This is the greatest unexamined story in North American today. What did we sign on to when we agreed to legalize sports gambling? What about all those promises of eliminating mobsters? Why is there a bloody war across Canada to control the illegal betting market?

“Gambling is far bigger than narcotics for the mob. Because it is everyday. And you also make money on loans to the gamblers and then you get to take their businesses when they get into debt.”
Former FBI undercover Joe Pistone aka Donnie Brasco

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
As the bleeding corpse of Harry Lainas, Hells Angels enforcer and gambling debt collector, lay in the underground parking lot in central Toronto, an investigator would be forgiven for thinking those thoughts.
Lainas was the victim of a targeted mob-style hit in an area where he was known as a ‘collector’ of money lost in bets. My sources claimed his killing was yet another attack in a series of shootings, bombings and murders related to the control of Canada’s illegal sports gambling market.
Why?
This the question that should trouble readers – why would any gambling-related mobster bother killing someone that year in Canada?
Lainas was murdered in February 2021, a few short months before the legalization of Canada’s sports gambling market. Everyone in the gambling world knew what was going to happen. Almost four years before, the United States Supreme Court had passed the oversight of their gambling markets to the individual states. It had kicked off a tsunami of legalized betting in states across America and Canada was known to be next in the wave.
One of the claims for legalizing betting was that all these ‘black-market’ criminal bookmakers were going to be driven out of business. They were not.
Instead many mobsters regarded it as such an opportunity they started killing each other to gain control of the market.
This is the greatest unexamined story in North America today. What did we sign on to, when we agreed to legalize sports gambling? What were all those promises of getting rid of mobsters really worth?
Only a very few journalists have actually examined the phenomenon of sports gambling – akin, in my opinion (and Trump’s former surgeon general) to a new form of opioid epidemic.
These journalists’ work is excellent. But almost all of them have taken the claims of the gambling corporations about the strong divide between legal and illegal bookmakers at face value.
I have not.
Here is why.
Just as the de-criminalization of marijuana did not got rid of the illegal drug market – now, many police agents claim that the expansion of legal gambling has merely fed the criminal gambling world. Government-permitted betting has make the total market bigger, and many gamblers attracted, at first, by the legal market have simply crossed over to the criminal bookmakers.
My upcoming book Birds of Prey: The Real World of Sports Gambling examines exactly this subject. If you do not know the story – stay tuned – it is a shocking and deeply worrying one.

Blood on the Streets

“The time to make real profits is when there is blood on the streets…”
Iraqi businessman in Baghdad during the American Invasion

In English Canada, Italian organized crime is not the “Mafia”. In American, the Sicilians and Napoletanos (Camorra) dominate the mob. In English Canada, it is the Calabrians who are our La Cosa Nostra. The Calabrians are from the southern most province of Italy. They speak a dialect tinged with Arabic and Ancient Greek words. And their organized crime entity – the ‘Ndrangheta – are, according to the Italian Government, the fifth largest economic entity in their country – with revenue worth over $65 billion a year.
It was they who, around Toronto and across Southern Ontario went to war with the bikers to control the gambling market.
Harry Lainas’s murder was just one more dead body in a conveyer belt-like line of dead bodies over control of Canada’s illegal sports gambling, all killed at exactly the same time the market was supposed to becoming more legal.
A few months before his murder, Harry Lainas’ erst-while colleague Rob Barletta of the Hell’s Angels had his house shot up – the hitmen were supposed to kill him but instead, such was their poor aim, they peppered Barletta’s front door and the neighbours’ houses.
Like most things in today’s society, the would-be hitmen of Barletta were filmed. As you can see, they make a fairly hapless looking pair. A couple of would-be street hoods hired by mobsters to commit the crime – but the dangers should not be overlooked. One of Barletta’s neighbours told me, “I was doing the washing up when the bullets came through my wall.”

The neighbours were right to be alarmed. In an earlier shooting for control of Canada’s sports gambling market – an innocent mother buying a sandwich with her daughter was left paralyzed for life. In a controversial decision, an illegal bookmaker donated $2 million for her care.
The killing of Lainas and the attacks on Barletta were not the only deadly incidents in this war. There were other shootings, arsons and murders for control of Canada’s illegal sports gambling.
A few months after the Canadian Government legalized sports betting, the alleged head of the true Sicilian Mafia in the French part of Canada – Leonardo Rizzuto – had his car windows were shot up in an attempted murderous attack. He was fortune to survive. The motive of the shooting? Control of the gambling market.

The Power of the Illegal Gambling Market

“Bookmaking was invented by the mafia because they have too much cash,” said one of Canada’s top undercover investigators. “If you’re a mafia boss and you have $10 million in cash, you can’t put $10 million in the bank to make interest on it. So the easiest way to make interest on your 10 million is to start up a bookmaking organization.”
He was an investigator in a multi-jurisdictional operation that revealed two top organized crime groups who, instead of fighting, had combined and were running an illegal sports gambling network in Canada worth hundreds-of-millions of dollars.
It is still going on.
Welcome to the real world of sports gambling.

More, far more, to come…