Eduardo Manuel de Melo (31 July 1960 – 6 April 2001), nicknamed "Eddie the Hurricane", was a Portuguese-born Canadian boxer and gangster.
Boxer Melo was born in São Miguel in the Azores archipelago, but grew up in Toronto, where his father worked in construction. Melo arrived in Canada on 5 October 1966. He recalled about his youth in a working-class neighborhood: "I was always fighting. If I had a black eye, I didn't put on dark glasses to hide it. If I got a little scratch and come home bleeding, my mother would go crazy. But the way I figured it, you can't give pain to somebody else and not expect to get a little bruised yourself". In 1971, his lifelong obsession with boxing started after he watched the famous Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali fight of 8 March 1971 on his family's television.
Melo dropped out of high school in Grade 9 and with a forged birth certificate moved to Verdun, Quebec where he worked as a boxer. As an amateur boxer, Melo won 93 matches while losing only four. Melo made his debut as a professional boxer in Montreal on 7 March 1978 at the age of 17. Melo's boxing style gave him the nickname of "The Hurricane". Spider Jones said of Melo: "Eddie Melo filled the Montreal Forum at 18 years old. His explosive power punching style made him on one of Canada’s most exciting fighters of our time". Melo won his first 12 matches in a row in 1978 and 1979, with the majority being by knock-out. In 1979, Melo became the Canadian middleweight boxing champion. He rapidly became a favorite of boxing fans in Montreal. Over the course of his first 18 months as a professional boxer, Melo earned $150,000, making him the best paid boxer in Canada. The journalist James Kernaghan described the young Melo: "He was fast, a terrific puncher and he could take a punch. Growing into a light heavyweight (175 pounds) he was still mowing them down. Of any Canadian boxer of the past 50 years, the guy who looked like a young Anthony Quinn had world champion written all over him."
On 31 October 1978, Melo first fought Fernand Marcotte at the Verdun Auditorium in a match that lasted ten rounds and ended with him winning by split decision. In their second match, Marcotte won by majority decision. The final match in the famous rivalry ended in a draw. The fights between Melo and Marcotte were regarded as some of the best boxing matches in Montreal. In 1981, Melo finally became old enough to box in Ontario.
One of Melo's fans was the gangster Frank Cotroni of the Cotroni family of Montreal. Melo came to enjoy a friendship with Cotroni, whom he called "my number one fan". Kernaghan wrote that Melo appeared to have been depressed after losing a title match for the Canadian light heavyweight championship in Montreal on 11 March 1980 to Gary Summerhayes, which caused him to draw closer to Cotroni. In 1980, Melo was convicted of stabbing a bouncer with a pocket knife during a bar brawl, for which he served 90 days in prison. Melo was to be convicted 8 more times over the course of the rest of his life on charges of extortion or illegal weapons possession. In the early 1980s, Melo's boxing career went into decline with him losing a match by knock-out to the journeyman Ralph Hollett in Toronto in January 1981, an upset that badly damaged his career. Later in 1981, Melo was convicted of uttering death threats. The Cotroni-controlled Local 75 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union fought with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union for the right to represent airport-strip workers at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. A bartender at the Pearson Airport bar complained to the police that Melo had pulled a loaded handgun to his head and asked him: "You don't want anything to happen to your baby or your wife, do you?" Melo denied the allegation to the police and then added that he never used a gun when threatening people as he clenched his fists and said: "I have my own weapons-these two".
On 4 May 1982, Melo had a much publicized match against Jimmie Gradson at the CNE Coliseum in Toronto that had been promoted by George Chuvalo. Prior to the match, both men had taken to insulting each other in public, and by all accounts the two boxers hated each other. The match was an extremely hard-fought one with judge Jackie Silver saying: "I’ve seen a lot of fights but never a war like this". The first three rounds of the Gradson–Melo match was described as leaving the audience breathless with excitement. Gradson finally won the match by knock-out in the tenth round. The last noteworthy fight by Melo was when he defeated via knock-out the former Canadian lightweight champion Gary Summerhayes in June 1983.
Melo had married a former Miss Montreal Alouette cheerleader. He used his boxing wealth to buy a Lincoln Continental automobile, a house in Toronto and some $20,000 worth of jewelry. It was felt that Melo suffered from poor management as his managers kept pushing for him "too hard, too fast" while he began to show signs of brain damage caused by his boxing. One of Melo's friends, the gangster, outlaw biker and fellow boxer Bernie "the Frog" Guindon thought it was wrong for Melo's managers to have him fight the top professional boxers while he was still a teenager, saying: "He was young and they didn't just care. They threw him in with the top fighters". Guindon felt that Melo who had won the middleweight Canadian boxing championship at the age of 19 would have benefitted if he been able to mature more as a boxer before being booked to fight the top boxers.
The hitman Réal Simard served as the Toronto representative of the Cotroni family starting in July 1983. Cotroni would visit Toronto about once every month to see Simard and during those visits Melo would serve as his chauffeur and bodyguard. A police check-up of Melo revealed that he was working as an organizer for Local 75 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union, a union so corrupt that it had been expelled in 1981 from the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec under the grounds that the union was controlled by Cotroni and it represented the interests of management instead of the workers. During one of his visits to Toronto, Cotroni went to the Little Italy neighborhood to meet with Rocco Zito, the leader of the Siderno Group of the 'Ndrangheta.
Starting in October 1984, a Royal Commission under Justice Raymond Bernier of the Quebec Sports Safety Board examined Mafia influence within boxing. Between October 1984 and July 1985, the Bernier Commission interviewed 105 people and in its report presented in March 1986 concluded that the boxing industry in Quebec was systemically corrupt and under the control of Cotroni, an avid boxing fan. Bernier wrote that Cotroni was the "guiding spirit" of boxing in Montreal and the boxing fights in Montreal were "probably rigged" to allow Cotroni to profit by betting against the boxers favored to win fights. The report listed Melo as one of the boxers who was associated with Cotroni. The Bernier commission report was so damning in its revelations of corruption in boxing that the report was censored by the Quebec government, and the full report has never been released to the public. It is believed that Melo's sudden career decline in the early 1980s after a promising start in the late 1970s was due less to a decline in his boxing abilities and more to him intentionally losing fights against inferior opponents to allow Cotroni to profit by betting against him. It was an open secret in the 1980s that Cotroni controlled boxing in Canada and that the Canadian boxing matches were rigged for his benefit, often in a clumsy and flagrant fashion as one policeman recalled: "Sometimes they missed a guy and he still fell down". The Ontario Provincial Police believed that Melo as a boxer was under the control of Cotroni. The police believed that the way that Melo lost fights in the 1980s against opponents whom he was widely expected to defeat were the result of match rigging with the popular rumor at the time being that Cotroni bribed boxers to lose by supplying them with free heroin, which could be either used and/or sold. With his career in decline, Melo retired in 1986. During his boxing career, Melo won 24 matches out of 34.
Gangster Melo at the time of his retirement went to work as an organizer for the Cotroni-controlled Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union and then in the vending machine business. Melo was known for his aggressive style both in and outside of the ring, with many finding his temper to be quite ungovernable. Melo's real job was as the agent for the Cotroni family in Toronto, bringing in strippers and video game machines from Montreal to various Toronto bars. The previous Cotroni family representative for Toronto, the hitman Réal Simard, had turned Crown's evidence, thus requiring a replacement. Johnny Papalia, the boss of the Papalia family, came to detest Melo, once telling Cotroni: "Put a leash on Melo or I'll kill him". A policeman told a reporter from The Toronto Sun newspaper about Melo: "He was muscle but not a freelancer. He would look after Cotroni's problems."
In 1989, at a pool hall on College Street, Melo assaulted a Mafiosi after words had been exchanged, which led to a murder plot against him, with a hitman being hired to kill him. The hitman turned informer, and the police faked the murder of Melo with a photograph being taken of a crash test dummy designed to look like Melo being shot up and covered in fake blood. The hitman showed the photographs of the crash test dummy and was paid for the supposed murder, leading to those who had paid him being charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In April 1989, Melo's first marriage ended in divorce, with his ex-wife, Sine, moving to Vancouver with their two daughters. In 1990, the charges against Melo for conspiracy to commit extortion were dismissed in the famous Askov decision when a judge ruled that Melo's constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated as the Crown had failed to start a trial against him 34 months after Melo was charged.
In 1991, a Mafiosi and the owner of Toronto's Casket Royale funeral home, Gaetano "Guy" Panepinto, had one of his business partners, Natale Roda, tried to assassinate the man behind the plot against Melo. Roda was carrying a bomb with the aim of avenging Melo, but the bomb exploded prematurely, costing him much of his arm. Panepinto was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. It is believed that Panepinto had been hired by Cotroni. In 1991, the Papalia family underboss Carmen Barillaro told the police informer Marvin Elkind while he was wearing a wire that Melo was working for him as an enforcer. Elkind and Melo were close and the former arranged for the latter to have a high-paying unionized construction worker job where he never showed up for work. When the police issued a warrant for Melo's assault on charges of assault, Elkind told the police that Melo could be found attending the wedding of Frank Cotroni Jr. (the son of Frank Cotroni) in Montreal, and the police duly arrested Melo as he was leaving the wedding. Later in 1991, Melo was convicted of assault after he used his boxing skills to beat up a man during a brawl at a stag party, for which he served 90 days in prison.