Hello everyone,

I hope the community here might consider my KickStarter project and help me put a whole new family on the map.

The Gentile family ran Vancouver from the early 1950's to approximately 1980. There is no major Mafia presence in Vancouver today other than some Montreal affiliates, but in the old days Vancouver as Canada's Western port city had its very own albeit very small family. This is their true story.

If you google names like "Joe Gentile" "Carlo Gallo" "Frank D'Angelo" or "Jimmy Sanseverino" you will see some vague references to this...hopefully enough to satisfy yourself that I'm not just making this up.

In the past few years I have spoken with reporters, academics, former crown prosecutors, and even the neighbours of these men, and I have commitments from them to finally tell their stories.

What we need now is a budget with which to collect notarized affidavits and the really expensive one - pay the archivist at the Vancouver Sun to go through 30 years of press clippings at the cost of $80 per hour.

I'm trying to raise $4,000 so you can see I'm not doing this to give myself a job. I just want to finally tell this untold story before too many key people are dead. Two of the most central characters to this tale died in the last year. I want to finally get all this on paper before it is too late.

I hope you will consider shining a light on a Mafia family that many never knew existed.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1921771251/vancouvers-family

When I google "Joe Gentile" all I get are a bunch of facebook accounts and Linkedin profiles of a CPA from Chicago. Totally legit guy.

When I google "Carlo Gallo" all I get are mentions of an actress, Carla Gallo, and thinks like her wikipedia page and ibmd mentions.

"Frank D'Angelo" seems to be a legit businessman from Toronto who got caught up in a sexual assault case. No mentions of anything Vancouver or LCN related.


Hope you manage to get the funds together, I'd like to learn about this Vancouver Mob, if they ever existed. Unfortunately I'm not getting anything that relates when I search those names.

That's weird - have you tried using quotes?

Try this: "Joe Gentile" Vancouver

My first hits are this:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=ZO8jKSn25DAC&pg=PA325&lpg=PA325&dq=%22Joe+Gentile%22+Vancouver&source=bl&ots=r-iRoneUrj&sig=iDjWh8epe95vhaw031GCVjNdoG0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7OjXVNOKAYf0oASTmILYDA&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Joe%20Gentile%22%20Vancouver&f=false

http://www.primetimecrime.com/columns/Columns%202000/20000301.htm


Admittedly, you won't get much - but that's the whole point. This is a virtually untold story. I have taken years piecing it together.

Gallo is identified in this old article as a hitman, although I have never found any murders in which he is a suspect. He did however get sentenced to life in prison where he died in the 1990's.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19790323&id=9j1OAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Ke4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4452,3986794

"I hope the community here might consider my KickStarter project and help me put a whole new family on the map."

From the title of this thread and your intro it sounded like you were selling buttons to get your own slice of the LCN pie.

Best of luck, keep us posted!

I know this smells a little fishy but maybe the guy is onto something here. However I also think he should give us a little more, maybe a little taste on what you've been working on... some other newspaper clippings, research, etc.

I can understand why this might smell fishy, but I have been working on this for some years and I'm at the point where I either do something with it, or fold it up and forget about it.

I have identified 15 members of the Vancouver Mafia group through court documents and old press accounts. They include Joe Celona, Frank Casisa, Joe Gentile, Gerry di Salvo, James Sanseverino, Frank D'Angelo, Carlo Gallo, Joe Biasi, Frank Magasano, Joe Romano, and five others I can't name publicly yet as there names are not in court documents, and thus they or their estates could technically sue me for defamation until, or if, I can come up with more info.

I have also interviewed friends of mob boss Joe Gentile as well as former neighbours of his old house which is on Adanac Street in East Vancouver, where he lived for 30 years. I have spoken with the proprietor of the shop where Carlo Gallo had his night club and even a local celebrity chef whose first job was working in one of Gentile's two restaurants. Gentile by the way was the (Christian) Godfather to Montreal Boss Paolo Violi's daughter.

You can also google for "Mickey Smith" from Vancouver or "Lucian Mayer" who was murdered in Vancouver in January, 1969. Mayer imported heroin for Gentile. The murder took place outside La Botte - an Italian restaurant owned and operated by Nino Gentile - the Godfather's brother. Smith did the hit for Fats Robertson, a competing gangster who was known for once setting up an elaborate casino at a location accessibly only by boat - the Wigwam Inn, a hotel in the remote Canadian woods which once hosted John Jacob Astor.

Gentile's Calabrese Capo was Carlo Gallo, a Teamster Rep in the Vancouver local and owner of the Italian Melody nightclub on Commercial Drive, which is now the locally famous store Wonderbucks. I have spoken with the crown prosecutor who put Gallo in jail even after he escaped from custody during his trial, only to turn himself in when he was reassured by a corrupt judge that his case would be overturned on appeal. That judge was caught on wiretap and forced to resign by the time Gallo had turned himself in. Gallo lost the case and was sentenced to life in prison.

I have lots of great data to work with, but to fill out the story and turn it into a narrative I need to pay the Vancouver Sun archivist $80 per hour to pull every mob story in 30 years of newspapers, and I need to notarize affidavits from people I have spoken to before I can actually publish this without it being regarded as defamation. This will cost approximately $40 per letter.

So I suppose you can say that I'm doing all of this just to try rip you off for $20, or you can get a sense that I do have some info here and that I'm desperately trying to find a way to get the story out there, but that I can't without the benefit of the funding to get the news accounts and affidavits I need to proceed with this.

I'm at the point where this is my last shot. I have a day job and can't continue to spend my few free hours combing through micro fiche. Either I get some help with this, or I just go about my life as one of the few people to know about the now totally forgotten Gentile family, publicly referenced only in Stephen Schneider's book. I would love to tell this story, but I don't have four grand to spend on researching and self-publishing a book.

If you think the story might be worth hearing, contribute. If not, don't.

Personally, I give it one shot in ten. But it's my last shot.

J_G:

I would like to offer to help in the way of providing PDFs of a few Vancouver Sun articles (from 1987 onward, but I suspect you already have the ones I've found and that these aren't as valuable as articles from before the 1970s), as well as PDFs of articles from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail if you can't get access to one or both of these latter two.

I could also arrange to scan some relevant pages from the 1979 book Making Connections: The Behind The Scenes Story and then send you the PDF.

I have some ideas about how you could conduct your research to search for and save articles for free using resources of the Vancouver Public Library. You have already probably thought of or tried some of these:

1. I think you and other library users are limited in the selection of the VPL's Vancouver Sun digital offerings, which I think go back only to 1987. However, there appear to be microfilm reels, and these would go much farther back. I am certain there is a way for you to search for the articles contained in microfilm or microfiche, and I suspect that doing so is much easier than it was even 10 years ago. If you get an overwhelming number of results, then I see how paying the newspaper's archivist would be worth your while.

2. You can access the Globe and Mail: Historical Newspapers (ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Globe and Mail) through the VPL--articles go back to 1844. Ask one of the library staff at a branch or, better yet, at the Central Library about using that database (if you don't already use it) and others. A librarian is usually always willing to help an author with how to do research for a book. Ask staff about access to the Toronto Star: Historical Newspapers--articles go back to 1894--and if you aren't offered access, I would be glad to use that database, search articles, save them as PDFs, and then send the PDFs to you by e-mail.

3. Ask library staff about some of the resources listed here:

http://www.vpl.ca/electronic_databases/cat/C530

In particular, ask about Infomart. You may discover that a good number of articles you need will be located through Infomart, after which you can pay for them individually or through some type of payment for a block of articles. I do not recommend using Infomart's Infoaction service (http://www.vpl.ca/electronic_databases/cat/C530) to find articles for you--that will be more expensive than paying the Vancouver Sun's archivist.

Please don't hesitate to ask followup questions or to seek clarification.

Thank you for the tips, antimafia, however we have mined all those resources to death. You are right, the digital search goes back to 1987, and most of what we are talking about goes 1950-1980, maybe 1985.

Joe Gentile himself fled the country in 1977/78 on word that he was about to be indicted, and the rest of his merry crew began collapsing soonafter.

We don't want to go any further than the mid-1980s....while there are stories there and extending to today, they are about Montreal-based guys who essentially run a small branch office if you can even call it that.

We wanted to tell the story of the Vancouver family that had its own boss and ran its own affairs. I'm not interested in trying to pore over the details of who has done what for Montreal out here. The Montreal family has been written about lots lately and plenty more comes out on them all the time. The interesting story is that there was this family here on the West Coast, that nobody knew of and now no longer exists, but for 30+ years wielded lots of influence out here.

A lot of the portrait I've put together is of a man who was quite beloved in this community. To a "T", every single former neighbour of these guys I have spoken to, including Gentile's, will say that they were great neighbours, and in Gentile's case could count on the occasional bottle of his home made wine. I spoke to one woman who knew Gentile and who recalled a story of how he angrily dismissed a couple of men from his table one evening for having sworn in the presence of a woman.

If I can bind it all together, it will make for an interesting story.

I do have a copy of Making Connections and have pored over every inch of it.

I will admit I haven't tried mining out the Globe & Mail - that could work, although we have a bit of a bias against them out on the Coast...we tend to believe that they don't really cover our news anyway so I'm not sure to what degree that would be worth my time.

Thanks for the tips.

If you want my help, it's there for the asking. In particular, I would be glad to provide or obtain information about earlier interaction between the Vancouver guys and the Siderno Group in Toronto.

I can always ask Jim Dubro, on your behalf, any questions for which you're seeking answers.

Let me know.