Marvin Elkind (13 March 1934 – 21 January 2024), better known as "The Weasel", was a Canadian gangster, professional boxer and police informer. Elkind was involved in organized crime for decades and associated with crime figures in Toronto, Montreal and New York, and also served as the chauffeur of Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa. In 1983, he turned police informer and became Canada's most prolific confidential informant, working for the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Early life Elkind was born in Toronto, the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother, Beatrice Feldstein, was a Jewish immigrant from Romania while his father, Aaron Elkind, was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Elkind said of his family: "My father was a bad guy. He hung around bad guys and was always getting into some trouble". Elkind described his mother as his main emotional support. Aaron Elkind abandoned his family in 1937 after a failed bank robbery attempt, and his mother remarried to her brother-in-law, Morris Elkind. The remarriage had been ordered by an Orthodox rabbi in accordance with traditional Jewish law that declared the brother had the responsibility to marry the wife of his brother if the husband was no longer around. Aaron Elkind returned to the Soviet Union where he continued his criminal activities which ended when he was executed in 1946.
Morris Elkind hated his stepson, who had a marked resemblance to his father in terms of appearance and personality, and Marvin Elkind recalled his stepfather as an emotionally cruel man who never extended him any love. Marvin recalled that his uncle/stepfather loved everyone except for him and his father. Morris Elkind was a devout Orthodox Jew who was ashamed of his disreputable older brother and whenever Marvin was in trouble was heard to say in Yiddish: "I expected it. He's Aaron's son. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree". Morris Elkind founded a successful clothing store, Elk's, which allowed the Elkind family to rise up to the middle class. As a child, Marvin Elkind suffered from dyslexia and ADHD, which caused him to placed "in care" in foster homes in the Toronto area from the age of nine onward. Morris Elkind was convinced that his stepson was a "bad seed" and on 19 March 1943 Elkind was expelled from his home, never to return, as he was placed "in care" of the Children's Aid Society.
Criminal career Elkind came to associate with the criminal elements that he met while "in care" and served as a petty crook for organized crime figures in Toronto and elsewhere. The home that Elkind was sent to was the house of a bootlegger, Lena Pasquale, who ran her bootlegging operations with the mother of future gangster Paul "The Fox" Volpe. At the time, bars and liquor stores in Ontario were required to close early, making bootlegging profitable despite the fact it had been legal to sell alcohol in Ontario since 1927. Elkind recalled that the best day for bootlegging was Sunday when it was illegal to sell alcohol. Lena Pasquale did not care for Elkind, and merely took him in for the extra money she was paid by the Children's Aid Society. All five of Mrs. Pasquale's teenage sons were criminals. John "Johnny Pops" Papalia was a frequent visitor to the Pasquale household, and he and Roy Pasquale (one of the five Pasquale brothers) were committing bank robberies together. His stepmother renamed Elkind Mario Pasquale and sent him to be educated at the St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic school to be brought up as a Catholic. She also engaged in sexual abuse of her charge, stripping both herself and him naked and spanking him under the grounds he was a "naughty boy" until he bled. Elkind recalled break-ins of grocery stores with the Pasquale brothers: "We would go the three of us, they'd break open a window in the back, a basement window, I was 11, I was a small kid, they would push me through and I would come upstairs and open the door and let them in. There was no such thing as safety deposit boxes in those days, the money was always in the store. If they got fifty dollars they would take most of it, and they would give me five dollars, which in those days was like a million, it was a lot of money. I used to keep the money in one dollar bills so it would look like a big roll."
Elkind was first arrested by Detective Eddie "the Chinaman" Tong (who despite his nickname was a British immigrant to Canada) of the Toronto Police Service on charges of theft as Tong knew that Elkind was working for the Pasquale brothers. Tong released him after his arrest out of the hope that he would lead him back to the brothers Pasquale. Tong was a local legend in Toronto as an incorruptible policeman who had walked the beat since 1929 and who stood out on the account of his fedora and trench coat which made him seem like a character out of a Hollywood film. Tong arrested the Pasquale brothers along with Elkind and several others breaking into a grocery store. Justice Harold Waisberg convicted Elkind of theft and sentenced him to serve his sentence at the Bowmanville reform school until the age of 16. During his sentence at Bowmanville school, which began in May 1945, Elkind took up boxing as his principal hobby. Discipline was enforced at Bowmanville via fearsome floggings and Elkind was flogged 175 times. He was raped with a baton by a guard, which caused him to suffer from anal bleeding problems for the rest of his life. Upon his release in 1950, Elkind resumed his criminal career working for Roy Pasquale. In 1950, he also started to work as a professional boxer, winning his first fight at the Palace Pier via knockout. Elkind was to suffer brain damage later in life because of his career in boxing. In March 1952, he moved to New York City to continue his boxing career. He took a fierce pride in his Jewish heritage as he resented the attempt to impose an Italian Catholic identity on him, and as a boxer he always carried a towel with the Star of David on it. Elkind was an unsuccessful boxer, but he obtained a job as a busboy at the Copacabana nightclub where the most famous musical and comedy acts in America such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr. and Harry Belafonte played. The Copacabana nightclub was frequented by gangsters such as Frankie Carbo and Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno. In 2008, Elkind recalled: "These guys would come in the Copacabana… Tony Salerno and Frankie Carbo, and these guys were very scary and they yelled at everybody and everybody was scared to serve them, but they were big tippers. One day, I'll never forget it, Salerno calls me over to the table and he says, 'Friday is your last day here.' I said, 'Why, what did I do?' He says, 'It’s nothing about that. As of Monday you're Jimmy Hoffa's driver,' and I said, 'But I don't want to be Jimmy Hoffa's driver,' and he says, 'Nobody is asking you.'".
Starting in 1952, Elkind worked as a chauffeur for the notoriously corrupt Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa for four years. Elkind was assigned by Salerno to work as Hoffa's chauffeur on the grounds that as a Canadian he would not drafted as Hoffa's previous chauffeur had been. Elkind stated in 2008: "Mr. Hoffa was a tremendously intimidating man. This man had no fear at all, of nothing, showed very little emotion, had completely no sense of humour, and was dedicated to the people that belonged to his union. When you drive these people you learn a lot and I’ll tell you why. They don’t know you’re there. You become a piece of the car, just like an extra gear shift or a brake, and they talk." In 1954, Elkind went to Miami to take part in a boxing match and was told by Hoffa that he would be met by someone powerful in Florida who wanted to talk to him. The powerful person turned out to be the gangster Meyer Lanksy who bribed him to lose the boxing match against his opponent as Elkind was favored to win the fight, and Lanksy stood to win a great deal of money in gambling by betting against him. Speaking to Elkind in Yiddish, Lansky asked him: "Who do you think owns this city?" After Elkind put on a great show of unable to get up after being punched in the third round, Lansky complimented Elkind after the bout by saying he would make a great actor. In 1956, Elkind was told by his employers that Hoffa no longer needed his services and he was going to Montreal to serve Vincenzo "Vic" Cotroni, whom "the Commission" (the governing board of the American Mafia) had appointed to be the Montreal boss. Roy Pasquale told Elkind that being the chauffeur for Cotroni was not a demotion as Cotroni was "the best" of the three Cotroni brothers and that Cotroni was just as important to "the Commission" as Hoffa was. Montreal was the North American terminus point for the French Connection heroin smuggling pipeline that ran from the "Golden Crescent" nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran via Turkey and France to North America. In the 1950s, 80% of the "French Connection" heroin arrived in Montreal before going south to New York, making Cotroni as the boss of a decina (arm) of the Bonanno family of New York, into a key figure in the underworld.
Upon his return to Canada in 1956, Elkind went to Montreal where he served as the chauffeur and bodyguard to Vic Cotroni. Elkind described Cotroni as extremely well connected as he drove him to meet numerous politicians, businessmen, union leaders, and policemen. Elkind also worked as a chauffeur and bodyguard to William "Willie Obie" Obront who he sold tainted meat for Cotroni. Elkind stated that both Cotroni and Obront had absolutely no concern that people were getting sick and sometimes dying from the tainted meat that Obront sold. He later returned to Toronto where worked for Tommy Corrigan, an Irish-American gangster whom Hoffa had appointed president of the Teamsters Toronto local 847. Corrigan became a permanent resident, but never took Canadian citizenship apparently because as an Irish-American he did not want to take an oath to Queen Elizabeth II. Elkind described Corrigan as unlike other American union bosses who were usually New Deal Democrats as Corrigan was a Republican who supported Joseph McCarthy. Elkind stated that Corrigan was a much more corrupt union boss than Hoffa as Hoffa at least tried to win better wages, pensions and working conditions for American truck drivers while Corrigan took bribes from the management to keep the wages and pensions of Canadian truck drivers low. Elkind stated: "The big difference between Jimmy Hoffa and Tommy Corrigan is that money was not that important to Mr. Hoffa. He loved the power—the power of running the union—and he wanted to say he made lives better for his people. Corrigan just wanted to be rich and didn't care who he screwed doing it. He looked out for himself an awful lot". Elkind swiftly learned that angering Corrigan could be deadly. Corrigan was the silent partner in a garbage company owned by Sam Salla and Murray Wortsman. When Corrigan learned his partners were cheating him, Salla was promptly murdered via poisoning while Wortsman fled Toronto. On 19 February 1958, Elkind married 19-year old Hannah "Hennie" Geist at a lavish wedding at the Beth Sholom synagogue in Toronto. To pay for the wedding, Elkind used money stolen from the Teamsters pension fund. In 1960 and 1961, Hannah Elkind gave birth to two daughters.