Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm sorry Michael Chettleburgh isn't here today, because he agrees with me on the position I am going to take about marijuana.
As Sergeant Tommy O'Brien, a wise old New York city street cop working organized crime, told me many years ago as we were walking along the streets of little Italy in New York to confront a mobster, “As long as people enjoy the services, and that is all it is, so long as people enjoy prostitution, untaxed cigarettes, after hours joints, gambling, as long as people enjoy that, there will always be Mafia people, criminals who will supply them. It's like anything else--if the general public wants it, they'll get it.” He chuckled when he said that--and that is very true today.
As an investigative journalist who has specialized in organized crime reporting for almost a lifetime, I have a different perspective from police and prosecutors who generally want more laws and easier arrests and convictions, or most politicians who usually desire a simplistic, nice-sounding, quick fix for political advantage to things that cannot be so easily fixed.
I've been looking at and documenting organized crime in Canada since 1974 for television documentaries, books, scores, and magazine articles, including the CBC Connections series from 1974 to 1979; a series called Mob Stories on the History Channel, where I was interviewed, along with Antonio; in the 1980s and 1990s, Mob rule: Inside the Canadian Mafia;Dragons of Crime: Asian Mobs in Canada; and three others, including one on organized crime during the 1920s prohibition in Canada.
I have been involved in many TV documentaries on people smuggling--one for A&E and one for the National Film Board and the CBC; a 10-part series on CityTV on Toronto organized crime groups; a CBC Witness documentary on cigarettes, guns, booze, and smuggling; a CBC Montreal documentary on the bike war in the 1990s; and many others. I am also the co-author of the definition articles of “organized crime” for all editions of the Canadian Encyclopedia.
The point here is that a lot of my life's work has been researching, looking at, and documenting organized crime in Canada and the various changing states of organized crime. Some of my sources I've met over the last 40 years--ex-hitmen, gangsters, con men, bikers, and mafioso--are still friends, as are some cops and some other mob sources. I see or call them and they call me frequently to chat, compare notes, and analyze the most recent organized crime developments. So I think I know of what I speak.
Since 1974, when I began work on Connections, and since 1985, when I published Mob rule: Inside the Canadian Mafia--the first book outside of Quebec on organized crime in Canada--we've come a long way in Canadian enforcement techniques and laws. Examples include the excellent anti-gang laws that were strengthened eight years ago, money-laundering legislation, and tougher, more rigorous immigration enforcement.