Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Bootlegger [Paperback]

Everyone knows who Al Capone is. Not many recognize the name Rocco Perri. It's ironic, because they both ran multimillion dollar gambling, extortion, and prostitution rackets, inspired comparable heights of fear among their enemies and subordinates, and became so ominipotent that their respective governments were the only ones who succeeded in taking them down. But Perri never demolished the competition via Thompson-wielding firing squads, so his name has been lost to history and knowledge of his career is confined to Canadian historians and a handful of American researchers who rightly sensed that someone formidable was calling the shots north of the border during the Prohibition years.

Rocco Perri was a Calabrian immigrant who came to Canada as the nineteenth century was yielding to the twentieth. He and his common-law wife, a financial genius named Bessie Starkman, built a criminal empire whose nucleus was in Hamilton, Ontario, but whose tentacles of influence reached all over the rest of Canada and into the United States. Al Capone and Joseph Kennedy were among their best customers.

Antonio Nicaso had a tough act to follow when he took on the story of Canada's 'King of the Bootleggers'. Robin Rowland and James Dubro's 'King of the Mob', which was published in 1988, was the first book-length treatment of Rocco Perri's rise to power in post-World War One Canada, his carefully crafted alliances with Italian crime families in both Canada and the U.S., his profitable association with the indomitable Bessie Starkman and Annie Newman, and his gradual decline after Canadian authorities branded him a potential Fascist and put him in a internment camp. Perri disappeared from the public record in April 1944, when he left his cousin's Hamilton residence, and never returned. The conclusion that Rowland and Dubro came to is that professional killers working for Stefano Maggadino's Buffalo mob snatched Perri during his stroll and disposed of him. That's the theory that subsequent writers and researchers have been accepting... until now, when Nicaso comes forward with evidence that Perri survived until at least 1953.

"Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Bootlegger" pays tribute to the research done by Rowland and Dubro, but also expands on it. Nicaso interviewed not only the surviving relatives of Rocco Perri but also his victims, which include a young woman who gave birth to his two daughters and then committed suicide when he refused to marry her. There's a powerful human element to this book that was absent from "King of the Mob", although Nicaso does not give in to sentiment.

The only reason why I'm giving this book four stars instead of five is that Nicaso's writing style is solid but lacks depth. It's like reading one long magazine article. A well-researched one, mind you, but there's a sparseness there that is not to my personal taste. Other than this stylistic issue, I found "Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Bootlegger" to be an engaging read. Recommended!

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  4.0 out of 5 stars