A peak of sorts was reached during the American experiment with alcohol prohibition. Even the Canadian government recognized the potential, permitting liquor to be manufactured for export during brief bouts of banning domestic sales. Export to the U.S. was illegitimate, but boatloads of booze bound for Cuba and beyond managed to achieve delivery without leaving the Great Lakes. Significant financial empires of the twentieth century were based on the trade.

Little surprise, then, that a major participant in the French Connection, one of North America's most infamous smuggling operations, should have been born and raised in the Southern Ontario whiskey trade. This is Johnny Papalia, son of Tony Papalia, a trusted associate of Rocco Perri, King of the Bootleggers. Perri's operations were based in the city of Hamilton at the western end of Lake Ontario through the 1920's and 30's, a location equally suited to cross-border trade and the organization of the province's criminal underworld, particularly Toronto and its industrial satellites.

Adrian Humphreys' the enforcer, Johnny Pops Papalia: A Life and Death in the Mafiaa well researched and annotated biography that goes beyond the works of James Dubro, the previously recognized authority on crime and criminals in Ontario. Supported by information found in police wire taps, court transcripts, newspaper reports and the research of other experts, Humphreys provides a thorough understanding of Johnny Papalia's brutal career, from his birth March 24, 1924 in a Railway Street house, to his assassination in a parking lot on the same block.

Papalia organized criminal activity in Ontario with the nod of Buffalo Don Stefano Magaddino and Carmine Galante, an underboss of the New York Bonnano family in Montreal. As Toronto grew to become the centre of Canada's above-ground economy, the Hamilton under-world siphoned away significant chunks of revenue.

"The story of the Papalia family is, by very little extension, also the story of organized crime in Canada," Humphreys states.

A tough steel town, Hamilton has long taken pride in the outsized role played by local mobsters. The sixteen-page photo-gallery in the centre of this book contains faces familiar from newspaper reports and the city's streets. Humphreys outlines the symbiotic relationship between the criminals and the surrounding community, starting with the early days when neighbours dropped into one of the blind pigs the Papalia's operated on Railway Street for ten-cent shots of whiskey. Often the next set of elbows on the bar was attached to a cop, a politician or a prominent businessman. Decades later, as the mobsters grew more sophisticated, they operated their own private club. Here the city's elite could, and frequently did, join them for cocktails.

The essential paradox of Papalia's character, as revealed by Humphries, was The Enforcer's ability to charm family, friends and acquaintances then ruthlessly exploit their usefulness to him. It was matched by a paradox in the surrounding community that condemned violence while being titillated by proximity to its occasion.

Humphreys' necessarily unauthorized biography is more than just a mob story. It is a valuable companion to authorized histories of the place where crime meets success.