The Siderno Group

Canada’s most durable criminal organization is not a gang, a syndicate or an alliance. It is a set of families from one small town on the Ionian coast of Calabria who began arriving in Toronto in 1952 and never stopped. Seventy years later, Italian investigators believe the board that sits north of Toronto has the authority to make decisions not only here, but back in Siderno itself.

What the Siderno Group Is

The name is a geographic label rather than a formal title. The “Siderno Group” describes a network of ’Ndrangheta-linked families whose members originated in Siderno, a town on the Ionian coast of Calabria, and who migrated to Canada and Australia beginning in the 1950s. It operates across Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe, and it is composed of families related by blood or by marriage.

That last detail is the whole architecture. Where the Hells Angels recruit and the street gangs of Montreal and Toronto form around neighbourhoods, the ’Ndrangheta binds through family. You are not recruited into it. You are born into it or you marry into it. That is why it has proved almost impossible to infiltrate with informants, and why it has outlasted every Canadian criminal organization that has tried to rival it.

Siderno is home to the Commisso ’ndrina, one of the ’Ndrangheta’s largest and most important clans, and a significant presence in the global cocaine trade and in money laundering.

The Racco Era, 1952–1980

Michele “Mike” Racco settled in Toronto in 1952, sent by Antonio Macrì, then the undisputed boss of Siderno. By 1962, working with Giacomo Luppino in Hamilton and Rocco Zito in Toronto, Racco had established a crimine and a Camera di Controllo — a controlling chamber — on Canadian soil. He maintained close relations with the Luppino family in Hamilton and the Cotroni family in Montreal, the latter being the Sicilian-aligned organisation whose eventual successors are examined in our Rizzuto crime family profile.

Two co-founders, Salvatore Triumbari and Filippo Vendemini, were murdered in 1967 and 1969 respectively after disputes; reporting attributes both sanctions to Racco. Macrì himself was killed in January 1975. Racco died of cancer in January 1980.

What followed was a brief and violent succession. Racco’s son Domenic Racco was murdered in December 1983 — lured into a car outside his Mississauga apartment and driven to a railway track. The plot was organised from inside Millhaven Institution by Anthony Musitano of the Hamilton-based Musitano family, over a cocaine trade agreement Racco had allegedly violated and a debt reported at up to $500,000. Four men were convicted. Rocco Zito emerged as boss of the Toronto group.

The Colombian Route — and Why It Matters

This is the point at which the Siderno Group separates from almost every other organisation covered on this site.

The ’Ndrangheta’s cocaine supply has historically run to Colombia, not through Mexican cartels. The organisation moved narcotics across three continents, with contacts in Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and Peru, permanent representation in Colombia for drugs and in Costa Rica and Panama for money laundering. Its key figure in Colombia, Roberto Pannunzi, was arrested in Medellín in 1994; he had previously run heroin shipments from Turkey through Italy to the United States.

That is a direct producer relationship. It removes the intermediary, and with it the margin, the dependency and much of the violence that comes from negotiating with a third party.

The Families

The Toronto-area Siderno group has been reported to include the Coluccio, Tavernese, DeMaria, Figliomeni, Ruso and Commisso families. Leadership is understood to sit in both Calabria and Ontario simultaneously.

Giuseppe Coluccio was arrested outside a strip mall in Markham in August 2008, having lived in Canada for nearly three years under a false identity, and was extradited to Italy within a fortnight. His brother Antonio, who had used the alias Giuseppe Scarfo in Canada, was among 29 people named in Italian arrest warrants in September 2014 and was sentenced to 30 years in 2018. A third brother, Salvatore, was already imprisoned in Italy.

Cosimo Stalteri, described as a boss of one of ten ’Ndrangheta clans in Ontario — based across Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa and London — died of natural causes in Toronto in 2011, aged 86. Carmine Verduci was shot dead north of Toronto in April 2014.

By mid-2019, police in both Italy and Canada had reached a striking conclusion: that the ’Ndrangheta’s Canadian presence had become powerful enough that the board north of Toronto could make decisions affecting not only Canada’s underworld but the organisation abroad, including back in Siderno. A Canadian branch with authority over its Italian parent is not a pattern seen elsewhere in this country’s organised crime.

Project Sindacato

The investigation began after a run of violence in Vaughan in 2017 — an attempted murder, drive-by shootings and arsons. York Regional Police formed an organised crime task force and spent more than a year on wiretaps.

On 14 and 15 July 2019, roughly 500 officers from eight police services raided 48 homes and businesses across the Greater Toronto Area. Police seized 27 homes worth $24 million, 23 cars including five Ferraris, and $2 million in cash and jewellery — more than $35 million in total. Fifteen people were arrested in Canada, nine of them described as top members of what police called the Figliomeni Crime Family. Italian State Police arrested a further twelve in Calabria in a coordinated action.

The alleged income model was unglamorous: eleven cafés in the Vaughan area running video gaming machines, with cash loans advanced to patrons at what police called astronomical rates — the “juice.” Detective-Sergeant Carl Mattinen described people gambling away their life savings while the group used intimidation and violence, including shootings and arsons, to collect.

York Regional Police called it the largest organised crime operation in the service’s history. It cost roughly $8 million.

Why Prosecutions Fail Here

Project Sindacato is not an isolated failure, and the reasons are structural rather than particular to one force.

Reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project identifies two features of Canadian law that experts blame for the pattern. The first is a disclosure obligation broader than in comparable jurisdictions, requiring prosecutors to hand over more material to the defence and producing lengthy disputes over what must be shared. The second is the requirement that cases before a province’s Superior Court be completed within 30 months of charges being laid.

An organisation that can afford sustained, well-resourced defence counsel is unusually well placed to exploit both. A seventy-year-old network with inherited membership and no need to recruit outsiders is exactly such an organisation.

The Banking Allegations

In April 2024, OCCRP published an investigation alleging that the ’Ndrangheta had made use of Canadian financial institutions. Nick Martino, one of those charged in Project Sindacato, had worked at the Royal Bank of Canada, though he no longer worked there at the time of his arrest.

RBC acknowledged that its internal controls had independently identified unusual transactions relating to what police would come to call Project Sindacato, and said the bank worked closely with law enforcement throughout the investigation.

These allegations have not been tested in court, because the charges were stayed before trial. That is the point worth holding onto: the collapse of the case did not only end a prosecution. It closed the only forum in which the evidence would have been examined publicly.

Established vs. Alleged

Related Files

The Calabrian network in Toronto sits alongside, and largely apart from, the other organisations tracked on this site. The Sicilian-aligned mafia in Montreal is examined in the Rizzuto crime family profile. The newer distribution networks and their reported cartel relationships are covered in the Wolfpack Alliance, Alkhalil Brothers and Wedding criminal enterprise files. The outlaw motorcycle networks are covered in Hells Angels Canada.

Standing of This File