Article content continued

So it came to this.

A deportation hearing at the Immigration and Refugee Board is another thing altogether from a criminal court. The IRB has a lower legal standard of evidence and Canada Border Services Agency, Correctional Service Canada and three police agencies were emptying their tanks to make accusations stick, here, where they failed in court.

It wouldn’t keep DeMaria in prison, but it would send him back to Italy, which he left before his first birthday.

The 63-year-old DeMaria is not making it easy. He is practiced at this sort of bureaucratic war.

His defence team has more lawyers than can fit on one side of the hearing room; he hired forensic accountants, former police officers and a law professor. Together they chiseled at police evidence.

“If you’re looking for the smoking gun for Mr. DeMaria to say he’s the crime boss, I don’t think you’re going to find the smoking gun,” Det. Todd Moore, an intelligence officer with Peel police, told the IRB in July, sounding exasperated.

“Mr. DeMaria is a very smart man and very discreet and he’s pretty cautious…. It’s like a puzzle, you have to look at all the pieces.”

On Roger’s Road in Toronto’s west end, just north of Corso Italia, a traditional Italian social strip, the doors of Angel’s Bakery & Deli were propped open in October, revealing the havoc of two dead-of-night fire bombings, the first at 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 29, and another at 4 a.m. on Oct. 1.

As DeMaria sat in prison fighting deportation, the arson attacks suggested he had enemies beyond the government. They picked an emotional target. Angel’s has been the centre of life for his family for decades.