That friendship included opening an illegal gambling house, The Porcupine Miners Club, with Papalia on John Street, two blocks from police headquarters shortly after Gasbarrini was released from prison in 1955. (It lasted for two years before the police "stopped looking the other way," Gasbarrini remembered.)

Keep alive a lifelong friendship with a man convicted in the infamous French Connection heroin smuggling plot, a man known for drug smuggling, gambling rackets, extortion, and even murder, and people will talk.

And talk they did. There was the 1963 testimony at the U.S. Senate crime investigations subcommittee hearing that identified Gasbarrini as father-in-law Sylvestro's likely successor and named him a key member of Canadian organized crime.

Back in Canada, he was identified as a suspected member of organized crime at the 1964 Ontario Police Commission hearings. Six years later, he was called "a kingpin in the Mafia in this country" by Ontario MPP Mort Shulman in a speech that led to a judicial inquiry. That inquiry probed connections between Gasbarrini, Papalia, Burlington businessman Clinton Duke, and senior Ontario Provincial Police officers.

At that inquiry, which dominated the news for months, Gasbarrini described himself as a businessman, a developer of apartment buildings and an entrepreneur. He denied doing any business with Papalia (including the gambling club 15 years earlier) and said they played golf together, often.

"Not being acceptable at most clubs, we play at Burlington Springs," he told inquiry lawyer J.J. Robinette.

His friend Papalia died at 73, shot in the head on a city street by a hit man who said he was hired by two other mobsters — Angelo and Pat Musitano — who figured it would be cheaper to pay the hitman than cover their $200,000 debt to Papalia. (The pair pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder, not Papalia, but his lieutenant, Carmen Barillaro, who the hit man gunned down two months after Papalia.)

Gasbarrini lived to be 93. He bought property and built buildings in Hamilton, Oakville, Burlington and Niagara. With Lee, his wife of 53 years, he raised a family that includes three children, seven grandchildren and six great grandchildren.

Visitation for Gasbarrini is set for Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evenings at Smith's Funeral Home on Guelph Line in Burlington. A funeral mass is slated for Monday at Holy Rosary Church on Plains Road in Burlington.

bdunphy@thespec.com

905-526-3262 | @BillAtTheSpec