Cecil Kirby

Cecil Kirby (born 17 August 1950) is a Canadian former outlaw biker, gangster and hitman for the Commisso 'ndrina, turned police informant.

Kirby was born into an Irish-Canadian family in the Weston neighborhood of Toronto on 17 August 1950, and was twice expelled from elementary school for unruly behavior.

He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Toronto and preferred to use violence from his childhood onward to solve problems.

He was refused admission to high school for being a discipline problem.

Kirby began his career in organized crime as a member of Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club, which he joined in August 1969.

At the time, Satan's Choice led by Bernie "The Frog" Guindon was the largest and most powerful outlaw biker club in Ontario.

In the 1970s, Kirby specialized in auto insurance fraud and theft.

Kirby rose up to become the sergeant-at-arms of the Satan's Choice Richmond Hill chapter.

Satan's Choice had opened a chapter in Montreal, where competition for control of the drug trade was intense.

Kirby was present when another Satan's Choice member, Howard "Pigpen" Berry, opened fire on the clubhouse of the Popeyes, the most violent of Quebec's outlaw biker clubs, with a sawed off Lee–Enfield .303 rifle with a ten-round clip, saying: "It was like a cannon going off".

Kirby recalled: "If there was trouble anywhere, they'd sent Howard Berry out to take care of it. He was the Choice hitman and everybody knew it".

In an interview, Berry stated that he was hired to work as a hitman, but he never actually succeeded in killing anyone.

Kirby learned that Satan's Choice members specialized in seducing the female clerks who operated the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)'s computers and shared information from the computers with their boyfriends.

Reflecting an emerging alliance with the American Outlaws Motorcycle Club, in 1974 Kirby visited Florida together with Garnet "Mother" McEwen, the president of Satan's Choice St. Catharines chapter, to meet Outlaw leaders.

Kirby was clean shaven and had no trouble at the airport as he did not look like an outlaw biker, unlike McEwen whose long hair and beard caused the airport security to view him as a trouble-maker.

Kirby described most of the Outlaws he met in Fort Lauderdale as deeply troubled Vietnam veterans unable to readjust to civilian society whose most notable qualities were a fondness for drugs and even more so for violence.

Kirby stated: "Their clubhouse was like a fortress. They put a chill down my spine".

Kirby worked as a courier for Satan's Choice delivering amphetamines and sometimes served as a bodyguard to the Satan's Choice national president Bernie Guindon.

In 1975, after Guindon was arrested at the Oba Lake drug bust, Kirby visited him in jail in Sault St. Marie together with his close friend Frank "Cisco" Lenti.

Kirby was disappointed that Guindon failed to pay him back a drug debt he felt he was owned by Guindon, causing him to become disenchanted with his club.

Kirby had a dispute with another Satan's Choice member who he had asked to watch outside as he went into a house to beat up somebody who owed him money, who refused to serve as his look-out on the grounds that he just ordered a pizza, causing Kirby to quit in disgust.

In March 1976, Kirby left Satan's Choice and began to work for the 'Ndrangheta, a Mafia-type criminal organization based in the Calabria region of Italy.

Lenti recommended Kirby as a hitman and bomber to Cosimo Commisso of the Commisso family, saying that Kirby was very good with bombs and guns, although he also warned that Kirby was not to be completely trusted as he was of non-Italian descent.

Kirby wrote in Mafia Enforcer about his new employers, the Commisso brothers: "I quickly learned that their big thing for making money was the construction industry. They probably made more money from extortions in the construction industry than they did from trafficking in heroin — and it was a Helluva lot safer".

Of the three Commisso brothers, Kirby usually dealt with Cosimo Commisso.

Kirby wrote: "Cosimo wasn't tough — he was homicidal. He'd kill you as soon as you were looking at him if he thought you were crossing him, if he thought it was good for business, or if he thought you insulted him or his family. The lives of other people meant nothing to him".

Kirby reported that: "The Commissos would collect money owned to a contractor and take a percentage of it. They didn't let legal technicalities or stalling tactics get in the way".

A very profitable form of activity was having their construction companies win the contracts to construct buildings for the federal, provincial and municipal governments as the Commissos used intimation, bombings, arson and murder to force legitimate companies to drop out of the bidding process or to take over the companies that did win the contracts.

After a Commisso-controlled construction company won the contract, Kirby reported: "Once their man got the bid, they became his partners and their people — plasters, electricians, plumbers, cement suppliers — would be used on the job. They'd inflate the cost of the job, pocket the profits and run like thieves while the public or business paid the price".

Later in 1976, Kirby blew up the car of a Brampton salesman, Antonio Burgas Pinheiro.

Pinherio was an effective salesman for his employer, Appia Beverages, who were competing against another beverage firm owned by the Siderno Group, and the message was to stop making sales at the expense of the Siderno Group.

On 11 November 1976, Kirby left a stick of dynamite in the mailbox of the owner of Pozzabona Construction to pressure him to pay a plastering bill to a client more promptly.

The unhappy client had hired Commisso who in turn subcontracted the job to Kirby.

In December 1976, Commisso paid Kirby $10,000 to kill Denis Mason, who was due to testify against an ally of Commisso.

Kirby planted the bomb in the car of the wrong Denis Mason, but it failed to explode owing to faulty wiring.

Kirby wrote in his 1986 memoirs Mafia Enforcer that there was one clerk who had access to the most classified information of the Canadian Police Information Centre and:

"Club members carried her number in their wallets. If a member was worried about the cops, all he had to do was call her number, and she'd access the police computer to see if there were any warrants on him. When we spotted a rival gang member, we'd also use her to see if there were any outstanding fugitive warrants on him. If there were, we'd have someone in the club call up the cops and tip them off where that rival was and who was with him. It was a good way of avoiding trouble and getting rid of rival gang members. We could also check out anybody's criminal record through that computer. This helped us spot people trying to infiltrate us from rival gangs or the cops."

Kirby concluded that Satan's Choice "had the upper hand in Toronto because we had the best intelligence network around. We were able to move on the other gangs faster than they could move on us because we had such good sources and good information on the habits of the other gangs".

Kirby's ghostwriter on Mafia Enforcer, the American journalist Thomas Renner, described Kirby as a small, but muscular man with curly reddish-blonde hair, striking blue eyes and "an impish, almost boyish face that often breaks into an infectious smile".

Those know Kirby well described him as being "schizophrenic" as he alternated between extremes of kindness and cruelty.