Bessie Perri: Queen of the Bootleggers
Rocco Perri was the Al Capone of Canada. Without him, the American market of alcohol would be a little...dry. He is frequently cited as the most successful bootlegger of Canada, however, for one important reason: his wife, Bessie Perri. If Rocco was the King of Bootlegging, Bessie was the obvious queen.
With page-turning suspense, this gritty book looks at the brains behind Canadian bootlegging and how her cutthroat ways forever changed the landscape of both prohibitions.
With page-turning suspense, this gritty book looks at the brains behind Canadian bootlegging and how her cutthroat ways forever changed the landscape of both prohibitions.
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Excerpt
Prologue
Gangsters were dying in droves in August 1930.
On August 13, three men were found shot to death on a lonely road near Wildwood, an amusement park near White Bear Lake, northwest of St. Paul, Minnesota. General W.F. Rhinow, who headed the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, was touring the back roads for signs of criminal activity when he came across an abandoned vehicle with bullet-punctured corpses strewn around it.
The driver was slumped behind the wheel, a gaping bullet hole behind his right ear. Records soon identified him as ‘Jew’ Sammy Stein, alias Hackle, a bank robber, kidnapper, and killer wanted for murder in Kansas City. The other dead men were Frank ‘Weinie’ Coleman and Mike Rusick, alleged co-conspirators with Stein in a recent heist that netted $70,000 from a Willmar, Minnesota bank. Although the triple murder was never officially solved, the theory prevailed that outlaw Verne Miller had shot them for double-crossing him and/or threatening to kidnap a friend of his.
That same night, in Chicago, gangster Danny Vallo, a suspect in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was shot to death as he and a female companion alighted from his automobile outside a roadhouse. Forty slugs pierced his body as he fell. The woman, who was unharmed, identified herself as his fiancée and said she knew nothing about his business except that he “received many telephone calls and made money.”
In Detroit, the city witnessed its fifteenth recent gangster assassination on August 13. The victim, Cicero Mangiapani, had been shot five times while driving through Grosse Pointe Park at 11:30 p.m. The assassin, who had been riding with him, leaped out of the spinning vehicle and escaped as it crashed into the curb.
And north of the border, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, another underworld powerhouse fell. Her death was different from the others that had taken place that bloody August night. It would alter the course of history for Canadian organized crime.
******
It was nearly 11:35 p.m. when the couple finally arrived home at 166 Bay Street South in Hamilton. The garage door behind their house was already open, so the woman drove in and parked her car next to their other vehicle, a seven-seater Marmon touring sedan that the husband often used. As she turned off the engine, she said to him, “Close the garage door. I’ll go turn on the light.”
The woman, a petite and attractive brunette draped in jewels, had only taken a few steps when shotguns roared, briefly illuminating the garage interior and filling it with acrid smoke. Her husband, who was at the garage door, fled into the back alley. Eyes wide and appearing to be deranged with terror, he bolted down the narrow passageway and staggered onto Duke Street. Then he turned left, ran back onto Bay, and encountered David Robbins, who was out walking his dog before bedtime.
“They’ve killed her!” he yelled.
Robbins accompanied his shaken neighbor to 166 Bay Street South, where they hurried through the house and entered the garage. There they found the woman lying near the steps leading into the kitchen, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. Neither Robbins nor her hysterical husband needed to be a doctor to know that she was dead.
A neighbor had called the police when they heard the shotguns, so minutes later uniformed officers converged on the nineteen-room house. So did men of a far different stripe: gangsters, gamblers, and bootleggers, who had flocked to Bay Street as soon as they got the news.
The murdered woman had been a criminal, but not in the auxiliary sense that women were typically relegated to in the underworld. Her name was Bessie Perri, alias Starkman, the acknowledged financial genius behind her husband Rocco’s criminal empire, which in 1930 controlled most bootlegging, gambling, and drug smuggling in Southern Ontario and beyond.
Rocco, normally glib and smiling in public, was now mad with grief and fury. “They’ve killed her,” he sobbed to his half-brother, Mike, who was trying to calm him. “They’ve killed my Bessie!”
The police later determined that the assassins had hidden in the garage, possibly for hours, waiting for the Perris to return. After Rocco fled the garage they had followed, sticking to the alley shadows until they emerged onto Duke Street, where a getaway car waited for them. In their wake, they left two double-barreled shotguns, one in the garage and the other just outside. Predictably, neither weapon contained fingerprints.
The investigating officers knew that this was no routine murder. Bessie Perri had been a powerful woman. Tiny in stature but possessed of an iron will, she directed the operations of a criminal syndicate that made millions and destroyed competitors without mercy. She was the right arm and trusted advisor of Rocco Perri, who headed the Calabrian mob in Southern Ontario and would go down in history as ‘King of the Bootleggers’ and ‘Canada’s Al Capone’.
As a woman in the male-dominated world of organized crime, Rocco’s men and business partners were not naturally inclined to see her as an equal, but Bessie’s business acumen and proven ability to make money earned her a reluctant respect. Some of the men even went so far as to call her “the boss”.
The Perris had gotten their start during the war years by supplying beer and liquor to the thirsty victims of the Ontario Temperance Act. When the Volstead Act took effect south of the border in 1920, the Perri bootlegging syndicate formed strategic alliances with American gangsters to supply them with quality Canadian liquor. Rocco and Bessie’s best customers included Al Capone and Joseph Kennedy, father of the future President.
Mob boss Joe Bonanno remembered, “Whiskey arrived from Ontario, sent to us by a Calabrian friend of Costello’s (Frank ‘the Prime Minister’ Costello, future boss of the Luciano crime family), a fellow who had married a Jewish woman. l met him once in New York.”[1]
It was a successful partnership that cleared over $1 million annually at a time when construction workers took home an average of $42 a week.[2] The outgoing Rocco traveled throughout the province and across the border, making the deals while Bessie handled the cash, using a portion of their profits to branch out into gambling and narcotics. The latter venture was supposedly her idea: Rocco had little interest in the drug trade, but Bessie knew there was money to be made and went for it.
Ironically, her murder may have been drug-related. A few days before the shooting, two Americans had allegedly visited the Perri home and demanded payment for a recent narcotics shipment. Rocco urged Bessie to comply, not wanting to antagonize the Rochester gangsters who had sent the goods, but she refused for reasons that were never made clear and ordered the visitors out.
Once he calmed down, Rocco told the police that the killers must have been after Bessie’s jewelry: she was rarely seen in public without acres of pearls or gemstones around her slim neck and her fingers encrusted with diamond rings. But nothing had been taken from her corpse afterward, even though she was wearing a small fortune. Police and reporters rightly suspected a gang hit, and figured that Rocco was being obstructive either because he planned to handle the shooters himself or he had something to hide.
Veteran reporters thought that some of Perri’s men had secretly aligned with Buffalo mob boss Stefano Magaddino, who was determined to wrest control of Southern Ontario away from his Calabrian rival. Other rumors accused Perri himself of ordering the hit. Bessie’s treatment of the American drug runners was not an isolated incident, and her domineering ways could have been seen as bad for business. She had already embarrassed Rocco on several occasions by refusing financial aid to the families of jailed gang members, even though he had promised such help beforehand. She also had affairs with powerful men (one of whom was allegedly the Hamilton police chief). Rocco had had two daughters with another woman, but a double standard existed, and his friends often taunted his apparent inability to control her.
“People talk, and how do you think you come off?” one friend snapped at Rocco during a card game. “At this point, she does what she wants, she answers to no one and treats friends like dirt. If things go on like this, no one will respect you any longer.”[3]
Bessie Starkman-Perri’s murder was never officially solved, but it doesn’t change the fact that she is the only Jewish woman who ever commanded an Italian mob. She may not have been well-liked by the men she controlled, but she was, as the Hamilton Spectator put it, a “dramatic and dynamic Jewess who mated with an Italian in a liaison of love and sinister business which ended only when a killer’s gun smashed the partnership.”[4]
[1] Antonio Nicaso, Rocco Perri: the Story of Canada’s Most Notorious Bootlegger, p.42
[2] Hamilton Spectator, January 4, 2005
[3] Hamilton Spectator, January 6, 2005
[4] Hamilton Spectator, August 18, 1930
Gangsters were dying in droves in August 1930.
On August 13, three men were found shot to death on a lonely road near Wildwood, an amusement park near White Bear Lake, northwest of St. Paul, Minnesota. General W.F. Rhinow, who headed the State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, was touring the back roads for signs of criminal activity when he came across an abandoned vehicle with bullet-punctured corpses strewn around it.
The driver was slumped behind the wheel, a gaping bullet hole behind his right ear. Records soon identified him as ‘Jew’ Sammy Stein, alias Hackle, a bank robber, kidnapper, and killer wanted for murder in Kansas City. The other dead men were Frank ‘Weinie’ Coleman and Mike Rusick, alleged co-conspirators with Stein in a recent heist that netted $70,000 from a Willmar, Minnesota bank. Although the triple murder was never officially solved, the theory prevailed that outlaw Verne Miller had shot them for double-crossing him and/or threatening to kidnap a friend of his.
That same night, in Chicago, gangster Danny Vallo, a suspect in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was shot to death as he and a female companion alighted from his automobile outside a roadhouse. Forty slugs pierced his body as he fell. The woman, who was unharmed, identified herself as his fiancée and said she knew nothing about his business except that he “received many telephone calls and made money.”
In Detroit, the city witnessed its fifteenth recent gangster assassination on August 13. The victim, Cicero Mangiapani, had been shot five times while driving through Grosse Pointe Park at 11:30 p.m. The assassin, who had been riding with him, leaped out of the spinning vehicle and escaped as it crashed into the curb.
And north of the border, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, another underworld powerhouse fell. Her death was different from the others that had taken place that bloody August night. It would alter the course of history for Canadian organized crime.
******
It was nearly 11:35 p.m. when the couple finally arrived home at 166 Bay Street South in Hamilton. The garage door behind their house was already open, so the woman drove in and parked her car next to their other vehicle, a seven-seater Marmon touring sedan that the husband often used. As she turned off the engine, she said to him, “Close the garage door. I’ll go turn on the light.”
The woman, a petite and attractive brunette draped in jewels, had only taken a few steps when shotguns roared, briefly illuminating the garage interior and filling it with acrid smoke. Her husband, who was at the garage door, fled into the back alley. Eyes wide and appearing to be deranged with terror, he bolted down the narrow passageway and staggered onto Duke Street. Then he turned left, ran back onto Bay, and encountered David Robbins, who was out walking his dog before bedtime.
“They’ve killed her!” he yelled.
Robbins accompanied his shaken neighbor to 166 Bay Street South, where they hurried through the house and entered the garage. There they found the woman lying near the steps leading into the kitchen, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. Neither Robbins nor her hysterical husband needed to be a doctor to know that she was dead.
A neighbor had called the police when they heard the shotguns, so minutes later uniformed officers converged on the nineteen-room house. So did men of a far different stripe: gangsters, gamblers, and bootleggers, who had flocked to Bay Street as soon as they got the news.
The murdered woman had been a criminal, but not in the auxiliary sense that women were typically relegated to in the underworld. Her name was Bessie Perri, alias Starkman, the acknowledged financial genius behind her husband Rocco’s criminal empire, which in 1930 controlled most bootlegging, gambling, and drug smuggling in Southern Ontario and beyond.
Rocco, normally glib and smiling in public, was now mad with grief and fury. “They’ve killed her,” he sobbed to his half-brother, Mike, who was trying to calm him. “They’ve killed my Bessie!”
The police later determined that the assassins had hidden in the garage, possibly for hours, waiting for the Perris to return. After Rocco fled the garage they had followed, sticking to the alley shadows until they emerged onto Duke Street, where a getaway car waited for them. In their wake, they left two double-barreled shotguns, one in the garage and the other just outside. Predictably, neither weapon contained fingerprints.
The investigating officers knew that this was no routine murder. Bessie Perri had been a powerful woman. Tiny in stature but possessed of an iron will, she directed the operations of a criminal syndicate that made millions and destroyed competitors without mercy. She was the right arm and trusted advisor of Rocco Perri, who headed the Calabrian mob in Southern Ontario and would go down in history as ‘King of the Bootleggers’ and ‘Canada’s Al Capone’.
As a woman in the male-dominated world of organized crime, Rocco’s men and business partners were not naturally inclined to see her as an equal, but Bessie’s business acumen and proven ability to make money earned her a reluctant respect. Some of the men even went so far as to call her “the boss”.
The Perris had gotten their start during the war years by supplying beer and liquor to the thirsty victims of the Ontario Temperance Act. When the Volstead Act took effect south of the border in 1920, the Perri bootlegging syndicate formed strategic alliances with American gangsters to supply them with quality Canadian liquor. Rocco and Bessie’s best customers included Al Capone and Joseph Kennedy, father of the future President.
Mob boss Joe Bonanno remembered, “Whiskey arrived from Ontario, sent to us by a Calabrian friend of Costello’s (Frank ‘the Prime Minister’ Costello, future boss of the Luciano crime family), a fellow who had married a Jewish woman. l met him once in New York.”[1]
It was a successful partnership that cleared over $1 million annually at a time when construction workers took home an average of $42 a week.[2] The outgoing Rocco traveled throughout the province and across the border, making the deals while Bessie handled the cash, using a portion of their profits to branch out into gambling and narcotics. The latter venture was supposedly her idea: Rocco had little interest in the drug trade, but Bessie knew there was money to be made and went for it.
Ironically, her murder may have been drug-related. A few days before the shooting, two Americans had allegedly visited the Perri home and demanded payment for a recent narcotics shipment. Rocco urged Bessie to comply, not wanting to antagonize the Rochester gangsters who had sent the goods, but she refused for reasons that were never made clear and ordered the visitors out.
Once he calmed down, Rocco told the police that the killers must have been after Bessie’s jewelry: she was rarely seen in public without acres of pearls or gemstones around her slim neck and her fingers encrusted with diamond rings. But nothing had been taken from her corpse afterward, even though she was wearing a small fortune. Police and reporters rightly suspected a gang hit, and figured that Rocco was being obstructive either because he planned to handle the shooters himself or he had something to hide.
Veteran reporters thought that some of Perri’s men had secretly aligned with Buffalo mob boss Stefano Magaddino, who was determined to wrest control of Southern Ontario away from his Calabrian rival. Other rumors accused Perri himself of ordering the hit. Bessie’s treatment of the American drug runners was not an isolated incident, and her domineering ways could have been seen as bad for business. She had already embarrassed Rocco on several occasions by refusing financial aid to the families of jailed gang members, even though he had promised such help beforehand. She also had affairs with powerful men (one of whom was allegedly the Hamilton police chief). Rocco had had two daughters with another woman, but a double standard existed, and his friends often taunted his apparent inability to control her.
“People talk, and how do you think you come off?” one friend snapped at Rocco during a card game. “At this point, she does what she wants, she answers to no one and treats friends like dirt. If things go on like this, no one will respect you any longer.”[3]
Bessie Starkman-Perri’s murder was never officially solved, but it doesn’t change the fact that she is the only Jewish woman who ever commanded an Italian mob. She may not have been well-liked by the men she controlled, but she was, as the Hamilton Spectator put it, a “dramatic and dynamic Jewess who mated with an Italian in a liaison of love and sinister business which ended only when a killer’s gun smashed the partnership.”[4]
[1] Antonio Nicaso, Rocco Perri: the Story of Canada’s Most Notorious Bootlegger, p.42
[2] Hamilton Spectator, January 4, 2005
[3] Hamilton Spectator, January 6, 2005
[4] Hamilton Spectator, August 18, 1930
