MURDER LOST TO TIME-Joseph A. Lapello

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web address ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. Once again, remember to go to this unique place ZipRecruiter dot com slash m u r d er. Zip recruiter the smartest way to hire. Good evening. The year is nineteen seventeen, less than two decades into the new century, and already the Great War is occurring in the muddy fields of France. Soon there will be the Spanish Influenza, which will kill many more millions, an inauspicious start to a new millennium,

to be sure. In one of Canada's largest cities, Toronto, there has been a murder of cab driver is found dead in West End, Toronto, stabbed multiple times. The cabby's name is Carmine Lapello aka Tony Lapello aka Tony Ross, an Italian Canadian. Inquests occur, but the murderer is never found. Now we take a leap forward to the year nineteen sixty four, when a ten year old Joe Lapello is going through some cardboard boxes in his parents' basement. He

finds an old photo of a handsome young man. He takes the picture to his father and is told that the picture is of Joe's great uncle, Carmine Lapello. Joe's father was only seven years old at the time of the murder. Become entwined in a story of a young man's undying love for a woman, which would drive him to participate in illegal alcohol smuggling during the Prohibition era.

Carmine was self employed taxi driver who became caught up with notorious people in a small immigrant community of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, known as the Ward. Circumstances were changed for the worse, turning this young man from a secretive life of crime to that of a police informant and eventually paying the ultimate price. In the early morning hours of July twentieth, nineteen seventeen, Carmine would be found brutally murdered in the street.

Followed Joseph Lapello through his discovery of this mystery as he unravels the unsolved murder of his great uncle, Carmine Lapello. The book that we're featuring this evening is Murder Lost to Time, the true story of one of Canada's oldest unsolved murders, with my special guest author Joseph A. Lopello. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Joseph A. Lopello.

And I found it very curious when I found out that he was murdered, that it had never been solved. I found that particularly interesting, you know. And that's my introduction into the case. Was at that age, ten years old, and it was quite you know. I mean, I shouldn't even been looking. I was supposed to be cleaning up the chef in the basement and cleaning up the basement,

and I had just my curiosity. I was opening boxes and seeing what was in there, and his photograph was in there with a bunch of other photographs.

room at Young and Dundas and you're there about thirty. Yeah, so a man, How does Joseph pill come you to meet? How do you to come to meet Joseph Pill?

and I really didn't pay any attention to him. But slowly, but surely, he had worked his way over to the way to the table that my friend and I were playing on, and he was staring at me. And I found this quite unusual. I didn't know this man. I couldn't recall him from anywhere. And my friend and made a remark, Jesus, Joe, you know, it looks like the old guy likes you, And laughing at it and everything. It was obvious he was staring at me, wanted to

speak to me. But you know, maybe he was a little bit shy or intimidated, you know, twenty year old kid. Was I going to react to him saying something to me? So I said hello to him, and he introduced himself as Joseph pill and that he was and he asked me what my name was. He says, he's your name, Lapello. And I was shocked that he knew my name because I didn't know him. I said, yes, it is, and he says, I knew. He said my uncle, well it is. In fact, Carmine was my great uncle, and he said

I knew him. I grew up with Weir school school chums from a very early age, from about when they were six years old or something, and they didn't live too far away, and they went to the same school. And he said that he was a taxi driver and he was with my uncle the night that the murder happened. He was on a taxi stand in Toronto. They had both their cars parked. They're waiting for bears. And at the time I didn't have any preliminary knowledge on the case.

So I didn't know what question to ask him about my great uncle except maybe his personality what had happened. And the recurring response I kept getting from Joseph Pill was they never found out who did it. They never found out they never caught the people that did it. And Heed he seemed very upset about that, like very personally upset about it. You know, he was close to

Carmine and everything. And I often got the feeling when I look back at that meeting between him and I, that was the only person I ever spoke to who was alive about the knowing my great uncle or anything that he had carried some guilt about it, you know, some remorse about maybe the way he behaved or did back then concerning the whole murder. So that was one meeting I had with him, and I never saw him again.

I had went down to that billiard room because he said he lived in the area downtown, he lived there all his life, and that he comes into the billiard room frequently. I didn't get a phone number or anything from him. I just thought i'd see him again. I never did. But he was an eyewitness to the events that happened on a taxi stand that night.

Your mother passes away in two thousand and five, so you have to go through these through boxes of mementos. What do you find in two thousand and.

but I was, you know, preoccupied with my own life, you know, and didn't really have any time to spend on it, delving into the case and doing more research on it.

the time where the body was found and everything. But at the end of the article it also said that some guilt or blame for the murder was placed on a man, a sailor in Britain who had lived in

Canada at the time. It didn't mention his name or anything like that, but I just thought in nineteen twenty three he was convicted of a murdering a taxi driver in London, England, and the newspaper here he was sentenced to death, but his death sentence was later commuted by an act of Parliament based on the flimsy evidence that convicted him, very shaky evidence, it was. I don't think he was guilty at all, but the newspaper here picked

up on its Toronto Star. I think it sort of laid the blame for my great uncle's murder on him, you know. And then so I reached searched him as as well as I could, and founder and I had to eliminate him as a suspect. He just did not fit the profile of somebody that would that would be involved in a heinous murder like this.

What did you find out about the registration for those cars? However, before we talk about the actual what you find out about Friday, July nineteenth, the day before all pardon me, yes, well, July nineteenth, just before midnight, eleven thirty and with fellow taxi driver Joseph phil sitting in Carmine's car, tell us a little bit about just the what you found about the ownership of these cars before we talk about July nineteenth, eleven thirty at the taxi driver staff with Joseph Pilboms.

At first it made no sense to me, but later on I found out the reason for that, and it became very questionable to me whether or not Carmine was the real owner of these cars. Because one year prior to supposedly going into the taxi business, well, the price of those two taxi cabs the time might have been between twelve hundred and two thousand dollars. I knew Carmine's parents fruit were immigrants, they were laborers. They didn't have that type of money to be able to lend to

Carmine so he could buy these cars. So I began to question, well, where did this money, where did he get this money to buy these cars? And were they even his cars? Were that I came to believe and conclude that they were not his cars? He said he was the owner. He had business cards written up with the number of his taxi cabs in case anybody wanted to call the dispatch to have him pick up a fare. But I mean, the only assets in the taxi business are the cars. Why would you put them in somebody

else's name. The only reason to do that is if you were up to something illegal with them, and in the event you were caught, the real owner of the car would be able to come to court and say, well, you know, they're my cars, and they're my taxis and he was just working for me and I had no

idea what he was doing. And then the court would have to release those those cars back to the original owner because they wouldn't be able to prove that he had knowledge that they were being used for an illegal purpose. That's the only thing I could conclude by that. But I mean prior to nineteen sixteen, one year before that, he was borrowing money from his estranged wife, Carmi, and

I don't think he had paid it back. So if he was borrowing, and it was a very small amount by today's standards, only fifty or one hundred dollars, but back then that was a lot of money. If he couldn't pay that back, where was he getting in the money, you know, a couple of thousand dollars to buy these two cars and to go into business. It just didn't make You were getting it up to me, Dan, you.

today King Edward Hotel? Tell us about what Joseph Pill says, especially initially, about who he sees and what these people, this man and woman do that night.

And the man who came with this woman went to the back of the taxi cab and he was he acted very very suspicious in so far as he didn't do any of the talking to try and hire Carmine, and he had he was wearing a cap which was pulled over his uh, pulled over his face, and had the collar of his jacket was pulled up to conceal his identity. And he never spoke a word all the time he was there. The woman did all the talking, and she said, I want to go out to Hyde

Park in the green car with the white stripe. I was out that way two or three days years ago, and that's the car that took me out there. Well, Carmine's car was green and it had a white stripe on it. And Carmine said to her that you must have been out with my driver, because you know, I don't remember taking you. And at first Carmine did not want to take them, and Joseph Pill didn't want to take them either. For some reason, they were alarmed by

this couple. You know, they were very shabbily dressed. They didn't look like they had the money for the taxi fair and Carmine and Joseph Pill, the man i met in the billiard room in downtown Toronto, argued about this for fifteen or twenty minutes till finally Carmine said, oh,

that's fine, I'll take them. And at the precise moment that he was loading them into his car, another driver pulled up to the stand and offered to take them to their location, their destination out in the High Park and or the High Park area, and the man who accompanied the woman who was asking for to hire a taxi cab waved off the other driver and pointed to Carmines car. Then they both got in and Carmine drove away, which it was very shortly after midnight. It could have been,

you know, twelve fifteen or something like that. And that's the last time Joseph Pill ever saw my great uncle alive.

at that time. Witnesses heard two men arguing earlier that morning. They thought it was sounded Italian, and they had heard a scuffle and a car speed away around four or five, around four am or so. Now, once you found that information, you write that this little photo you had of your great uncle, you wouldn't need that on your computer anymore. This was you didn't need a reminder to deep dive into this investigation and find out who killed your great uncle. Isn't that true?

away from his house. It was very dark by the way back then, there were no street lights or anything. He had seen the figures of two two people, one man was quite a bit taller than the other one, and he heard them arguing in a foreign language. He was asked at a corner's inquest if it was Italian. While George Rush didn't speak Italian, he couldn't say for sure,

he couldn't confirm it. But Carmine could only speak English an Italian, and so we have to conclude that the argument was an Italian, which meant that the killer, the man he was fighting with, and the fight that Rush witnessed, was with another Italian. But another observation George Rush made was that one man was quite a bit taller than the other. Now, the man from the taxi stand who accompanied the woman who hired Carmine, was approximately five foot six.

The autopsy report puts Carmin's height at five foot seven. Well, at sixty yards, a one inch difference in height wouldn't be that noticeable. So I started to ask myself, you know, the man who was with the woman from the taxi stand, he couldn't have committed the murder because there was an eye witness and a discrepancy in the height that was very dis distinguishable. And so I knew then that this

was a conspiracy. I knew that the primary job of the man and woman who originally hired him at the taxi stand, their job was to rure him out to that area, and once they got him there, at that time, I didn't know what they do. I later found out that they left him. I believe they were at a location there, and then the killer was brought out there

and driven out there by somebody else. Once the man and woman left, Carmine the other men that the killer posed as a taxi fair wanting to go back to Toronto, so Carmine naturally picked him up and agreed to take him, and when they stopped on Salisbury Avenue, that's when the fight started. After the fight, not just George Rush, he saw the fight and went into the house. But there were two women who lived on Queen Street very close to that location that heard a car speeding along Queen

Street going west. It stopped, it turned around, It was there for a little while, and then later off it sped back to Toronto. Well, obviously the man who murdered Carmine had a getaway driver. Once he finished committing the murder, he ran down to Queen Street, he was picked up, and then they both headed back to Toronto. So does that answer your question, Dan, And I didn't need any reminder of the case. I didn't need the picture in front of me anymore because it began to intrigue me as

a real mystery. And what was unfolding in front of me was the makings of a plot, like a conspiration, see like this, of a plan. This wasn't you know. The police, originally and right to the end of their investigations, seized on the motive of sudden jealousy, as if my great uncle had offended this woman and the man went into a rage. They had a fight, and the man killed him like sudden jealousy, a crime of passion. But later facts that I uncovered just tore that theory, all the part apart.

that it was jealous rage. Now why it also police thought that is because as you say that the your commine's body was staged, tell us how it was staged to look to accommodate this narrative that police later believed was true thanks to the guidance of the again, the woman, the mysterious woman in this case.

and his privates exposed. And I don't know if any of your listeners are Italian, but an Italian tradition of revenge against a man who has either insulted your wife or has done something to her to insult you, this is a very typical way to leave the body of the person who's done that, if you've killed them, it's like to leave them in a state of eternal disgrace

for offending your woman. Okay, So, but the the police would have known that back then, because there was organized crime in Toronto, they had a bit of a glimpse into it, and they would know that this would be the result of a man who went crazy because you insulted his woman or made a path at her in front of him. And the amount of stab wounds too,

it seemed like an overkill, you know. It was like it was deliberately done to make it look like, yes, somebody was in a jealous rage, uncontrollable jealous rage, where in fact, the coroner found out after the second stab wound, which had punctured his lungs, he had already died. He was deceased, so every stab wound administered after the second or third was useless, okay, And leaving his body with the pants pulled down, his private hanging out, you know,

like you know, he had disrespected a man's wife. That was the motive. That's what it looked like originally at the scene, and that's the motive they seized on because they had no other motive.

you used to your advantage, some of the resources. You talked about this inspector from the Ontario Provincial Police, the equivalent of state police in Canada, this Inspector Boyd, and so you read his report and got a lot of information. You read this taxi driver site, and then you went to ancestry and did some interesting work to connect the dots.

Tell us about some of the things, including with newspaper archives, how you came to find out who you believe are the suspects, were the perpetrators of this crime, this whole group that conspired to kill your uncle and why?

police forces working on this. There was Toronto Police, the Mimical Police and the opp but Inspector Boyd was put in charge of the case. Now, in his report, there was a few things that I found that weren't in any of the newspaper articles, but nothing in his report conclusively identified the man and woman. They were still a mystery, and that's later on I had to broaden my search to find out who they were. But I got names

from that report. And there was one report as he was interviewing people at a location in Toronto's area known as the Ward. It was Saint John's Ward on a street called elm and I found that there was a boarding house, grocery store and residence there and it was a a bit of a notorious place. Most of the lodgers were very transient now, like they would stay there

a week or two and they would leave. But a conversation had taken place there and this was reported to Inspector Boyd by somebody who was actually informing to him about the murder. And two of the lodgers were talking and one of them said, you know, they were talking about the murder, and he had heard that somebody was arrested, and the other one said, well, how can that be. The person who did it was just here a little

while ago. This was on a Sunday afternoon and those two lodgers had an argument and the next day they left that lodging house and nobody knew their names. They were never identified. But there was also a man wanted in Hamilton the police. He was one demand from Hamilton, Ontario, which is about thirty miles away from Toronto, and he

was hidden out there. So it made this location and the people running it very suspicious to me, and I broadened my search on them find found out as much as I could about them, which gave me a lot of information that helped me find the information of the people who planned this and who committed this murder. Later on, there was a private from the Canadian Army. His name was Arthur Colin Kilner, and nine days after the murder,

he was on a train coming from Montreal. He was on leave, so he went to Montreal to visit his mother.

On his way back to Toronto to rejoin his regiment, he was approached by a woman on a train who by the way, matched the description of the woman from the taxi stand the night of the murder, and she started a conversation with him and asked him where he was going and everything, and he told her he was heading back to Toronto, and she asked him if he would pick up her suitcase for her down in Toronto.

She had left it there and when he asked why she didn't pick it up herself, why she just didn't go and pick it up herself, she explained to this young private from the Canadian Army that approximately nine days or earlier, her and her husband were out in a taxi cab around the Humber Bay area and the taxi cab driver and her husband got into an argument. She left and the next day she doesn't know, She doesn't know what she's explained to him. She didn't know what happened.

The next day, the taxi driver was found murdered, and she didn't want to go back to the location where her suitcase was. He agreed to pick up her suitcase. They had a drink, a cup of coffee or something which she bought, and shortly after taking this drink, having this drink of coffee with her, the private got very he got violently ill to his stomach. He went into

a cold sweat, he was vomiting. He was so sick that when the train stopped halfway between Montreal and Toronto and a town called Belleville, he had to be removed and hospitalized. He was in the hospital for nine or ten days before Inspector Boyd, who was in charge of the case, was notified and he went to see this private and sure enough, the description of the private gave Inspector Voyd of this woman matched up with the woman

from the taxi stand. Also mentioned that she was from Montreal and she would only be in Toronto a couple of days. She actually went to the effort of showing Private Kilner her return train ticket back to Montreal, so for all intents and purposes, everybody thought she was from Montreal. Well, sure enough, Inspector Boyd secures leave from the Canadian Army to take Private Kilner to Montreal and look for this woman. But I mean, obviously this was just another act of deception,

because what had happened before all this took place. Inspector Boyd had been at one twenty four Elm Street, this residence where there was a grocery store, hideout for criminals, lodging house, and it was in the middle of the Ward, which was riddled with crime at the time, and the crime was all around down there. He had questioned the people that owned this grocery store, lodging house and residents about the murder. I believe that the man and woman from the taxi stand had made their way up to

Northern Ontario. From there they separated. The men came back to Toronto and the woman went on to Montreal where she was hiding out. After Inspector Boyd went to the Ward to this address at one twenty four Elm Street questioned these people. I believe these people got frightened because they did know the murder. They didn't know the murder

and their grocery store. They had a truck that used to go out to the area where the murder was committed because there was hobby farms out there, and that's where they used to buy their vegetables and fruit and bring it back to the grocery store and sell it. Well. The two women on Queen Street that witness the car speeding by the getaway driver, I think the getaway driver the lights were on in their house, and I think the getaway driver saw them, and he thought that they

saw him and the killer driving back to Toronto. So when they got back to Toronto, they told this woman who owned the truck in the grocery store which they had used her truck as the getaway vehicle. If anyone asked, were you out that way near the murder scene, you tell them you were out there buying vegetables. When the police questioned missus Coelo from one twenty four Elm Street, she said, yes, I was out there buying vegetables. I saw the car and the body, but I thought it

was somebody sleeping off a drunk. Well, I thought that very suspicious. Why would Carline's body was found in a ditch? Why would somebody sleep a drunk sleep a drunk off in a ditch when they had the back of the car to sleep. And I knew she was lying right away, So this became a very suspicious address to me in Toronto.

passenger who was wanted for stabbing. The only thing, the only benefit that was to me was the timeline. At three am that car was seen leaving the ward in Toronto. Well, that gave them plenty of time to get out to the Humber Bay area, get situated, you know. And wherever Carmine I believe Carmine was being babysitted by the man

and woman from the taxi stand. They might have been out at a roadhouse or a rest all night restaurant something, or they might have been somewhere somewhere what they were together and once they left, this man came in and poses, then the murderer came in and posed and as a taxi fare right, But the timeline was the thing that made me very suspicious. It fit perfectly. At three o'clock they left the ward at four o'clock the murder occurred. Didn't have taken them half an hour to get out

to the Humber Bay area. Gets go to where Carmine was being babysitted, and then the murder would pose as affair, commit the murder, and he'd be out there with his getaway driver, and then they'd be back in Toronto before five am before the body was found. They were probably back in Toronto and the man and woman from the taxi stand were long on their way before the body

was discovered. As a matter of fact, they were seen at an area around four point thirty in Toronto that was near a train station, the Grand Trunk Railroad station. From there they could have caught a train to northern Ontario. I checked with the with the records department of the train company, and yes, there was a train that left there at the Parkdale and went up to North Bay, where they were seen the next day by an insurance agent, a man named Winters, who had an insurance company up there.

He after he read the newspaper, he had a very sleepless night because the man and woman that he met up there that asked him for a ride to an area out there called Trout Lake up in northern Ontario, that their identities tallied up so exactly with that of the newspaper that he phoned the Crown Attorney, which in the United States you'd call it the district attorney to tell him because there was already a reward put out for five hundred dollars for any information leading to the killers.

So the report of Inspector Bully was very useful to be because it had had brought to the surface a lot of details that weren't in the newspaper that the newspaper wasn't even privy to, Like this attack on the Canadian soldier appeared in no newspaper, but it was in

the police report. I should mention too that Joseph pill three days after the murder, got a threatening note to his house, but they knew where he lived and told him you'd better stop helping the police, because his original statement to the police the day after the murder was

that he saw this woman before in the war. He didn't know the man, he didn't really get a good look at him, but if he saw this woman again he would recognize her right and shortly after getting the threatening letter at his house, all of a sudden, his story chartered to change. Well, I don't know if I saw her before. I don't know if I could recognize her. I'm not sure now if it was the same woman I'm thinking of. So now the reason go ahead dance now.

he changes his story. But when you went through ancestry, when you went through Ancestry dot CAA, you made some connections with organized crime, and you took it all the way back to again Italy, in the Collabria area of Italy, and you found out took some of these names and did further research into their families and they're also their criminal careers. So you and one of those people you

researched heavily was Frank Lombardi. Tell us Frank Lombardi two months before his interaction with Karma, and then what you found out about Frank Lombardy.

educated here. He could speak English very well, and he Carmine and him had in May of nineteen seventeen had an argument, a pretty bad argument, and Frank Lombardi said at a coroner's inquest that the argument was over a fair, a dispute over a taxi fair that Frank Lombardy thought it was his fair and Carmine thought it was the fair belonged to him, and supposedly this is what this

bad argument was about. But I had spent day down at the Archives of Toronto and I got the police record book from nineteen sixteen in nineteen seventeen, and I spent the whole day reading there. I didn't even know what I was looking for. I was just trying to find something that would I could see as recognizable. That might give me another lead on what was going on. Well, I read through quite a few pages that day and I came upon my great uncle's name. He had been

charged with the illegal shipping of alcohol. No, I didn't know what that charge was at the time, but he had been charged. And Frank Lombardi very close to the date that Carmine was charged, he was charged with the same thing. They obviously were in the same business, and the argument over the fair wasn't true at all. What they were argued was over I believe that. Oh I also found out that Carmine had been arrested a second

time for the same charge. I believe it was then that, either through coercion through the police or he made his own decision, he became an informer for the police. I think Frank Lombardy knew this, and this is what the argument was over. That was that will, that will, That is what the letter was all about in February sent

the Carmine from Montreal. Stop talking to the police or else. Well, Carmine, I don't think, realized the seriousness of the people he was dealing with, and he probably kept informing on them and and you know, like you said at the introduction. He ended up paying the ultimate price for his bad decision. You know, But Frank Lombardi, he had been involved in shady dealings, illegal activities. The only thing is it was

mostly theft and things like that. I've got his criminal record going back to uh I believe, eighteen ninety eight. The one thing that's absent from his early criminal record is any violence. He was just a man. I believe he dealt in stolen goods. And later on in our discussion we'll talk about what else he was involved in and and so. And he had tithe t to organized crime. I don't know if he was an actual member or

an associate. I you know, at this uh at ninety three years after the murder and everybody being gone, it was it's it's hard to uh, you know, to determine that for sure, but he sure knew everybody.

Rocco was one of them. Well, in nineteen nineteen eleven, I guess nineteen eleven, Bessie and Rocco began an affair together, and shortly after the affair, well, well, wait a minute now. In nineteen twelve, Rocco was charged in a small town, Guelph, just west of Toronto, about fifty miles west of Toronto, of murder. So he was in jail for a year awaiting trial. By the way, he got off on that charge and he went back got Bessie. Bessie had two

small children. She abandoned them and her husband and ran off with Rocco. And Rocco was worked on the wellon Canal out by the Niagara region. It was just being built. It was a big project and he was a laborer. But after that, you know, he had murdered a guy, for he had actually murdered somebody who had disrespected a mob boss out in Gwelph.

of alcohol was legal. However, it was able for these criminal organizations, along with the legit manufacturers of alcohol, to be able to export that alcohol to the US, which would be incredibly lucrative and also, as you say, the springboard for all the murder and Mayhemond crime that ensued after that.

bottles of wine to last a year. It didn't. Now, the Volstead Act in the United States, the United States made the manufacture of alcohol illegal. In Canada, it wasn't illegal to manufacture it, it was illegal to sell it here. If you manufactured it and exported it, you could you could make as well. You could brew as much alcohol a beer and alcohol as you wanted, as long as it got shipped offshore. So what the what the organized crime people found out that there was a flaw in

this law the way it was written in Canada. Now, what they did is they placed orders with breweries, say somebody that manufactured whiskey. They would have a phone call come from say New York State, and they would place an order for say a thousand cases of whiskey to be delivered to somewhere in New York, Upper New York State. Okay, So the manufacturer would manufacture them, he would sell it

to the bootleggers. The bootleggers when they got it to the dock, there would be a government official there and they had to pay an excise tax, okay, because for shipping it off shore, and all they had to do was load it on a boat. Say that, you know, show the way bill that it was going to New York State. They would pay a certain amount of tax. Now, when the boat returned empty, they would recapture some of that tax. They were entitled to get some of the

tax money back. But if nobody came back, or if they didn't come back and claim a portion of that tax they had already paid, well, the government just kept all the money. So the government was happy. They didn't care. They didn't have to refund any of this tax money. They were keeping it for themselves. It was additional revenue. So the flaw So, I mean, you could load up the same boat three times for export and say it

was going to Cuba. It could come back three times the same day as long as you pay the excise tax. The government didn't care what you did with it. They did. Yeah, I mean later on in nineteen twenty, even though the Canadian government knew that alcohol was prohibited in the United States, as long as like you could put down in nineteen twenty one that it was being shipped to Upper New York State. Canadian government didn't care as long as they got their tax for it. Once it's hit the shores

of Upper New York State. It was the US's problem, US authorities problem.

it was going. You paid the tax to ship it, They kept the money. Everybody was happy. So they said, you know, like the waybill that would say, oh, it's being shipped to Cuba. So they'd loaded up in Toronto, wherever these breweries were, and they'd drive the boat over to Niagara Falls and unloaded, and from there they would distribute it to all the speakeasies in Ontario. That was the loophole that they found and they took advantage of it.

Who were those players? Finally you come to a resolution and conclusion of who did what? Who are the players? Tell us about that?

seventeen Unsolved homicides. But the real brains behind uh Rocco's organization wasn't Rocco. The real brains was his common law wife, the woman he had lope with. Bessie Perry or Bessie Startman was her maiden name. Her married name was Bessie Tobin, but she went by the name of Bessie Perry. She was extremely smart woman. It was actually unfortunate that she was born when she was because had she been born in the twenty first century, it is no doubt in my mind that she would have been the CEO or

CFO of a transnational conglomerate corporation. She was very smart. Uh she educated herself and she she was cunning too. She was a very u forward strategic thinker. She was also a bit of a sociopath, and you can see that in her life the way she I mean, when she abandoned her two children, they were infants. One of them was like eight months old, the other one was a year and a half old. They were just babies, and you know, I mean she just left them to

go run off with Rocco. And Rocco at the time that they ran off, wasn't King of the bootlekers that he was, you know, five years later, you know, so, I mean everything that she did. I mean she was convicted in Hamilton of running a brothel and they were selling alcohol out of there in you know, nineteen eighteen or something like that. You know, she was a person that when you know, she looked at everybody as if what is it I can get from you? What is it you can do for me? You know, she was

the brains behind. She did all the organizing, She did all the ordering, she arranged the shipping. Roccal and his crew were more or less the muscle now, but as far as their part in the murder. When this murder occurred, they weren't the prominent bootleggers that they had turned that they wound up being in the nineteen twenties. But they were ruthless, you know. They if somebody stood in their way, there would be no hesitation has take to take that

person out, you know. But I'm not sure Dan. As far as the organized I mean, Rocco had ties all over southern Ontario in organized crime groups. As a matter of fact, the Purple Gang of Detroit, who were buying Canadian whiskey and selling it to compone in Chicago. They were buying that whiskey of Rocco Perry, you know, so he was he was well embedded in that in the

illegal alcohol business. Tying all these people up, I mean, I mean to go into it in great detail, Dan would be kind of tough because they're so you know, there's cousins and then there's uncles and and it's a family thing, you know, this organized crime group. You know, they stated themselves and well, what I basically found out is the man that Rocco killed in nineteen twelve who

had insulted the mob boss from Gwelph his wife. The mob boss's wife was the sister of a man who was married to somebody at one twenty four Elm Street. There was the connection that all led to Rocco Perry. Rocco Perry was a witness at the wedding along of this man's wedding in nineteen nineteen, and the other witness, the maid of honor, also was Mary Colilo, who was

a resident at one twenty four Elm Street. This was a very tight knit group of people, ethnic Italian people and the traditions from the old country they just brought over here. The organized crime traditions, but it was really alcohol prohibition that gave them their big boost, gave them a chance to make tons of money. You know, I don't know if that answers your question, Dan did.

for Rocco too. He was like an enforcer type of a guy, and like Rocco had that area of the Ward and surrounding area. He was the supplier to all the alcohol. If he ran into any trouble with somebody trying to come into his area, he would send, like Giuseppe Bernadelli to see the people and straighten it out. And actually Giuseppe Bernadelli he got into a confrontation with Frank Lombardi in nineteen nineteen September of nineteen nineteen and

Frank murdered him. He shot him. A coroner's inquest, you know, it came out that you know, this Joe Berlito, Giseppe Bernardelli, he was you know, he was a pimp. He sold alcohol. He used to muscle people down there in the Ward for money and he and he was connected to Rocco Ferry. He fit the profile and he was about six y' one in height, yeah, sixty one, and he spoke Italian exactly like the man at the murder scene who had a fight with my who was fighting with my great uncle.

The man that George Rush when he returned to his house saw and heard you know.

opened the garage door. She went in to turn the light on in the garage, and two men stepped out behind the second car that was parked in the garage, and she was hit by two blasts of a twelve gate shotgun, one in the face and one in the hip that killed her. Instantly got out a scream, and that was the end of Bessie. She was no more. Rocco exited the car ran up the street, screaming in terror because he thought, you know, maybe this was intended

for him, but it wasn't. Bessie was the type of person that didn't think much of abusing somebody, and I think what she failed to recognize was that although she was very clever and she thought that gave her some sort of superiority to the people that she. You know, Italian organized crime has been predominantly men for as many centuries as it's been going on, and this was a woman who wanted to be in charge. She was verbally abusive for the people that worked for them. She was

very stingy when it came to money. For the life of me, I can't figure out why they discovered close to a million dollars in cash in nineteen twenty six in her bank account. And that's well not all the money she had. I mean, as you say, Dan, they became very wealthy. They had numerous trips down to New York Broadway and spending sprees. And at the time she died,

she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of jewelry. I mean, you know, back in back in nineteen thirty, I mean, that was quite a that was quite a lot of jewelry to be wearing, you know, And you know, I mean her her her abusiveness, and she failed to recognize that the people she was dealing with weren't going to

put up with that from her. Actually, they wouldn't put up with it from anybody that was just you know, their ego you know she and she you know, she as clever as she was was, she didn't understand the people, she didn't completely understand them, and and it caught up to her that night, that evening when she came home, and that ended up being her fate, you know, dying on the garage floor there. And yeah, Rocco emotionally fell apart for about six or eight months afterwards. He wouldn't

leave the house. He was terrified. And then finally I guess he got the word that's you know, why it was done and everything, and there was nothing he could do about it.

his life out in Massana, New York. Anyway, I want to thank you so much, Joseph Lappelo for coming on and talking about your book, Murder Lost the Time, The True story of one of Canada's oldest unsolved murders. This was a fascinating investigation that you undertook. Congratulations on finding I believe and you believe who killed your great uncle and exactly why. It's a fascinating story. Thank you so

much for coming on and talking about this. This book is available in ebook and paperback and also you could be found on Facebook. Am I not correct?