To my surprise, Mr. Buchanan is already standing by the entrance. He’s wearing a navy jacket over a blue shirt and holding a weathered brown leather briefcase.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Kelly,” he says, bringing light to my dark day. He hesitates, then decides to hold out his hand.
I shake it. “I can’t wait to hear what you’ve found out.”
The hostess appears, and we follow her through beautiful lit archways that soar over the corridor, then past walls of rich Canadian walnut with crushed velvet and gold accents. All around us stretch murals of farmland in a beautiful salute to Canadian farmers. At our table, I order coffee, and Mr. Buchanan does as well. There’s a nervous pause, then he dives in.
“I came across some information that I thought you might like to see.”
“Oh, yes, please!”
He starts to unlatch his briefcase and dig inside, but he stops when the coffee arrives.
“Are you ready to order?” the woman asks.
Mr. Buchanan’s reaction is one of alarm. It’s like he never leaves his office.
“Not yet,” I tell the server. “A few more minutes, please.”
She walks away, and he sags with relief. “I guess I’d better read the menu first.”
“I haven’t yet, either,” I say to ease his tension.
When the server returns, I order a steak sandwich. Mr. Buchanan is stressed again, so I tell him to order whatever he likes.
“I’d like the braised beef,” he says, surprising me. It’s a substantial meal. The man likes to eat. Not for the first time, I notice the width of his shoulders beneath the jacket, a hidden strength in his hands. The close shave that hints at golden blond in the restaurant’s lighting.
“Anything else to drink?”
Mr. Buchanan and I exchange a glance.
“You know, that beef would go well with a glass of red wine,” I suggest. “With my sandwich, too.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “At lunch?”
“It’s a working lunch,” I say, wondering what it will take to loosen him up. I’d rather not lead him by the hand the entire meal. “And I work best over a glass of wine, don’t you?”
He seems a bit scandalized, but also pleased. When the wine arrives at our table mere seconds later, we toast our new research project, take a sip, then he dives eagerly into his briefcase. He has brought copies of typed pages, photos, and newspaper articles, and as he lays them out, I see his confidence resume.
“We sort of breezed over that conversation about ghosts,” he begins, “and I kept thinking about whose voices might have travelled through those pipes. From an academic perspective, it seems obvious that they came from the living, not the dead, and I had read something a while ago about possible criminal activities at the time, including some interesting but undesirable characters who could have been guests at the hotel. As soon as I began to research it, I discovered a gold mine. These days, the country is filled with gangs. Those emerged a few decades after the age of the real gangster. We have the Bloods and the Crips—”
“We do? I had no idea.”
“Canada has a lot of different kinds of gangs. Biker clubs, Mafias, Indigenous gangs, cartel affiliates, race-based groups, and street-level gangbangers, like the Bloods, the Crips, the Asian Assassinz, and the biggest biker gang of all, the Hells Angels. There’s another very violent gang in Toronto these days called XYZ. You’ll never guess their biggest competitor.”
I lean in.
“ABC,” he exclaims.
With every word, he’s getting more comfortable. It’s surprising, hearing this somewhat meek archivist talking about violent offenders as if they are little more than statistics, but I like it.
“Gangs started getting organized in the 1970s. Before then, the Mafia bosses ran everything, but we didn’t hear too much about them up here. The best-known gangster in Canadian history is Rocco Perri. When he came to Toronto from Italy, he lived in The Ward. A lot of immigrants lived there before they were able to make a real living. Perri was what they called an enforcer. Collecting on debts, breaking legs, that kind of thing. His troubles started when he fell in love with a woman named Bessie Starkman, who was almost as tough as he was. They married and moved to Hamilton, where they ran a brothel. They had their hands in a lot of things, like gambling. Funny thing about those two: people kept showing up dead around them.”
The meal arrives, and Mr. Buchanan leans back, eyeing the meat with anticipation. After I start, he takes a big bite of his lunch, quietly sighs with appreciation, then swallows and continues the story.
“In the 1920s, Toronto had a reputation as a gambling town. Ernest Hemingway even wrote an article about it when he wrote forThe Toronto Star Weekly. It was estimated that in Toronto, ten thousand wagers were placed on horse races every single day. The Perris were getting very rich off those, but the best was yet to come for them: Prohibition. The law said it was legal tomakealcohol in Ontario, but illegal tosellit here, so the Perris hired men to bribe officials, fake paperwork, and buy large quantities of booze. They packed it into their fleet of fifty ships, then they pretended to ship it across to the US. In reality, they turned the boats around at night and sold everything to the speakeasies in Ontario.”
I’m rapt. I think I learned something about Perri back in university, but I had no idea his story was this intriguing.
