Sunday, January 31, 2016

‘You’d never guess he was a Mafia chieftain’: Longtime mob boss killed in violent attack in Toronto home

Rocco Zito in the 1980s
Rocco Zito, a leading Mafia boss in Toronto until slowed by age and a growing distaste for the self-indulgent glitz of the modern-day underworld was killed Friday in a violent attack inside the modest house he lived quietly in for decades.

He was 87.

Zito was pronounced dead Friday after suffering a single gunshot wound. Emergency crews were called to the home at dinnertime and quickly searched for a gunman.

After police publicly named Domenico Scopelliti, 51, of Toronto, as the accused gunman, the suspect — Zito’s son-in-law — surrendered to police during the night, ending the manhunt but not the investigation into the violent end of a figure who, despite being a slight, unassuming man, loomed large in the underworld since the late 1950s.

Zito was at the centre of underworld intrigue at a time when police in Canada were beginning to realize the presence here of the ’Ndrangheta, the powerful Mafia that formed in the southern Italian region of Calabria.

But Zito loathed the flash of the modern Mafia, with its ostentatious displays of wealth meant to show power; true respect, he believed, came from “honour.”

In the years before he was killed, Zito often dismissed the young mobsters who were pushing and preening north of Toronto as “Hollywood.”

Zito said he disliked hanging out with “the people in Hollywood,” meaning Woodbridge, Ont., where many mobsters now call home, and lampooned them as “glamorous,” according to a source who knew him.

“In my day, we didn’t have the big houses, drive the big cars and the suits and all the flash,” Zito said. “But all the guys in Woodbridge have the big houses and drive the big, black SUVs and put on airs.”  (more...)



Two experts share their thoughts on the murder of 'Ndrangheta boss Rocco Zito http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/murder-of-mob-boss-rocco-zito-hit-or-domestic-dispute by Gangsters Inc.
Posted by Gangsters Inc. on Monday, February 1, 2016

Background:


Do you wonder what a diligent investigative reporter might dig up among our city councilors and school trustees? Or chancery and parish councilors?

"Red light district"? I'll give you the GTA!

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