MAFIA BOSS SEES SCANT FREEDOM

Rearrested on day of parole to face deportation

The only semblance of freedom a man who was once named as the top Mafia boss in Toronto enjoyed after winning his parole was the narrow view from a window as he was driven from one prison to another.

Vincenzo (Jimmy) DeMaria won his fight for day parole last week, but before he could leave Collins Bay prison in Kingston, Ont., he was rearrested by Canada Border Services Agency officers on Thursday and driven 240 kilometres east to the Central East Correctional Centre.

There, he was placed in solitary confinement for a 14-day quarantine, as is the pandemic protocol for prisoner transfers.

While concerns over COVID-19 helped DeMaria gain his parole, the fact the same deadly contagion has been especially cruel in Italy will form a powerful argument for not sending him to the country he left as an infant, but CBSA is trying.

From prison, DeMaria is now in the midst of a detention review by the Immigration and Refugee Board, arguing for release before a much longer hearing on his status in Canada.

These sorts of hearings are always marathons for DeMaria, who has a 35-year history of fighting authorities in courts and tribunals, and often winning.

His parole decision last week gave a wry nod to the legal might DeMaria brings: “The board received your submission and the numerous submissions from your lawyer,” the board said, denying him full parole but granting him day parole.

DeMaria, 66, said he has chronic kidney problems, regularly sees a specialist and is a cancer survivor. His age and health place him at greater risk from novel coronavirus.

“Your pre-existing health concerns must be taken into consideration,” the parole board said in its decision.

As with his every proceeding, DeMaria’s parole hearing vacillated between allegations of deep involvement with the Mafia and his formal criminal record, which remains clean since a murder conviction, despite his previous years of freedom.

The board heard that in October, DeMaria’s younger brother, Giuseppe DeMaria, known as “Joe,” and two other men he knows, were charged in Italy with Mafia association. The charges stemmed from a probe in Italy and Canada of related clans of the ’Ndrangheta, the proper name of the Mafia in Italy’s southern region of Calabria.

The men were on DeMaria’s list of approved visitors while incarcerated and had visited him as recently as May.

At his hearing, DeMaria continued to deny any involvement in organized crime.

His history with prisons, parole boards and police is long and complicated — and cyclical. His tug of war with authorities was the focus of a National Post investigation in 2018.

The yin and yang of DeMaria’s recent time in prison runs from his excellent in-custody behaviour working as a cleaner in the health-care unit to a confidential report warning he “runs the institution.”

DeMaria is serving a life sentence for a second-degree murder in 1981 in Toronto, when he shot and killed a grocery clerk who owed him money.

He was released on parole in 1992. Because he has a life sentence, he remains on lifetime parole and, over the years, as police grew convinced he was forging a mighty place for himself in the underworld, he was periodically yanked back behind bars for alleged parole violations.

He disputes each parole revocation and often wins.

In 2013, he was again returned to prison. He fought the allegations and won a new hearing but remained behinds bars.

He also fought his deportation.

At IRB hearings in 2018, a police witness called him the “the top guy in Toronto” for the ’Ndrangheta, one of the world’s most powerful crime groups.

Although DeMaria has lived in Canada since before his first birthday, he never became a Canadian citizen.

In 2018, DeMaria was ordered deported but he won his appeal to the Federal Court of Canada. The judge found “strong suspicions” DeMaria was a mobster, but said opinions from police needed to be backed up by hard evidence to justify deportation. CBSA is trying again. An immigration arrest warrant was placed on DeMaria’s prison file, allowing agents to pick him up before he could leave prison.

At his parole hearing, DeMaria said he was expecting this to happen and promised to fight to remain in Canada each and every time. Like he always does.

Both CBSA and DeMaria’s lawyers declined to comment. His detention review is expected to end Friday.