Ciment --this is a looooooong reply; the new French Beaujolais wine has come out today and I'm test-driving it. Pip pip.

Please identify yourself. Don't be afraid. (you can email me through my website www.leelamothe.com Click on the contact page.)

I've written literally hundreds of stories for the Toronto Sun; I've written a dozen books -- both true crime and pretty edgy crime novels, man. I put my name on each book or story like driving a nail into it. Come out of the shadows. Grab up your nuts. Name yourself, unless your name somehow shames you. Are you Alice No Nuts? Billy No Balls?

I am indeed Lee Lamothe -- retired. Or as one of my characters in a novel -- Free Form Jazz -- is described: Forgotten but not gone. (I am -- not to self-promote -- writing the ndrangheta novel that hasn't been finished to date ... But that's another tale ...)

Re the ndrangheta in Toronto: a few months ago my wife and I were at the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto; we saw Cosimo Commisso at D bar."; no "cover" folks with him; the following week we were shopping in Yorkville and saw Remo Commisso strolling up Bay Street with a lady friend -- again, no cover team. We plugged in behind him -- why not? He glanced back a few times, but my wife's in a wheelchair (great cover, eh?; this worked great when we were private investigators ...) and how dangerous could that be? It was a lazy Sunday. Clearly the ndrangheta folks in Toronto aren't in fear -- although they might have been several months ago.

To put this in perspective: several years ago before Eddie Melo was assassinated, my wife and I were at a bar in north Toronto; Eddie and his lawyer walked in and tried to send us a round of drinks; we declined -- I was still a reporter at the time -- and my wife, Lucy White, was a reporter at the Financial Post covering insider trading. But what stayed with us was his politeness -- I had, after all, recently written a totally inaccurate story about some unfortunate events in his workplace. I was wrong. He accepted it, and, in a telephone conversation offered to "come down there and sharpen your fucking pencils for you"; as a threat it was pretty okay with me (the cops had a wire up on his phone; and asked me later did I want to press charged ...Ahhhh, no, not so much ...) I wore the smelly brown helmet for that one -- I believed the cops, who apparently we guessing as much as I was ... -- and as I said: I'm retired.

But my world intersects with the "guys" on a regular basis, simply because I love food.(One of the ndrangheta folks, who own a restaurant in Little Italy, preparing to thrown me out of his resto, paused when I said, I'm not in the game any more: I just want to learn how to you make Veal Saltimbuccco; he called out his chef and said, "Show this little fuck how you do it ...) I run into the boys occasionally but I'm not worried: they do their thing, I do mine.(When I left the trade, I went to various mob joints I'd sat on late night shifts -- bakeries, meat markets, etc. and said, "I'm out of the game, I did my job .. You got probs? Let's straighten it out now ..." Kinda neat: I ended up with a year's worth of prosciutto, parmesan, olive oil, and to this day I never paid for baked goods on St. Clair. My bill comes to eighteen bucks? No problem. I give the guy a twenty, he gives me back four fives. What am I to do? I'm a fucking retiree. Every nickel counts, right?

Short tale: the ndrangheta -- Commissos and the rest of the new "cimini" have Toronto by the nuts. My own feeling is that the Hamilton group -- Violis -- settled their scores with the Rizzuto's as a matter of family honour. No sane person could look at the Rizzuto murders as anything but revenge. But if there's profit to be made, well that's the gravy on that meatloaf.(Further, I see Mr. Campoli, Vito Rizzuto's "man in Toronto" at his development office up on Avenue Road in North Toronto -- he's as serene as a parish priest with no witnesses. (When, as an old duffer on a pension, I have time to waste, I park uptown and check out various places, including Mrs. Rizzuto's place near Mr.Campoli's office. There's a great bagel place across the road ... I have to say, from my admittedly amateur investigation: there's a huge stretch of Avenue Road in Toronto that's hooked into the Sicilian (Camilleri/Rizzuto/Campoli) and Calabrian mob (Zito, Stalteri_ ...) And if anyone wanted to do some research: interesting that an all-star Canadian hockey legend is ... very friendly with Mr. Campoli -- their sons play in a league together ... and they're all over the wiretaps.

To your question: The HA are interesting as relate to the Toronto organized crime groups. Adrian Humphreys and I have many hundreds of hours of wiretaps/room/car probes of Rizzuto's folks in Toronto and leaders of the HA over a car probe in Toronto's club land. Listening to, for example, Joe Bravo talking with the head of the Ontario HA about a serious meeting of the "Clabs" at a Toronto hotel is pretty enlightening. Joe Bravo seemed to have a lot of respect for the Clabs; not so much for the HA.

While I have some personal connections and respect going back to the 1960s in Toronto of bikers who became HA folks(mostly the Vags who I still today count as friends), I have to say (having been to South America, NYC, and Sicily ...) Naw, the HA and the other bikers -- and I met some in Bangkok who are "chartered" (I think there re six of them) -- they're local yokels; real criminal types but .. .limited). Some good strong folks in there, but go to upcountry Burma -- specifically Hoa Tao, six kilometers from the Chinese/Yunnan border) and say "hells angels" and Wa tribe goes,in their headhunter dialogue while checking out your hat size: Who the fuck?" But say Sicilian mafia of Canada and they go ... "How much? What bank?"

I could go on, more and more. A great life of exceptional folks, both cops and crooks. But I've morphed myself into a visual artist -- life goes on, right? I spent a quarter century at it ... And a thousand stories that make absolutely no difference It's a game. I have my beliefs and they come from my own experience.

I greatly love the back and forth on the site especially about the Canadian mafia books. I don't so much love the stupid criticism. There are great people out there who risk their ... maybe not their lives, but their well-being and personal security: Paul Cherry of the Montreal Gazette, Kim Boland of (I think) the Vancouver Province, Michel Auger, and anyone who writes long-form journalism about organized crime. (In Toronto: not so much, except my writing partner Adrian Humphreys, the rest are essentially stenographers for the cops .. they don't go outside, God forbid. They live on press releases. They wouldn't know a gangster unless one of them held them up. There are less and less of them -- this work requires time and a commitment from their news organization. I was lucky: I had a city editor who said, "Just go and do the fucking work ..." He was fearless; thusly, so was I.

When my writing partner and I did a major take-out on a mob boss, the city editor, John Paton, offered us personal security. Of course we didn't take it. Why would we? We weren't afraid then, we aren't afraid now. We sign what we do.

Jeez. What late night wine will do to you. I'm out of it, out of the game; but still interested. I wish I could help, man. But no one knows what goes on in the underworld except the underworld. We have to hope for a rat. But, I swear, it won't a Calabrese or Sicilian rat. It'll be a biker. No question. And then we'll only know a tenth of the story.

There's heroes and there's zeroes. Too many zeroes.

Lee Lamothe