MGB GT

I had one once.

Bought it from my neighbour Nicky Macerollo. He was the younger brother of Joey, one of the most famous exports of Guelph's Italian community.

Google him.

Not what you were expecting, was it?

Guelph's Italian community has long been stigmatized as a hotbed of mafia activity. The CBC even had a few of my neighbours in a documentary about organized crime once.

That was never true.

A few old-timers may have lived here, but most of the "activity" occurred elsewhere.

Anyway, when I moved into my place on McTague Street, there was this derelict MGB GT parked next door. That must have been one of the earliest examples of the compact hatchback.

She was red, with a black leather interior. There was red piping on that black leather. Had the genuine spoke wheels with the knock-offs, and came with a lead hammer to knock them off.

The only problems were it hadn't run for about ten years and the floor was completely rotted out.

I figured these were minor obstacles. A couple hundred bucks changed hands, and Nicky and I pushed that car from his driveway into my garage.

The high point of my relationship with her was the 30 seconds or so that I had the engine running a couple weeks later.

That filled me with hope!

Sadly, life took over.

I was young and ambitious, and there simply wasn't any time for fooling with an old car, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the interior.

Instead of rotting in Nicky's driveway, she was now rotting in my garage.

Every once in awhile, usually late in the evening, after a toke and a couple beers, I'd go out to the garage and just sit in her for a spell.

My old pal Robert suggested I was on a slippery slope;


"Neumann, if you get one of those blow-up dolls for the passenger seat, I'll be really worried for you."

What to do when you find out your neighbour is a mafia boss

Nothing.

And let me tell you why.

These guys are the very best of neighbours.

I didn't even have an inkling that Buddy next door was any sort of Mafia bigwig until I saw him on TV. In fact, when you watch the show, it even had my house in one of the shots!

Now, had I given it more thought, I might have come up with suspicions about Buddy. Middle aged Italian gentleman who dressed nice, didn't appear to have a regular job, went away somewhere warm every November to March, and always drove a Cadillac or a Mercedes - it changed every year.

When you put it like that you'd have to say only a willful idiot didn't see it.

But it wasn't like that at all.

He was the best of neighbours. Liked to mind his business like I mind my own.

The odd time we'd stand and chat for five minutes. Mostly it was just a neighbourly wave as he went about his business and I went about mine.

But then, there was that time I was scalping tickets outside Copps Coliseum... it was the Canada Cup back in ... oh man, 72?  82?...

Anyway, this wasn't anything I did on a regular basis, but a friend had a few extras and so there we were about a block down the street, and there was lots of folks around doing the same thing. Lots of people just happened to have a few extra tickets, and this Canada-Russia shit kinda went viral... people were happy to pay $500 for a ticket with a face value of less than fifty bucks!

And suddenly here is this well-dressed Italian gentleman sidling up the street, and the scalpers scatter. Well, some of them.

The rest of them seem to be friends of his. Then he sees me, and.... holy jumpin'... it's my neighbour!

So we stopped and chatted for a minute. He knew exactly what I was doing. I knew exactly what he was doing. If I hadn't been his innocent next door neighbour, there might have been an issue.

But there wasn't.

Which is why, when you find yourself living next to a middle age Italian guy with no visible means of support but a really nice car, you know you've got nothing to worry about.

About the dp's and the Chinese and the niggers and the jews

and all those other folks who don't quite fit the template...

Ya, there was always a template. When I was dp trash coming up, the winds of political correctitude weren't what they are today.

Just as a ferinstance, the "n" word may have occasionally been used in reference to folks with a black skin, but it was far more often used to refer to people, usually ourselves, who were condemned to lives of manual labor because we were not born into the ranks of the university bound.

That's what motivated an entire generation of dp immigrants to get their kids into higher education.

A couple of times I had the pleasure of trading stories with the elderly Italian gentleman who owned the main pub up this way. He knew a lot of the Italian folks who had made their mark down in Guelph back when the Italian immigrant community was pivotal in the evolution of that community.

He was personally acquainted with a lot of the folks you run into in those supposed "mafia" stories about old Guelph. He himself had to make a go of it in that world, and he did.

But he had two kids, and one of them is a professor at a university in the US and the other one is a surgeon in a hospital in Toronto.

He came from a world when his people were "wops" and "dagos" and "eye ties."

Somehow his people survived and became doctors and professors and captains of industry and politicians...

My dp father washed ashore in this great land almost 60 years ago. This was truly the land of opportunity. The locals might not have seen it at the time, but the bohunks and the squareheads and the dagos and the kikes sure did.

They were all niggers then.

Mafia tales

When the Toronto Star, Canada's most liberal newspaper, has the opportunity to make mountains of news out of molehills of facts, they usually pick on their big fat slob of a right-wing mayor, Rob Ford.

But this week they've taken a new tack.

The Mafia!

Yes, THE MAFIA is big news in the Toronto Star these days.

As a kid who grew up in working class Guelph back in the day, I learned a thing or two about my Italian neighbors.

Guelph had a huge Italian immigrant population at the time, and being just a generation or two removed from the old country, certain cultural artifacts still had currency among them.

Like respect for certain semi-underground organizations loosely known as "the mafia."

There were certain family names that were reputed to have greater or lesser connections to this supposed criminal organization.

Over the years I eventually got to know folks from all those families. I don't know anything about the mafia, but I know none of those folks would mess with you if you weren't messing with them.

So I'm a bit skeptical about the mafia stories the Star has been running all week.

Seems the fact that Vito Rizzuto will be out of a Colorado prison soon is one of the drivers behind their binge of mafia stories. According to the Star the fact that most of his immediate family has died in Montreal turf wars while he was in the big house means he'll be looking for revenge when he gets out.

They also speculate, for no reason whatsoever, that he'll be making Toronto his base of operations.

I knew a guy, Manny Crabtree, who used to be a prison guard at the prison where Johnny Papalia did one of his stints. Papalia was well known as a local mafia big dog. They became best friends. Manny looked out for Johnny, and when Johnny got out he looked after Manny.

Johnny eventually caught a bullet, but their friendship was proof that insofar as there is a mafia, it honors a social contract the likes of which we would all benefit from.

All of those "mafia" families in Guelph went mainstream generations ago. The guys who got off the boat and did what they had to do produced a wave of offspring who became lawyers and university professors and doctors and congressmen and members of parliament and real estate developers and businessmen of all stripes.

Pretty much like most other immigrant communities.

But the Toronto Star still needs to sell papers.