Mob Rule

On Monday, November 14, 1983, the body of Paul Volpe was found in the trunk of his car in the parking lot at Toronto International Airport. He had been shot several times in the head at close range with a small-calibre weapon. The life and crimes of one of the most prominent mob bosses in Canada had come to an end.

Paul Volpe's rise to power in the Canadian Mafia, from his youthful career as a delivery boy for his family's bootlegging business to his golden days in the mid 1970s as the head of a sophisticated, Toronto-based criminal organization, parallels the development of the Mafia as a force to be reckoned with in Canadian organized crime. His story reveals fascinating details about the inside workings of the Mafia in Canada—and its ties to Mafia groups in the United States and Italy.

But, at the same time that Volpe was consolidating his position in the mid seventies, a new group was gaining prominence in North America. Mafia families from Calabria, altogether more ruthless than Volpe and his colleagues, were challenging the established Mafia powers. Mob Rule presents a shocking picture of the methods employed by this group— through the activities of one of their hired hit men, Cecil Kirby.

The inevitable clash between the aggressive Calabrians and the older, more "conservative" Mafia represented by Paul Volpe did much to bring on the mob wars of the early 1980s (of which Paul Volpe was a victim) and presents a chilling picture of the future of organized crime in North America.

In Mob Rule, James Dubro has presented a fascinating and hard-hitting look at the Mafia in Canada from the Black Hand extortions and the bootlegging of the early years of the century to the power struggles of the 1980s.