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Under cross examination, Wednesday, Dragi Zekavica, lawyer for accused mobster Giuseppe Ursino, 64, known as Pino, suggested Guido was rolling in government money.

“I didn’t go into being an agent for the money,” Guido objected. It was for his peace mind and a way out, he said.

“I figured, if I’m going to do this, I got to live the rest of my life in hiding, I’m going to need so much money,” he said.

“I had to leave for another life, leave everyone I knew behind, leave every source of income. I can’t walk out with no money. I need money to survive. I compensated my family for everything I was going to put them through.”

The monthly stipend from police helped him maintain his cover on the street as a working mobster, he said.

“I still had to maintain that I was some wiseguy gangster.”

Guido was born in Toronto to Italian immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. He ran tough as a kid, getting into fights and into trouble with police before he even left high school.

Nobody talked to me before until they saw the money I was bringing in

He worked in carpentry with his uncle’s construction company but slowly shifted his talent from job sites to the streets. He was involved in equipment and bank frauds and started spending more time in Italian social clubs with established gangsters, he told court under cross examination.

He soon found himself hooked into organized crime, specifically the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia from Italy’s southern region of Calabria.

Guido admitted what he knew of the Mafia at the time came from movies and a Google search. But he looked the part, admitting he had a “dangerous image” that helped.