Cecil Kirby (born 17 August 1950) is a Canadian former outlaw biker, gangster and hitman for the Commisso 'ndrina, turned police informant.
Kirby was born into an Irish-Canadian family in the Weston neighbourhood of Toronto on 17 August 1950, and was twice expelled from elementary school for unruly behaviour.
[3] At the time, Satan's Choice led by Bernie "The Frog" Guindon was the largest and most powerful outlaw biker club in Ontario.
Kirby was present when another Satan's Choice member, Howard "Pigpen" Berry, opened fire on the clubhouse of the Popeyes, the most violent of Quebec's outlaw biker clubs, with a sawed off Lee–Enfield .303 rifle with a ten-round clip, saying: "It was like a cannon going off".
[10] Kirby described most of the Outlaws he met in Fort Lauderdale as deeply troubled Vietnam veterans unable to readjust to civilian society whose most notable qualities were a fondness for drugs and even more so for violence.
[11] In 1975, after Guindon was arrested at the Oba Lake drug bust, Kirby visited him in jail in Sault St. Marie together with his close friend Frank "Cisco" Lenti.
[13] In March 1976, Kirby left Satan's Choice and began to work for the 'Ndrangheta, a Mafia-type criminal organization based in the Calabria region of Italy.
[15] Kirby wrote in Mafia Enforcer about his new employers, the Commisso brothers: "I quickly learned that their big thing for making money was the construction industry.
[3] After a Commisso-controlled construction company won the contract, Kirby reported: "Once their man got the bid, they became his partners and their people — plasters, electricians, plumbers, cement suppliers — would be used on the job.
[3] On 11 November 1976, Kirby left a stick of dynamite in the mailbox of the owner of Pozzabona Construction to pressure him to pay a plastering bill to a client more promptly.
[3] Kirby planted the bomb in the car of the wrong Denis Mason, but it failed to explode owing to faulty wiring.
[3] In Mafia Enforcer, Kirby coldly wrote about Chong's death: "The murder could have been avoided if the Commissos had done their homework better before handing out the bombing contract.
"[2] In 1978, Kirby bombed the home of Ben Freedman, a Toronto construction contractor who had fallen into debt with his subcontractors, who in their turn had hired Commisso for help.
[3] On 1 August 1978, Kirby blew up the car belonging to a Hamilton businessman named John Ryan, as part of a Commisso extortion bid.
[20] Kirby also supplied the gun used to kill Toronto Police constable Michael Sweet at the Bourbon Street Tavern on 14 March 1980.
[19] In reality, Nafplotis disappeared into the witness protection program and a report that she had been murdered was leaked to the media, which satisfied Kirby's employers that she was dead.
[19] Commisso then gave Kirby the task of murdering Toronto-area Buffalo crime family caporegime Paul Volpe, and his driver-bodyguard, Pietro Scarcella in return for $20,000.
[22] Like the Commisso brothers, Volpe's crew was heavily active in extorting from construction companies throughout the greater Toronto area.
[23] Volpe, who also had a well deserved reputation for being treacherous, had invited the Commissos into a real estate deal and then cheated them, causing the brothers to vow vengeance.
[19] Finally, Volpe had willingly appeared onscreen in multiple Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) documentaries about the alleged role of the Mafia and other organized crime within the Canadian economy, which further enraged old school Wiseguys who felt no Mafiosi be interviewed for television even if it was only to deny being a criminal, as all publicity was bad publicity.
[19] During a conversation on 31 March 1981, Commisso told Kirby that he needed permission from an unnamed higher authority before he could issue concrete the orders to kill Volpe.
[19] Volpe's further violation of the Mafia code by co-operating with Canadian law enforcement was duly noted and in 1983 he was assassinated, it is believed, by fellow members of the Buffalo crime family.
[2] Notably, Kirby proved far more willing to testify against the Commisso brothers and the people who had employed them than he was against his former associates in Satan's Choice, providing the police with hardly any information of value about his former outlaw biker club.
[29] In November 1986, Kirby published his autobiography Mafia Enforcer, ghostwritten by an American journalist Thomas Renner, which provoked controversy with many charging that a criminal should not be allowed to profit from his crimes by writing a best-selling book.
[17] Kirby openly admitted that he felt no remorse for his crimes and that his reasons for turning Crown's evidence were not moral, but rather practical, namely that he feared that the Commisso brothers were planning to kill him.
[30] During his time at the Oak Ridge asylum for the criminally insane, Vaughan had refused all treatment and was described by one psychiatrist who examined him as "cold, controlling, distrusting, narcissistic, paranoid, and psychopathic".
[30] Despite this assessment, in 1998, it was decided to allow Vaughan unsupervised work terms from Oak Ridge asylum, which led the police to fear that a violent misogynist and a potential serial killer was about to be unleashed.
[1] Kirby stated that he was very frightened when a woman he did not know took a photograph of him on the street with the intention of posting it on Instagram, causing him to violently berate her until she deleted the photo from her phone.
[1] Kirby has expressed much remorse for turning Crown's evidence, telling Edwards: "I wish I would have taken a bullet in the head instead of cooperating with those bastards".