In a recent VICE story regarding the murder of Tony Magi in Montreal in late January, John Westlake, a veteran of both the Montreal police force and the RCMP, said that the shift from Montreal to Hamilton is a done deal, stating “[the Montreal murder] doesn’t point to a shift, the shift’s already there—the Hamilton people are back.”

Like Nicaso, Westlake suspects that this murder is another indicator of the balance of power shifting from Montreal’s Sicilian Mafia to the Hamilton-based Ndrangheta.

“It doesn’t point to a shift, the shift’s already there—the Hamilton people are back,” he explained. “Maybe they want to finish off the Rizzuto people and obviously Tony was a Rizzuto guy.”

Magi’s status as a “Rizzuto guy” is indeed irrefutable.Not only had he been in business with Nick Rizzuto, but he could also be heard speaking directly to Vito Rizzuto, who once governed Montreal’s “consortium” of Italian, Irish, Colombian, and biker gangs, in wiretaps. “The Rizzutos are finished,” Westlake concludes.

Magi had been developing Montreal real estate up until his death, though the criminal shadows of his past may have finally crept up on him. As Antonio Nicaso put it, rather poetically, “In the life of mobsters, blood flows from generation to generation and that does not change, like the world and the sky. Blood calls to blood and blood washes blood.”