Joe Celona

The House that Joe Built

by Eve Lazarus on January 7, 2024

Multiplexes will soon replace single family homes all over Vancouver. How many stories will be erased from our history?

I was reading an article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday called “Multiplexes may be coming to your neighbourhood soon.” It’s City Hall’s way of densifying our neighbourhoods, replacing those entitled single family homes with up to six strata homes on a single lot.

2667 Pender Street — Vancouver Sun, January 6, 2024

2667 East Pender Street:

The article is illustrated with two pictures – the five-unit development proposed for an east Pender Street house in the Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood “made possible through the city’s ‘missing middle’ zoning,” and the little house that it replaces.

And, then I realized, hey I know this house.

Louise Ricci at 2667 East Pender Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2014

The new project, says the article, would almost double the livable square footage, and the guy who now owns the property expects to get $1.65 million each for the two units in the front of the building and another $900,000 each for the ground level two-bedroom units. It doesn’t say what the new owners will pay for the laneway house at the back, or the monthly strata fees. But let’s assume fees will be hefty, and clearly at these prices, we’re not talking about first-time, average wage-earning home buyers.

Louise Ricci sitting on her dad’s knee, ca 1932 at 2667 East Pender Street. From Sensational Vancouver

Detective Joe Ricci:

So, let’s take a minute to look at the diminishing heritage house stock that these multiplexes will replace. The house in the article was built by Vancouver Police Detective Joe Ricci in 1922. Joe immigrated to Canada from Falvaterra, Italy in 1906, and six years later, he was the first Italian to join the Vancouver Police Department.

Joe Ricci Vancouver Police Detective — Joe Ricci and daughters 1930s, from Sensational Vancouver

Joe raised his two daughters in this house, and in 2014 when I took photos for my book Sensational Vancouver, his daughter Louise still lived there. I know because I sat with her in their kitchen going through boxes and boxes of newspaper clippings and photos about her Dad. Louise showed me the back porch where Chinese gangsters broke into Joe’s house during the Tong Wars of the 1920s, and threw chicken blood all over the cupboards. It was a warning for Joe to stay away.

West Coast Central Club:

Joe was on duty March 20, 1917, the night that Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan was killed in a shootout in Strathcona. He worked on the dry squad, the drug squad, and later, the Morality Squad. He left the force and founded the West Coast Central Club right next to the old police station on Main Street. Louise worked at the club and remembers serving newspaper reporters like Jack Wasserman and Jack Webster. “Webster used to sit beside the planters so nobody would see him. I’d serve him screwdrivers,” Louise told me. She remembered Officer Bernie “Whistling” Smith as well as crime boss Joe Celona and Judge Les Bewley.

That’s just one house’s story. I wonder how many more we’ll be erasing in the coming years.

2667 East Pender Street

Tags 2667 East Pender Street, Jack Wasserman, Jack Webster Bernie "Whistling" Smith, Joe Celona, Joe Ricci, Les Bewley, Louise Ricci, Sensational Vancouver, West Coast Central Club

That House on Yale Street

by Eve Lazarus on April 25, 2020

This interesting looking house on Yale Street at the corner of North Kamloops in Hastings/Sunrise was built by a bootlegger in 1931.

2492 Yale Street, Eve Lazarus photo, 2020

The Alvaros:

Turns out the house was built in 1931 at a cost of $8,000—a lot of money smack in the middle of the Depression. Its owners were Joseph and Rosa Alvaro, who kept the house they had at 421 East Georgia in Strathcona as a warehouse, and moved their family (they had four boys and four girls) into the new digs. The Alvaro’s were born in Calabria, Italy and married in 1909.

2492 Yale Street in 1978. Vancouver Archives 786-80.15

And no wonder Joe could afford his new house. He was in the bootlegging business big time, and at least until 1934, had an in with John Cameron, the Vancouver Police Department’s chief of police. Cameron was likely one of the 150 guests who attended the Alvaro’s silver anniversary party at the Yale Street house in September 1934, entertained by an eight-piece orchestra.

Arrested:

The following year, Joe was arrested along with Chief Cameron, Joe Celona—King of the Bawdy houses, Shue Moy, Eugene Valente and Wally Cole for “conspiring to corrupt the police department.”

The Alvaros’ moved to Pandora Street in 1942 and the Yale Street house sold to James and Cora Doherty. James was the general manager for the Program Engineering Works and Cora liked to hold garden parties. They lived there until the early 1950s.

The next residents were Heinrich Scheide, a porter with the CPR and his wife Margaret. By 1971, John and Ruth Berryman were selling smokeless incinerators from the house. 2492 Yale Street was up for sale again in 1980.

According to BC Assessment, in 2020 the property is worth $2,315,000, the house just $10,000.

Tags 2492 Yale Street, 421 East Georgia Street, Eugene Valente, Joe Alvaro, Joe Celona, John Cameron, Shue Moy, Wally Cole

Italian Heritage Month – meet the East End’s Angelo Branca

by Eve Lazarus on June 17, 2017

One of the best parts about messing around with history, especially criminal history, is digging up connections. Angelo Branca appears as a Canadian middleweight boxing champion in the 1930s, and as the scrappy East End (Strathcona) lawyer and defender of madams and bookies in At Home with History.

In Sensational Vancouver, he is defence attorney to notorious brothel owner Joe Celona during the Tupper Royal Commission into police corruption. In another chapter, he pops up as a patron of former VPD detective Joe Ricci’s West Coast Central Club, and in another, he is boss and close friend to Tosca Trasolini a pilot and member of the Flying Seven, Canada’s first all-female aviator club.

In Blood, Sweat, and Fear, Branca swaps sides in 1935 and defends 17 VPD officers suspended for corruption. Every one of them got their job back. Ten years later he is defending a soldier accused of murdering a young woman in English Bay in 1945. It’s one of the few cases he loses in his career.

During his career, Branca defended 63 people on murder charges, and only one, Domenico Nassa, received the death penalty in 1928. Branca told his biographer that he had no quibble with that decision, but he didn’t think the soldier deserved to hang, and he fought the verdict all the way to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. He often took on pro bono cases.

Angelo Branca with client Joe Celona. Province photo, 1955.

Branca was born in 1903 and grew up at 343 Prior Street with parents Teresa and Filippo, two brothers John and Joseph and sister Anne. Filippo ran the grocery store on Main Street and he and Peter Tosi and Sam Minichiello were the three biggest importers of California grapes in the area.

West Coast Central Club, Main Street, ca.1950. Joe Ricci far left. Photo courtesy Louise Ricci

My favourite story comes from Ray Culos whose grandfather was Sam Minichiello, and says that the joke in the neighbourhood was that wine was a family affair. Filippo would sell the grapes to the bootleggers, his son John, a detective with the dry-squad would arrest them, and his other son, Angelo, would get them off in court.

The Canadian Lawyer magazine wrote that Branca was the most famous criminal defense lawyer in Canada’s history. In 1963, he became a Supreme Court judge. Branca died in 1984.

To read more about his remarkable life, check out:

Vincent Moore’s book: Gladiator of the Courts, Douglas and McIntyre, 1981

Ray Culos’s website

Tags Angelo Branca, Domenico Nassa, Flying Seven, Joe Celona, Joe Ricci, Tosca Trasolini, West Coast Central Club

Joe Ricci’s Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on August 24, 2013

Excerpt from Sensational Vancouver

Detective Joe Ricci, 1914. Vancouver Archives

When I write a history book there’s always one character that really captures my attention. In At Home with History it was Alvo von Alvensleben. In Sensational Victoria it was Spoony Sundher, and in Sensational Vancouver, it’s Vancouver City Police Detective Joe Ricci—a kick-arse cop from the old school. I got to know Joe really well through his daughter who lives in the home he built in 1922, through the boxes of newspaper clippings, letters and photos that she saved, and from the testimony he gave at the Lennie Commission—one of the many inquiries into police corruption that took place last century.

Joe Ricci, middle (holding murder weapon), 1924. Vancouver Archives and Canadian Colour

Joe was the first Italian to join the force. He was hired in 1912 because of his contacts within the close knit Italian community, his knowledge of the Black Hand (a sort of early version of the Mafia) and his ability, often with his partner Donald Sinclair, to bring in the bad guys. Ricci and Sinclair were on the scene at the 1917 shoot-out in Strathcona when Police Chief Malcolm Maclennan was murdered with a shotgun blast to the face.

Those were the days when police didn’t worry too much about procedure, warrants and other legal niceties. In fact, more often than not Ricci and Sinclair took to opium dens with axes, fired their service weapons at fleeing bad guys and brought in the evidence – whether it was illegal stills during Prohibition or millions of dollars worth of drugs squirreled away in the secret compartments of buildings.

West Coast Central Club, 1948. Joe Ricci far left

A few years after he left the police force, Joe opened up a club right next door to the station. Everyone was welcome from Joe Celona, King of the bawdy houses to Angelo Branca Supreme Court judge to Jack Webster, reporter, as well as any cop who wanted a drink. He told a newspaper reporter at the time that he no longer had any interest in chasing bad guys. “I’ve had a bellyful of police work and criminals,” he said. “The crooks are too dumb today to make it worthwhile.”

Tags Angelo Branca, Black Hand, Donald Sinclair, Jack Webster, James Thorburn, Joe Celona, Joe Ricci, Lennie Commission, Malcolm Maclennan, Malcolm Mclennan

Vancouver Noir

by Eve Lazarus on July 11, 2012

Definition of “Noir” from the Free Dictionary: “Of or relating to a genre of crime literature featuring tough, cynical characters and bleak settings. Suggestive of danger or violence. Of or relating to the film noir genre.”

When I wrote At Home with History, the 1930s Strathcona seemed a natural place to start. I talked to people who had lived through that era, had parents who bootlegged to survive, knew the girls from the local brothels, and many of the cops who enforced BC’s crazy liquor laws. That chapter soon morphed into a second and a third on rum runners and liquor barons who lived on the west side of town, and who by their vast wealth remained relatively untouched by a largely corrupt police force.

I took Will Woods Forbidden Vancouver tour last month, and I recently finished Vancouver Noir, a book that covers a 30 year period through the lens of a camera.

Authors John Belshaw and Diane Purvey believe that Noir-era values are found in the gritty black and white police and newspaper photographs of the day. Shot by the Speed Graphic camera—a invention of the late ‘20s—the photos feature hard-nosed detectives, murder scenes, bullet-ridden cars, riots and rain slicked streets lit by neon signs.

“What appeals to us about the period 1930-1960 is that there isn’t a lot in the way of progress, in fact, there’s an overall collapse,” says Belshaw. “It’s an era of failure.”

It was a city that produced Walter Mulligan, the top cop on the take, serial Mayor L.D. Taylor, Joe Celona–Vancouver’s own Al Capone, and fruitless wars on vice, racism and poverty.

“What we tried to do with Vancouver Noir is show Vancouverites a city with big brass balls. A place where gambling joints were everywhere, cops were on the take, and you could get a decent steak dinner and hear some great music anywhere from Hogan’s Alley through the Mandarin Gardens to The Cave,” he says. “This was a city without global ambitions—it was a hard-boiled port town where even the Chief of Police wrote like he was Dashiell Hammett.”

Belshaw and Purvey argue that it was a period of one moral panic following another. Values were in flux and the growing middle class tried to squash what they saw as deviant behavior.

“We wanted to show that the battle against deviance was a serious business. It took out whole neighbourhoods, justified murders, deported its enemies—this was no imagined confrontation—it’s bare-knuckled stuff,” says Belshaw.

It’s a long way from the glossy tourism photos of English Bay and Grouse Mountain, and it’s a side of Vancouver that will likely surprise most Vancouverites. But it’s as much a part of our make-up as the stories of Gassy Jack and the CPR, and one that I’m betting we’ll be hearing more about from a whole new wave of writers.

For more information see the authors’ blog and Anvil Press.

Tags Diane Purvey, Hogan's Alley, Joe Celona, John Belshaw, LD Taylor, Speed Graphic camera, Vancouver Noir, Walter Mulligan

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