JCB1977 wrote: ↑Wed Feb 14, 2018 7:41 am
antimafia wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:40 pm
JCB1977 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:12 pm[snip]
Nicky Melia is 100% Calabrian...he is a first cousin to my grandmother.
JCB,
If you wouldn't mind taking a look, please tell me what parts of what I've written below I've got wrong.
One of your grandmothers had the maiden name
Mallamo. (At first I guessed that this was your maternal grandmother but then I realized I didn't have enough information from the posts of yours that I have saved over the years.)
The Mallamos, Romeos, and Pratos have ancestry from San Nicola, which is part of the
comune of Ardore in Reggio Calabria (
provincia).
Nicola (Nick) Melia and his older brother Vincenzo are related to the Mallamos, Romeos, and Milanos. If not related, the Melias were somehow tied in to the Mallamo-Romeo-Milano clan.
Vincenzo Melia, who was born in the
comune of Platì, had an attachment to Ardore (which borders Platì). (My guess is that because Ardore is where Vincenzo lived the last years of his life before being arrested in his 80s, he either grew up there, owned properties there, had relatives who lived there, or "retired" there (or a combination of the preceding).
Your great uncle Domenico Mallamo was part of
la Società Onorata but relinquished his membership in this Calabrian secret society when he was made in 1928, in Brooklyn, in what was then the Profaci Family.
Nick Melia was probably inducted into the 'ndrangheta--I don't want to write that this is a given--and if he is a 'ndranghetista, this is the reason he could not be made into the Gambino Family or the reason he had to decline any proposed membership in the Gambinos.
The Mallamos, Romeos, Milanos, and Melias had or have relatives in Quebec.
Please PM me with specific questions as I don’t want my family history on the forum. YES, Nick Melia’s Brother was a part of Montreal and yes, the Mallamo’s and Romeo’s has relatives in Canada who were part of the N’drangheta.
JCB, thanks so much for telling us what you were willing to share. I will send you a PM as requested. I entirely understand your reluctance and refusal to discuss your family history--here or anywhere else for that matter.
I'd like to provide you and others some information I have gathered about Vincenzo Melia and his wife's having resided and worked in Quebec in the 1960s.
In 1963, Vincenzo Melia and his wife (Eugenia Maria Tarantino) lived in Saint-Marie. He was a fruit merchant at the time; she was a packager (she had a job in which she packaged items).
In 1968, the couple were then living in Terrebonne. He was a labourer at this time; she was now a housewife.
The above information, except Eugenia's full name, comes from 20th-century Canadian election records (Voters Lists, Federal Elections, 1935-1980).
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As I wrote in my first post in this thread, Vincenzo was shot in the face on the day of Paolo (Paul) Cotroni's funeral (August 28, 1998). In Darcy O'Connor's 2011 book,
Montreal's Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang--a book that I didn't care for but eventually bought anyway--Melia is described as a "known Rizzuto mobster." The page containing this quote (p. 26) is a perfect example of what is wrong with O'Connor's book, as he describes Melia's being shot in the face on the morning of Frank Cotroni Sr's funeral (Frank is Paul's father), which took place in 2004.
Nevertheless, I took "known Rizzuto mobster" to mean that Melia, a well-known 'ndranghetista who had been lumped in with the Toronto-area Siderno Group, had been operating in the Montreal area with permission from the Montreal Mafia hierarchy. My own theory as to what Melia was doing in Quebec in the 1990s is that, having already lived in Toronto at an earlier time in his life (as did brother Nick) and having been charged and sentenced along with Cosimo Commisso of Toronto for the 1981 murder plot involving Nick Melia's girlfriend in Stamford, CT, Melia would have felt comfortable living in Canada; in addition, I also theorized that Melia would have been introduced to the Rizzutos through Commisso himself, as Cosimo and Nick Rizzuto Sr. were apparently very close and considered each other friends.
The research about Melia and his wife's having lived in Quebec in the 1960s proved my theory wrong. He was already familiar with the province. Other research I have done leads me to believe that, in the Montreal area, there is a vibrant community of individuals who have ancestry from Ardore. Various organized-crime figures who have been said to be part of the Armeni clan in Quebec--for example, the deceased Giuseppe Armeni and the currently imprisoned Vincenzo Armeni--have had close ties with the Rizzutos. I haven't done intensive research about where in Calabria the Armenis descend but I have had an inkling that they have ancestry from Ardore. I believe that a longstanding community of
ardoresi in the Montreal area means that Vincenzo Melia would have encountered familiar faces when he lived in Quebec in the 1960s and then again in the late 1990s--and who knows whether he was in Quebec before 1963?
