Rocco Perri (; born Rocco Perre; December 30, 1887 – disappeared April 23, 1944) was an Italian-Canadian organized crime figure in Hamilton, Ontario. He was one of the most prominent Prohibition-era crime figures in Canada, and was sometimes referred to as "King of the Bootleggers" and "Canada's Al Capone."
Born in the Italian town of Platì in Calabria, Perri immigrated to the United States, and later to Canada, in 1908. In the early 1910s, he started work in construction and in a bakery. Perri and his common-law wife, Bessie Starkman, began a business in bootlegging when the sale and distribution of alcohol was prohibited in both Canada and the United States. Starkman dealt mainly with the finances of the business.
In 1928, Perri was charged with perjury after a Royal Commission testimony, and served five months of a six-month prison sentence. In 1930, Starkman was ambushed in her garage and killed; no one was charged with her murder. In 1940, Perri was arrested and sent to internment at Camp Petawawa as part of the Italian Canadian internment; he was released three years later. Perri disappeared in Hamilton on April 23, 1944, when he went for a walk; his body was never found, and this caused speculation surrounding his purported death.
Early and family life Perri was born Rocco Perre in Platì, Calabria, Italy, on December 30, 1887. His family were poor shepherds, and he dropped out of school in grade 5. In the late 19th century, 80 percent of the people in Calabria were illiterate and Perri stood out in having at least some literacy. Like many other Calabrians of his generation, Perri as a young man longed to go to "America" with the United States being seen as a land of hope, opportunity and prosperity. He immigrated to the United States in 1903, then to Canada in 1908. Perri left for Boston in April 1903 abroad the ocean liner SS Republic on a third-class ticket. Perri soon moved to New York City, and then settled in Massena in St. Lawrence County, New York, where he worked as a general labourer. In May 1908, he moved to Montreal in search of work. In November 1908, Perri moved to Ontario and settled in Cobalt where he worked in a stone quarry owned by the railway. Perri who disliked the harsh winters in northern Ontario lived a semi-nomadic life as he lived in Cobalt in the spring and summer while spending his falls and winters in Toronto. Perri later said of his early years in Canada: "We were treated worse than the Blacks but, unlike them, we couldn't speak English."
During this period, Perri began to engage in crime as he wrote coded letters in Italian full of references to "furniture" and "stuff" that he was always selling and buying to men with criminal records. In May 1912, Perri hired a man, Camillo Tuzoni, to burn down a house in North Bay that was owned by Donato Glionna as a part of extortion bid. Tuzoni after his arrest for arson named Perri as the man who hired him. In the spring of 1912, Perri settled in Toronto permanently.
In 1912, Perri met Bessie Starkman, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to Canada circa 1900, while he lived as a boarder in her family home in The Ward, Toronto, Ontario, with her husband Harry Toben and their two children. Shortly after, Perri began an affair with Starkman, and when he got a job working on the Welland Canal in 1913, she left her husband and children to move in with Perri in St. Catharines and begin a common-law relationship. After a few weeks of living with Perri, Starkman attempted to return to her husband, who refused to accept her. Starkman later said of her life with Perri in St. Catharines: "We had no friends. We ate bread and swallowed insults. We were marginalized among those who, as immigrants, were already marginalized." In a letter to his mother in Italy, Perri wrote: We used to work risking not only our health, but in many cases our lives."
When the Canadian government cut funding to the Welland Canal project due to World War I, Perri became unemployed. After working in a bakery, he was hired as a salesman for the Superior Macaroni Company. However, Perri and Starkman found a better means of income when the Ontario Temperance Act came into effect on September 16, 1916, as it restricted the sale and distribution of alcohol. The couple began bootlegging; using Starkman's business acumen and Perri's connections, they established a profitable enterprise. It was Starkman who suggested bootlegging, but Perri used his network of his Italian friends to create the Perri-Starkman gang. Alcohol was still legal in Quebec, and Perri used his network of friends in Montreal to buy alcohol to smuggle into Ontario. By this time the two lived in Hamilton, Ontario, and by 1920, moved into a larger home at 166 Bay Street South. Perri and Starkman also opened brothels in Hamilton, at the time the city with the highest percentage of its women engaged in prostitution in North America. On March 9, 1917, the Hamilton police raided the house at 157 Caroline Street North owned by Perri and Starkman and arrested Starkman for keeping a bawdy house after the police discovered a prostitute, Mary Ashley, engaged in her trade at the house. Starkman was convicted and fined $50. On November 17, 1917, Starkman gave birth to a son by Perri, but the child died after only two days. On April 1, 1918, the Dominion government banned alcohol everywhere in Canada, a law that remained in effect until December 31, 1919. Perri and Starkman had to smuggle alcohol from the United States into Canada to maintain their business.
In 1918, Perri began an affair with Sarah Olive Routledge, with whom he had two daughters; Autumn (born in 1919), and Catherine (born in 1921). After Autumn was born, Perri had refused to marry Routledge, but he did maintain a home for her in St. Catharines and paid child support. Their affair resumed in 1920. Perri's job as a macaroni salesman required travel across Ontario; he also used those trips to arrange the sale of liquor. Starkman, busy running the finances for their organization, did not question Perri's outings. In February 1922, Routledge was falsely told by Perri's lawyer that he was already married to Starkman. Despondent, Routledge committed suicide by jumping from her lawyer's seventh-story office window of the Bank of Hamilton; her parents took custody of their children. In the 1930s, Perri asked to see his daughters on weekends, although their grandmother would always accompany them for fear that he would take them.
On December 31, 1918, Perri and Starkman were hosting a party where two of the guests, Alberto Naticchio and Antonio Martino, become engaged in a dispute. The two men went outside and Naticchio shot Martino who died later that night of blood loss. Perri gave the police the false name of Rocco Suseno, which led him to be charged with lying to a police officer when the police discovered his real name. Perri was charged with selling alcohol on January 3, 1919, and three days later, was convicted. Perri was fined $1,000, but his lawyer, Michael O'Reilly, had the fine reduced to $700 on an appeal.
Starkman was the head of operations and the duo's negotiator and dealmaker, until August 13, 1930, when she was ambushed at around 11:15 p.m. as she got out of Perri's car in the garage of the couple's home. Perri ran down the street after the assailants before retreating back to Starkman, who had been killed with two shotgun blasts. With tears in his eyes, Perri told reporters the next day "I'd give up all my money just to have Bessie still here with me. I've lost my best pal". Police found two double-barreled shotguns and the getaway car without fingerprints. The investigation eventually resulted in no criminal charges being brought despite a $5,000 reward offered by Perri. However, it was thought that Calabrian compatriot Antonio Papalia, leader of the Papalia crime family and father of Johnny Papalia, played a role in the murder. The stolen license plates used on the car that Starkman's killers had fled were taken from a car parked in an automobile repair shop where Antonio "Tony" Papalia worked. Papalia told the police when questioned: "I've got nothing to do with it. But even if I knew something, I would certainly wouldn't tell you about it." Perri told the reporters about Papalia's possible involvement: "If it were true, I wouldn't be surprised." Two weeks after Starkman's murder, Perri had a will written up, saying he was in fear of his life and "I don't trust anybody." Perri added the clause to his will: "I direct that in the event of my death occurring under any unnatural circumstances that my executor investigate same and if any of my beneficiaries are in any way suspected of having anything to do with my unnatural death, their share of my estate shall be forfeited."
On August 17, about 20,000 people lined the street for the funeral cortege of hundreds of vehicles; Perri fainted at the gravesite. At the funeral, as the rabbi said kaddish (the prayer for the dead), Perri broke down in tears and fainted. Starkman's headstone in Hamilton's Ohev Zedek Cemetery, commissioned by Perri, referred to her as "Bessie Starkman – Perri," but the "Perri" part was later removed by persons unknown. Part of Starkman's estate went to Perri, and the rest to her children. By 1933, Perri was living with another woman, Annie Newman, who helped him to improve his criminal enterprise. The couple profited from enterprises such as bootlegging and drug trafficking. "Annie was just as corrupt and business-like as Bessie," according to one source. In 1943, Newman was imprisoned for smuggling gold.
Criminal operations Perri and Starkman survived financially in the few years after 1915 from his income as a macaroni salesman and the grocery store on Hess Street. After the Ontario Temperance Act was passed in 1916, making the sale of alcohol illegal, the couple started selling shots of Canadian whisky on the side. Their bootlegging was done on a small scale, with their kitchen as the centre of operations.
Bootlegging became a larger and more profitable enterprise when Prohibition was declared in Canada nationwide on April 1, 1918, and the Eighteenth Amendment that prohibited sale of alcohol in the United States in 1920. Through the 1920s, Perri became the leading figure in organized crime in Southern Ontario and was under constant surveillance by police. The government allowed for numerous exceptions, allowing various breweries and distilleries to remain open for the export market.
Perri specialized in exporting liquor from old Canadian distilleries, such as Seagram and Gooderham and Worts, to the United States, and helped these companies obtain a large share of the American market — a share they kept after Prohibition ended in Ontario in 1927, and the United States in 1933. Perri sold alcohol to the Chicago Outfit via the Purple Gang of Detroit, and he was described as the largest source of Canadian whiskey in Chicago. He has also been linked as a distributor of Canadian whisky to New York City's Frank Costello and Chicago's Al Capone, yet when Capone was asked by Daily Toronto Star reporter Roy Greenaway if he knew Perri, Capone said "Why, I don't even know which street Canada is on." Other sources, however, claim that Capone had certainly visited Canada, where he maintained some hideaways, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police states that there is no "evidence that he ever set foot on Canadian soil." Perri also sold trainloads of liquor into Chicago and Detroit through Niagara Falls and Windsor, Ontario. During Prohibition, "The authorities were quite happy to turn a blind eye to bootlegging, and also to take payoffs ... and Rocco had all the important police in Hamilton ... on his payroll" according to author Trevor Cole. Stefano Speranza, a member of the Chicago Outfit, described Perri as "the most powerful boss in Canada."