Canadian Letters: Lake Steeltown and Down-the-Nose Torontonians

canadian letters: Despite or perhaps, because of its woolly downtown, rheumatic shoreline and pockmarked history, Hamilton is vastly interesting; Toronto with a fever and the sweats, according to Hamilton Spectator. While the works of Salvatore DiFalco, David Collier and others have mined these veins, it's still a place largely unwritten about in Canadian letters. Although regarded, at least by down-the-nose Torontonians, as a greaser with a knife in its cuff a sentiment blithely echoed by Hamilton legend Tom Wilson, who has said that his city was punk rock before punk existed Lake Ontario's steeltown finds itself rounding into a vanguard of new expression. Another artist who has identified the city's narrative protein is Trevor Cole, whose recent book, The Whisky King The remarkable true story of Canada's most infamous bootlegger and the undercover Mountie on his trail, dives into an era when Hamilton was a bootlegging hub, filled with rounders, ghouls and thugs. Both men came to North America from opposite regions in Italy Perri from the South; Zaneth from the North and Cole's portraiture details their upbringing, home life and struggles in the new world alongside the civic evolution of Canada, taking us through the rise of prostitution, crime, gambling and the dance of sin and alcohol, the latter propelling Perri into one of Canada's most opportunistic, and combative, rum runners. Cole tells the story of ambitious mobster and bootlegger Rocco Perri small, stocky, social and quietly fearsome and the man who pursued him, a resolute and self-hating Italian immigrant named Frank Zaneth, regarded as the RCMP's first undercover operative. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.