CBC Digital Archives

Canada, a gateway for gangsters

Rum runners. Heroin connections. Ecstasy labs. All part of a long line of criminal dealings in the service of international drug trafficking that smear Canada's squeaky-clean image. As the international community began to regulate intoxicating drugs in the 20th century, drug traffickers forged global routes through Canada in a vicious and wildly lucrative case of supply and demand. CBC Digital Archives looks back at Canada's unique place in this perilous trade as a customer, conduit and producer of illegal drugs.

Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver now send millions in illicit drugs into the United States, says American narcotics agent Charles Siragusa in 1966. "You've got a serious international narcotic trafficking situation," he says of Canada, contradicting reports that the RCMP says there isn't a problem. It's a presence that's grown since the 1940s, he says, and this increasingly professional cadre of dope smugglers makes Canada a growing gateway. But, Siragusa laments, knowing who's behind the trafficking is one thing, and making a case against them stick is quite another.
• Charles Siragusa's book Trail of the Poppy chronicles his 25 year career with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (which merged into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1969, and became the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973.) Siragusa played himself in a 1974 true crime feature length film about Lucky Luciano. • Although Siragusa doesn't name them in this clip, the entrenched Mafia in Ontario known to police at the time included Johnny Papalia's crew, operating out of Hamilton. An associate of the Bonnano clan in New York and the Cotronis family in Montreal, Papalia got into the heroin trade in the late 1950s. In 1961 he was busted for trying to import $150 million in heroin into the U.S. Although he was convicted and spent five years in jail, he remained a powerful figure in the Canadian Mafia until his death in 1997. Paul Volpe, a Toronto-based associate of Buffalo's Magaddino crime family, also made a Mafia name for himself in the 1960s and 1970s. He was found dead in the trunk of a car at Toronto International Airport (now Pearson International Airport) in 1983.

• As mentioned in this clip, Lucien Rivard was a going concern in heroin trafficking in the 1960s. A close associate of Vic Cotroni's younger brother Guiseppe, he was arrested for trafficking in 1964. He came to fame after a number of senior aides to the federal Liberal government were implicated in a scheme to buy bail for Rivard. For more on the scandal caused by bribery allegations and Rivard's famous prison break in 1965, visit CBC Television's This Hour has Seven Days clip Scandal in Ottawa.

Medium: Television
Program: TBA
Broadcast Date: Sept. 21, 1966
Guest(s): Siragusa Charles
Announcer: Warren Davis
Reporter: Ed McGibbon
Duration: 10:14

Last updated: November 22, 2012

Page consulted on April 16, 2013

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