Carmen Barillaro

Barillaro was born in Italy and immigrated to Canada with parents at the age of nine.[2] He grew up in Niagara Falls, and joined the Papalia family.[2] In 1931, when the Commission was established, dividing up North America into territories controlled by various Mafia families, much of southern Ontario was assigned to the Magaddino family of Buffalo, New York, to whom the Papalia family of Hamilton were ultimately responsible to.[3] Barillaro became a "made man" in the Magaddino family of Buffalo.[2]

In 1978, Barillaro was convicted of conspiracy to import heroin and sentenced to two years in prison.[2] Released on parole in 1979, he was convicted of trying to sell three pounds of heroin to an undercover police officer in 1980, causing him to spend the next three years in prison.[2] During his time in prison, Barillaro had bulked up by working out, and upon his release Papalia employed him to extort money from illegal gambling houses in Toronto's Greektown in the Pape-Danforth area.[2] Considered to be a terrifying figure, Barillaro together with other muscular Mafiosi would raid gambling houses that refused to pay protection money to Papalia to intimidate and rob the gamblers.[4]

Louis Iannuzzelli was a prominent businessman in Niagara Falls, Ontario who owned the House of Frankenstein Wax Museum and who started to engage in loansharking in the Niagara Peninsula, which Papalia considered to be his territory.[5] However, Ianuzzelii had a protector in the form of Dominic Longo, an elderly Mafiosi who worked alongside Antonio Papalia, the father of Johnny, who ordered Johnny to accept Iannuzzeli operations.[6] Papalia was respectful of his elders and accepted Longo's orders.[7] Longo died in October 1985, and three days later, Iannuzzelli disappeared without trace, never to be seen or heard from again.[7] Barillaro was never charged, but remains the prime suspect in the presumed murder of Iannuzzelli.[7] In an interview with the journalist Peter Moon of The Globe and Mail in December 1986, Papalia denied having anything to do with Iannzzelli's presumed murder, but did express much hatred of Iannzzelli, whom he suggested maliciously was "depressed" because of his failures in life and had committed suicide.[7] One police officer told Moon: "I'm sure he [Iannuzzelli] was depressed. You'd be depressed too if you thought Johnny Pops was mad at you for some reason. He didn't commit suicide. And with him gone, there's no competition for John in Niagara Falls".[8]

In December 1985, Barillaro was arrested and charged with extortion of the gambling houses in Greektown as part of Operation Outhouse, a crackdown by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) on the Papalia family.[9] The police believed that Barllaro was acting on Papalia's orders during his raids on the gambling houses of Greektown, but Papalia was not charged because it was thought likely that he would be acquitted in court, which would add to his mystique as Papalia had a near-legendary reputation by the 1980s.[10] Instead, the police contented themselves with charging Barillaro, Enio Mora and several others for the brutal raids that saw numerous patrons beaten up and the ear of one gambling house owner sliced up with a knife.[11] Ultimately, the Crown dropped the charges, and Barillaro never went to trial.[9] On 24 December 1986, Barillaro filed for bankruptcy, claiming he had no assets and his only source of income was his weekly salary of $245 at Murphy's Restaurant, while at the same time he allowed a friend to use his credit card as much as he wanted, saying that the costs of paying off the credit card bill was not an issue for him.[12]

To launder money for the Papalia family, Barillaro opened up a restaurant-bar in Niagara Falls.[4] Barillaro was an exacting and tyrannical manager who beat up a cook who tried to defrost a chicken with cold water instead of a microwave as he had ordered.[4] He owned the restaurant-bar via a convoluted ownership structure that was meant to pass himself off as a silent partner as his criminal record made him ineligible to have a liquor license in Ontario.[4] In 1989, Sergeant Reginald King of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) made a listing of all 275 Mafiosi in Ontario in order of importance.[4] King placed Papalia as number one and Barillaro as number seven.[4] By the late 1980s, Barillaro was in charge of the Papalia family's operations in the Niagara peninsula area while Enio Mora was in charge of the Papalia family's operations in the Toronto area.[8]

In 1987, Barillaro hired a woman, Faye Fontaine, to serve as an assassin, saying he wanted Roy Caja, a drug dealer who had once belonged to the Outlaws biker gang, killed for not paying a drug debt.[2] Fontaine ultimately chose not to serve as a hitwoman, and instead turned police informer.[2] On 24 January 1989, Barillaro was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.[2] Shortly after his release, Barillaro was charged in May 1992 with conspiracy to import several kilograms of cocaine and 900 kilograms of marijuana from the United States.[4] The drug shipment was estimated to be worth $3 million Canadian dollars.[4] Barillaro ended up pleading guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine and was fined $10,000.[4] Barillaro and his crew specialized in loan-sharking, drug smuggling, and bookmaking.[9]

Barillaro was married with two daughters and always had dinner with his brother every Sunday.[4] He was a devout Catholic who was a close friend of his priest, Father Malachy Smith, who called him a model family man.[4] Barillaro was considered to be friendly man by his neighbors who always greeted others on the street and loved to barbeque in his backyard with his family.[8]

Mora borrowed $7.2 million from Vito Rizzuto of Montreal's Rizzuto family and gave the majority of the money to Papalia and Barillaro, who used some of it to open nightclubs and restaurants while the rest just vanished.[13] Neither Papalia nor Barillaro were interested in repaying the loan as the police recorded Barillaro saying on his phone "They can't touch us".[13] The Canadian journalists André Cédilot and André Noël wrote that this was a "major mistake" as Rizzuto decided to wipe out the Papalia family's leaders.[13] On 11 September 1996, Mora was murdered getting into his car in Vaughan.[13] Rizzuto formed an alliance with the Musitano crime family of Hamilton, who had their own reasons for wanting to eliminate the Papalia family.[14]