Frank Zaneth (born Franco Zanetti; 1890–1971) was an Italian-Canadian officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, noted as the first Mountie to ever go undercover in the Mafia.
Zaneth was unable to discover the supposed conspirators behind the riot, but his undercover work resulted in several French-Canadian young men attempting to be avoid being conscripted being arrested.
[1] In Calgary, Zaneth gained the confidence of the union leader George Sangster and was able to obtain the complete membership list of the Socialist Party of Canada.
[5] In December 1919, Zaneth's cover was ended when he was compelled to testify for the Crown at the trial of Robert B. Russell, one of the leaders of the Winnipeg general strike.
[5] Later that year, Zaneth went to Montreal with the new alias of Jacques Leplante, a French-Canadian immigrant to the United States who had been radicalized after working in a New England textile mill who just returned to Canada.
[5] Feeling that Zaneth was too well known in the left-wing "radical" community, he was reassigned by his superiors to infiltrate the Mafia, which he was felt to be well suited for because of his Italian origins.
[4] Zaneth's investigation of money laundering and bootlegging took him abroad several times as he went undercover to Chicago, the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the Dominion of Newfoundland.
[6] The journalist Antonio Nicaso wrote: "Zaneth, tenacious to the point of being obstinate, understood that the only way to trap Perri was to infiltrate his gang".
[8] On 8 May 1929, another member of the Perri-Starkman gang, Tony Roma arrived at Zaneth's hotel room to hand him 100 white cubes of morphine, all of which weighed between 2 and 2.5 grams.
[8] His suspicions were confirmed when Brasi and Defalco told him that Francesco Rossi of Hamilton, aka "Frank Ross", was the main distributor of cocaine and morphine in Ontario.
During the conversation, he also mentioned one Frank Ross, residing at 255 Barton St. West, as being the first lieutenant of Rocco Perri, and the distribution of drugs rests with him.
[10] On 29 June 1929, Zaneth ordered Italiano arrested, whom he suspected of being the man who sold cocaine and morphine to De Falco and Roma who "both came from the same area of Calabria as Rocco Perri".
[11] However, the attempt failed as Perri would not sell drugs to members of the North Side Gang, who were the rivals to the Chicago Outfit led by Al Capone.
[11] In another attempt, Zaneth lobbied his superiors to buy him a McLaughlin-Buick (an extremely expensive car in 1929), and again he posed as a drug dealer to James Harris, another member of the Perri-Starkman gang.
[13] Of his meeting with Starkman, he wrote: "During the conversation I made every effort to press the issue but they informed me that their connections had been lost; that their New York man had flown the coop and that they were not in a position to say when they could resume negotiations with me".
[10] On 27 July 1936, Roma was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Fowler, California and was extradited back to Canada, where he was convicted on 21 December 1936 on narcotics trafficking.
[13] Licastro reported to Zaneth: "Joseph Serianni, the boss of Niagara Falls, is the man who takes care of the drugs on arrival from New York.
[15] Zaneth reported that a woman in Thorold had heard Roma's wife, Ethel Groves, say to him "What a fine friend [Perri] turned out to be.
[15] In pursuit of this line of inquiry, Zaneth discovered that Perri gang had engaged in human trafficking by bringing in illegal immigrants from Italy to Canada to be exploited.
[4] When Stuart Taylor retired as the Chief Commissioner of the RCMP, Zaneth was widely regarded as the logical successor because as Nicaso put it he was "the natural choice, given his charisma and ability".