Domenico Violi, the Hamilton son of a murdered mob boss, has been sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty Monday to trafficking drugs with a “made” member of a New York Mafia family.

The New Yorker — who did not testify at Violi’s trial and is not named in court documents — was secretly working as a paid police agent in a three-year, RCMP-led police operation during which he was officially inducted into the Bonanno Mafia family, according to an agreed statement of facts presented in court Monday.

Violi, 52, showed little expression before Justice George Gage as he was sentenced in a Hamilton courtroom packed with family and supporters.

He hugged his wife and kissed his son on the cheek before he was led into custody.

“This investigation and the prosecution stemming out of it have been a significant achievement,” prosecutor James Clark said in an interview outside court.

Veteran defence lawyer Dean Paquette, who represented Violi, said bringing the police agent into court to testify would have been a “high security risk.”

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“The prosecution was probably happy not to have to get him,” Paquette said.

Dozens of other well-wishers waited outside the courtroom in a show of support for Violi, who ran a business selling pasta, olive oil, coffee and hardwood flooring.

“Be nice,” one told a Star reporter. “It’s family. I know you have a job to do.”

Accounting credit for time served in pretrial custody, Violi has six years and 142 days left to serve in his eight-year sentence.

As part of his plea, the Crown dropped charges of criminal organization against Violi, who in November 2017 was charged with his younger brother, Giuseppe (Joe) Violi, and seven others a massive drug bust, code-named Project OTremens.

At the time, the RCMP called the arrests a “tremendous blow to organized crime in Canada.”

Giuseppe Violi, 48, who managed a linen and laundry services company in Hamilton, was sentenced in June to 16 years in prison for fentanyl and cocaine trafficking.

At the time of their arrests, the RCMP said the Violi brothers were well-established organized criminals with “an international reach.”

Domenico Violi admitted to trafficking approximately 260,000 pills, including PCP, ecstasy and methamphetamine to the American police agent, who posed as a mobster.

According to a prosecutor, the agent is currently in an undisclosed location in a witness protection program. Details of his initiation into the Bonanno crime family were not disclosed in court, nor was the amount of money he was paid for his work as an informant.

According to the agreed statement of facts, the agent paid Domenico Violi $416,000 (U.S.) for the pills.

Violi was paid another $24,600 as his share of the profits, according to the agreed statement.

According to police, Giuseppe and Domenico Violi are at least the third generation of a ’Ndrangheta Mafia group. The brothers were 8 and 11 years old, respectively, in 1978 when their father, Paolo Violi, was murdered in the Montreal ice cream shop that had been his headquarters.

At the time, Paolo Violi was acting boss of the Montreal mob, which police considered to be an arm of the Bonanno crime family of New York City.

Paolo Violi’s criminal organization in Montreal was severely damaged when undercover police officer Robert (Shotgun) Menard rented out an apartment above the ice cream shop in the Saint-Léonard district of Montreal and secretly recorded conversations between 1970 and 1976.

Those secret recordings included telephone calls to Calabria and Sicily in Italy, and to New York and Miami.

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Portions of those conversations were played at the mid-1970s Quebec Police Commission inquiry into organized crime and in trials in Italy, where they were used to show connections between Italian and North American criminals.

Menard died of a heart attack in 2016 at age 82.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two uncles of Giuseppe and Domenico Violi were also slain in the protracted war with the Rizzuto crime family that also killed their father.

After the murders, survivors in the Violi family moved back to Hamilton, where Domenico and Giuseppe Violi lived under the protection of their grandfather Giacomo Luppino, police said.

Police considered Luppino to be a long-standing associate of the Buffalo mob and a founding member of the Crimine, a governing body for criminals in the ’Ndrangheta.

Luppino died of natural causes in Hamilton in March 1988 at the age of 88.

The agreed statement of facts filed in Hamilton court on Monday spoke of tight working relationships between Canadian and American mobsters.

The police agent, it said, “was a trusted associate and then official ‘made’ member of the New York City-based ‘Bonanno’ family” and his membership “facilitated his criminal transactions with members and associates of other criminal organizations operating in Canada and in the United States.”

He had “numerous discussions about multiple organized crime groups operating in the Greater Toronto Area and elsewhere in Canada and the United States,” the statement continued.

The agent maintained a social relationship with Domenico Violi and met him regularly, it said. In one meeting, at Violi’s Hamilton home, the agent handed him $240,000 wrapped in a plastic yellow grocery bag, placed inside a pink and grey shopping bag, according to the statement of facts.

Witton Luu, 25, one of Violi’s co-accused in Project OTremens, died in August at the Joyceville medium-security prison near Kingston under what the Correctional Service of Canada called “non-natural” circumstances.

Luu had been there since May 17, when he was sentenced to three years and nine months.

The project culminated in dawn raids two years ago in Hamilton, York Region, Niagara, Innisfil, Vancouver and Montreal.

The raids included officers from the RCMP, OPP, and Toronto, Hamilton, Peel and York region police. The operation also partnered with the OPP-led Contraband Tobacco Enforcement Team and seized more than three million contraband cigarettes.

Project OTremens was also assisted by U.S. Homeland Security, Italian police departments, the Colombian National Police and RCMP liaison officers in Colombia, Mexico, Italy and the Netherlands.

The FBI in New York City conducted what the RCMP called “a parallel, but separate” investigation into the Sicilian Mafia in that city, focusing on members of the Bonanno and Gambino families. Several “members and associates” of those crime families were charged with cocaine trafficking, loan sharking, extortion and money laundering.

Erin Maranan, a Toronto police civilian employee, was also charged in the investigation. She was convicted last June of leaking information to criminals.