Joe Ricci

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

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

Colouring History

by Eve Lazarus on March 11, 2017

If you’re on social media you are likely already familiar with Canadian Colour–beautiful, eye-popping historical photographs of Vancouver’s people, buildings and events. The guy behind these colourized photos is Mark Truelove, a Brit who moved to B.C. 16 years ago, and now lives in Hope.

Mark’s day job is web designer/developer, but increasingly he’s doing colourization work for individuals and corporations.

Lucky for us, he also colours photos for fun and then shares them via Facebook and Twitter.

“The colour erases a little bit of that barrier between us and history and I really like connecting with the regular people back then and I find the colourization helps me to do that,” he says.

Mark has always been interested in history, and about five years ago, started to digitally colour old black and white photos from his family album.

When he ran out of those he went to Vancouver Archives.

One of his favourite finds is a photo of the Amputation Club of 1918. The club, which had offices in the Dominion Building, was formed shortly after World War 1 and is now known as War Amps.

“That photo ticks my World War 1 interest box. I can see the connection between then and now with lots of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan or somewhere like that. Their hopes and dreams are going to be similar to the ones those guys have, so I see a connection across time.”

Another one of his favourites shows a crowd going about their morning outside the ABC coffee shop in Burnaby in the ‘40s.

“I’m not so keen on doing famous people, I genuinely like photos that are of regular people doing regular things. It’s more just slices of life,” he says.

After Mark finds an archival photo that captures his attention he starts to research the period to find out the proper colour of everything from clothing to transit to sign posts. He often lands on blogs such as Past Tense, Illustrated Vancouver and Every Place has a Story where a local writer has already researched the history, such as his colourized photos of Joe Ricci and the Vancouver Police Department, Joe Fortes, and the Flying Seven.

“Knowing those personal details really ties me to the photograph,” he says.

He starts by loading the black and white photograph in Photoshop. Then he adds layers of colour and then begins to define a “mask” for the layer which shows where to apply the colour on the image.

“If I am working on a portrait of somebody I would put on these coloured layers and I would mask it out so that colour only applies to the face,” he says. “If it was a guy in a suit, I would do another layer for his jacket, and for his waistcoat, shirt, tie and shoes.”

A portrait, he says, can take just an hour or two, whereas a photo with dozens of people and buildings and scenery can take upwards of 40 hours to complete.

Tags Amputation Club, Bloody Sunday, Canadian Colour, Flying Seven, Joe Ricci, Mark Truelove, Vancouver Archives

The Black Hand’s Vancouver Connection

by Eve Lazarus on August 27, 2016

Joe Ricci’s story is in Sensational Vancouver

Joe was a kick-arse Italian cop who worked for the Vancouver Police Department between 1912 and 1928 and didn’t get bogged down in the details. He’d kick down the doors of opium dens, shoot first and ask questions later, and not worry too much about legal things like warrants and warnings.

The Black Hand (La Mano Nera) was an extortion racket, a sort of early form of the Mafia, that was well established in major Italian communities in American cities in the early part of last century.

Typically, a member of the Black Hand Society would send a letter to a target threatening violence, kidnapping, arson or even murder if they didn’t pay protection money. The letter was often decorated with a smoking gun, a noose or a knife dripping with blood, and accompanied with the message: “held up in the universal gesture of warning” drawn in thick black ink.

Black hand letter 2

In November 1923, Joe was flipping through the circulars and pictures of wanted criminals, when he stopped at one, sat back and whistled softly. Starring back at him was the face of Dominic Delfino, a lieutenant and hit man for the Black Hand Society who was wanted by every police department in the U.S. after his escape from jail several years before.

Just a few hours earlier one of Joe’s informants had tipped him off that a “very bad Italian—maybe a murderer” was being held in a jail cell in Nelson, BC, on an immigration charge. The prisoner had boasted: “I shot my way out of the death house, and they’ll never hold me very long.”

Delfino had been held in a county jail in Pennsylvania charged with multiple murders. Before he could be transferred to his execution in New York, two of his colleagues disguised as nuns managed to smuggle in a saw and a revolver. Delfino escaped, murdering four guards on the way out.

Joe decided to play a hunch and went to Nelson to see for himself. Delfino wouldn’t talk, but the detective identified him from the mug shot. Delfino was sent back to the States and electrocuted. Ricci received front page headlines and collected a $500 reward.

Tags Dominic Delfino, Joe Ricci, La Mano Nera, Sensational Vancouver, The Black Hand, Vancouver Police Department

The murder of Chief Malcolm MacLennan and nine year old George Robb

by Eve Lazarus on March 20, 2015

On March 20, 1917 Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan, 44, was killed in a shootout with a drug addict. This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver:

Chief Malcolm MacLennan Vancouver Police Museum #P00923

Robert Tait, 32, a drug addict, police informant and pimp from Detroit lived in a rundown apartment over a grocery store at 522 East Georgia with his girlfriend Frankie Russell.

Russell, 28, had numerous arrests for prostitution, theft and drug possession. At one point she worked out of Marie Gomez’s House of all Nations, a high-profile brothel on Alexander Street. She later became notorious in the press as the “white girl of the underworld.”

After months went by in unpaid rent the owner Frank Smith decided to evict them. When Smith entered the kitchen he was greeted by Tait brandishing a shotgun. He told Smith “leave or I’ll blow your brains out.” Smith left and called police.

It was dark and raining by the time Detective John Cameron and three constables arrived and knocked on the kitchen door. Moments later a blast from the shotgun fired through the frosted glass of the door, catching Cameron in the face and tearing out his eye. The other police, all of them bleeding from shards of flying glass grabbed Cameron and retreated back out into the street.

Frankie Russell mugshot Photo courtesy of the Vancouver Police Museum

As Tait blasted away through the door, George Robb, 9, was walking from his house to buy candy at the nearby store. The boy was killed by a bullet to his back from Tait’s rifle.

Police called for back-up and Deputy Chief Bill McRae, Inspectors John Jackson and George McLaughlin, Chief Malcolm McLennan and detectives Joe Ricci and Donald Sinclair rushed to the scene.

“We were in the hallway. Tait was in the kitchen. He had a loaded shotgun and warned us he would use it if we came a step closer. The Chief said he was going in to get Tait. I tried to reason with him because I was sure Tait would shoot. As soon as the chief stepped out of the hallway into the kitchen he got the full shotgun charge in the face, killing him on the spot,” Ricci told a reporter in a 1961 interview with the Times Colonist. “I crept up as close to the doorway of the kitchen as I could and grabbed the dead Chief by the ankle. I dragged him along the hallway out of range. Then we carried him out of the house to a police car. I still feel sick at my stomach when I think how close I came to getting the shotgun blast myself.”

Four hours after police first entered the building they went back inside and found that Tait had blown off the top of his head with a shotgun, fired by pulling the trigger with his toe. He was lying on top of Russell, who was unhurt, but heavily splattered with his blood. The walls were riddled with bullet holes, and police found two heavy calibre rifles, a double-barrelled shot gun, two revolvers and a stock pile of ammunition.

MalcolmMcLennanfuneralVPM

Malcolm McLennan was a popular chief who had served on the force for 20 years. He left a wife and two boys aged 9 and 11 in the family home at 739 East Broadway.

Tags Bill McRae, Donald Sinclair, Frankie Russell, George McLaughlin, George Robb, Joe Ricci, John Cameron, John Jackson, Malcolm Maclennan, Robert Tait

The story behind a 1924 Vancouver photograph

by Eve Lazarus on January 24, 2015

The story behind this photo of VPD detectives that appeared in the Vancouver Daily World on January 25, 1924

Joe Ricci’s Vancouver:

One of my favourite characters in Sensational Vancouver is Detective Joe Ricci who joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1912. Joe was a kick-arse cop from the old school who didn’t get too hung up on legal niceties such as warrants or evidence, but would take to the doors of opium dens and gambling joints with axes, fists swinging and shooting first, asking questions later.

Most of the material that I used in that chapter came from Joe’s daughter Louise. Louise still lives in the house that Joe built in 1922 and has kept all her father’s memorabilia including boxes of newspaper clippings, photographs and letters.

The photo (above) was in one of those boxes, but unfortunately wasn’t dated or labeled. I recognized Joe holding the knives and his partner Donald Sinclair from a photo hanging in the Vancouver Police Museum, but I couldn’t identify the other men or find out what the story was behind the photo until this week.

Jason Vanderhill kindly sent me some clippings about Joe that originated from the long defunct Vancouver Daily World.

The clipping has the same photo taken from a different angle, but it’s clearly the same event and it ran with the quite wonderful caption: Officers Battle with Slayer of Seamen.

It turns out that on January 25, 1924, Ben Baba, a Maltese seaman had armed himself with two stiletto knives and gone on a rampage onboard the Pilar de Larringa murdering the captain and a crew member and injuring four others before police arrived to stop him.

Sergeant George McLaughlin shot Baba with the sawed-off shotgun that he’s proudly displaying in the photo (they called it a riot gun), and according to the story, Baba then slit his own throat.

The story doesn’t say what set him off.

For another photo mystery that was solved, see Women Police Officers on Patrol

Tags Ben Baba, Detective Donald Sinclair, Detective George McLaughlin, Detective Killeen, Donald Sinclair, Inspector John Jackson, Joe Ricci, Pilar de Larringa

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

The House that Joe Built

2667 East Pender Street:

Detective Joe Ricci:

West Coast Central Club:

Related:

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

Colouring History

The Black Hand’s Vancouver Connection

The murder of Chief Malcolm MacLennan and nine year old George Robb

The story behind a 1924 Vancouver photograph

Joe Ricci’s Vancouver:

Related:

Joe Ricci’s Vancouver

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2667 East Pender Street:

Detective Joe Ricci:

West Coast Central Club:

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