King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan and the author of Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

King of the Mob can be read as an allegory for these free-trade times we live in. Rocco Perri, an Italian immigrant, emerged as a kingpin among bootleggers in the era of the Ontario Temperance Act and American prohibition. Aided by his common-law wife Bessie Starkman, he built an empire that legally shipped liquor into the dry United States, and rather less legally diverted some of it to centres in parched Ontario. After Bessie was murdered, Rocco teamed up with another brainy woman, Annie Newman, and carried on bootlegging, drug trafficking, and highgrading gold from northern Ontario. The police were rarely able to catch him, the press loved his outspoken ways, and the public admired his success. Only the outbreak of World War II provided the authorities with an opportunity to cage Rocco: they interned him as an enemy alien since they were unable to convict him of a criminal offence.

Authors Dubro and Rowland are imaginative in both the positive and negative senses of the word. They made effective use of usually neglected sources such as bank records, police files, Mounted Police surveillance reports, and American consular dossiers that deal with Canadian sources of prohibited alcohol. From these they constructed a fascinating portrait of a charming thug who had the good sense to team up with intelligent and tough-minded women on his way to becoming a major hood. The downside of their imaginative reconstruction of this misspent life is that the authors cannot always draw the line between evidence and events that were, because of their illegality, hidden. They do not fully prove ties between Rocco and an extensive crime network in southern Ontario. And the extended argument in chapters 12 and. 13 about Perri’s supposed control of a drug-trafficking ring is based on a plethora of police allegations rather than hard evidence. Finally, they cannot tell us for certain what happened to Rocco Perri when he disappeared in 1944. The authors’ best guess is that Rocco was killed by a Buffalo mafia family that was moving in on organized crime in southern Ontario.

Sometimes those who live by free trade die by it, too.