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Anthony Musitano, known to everyone as Tony, was walking through the dry cleaner he ran in Hamilton, Ont., lighting a cigarette as he passed stacked barrels of chemicals.

“Should you be smoking here? Is that stuff flammable?” I asked.

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Musitano turned with a serious look and said: “I can make it burn, if you want.”

The joke was that Musitano was once so notorious for a string of arson and bombings in a Mafia extortion plot that Hamilton city council passed a unanimous motion banning him from the city when he was released from prison.

Musitano, a leading Mafia figure through the 1970s and 1980s, died Wednesday in a residence in Caledonia, west of Hamilton.

He was 72. Foul play is not suspected.

Born in Calabria, Italy, and having immigrated to Canada when he was six, he leaves behind two children, a son and a daughter who are both pharmacists, and two ex-wives.

For all of the mayhem he caused and the bloodshed that surrounded him, Musitano was a surprisingly funny and sociable man who professed to have cleaned up his act after prison — but always left a hint, to me and to police, that this was not the full story.