

you're not going to burn me or stab me in the back.

Me trusting the RCMP hundred percent?

That will never happen.

Becoming a police informant, not a good thing to do.

Should I have just walked outside,

shot myself in the head?

Maybe so, but I didn't.

Over the years, the number of attempts that have been made

to try to get close to the Commisso family...

First of all, the best way to get there

is to infiltrate, and believe me,

policemen have been trying for decades to infiltrate,

but nothing has been that good in Canada

and that close to what Cecil did.

It's a tremendous risk because first of all,

he's crossed Cosimo and that's bad because that gets reflected

throughout the organized crime community.

And so we decided that we would give him immunity

and then the case was how now do we get corroboration?

And not only that, but the level of corroboration

had to be extremely high... like a wiretap.

After I got the immunity agreement, I was wired up.

My car was all wired up for sound.

Cosimo, one day he says to me, I can trust you.

I said, yeah.

I said, I've been with you this long.

I said, I'm still here. I said, sure, you can trust me.

I said, you shouldn't even bring that up.

The next, they say, we want you to kill Peter Scarcella

and Paul Volpe.

I said, well, here we go.

Paul had obviously stepped on somebody's toes.

I know that there was some dislike

between the Commissos and him

where they would never have taken the original contract

to kill him.

You just don't go out and murder another member of a family.

You go to obviously the Don and whoever the Don is at the time

that you're answering to

is going to make that decision

and give you the permission to do it.

He was then asked to do a more important hit

and that was the leading associate of Paul Volpe

named Peter Scarcella.

Cosimo drove me around.

He showed me where Scarcella lived off of Jane Street.

Then he said to me, do you know where Volpe lives?

And I said, yes, I do.

I know exactly where he lives, up in Nobleton.

The RCMP wanted me to get Cosimo and Remo and Michael on tape

with the conversation about conspiracy to murder.

There was a series of meetings

between Cosimo Commisso and Cecil Kirby.

Initially, it was going to be Scarcella and Volpe

were to be whacked.

The meetings just kept happening and happening and happening,

and the RCMP said to me,

some of the recordings aren't that great.

You got to get 'em to stay in your car.

I said, that's going to be a challenge.

So, I bandaged my foot all up with elastic tape.

I met Cosimo at the Howard Johnson hotel.

I said to him, I hurt my ankle jogging the other day.

I said, I can't walk that good.

And he says, we're going to talk in your car?

I said, yeah.

I said, you know as well as me,

I know the guy that does all the debugging.

I said, this car's been checked a lot of times.

He got inside my car, my Shiv Caprice Classic.

I said, so it's safe to talk in.

So that's how I got him to talk

and he says, hold off on Peter Scarcella.

Don't kill him. He's on our side.

I said, oh, okay.

He's not with Paul Volpe anymore?

He says, well, he's working for us now.

The police thought they could maybe just grab Volpe

and have him disappear for a bit,

and then the assumption would be he was dead.

We told them that that would amount to kidnapping

under the Criminal Code.

Howard Morton said, no, we can't kidnap him.

So someone else, I think it may have been Murphy, said,

why don't we just ask him if he would like to cooperate?

That was the RCMP Corporal, that was his idea.

Take him into custody, get his wallet, fake his death,

and I had to have that wallet

for absolutely good, strong proof that I killed him.

Murphy and another metro Toronto police officer who Volpe knew,

went up there and said, look, Commissos want to kill you.

They've hired this hit man to kill you,

and we want to pretend that you've been killed.

Could you give us your wallet and said,

we better bring your wife too.

CFSU takes them into custody and takes him to the RCMP station

incommunicado to make 'em look like

they've fallen off the face of the earth.

He immediately handed over his wallet

without even checking what was in there.

Paul was upset.

In fact, he almost had big elephant tears

because it was one of these like, who would want to kill me?

The whole drama of the moment is that Cecil Kirby had to go back

to Remo and Cosimo with a body pack

so that they could incriminate themselves

and they had to do it fast

because they couldn't keep Volpe and his wife for days

at RCMP headquarters.

They could only keep them for a day or so.

The corporal gave me the wallet.

I drove over to Remo Commisso's house.

[knocking]

Knocked on the door, went in.

I said, I got to talk to you.

So we went downstairs to the basement, into the bathroom.

Remo put on the cold water tap

in case the place is bugged or anybody's listening.

He was always suspicious and on guard for everything.

He says, what's going on?

I said, I handed him Paul Volpe's wallet.

I said, Paul Volpe is dead.

I said, Cosimo told me to kill him.

He's dead.

I need some money to get out of town.

The cops were listening to the whole conversation

and they had an enforcement team

just down the street waiting in case something did happen.

I was a little concerned because the hair on my chest,

the tape kept falling off.

There was a sound of water.

We thought it was a shower being turned on.

In one of the Godfather movies one of the characters

in the movie does exactly the same thing,

turns the shower on to try and muffle a possible wire tap.

Remo was furious. You don't bring me his wallet.

Why didn't you get rid of it?

He says, take that wallet and throw it down a sewer drain.

The most traumatic part was showing

that wallet to Remo Commisso in the basement of his house,

face to face with a homicidal killer.

And I thought, is this where they're going to kill me?

But finally, he admits that he knows

that they were supposed to be killed.

That's the important thing.

So he implicates himself in the hit plot.

It was solid evidence.

You couldn't get better corroboration than a wiretap.

I said, I want to fly to Florida

and get away from here right now.

He said, okay. He says, Mike will meet you

out at Howard Johnson's at about 4:00.

He'd give you some money then.

And that's what happened.

Michael met me there,

I think it was 500 bucks or something stupid,

and he left and he only went down the highway

maybe three miles, and police surrounded him, arrested him.

I was given the instruction then to arrest Remo Commisso

and bring him to the station.

We walked up to the door, knocked on the door,

identified myself.

He invited us in. He was very calm.

Somebody's coming in to arrest you for conspiracy

to commit murder.

Most people would be a little bit shaken and upset.

I never saw that in Remo.

I said to Remo, you're under arrest for conspiracy

to commit murder.

He would've been able to put that together very quickly.

He knows that Cecil was just there showing him

Paul's identification.

He knows right then that Cecil is a rat

and he's been done. So better he say nothing.

I mean, if he turns around and says,

well, that dirty rat Kirby, that's a statement.

I mean, that becomes something. He said, nothing.

It was a very simple arrest.

It was, you're under arrest Remo, come to the station.

They were charged with the plot to kill Paul Volpe and his wife,

and even Scarcella.

They're charged with a number of bombings and assaults

that Kirby did for enforcement work.

Cecil Kirby committed a number of crimes

on behalf of the Commissos.

He clearly was capable of extreme violence.

It may seem strange to say this, but despite his background,

I found him believable.

I testified against Remo and Cosimo.

Cosimo wasn't too bad. He just stared at me.

With Remo, he gave me some pretty mean looks

like, oh, I'd just love to kill you.

If you're testifying, you're going to be cross-examined

on your associates and what you know,

and even if you give the right answers,

the fact is you've divulged all of this information,

and this is a secret society. You don't talk.

Silence, and that's tradition.

They had two really good lawyers,

Bob Carter and Eddie Greenspan.

And if those guys thought that they could beat the charges,

they would not have plead guilty.

They didn't even fight it. They pled out.

Their lawyer, Eddie Greenspan

had to say in the end that he really thought

that Cecil Kirby was one of the best witnesses

that he had ever seen in terms of an informant.

He's pretty courageous.

He really hates rats, and he became a rat.

They made a mistake.

Kirby's not the brightest tack in the box, the sharpest tack,

but he was good for what he was used for.

But they turned on him, he turned on them,

and then that's the way it is.

Four Toronto men,

three of them members of an organized crime family,

pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Volpe.

A $20,000 contract had been put out on his life,

but the reason was never disclosed.

It was necessary. It had to happen.

I had no remorse about it.

It was the only option I could see of an outcome with me living

and not dying at their hand.

Remo and Cosimo pled guilty to all the crimes.

They got about eight years in jail, which isn't much,

and that puts the end of one chapter of their career.

Cecil Kirby had to, after that, live in hiding

because he put some of the most feared mafia in jail,

and of course they were going to kill him.

But he said he was a dead man. He could live with that.

He thought he'd be a dead man either way,

whether he stayed with the Commissos or whether he left.

What is the word on you in the criminal world in Toronto?

What do they think about you?

What do they think of me? They think I'm dead.

They think-- they know they'd kill me.

They all think they'd kill me sooner or later.

They believe the Commissos will get me sooner or later.

Is there a contract on you?

Yes, there is.

For how much money?

For $250,000.

I found out about the contract on my head

from Sergeant Lyle McCharles of the Ontario Provincial Police.

He told me, and he swore to this in court,

that there was a bounty for me of first it was 50,000.

Then it was a 100,000, then 200,000.

This contract at one point was close to

about half a million dollars.

I thought, boy, that's pretty high.

It's getting up there.

It's like winning the lottery, but no winner so far.

And who'd want to be the guy to try and kill me?

You think I'm not going to fight back?

I'm not going to shoot back? You're damn right I'm going to.

So if you're coming to kill me, be prepared to die yourself.

I don't hide.

I just keep a low profile except for this interview.

I've never been afraid of anything

and I couldn't give a damn what happens to Commissos.

Hopefully they'll die before me.

I don't know why the Commissos

wanted to have anything done to Paul.

There may have been some other infringements

on their territories or our territories.

There's always this animosity between Italian mob families

that some other family's want them dead.

And Volpe,

he was more popular than the Commissos were at the time.

Over the years, Paul made a lot of enemies.

Where do you start looking?

I only have my own thoughts and suspicions,

was acting like that lone wolf and wasn't sharing.

Paul didn't care.

Paul wasn't worried about anybody.

Some of the 'Ndrangheta people other than the Commissos

who were out in the street resent him on a tape.

I know one cop told me that they heard

an 'Ndrangheta boss saying, why are they giving the money

to construction companies, to Volpe?

He doesn't do anything.

Why don't we just get rid of him?

Volpe was so hot-headed that he'd made many, many enemies.

Volpe was already feuding with members of the new mafia

in Canada,

and the story on the street was he had double-crossed them.

[phone rings]

My office called Monday morning

and said that Paul Volpe had been reported missing.

On a Sunday he kissed his wife goodbye in the morning,

said he was having lunch with his assistant, Scarcella,

and then he was going off to a meeting with some

unidentified people at the airport.

The last he was seen alive,

he was at a coffee shop called La Seine in Woodbridge.

He was with Peter Scarcella.

My understanding is that a short time later, not a long time,

his vehicle ends up parked in the airport parking lot.

They traced his car to the Terminal 2 in the airport,

blood was on the fender, they opened the trunk.

And found that he'd been shot twice in the head,

and the hit team got away

The police plan to release a photograph of the car

in which Volpe's body was found.

They're hoping someone might have seen the late model BMW

between Sunday morning when he left his home

and Monday afternoon when he was found dead.

It certainly has all the earmarks

of a very professional killing.

What happened to Paul could have happened from Atlantic City.

It could have happened from any number of different areas.

I don't know.

Nor do I want to know.

The police are still looking for

Volpe's killers at his funeral today

on the street and in his storefront window,

We were fairly powerful.

But, I don't know, if someone's got a hit on you,

you're going to get hit.

The last person to see him alive was Scarcella.

Scarcella was also a target at one point,

but then his life was spared for some reason.

He had the meeting with Scarcella,

who, from everything I've heard, set him up.

Scarcella's a nasty piece of work.

Every time I hear Scarcella's name,

all I think of is three things.

A rope, a shovel, and a hole in the ground that he belongs in.

He's a Judas.

He stabbed Paul in the back, and that's why Paul died.

I don't care.

They're just words, they can't hurt me.

They could shoot me, kill me, but not words, nothing.

They are murder incorporated. Period.

They don't care who they have to kill or what they have to kill.

There was obviously some dislike between the Commissos and him

or they would never have taken the original contract

to kill him,

but I don't believe that they did it.

They asked me to kill Paul Volpe.

We saved Paul Volpe's life.

Commissos was going to jail for conspiracy to murder then what,

a year later, Paul's dead?

What a coincidence.

Although while they're in jail,

it's uncertain what they were doing

because Volpe was actually killed

less than two years later.

And whether the contract that Remo and Cosimo gave out

was fulfilled then through other people in the 'Ndrangheta

or others, is an open question.

You can easily get people killed while you're in jail.

And in fact, 40 years later,

no one has been charged with Volpe's murder.

Commissos emerged from prison.

They were much more low key, far more sophisticated crimes,

money laundering, real estate fraud.

They would certainly be a lot more careful about anybody

they dealt with outside of their own community.

Now you got to see that Cecil Kirby

was not in their community,

but they're going to be a lot smarter

before that ever happens again.

All organized crime, they need facilitators.

Joe Ferraro was a Commisso family associate

who was operating out of Toronto.

His nickname was Joey Limousine.

Because he ran a limousine company,

He was also able to manipulate things.

He was very boisterous how he dressed and behaves.

He wasn't afraid to make enemies.

He was also muscle.

He was an enforcer.

He would go around trying to collect debts.

He's violent.

He's been known to cut people's limbs off.

This is a serious dude.

Joe Ferraro,

in addition to being muscle for the Italian mob,

is also an alleged drug trafficker for the 'Ndrangheta