Mobster shot down outside his Hamilton-area home.

• Angelo Musitano, a scion of an entrenched Mafia family, was gunned down in the driveway of his suburban Hamilton home Tuesday.

Police cordoned off Chesapeake Drive in a neighbourhood of detached, new-build homes in the community of Waterdown after a shooting around 4 p. m. Tuesday. The homicide unit was called in and was investigating, said Staff Sgt. Chris Hasting.

Police did not release the victim’s name but a longtime business associate of the Musitano family confirmed it to the National Post.

He was married with children, at least two. He was 40 years old.

“This is an obvious tragedy for the family,” said the associate who did not wish to be named. “Who? Why? We don’t know yet.”

The Musitano name is one of the best known in the colourful history of Hamilton’s vibrant underworld.

A new branch of the longtime Mafia crime family took root in Canada in 1937 when Musitano’s namesake greatuncle fled Delianova, Italy, a village in Calabria, the toe of the boot-shaped map of Italy.

The elder Angelo Musitano garnered the sobriquet “The Beast of Delianova” by dragging his sister, whom he accused of dishonouring the family, through the town’s streets to her lover’s home, where he killed her on his front steps with a dagger.

That great- uncle, Angelo Musitano, settled with family in Hamilton, where he inculcated two nephews into the outlaw tradition, including Musitano’s father, Dominic, who built a crime family that vied for power in Ontario’s active criminal milieu. Pat Musitano, the eldest son, was seen as heir to his father’s mob boss mantle after his father’s sudden death from heart failure in 1995.

In 1998, police detectives arrested Musitano and his brother Pat, charging t hem with ordering t he high- profile murder of John “Johnny Pops” Papalia, the top-ranked Mafia boss in the province who was known as the Enforcer for his fearsome power and demeanour.

In 2000 the Musitano brothers were sentenced to 10 years in prison under a plea deal that saw them plead guilty instead to conspiring to murder Papalia’s right-hand man, Carmen Barillaro of Niagara Falls. The charges in Papalia’s death were dropped under the deal. Musitano was released from prison in 2007.