Mafia bosses in Italy secretly voiced 'great respect' for Toronto man now fighting to stay in Canada

A man who police called Toronto’s top Mafia boss was highly respected by Mafia bosses in Italy, a senior police officer from Italy told an immigration hearing for the man Canada has been trying — and failing — to deport for more than 40 years.

Vincenzo (Jimmy) DeMaria, 71, is facing another deportation attempt over allegations he has secretly been a powerful boss helping oversee a shadowy global criminal cabal called the ’Ndrangheta.

An immigration tribunal heard this week that accused Mafia bosses in Italy were caught on covert police recordings praising DeMaria, saying they “consider him a person worthy of respect,” and he “could carry a lot of weight within their organization,” the Italian police witness said.

The hearing will decide if DeMaria should be deported to Italy.

DeMaria was born in Siderno, Italy, and came to Canada in 1955 with his parents when he was nine months old and has lived here since, but he didn’t become a Canadian citizen. His eligibility for citizenship ended in 1981 when he shot dead a man who owed him money. DeMaria was convicted of second-degree murder in 1982 and given a life sentence without parole for 10 years.

He was first ordered out of Canada in 1984 because of his murder conviction.

From that moment, DeMaria has mounted stubborn, well-resourced and remarkably successful challenges — in courts, at immigration tribunals, and at parole hearings — to rebut allegations of involvement in organized crime.

In disputing, denying, and delaying, he has remained with his wife and children in Canada while periodically being yanked back into prison for alleged parole violations before fighting his way back out.

The federal government is trying once again to deport him.

All week, an Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) tribunal has been hearing the government’s appeal of a prior decision that allowed DeMaria to remain in Canada. The adjudicator at that hearing ruled evidence of DeMaria’s membership in the Mafia was “circumstantial.”

In pressing its case this time, the Canada Border Services Agency is trying to bolster allegations with evidence captured by Italian police in a probe against alleged members of ’Ndrangheta who, while under investigation, visited Canada in 2019.

The wiretaps are contentious because, as first reported by National Post , the sneaky wiretaps were secretly recorded through the Italian visitors’ own mobile phones that were turned into constant microphones, and these interceptions on Canadian soil were not authorized by a Canadian court.

DeMaria’s lawyers referred to them as “ foreign interference.”

Called as the government’s first witness was a senior officer who led several Italian probes that linked mobsters in Italy’s Calabria region, which is the birthplace of the ’Ndrangheta, to affiliates in Canada, including the probe involving the Italian visitors who came to Toronto.

Chief Commissioner Giampiero Muroni headed the Polizia di Stato’s Central Anti-Crime Directorate from 2008 to 2019. He spoke in Italian, through an interpreter.

Muroni said Italian operations showed that the ’Ndrangheta was based on individual family clans rooted in a geographic region that were linked by a centralized hierarchy in Italy with international branches in Canada, Germany, and Australia.

He said information in police files, which included information from informers in Canada, disclosed the presence of nine ’Ndrangheta clans in Ontario, each based on a family originally from Calabria, mostly from the town of Siderno, where DeMaria was born.

He said there was a powerful “Camera di Controllo” — literally meaning “control room,” which acts as a board of control for the ’Ndrangheta — in Canada that mirrored the structure in Italy.

“This is the highest and most important structure of ’Ndrangheta in Canada,” Muroni said. DeMaria was named in Italian court documents as one of the men allegedly sitting on the board.

Under questioning by government lawyer Daniel Morse, Muroni said secretly recorded conversations heard that the ’Ndrangheta in Italy, including its top boss at the time, knew of DeMaria and spoke of him warmly.

In another probe, in 2019, an alleged mobster named Vicenza Muià was coming to Canada to try to learn who within ’Ndrangheta had murdered his brother so he could avenge his death. Muià needed to be 100 per cent certain before seeking retribution and wanted to check in with DeMaria as well as other alleged ’Ndrangheta bosses in Canada.

Muroni was asked why.

“Vincenza Muià, but also other persons, have great respect for Vincenza DeMaria. They consider him a person worthy of respect. They think he could carry a lot of weight within their organization,” Muroni said.

Muià also thought DeMaria could have information on his brother’s murder, Muroni said.

Muià allegedly also said he hopes DeMaria remains free in Canada because “they think that he alone could fix the situation that ’Ndrangheta has undergone in that city.” The men in Italy discussed several violent incidents in the Toronto area involving alleged ’Ndrangheta families, including a murder and an arson attack on DeMaria’s family bakery.

Under cross examination, Jessica Zita, one of DeMaria’s three lawyers, questioned the legitimacy and accuracy of the police wiretaps and Muroni’s explanations of what the men were talking about. She also suggested the officer misidentified the man they were speaking about as DeMaria.

Zita also said the wiretap evidence would not be acceptable as evidence in criminal court because they were illegally obtained in Canada under Canadian law. The IRB, however, has different rules of evidence than a criminal court and a lower standard of proof. Earlier, Benjamin Dolin, the IRB member deciding the case, denied DeMaria’s motion to exclude the wiretaps.

DeMaria sat each day watching the testimony on a video screen at his lawyers’ office, dressed in a shirt and tie underneath a suit jacket, with heavy-framed glasses attached to a loop of cord around his neck. He occasionally scribbled notes, typed on his phone and a laptop, and sometimes leaned to speak with a lawyer in a gravelly whisper.

Documentation filed in the case is so voluminous — more than 20,000 pages — that the computer system the IRB used crashed when more than one of the huge files was opened at same time.

Also called to testify this week was Mark Grenon, a federal government forensic accountant who does analysis for investigations into money laundering and other financial crimes.

Grenon told the IRB his number crunching, requested by the Canada Border Services Agency, suggested several red flags for potential money laundering in the various financial accounts of members of the DeMaria family and their businesses.

He studied transactions reported to Fintrac, Canada’s anti-money-laundering agency, from 2006 to 2013, that included DeMaria’s property management and investing companies, and those of Cash House, a money services business run at the time by DeMaria’s son, Carlo DeMaria.

Grenon said he found several red flags of potential money laundering after tracing about $143 million sent by Cash House to accounts in about 50 different countries, most of it in 2013. The top 10 destination countries were, in order: Barbados, China, Israel, United States, Mexico, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Italy, Switzerland, and Greece.

The Cash House business was sold in 2015 for about $1 million, the IRB was told. That seemed a low price for a company doing that volume of business, Grenon said.

In her cross examination of Grenon, Zita highlighted rebuttal evidence explaining some of the transactions he found unusual, and noted potential flaws in the data and missing information.

Grenon agreed that in all the financial transactions he studied, most involved DeMaria’s family and family businesses; he found only two that were directly tied to DeMaria himself.

Stephen Schneider, a criminology professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax also testified to give expert opinion evidence on money laundering and organized crime.

He described the ‘Ndrangheta as a globally powerful, extraordinarily wealthy, and extensively active organization involved in a variety of crimes around the world.

He said money services businesses were popular among money launderers.

“They are really the perfect money laundering vehicle,” Schneider said.

The hearing continues.

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