Sheriffs And Outlaws Of Western Canada

Dramatic cases involving Western Canada's pioneer lawmen. Included are The Mad Trapper of Rat River, Saskatchewan's Midnight Massacre, The Yukon's Christmas Day Assassins, When Guns Blazed at Banff, The Strangler Who Terrified the Prairies and British Columbia's Boone Helm- The Murdering Cannibal.

Includes the Mad Trapper of Rat River; Saskatchewan's Midnight Massacre; Yukon's Christmas Day Assassins; When Guns Blazed at Banff, BC's Murdering Cannibal, Boone Helm; Winnipeg's Prairie Strangler and others.

Some of western Canada's most shocking and dramatic crimes are chronicled: Albertan Swift Runner, who ate his mother, brother, wife and six children; Saskatchewan's first stagecoach holdup; the 1880 death of Manitoba's police chief; BC's "Phantom of the Rangeland; and many more. The book includes 80 photographs.

"You're lucky he didn't have an ice pick in his hands. I know how this guy performs." -Mobster Paul Volpe speaking about a Buffalo-mafia enforcer named "Cicci" Canada is lauded the world over as a law abiding, peaceful country - a shining example to all nations. Such a view, also shared by most Canadians, is typically naïve and misinformed. Throughout its history, to present day and beyond, Canada has been and will continue to be home to criminals and crime organizations that are brilliant at finding ways to make money - a lot of money - illegally. Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada is a remarkable parallel history to the one generally accepted and taught in our schools. Organized crime has had a significant impact on the shaping of this country and the lives of its people. The most violent and thuggish - outlaw motorcycle gangs like Hells Angels - have been raised to mythic proportions. The families who owned distilleries during Prohibition, such as the Bronfmans, built vast fortunes that today are vested in corporate holdings. The mafia in Montreal created and controlled the largest heroin and cocaine smuggling empire in the world, feeding the insatiable appetite of our American neighbours. Today, gangs are laying waste the streets of Vancouver, and "BC bud" flows into the U.S. as the marijuana of choice. Organized crime is as old as this nation's founding, with pirates ravaging the east coast, even as hired guns by colonial governments. Since our nation's earliest times, government and crime groups have found that collusion can have its mutual benefits. Comprehensive, informative and entertaining - as you will discover in the remarkable period pieces devised by the author and the illustrations commissioned specially for this book - Iced is a romp across the nation and across the centuries. In these pages you will meet crime groups that are at once sordid and inept, yet resourceful entrepreneurs and self-proclaimed champions of the underdog, who operate in full sight of their communities and the law. This is the definitive book on organized crime in Canada, and a unique contribution to our understanding of Canadian history.

Short-listed for the 2007 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction They were among Canada's most desperate criminals, yet their names have been all but forgotten in the annals of history - until now! In their day these lawless men made headline news. Author Ed Butts has rescued their stories from dusty newspaper pages and polished them up for today's readers in this fascinating volume. The Markham Gang introduced Canada West to organized crime long before anyone had heard of the Mafia. Lew Bevis took on the whole Halifax Police Department in a blazing gun battle. The wild Macdonald cousins went to Michigan, where they ended their violent careers as victims of a savage lynching. Reid and Davis, the notorious Border Bandits of the Roaring Twenties, were the nightmare of every banker from Manitoba to the state of Washington. This rogues' gallery of killers, robbers, and men of mystery shocked the nation, challenged the forces of law and order, and sometimes even got away with it.