The “Bombing Baker,” Tony Musitano passed away peacefully in Ontario, Canada this week at 72 with little fireworks or fanfare. The Hamilton mafia figure served seven years in prison (1983-1990) for staging a bombing campaign in an effort to extort a string of bakeries and playing a role from behind bars in the murder conspiracy surrounding the gangland slaying of drugged-out Toronto mob scion Domenic Racco in the 1980s. Back then he headquartered from a bakery himself.
Despite the Hamilton City Council passing a resolution barring Tony Musitano from returning to town, the crafty, wisecracking gangster came back anyway after his release from prison in 1990 and opened a chain of dry cleaning stores. He quietly stayed off the radar for the last three decades of his life, deferring any and all heavy lifting in family mob affairs to relatives. His uncle Angelo (The Beast) Musitano founded the Calabrian mafia in the hardworking steel town of Hamilton in the 1930s before being extradited back to Italy in 1965 for the murder of his own sister when he was a young man.
Musitano’s older brother Dominic was a boss of the Hamilton mafia until he died of a heart attack in 1995. He was convicted for participating in the Racco murder conspiracy as well and did five years in the can on a plea to accessory after the face.
Patrick (Fat Pat) Musitano, Dominic’s oldest son and one of Tony Musitano’s nephews, is reputed to be the don of Hamilton’s Calabrian mob today. The Musitano family was pulled into the ongoing unrest in the Canadian underworld with the 2017 assassination of Tony Musitano’s other nephew Angelo (Big Ange) Musitano, Fat Pat’s baby brother and Dominic’s youngest son. A mob war erupted in Montreal in 2009 and has since spread to other parts of the country, finally reaching Hamilton two years ago by way of the Big Ange Musitano hit.
Tony and Dominic Musitano had Toronto mobster Domenic Racco killed in 1983 after the cocaine-addled Racco, a spoiled mafia prince who had done time in prison for a shopping mall shooting in the 1970s, accrued a $500,000 drug debt and was dragging his feet on repaying it. Racco’s father, Mike Raaco, was the highly-respected boss of the Calabrian mafia in Toronto for years. Mike Raaco died of cancer in 1980, leaving his loose-cannon of a son unprotected.
Domenic Racco was under indictment in a narcotics-trafficking case at the time of his death and between lawyer fees and his own habit, he was having trouble making good on the consignment shipments of drugs provided to him by the Musitanos. Royal Canadian Mounted Police intercepted phone calls and observed face-to-face meetings between Racco and Dominic Musitano discussing the debt in the weeks and days preceding Racco’s murder.
Racco was last seen alive on the evening of December 9, 1983 getting into a car with Dominic Musitano and two hit men Tony Musitano knew from prison (and had arranged to handle the contract’s trigger work) in the parking lot of his suburban Toronto apartment. The next morning, Racco was found face dowm sprawled across a set of train tracks in a field in Milton, Ontario with three bullets in the head and two in the chest.
The post Hamilton (Ont.) Wiseguy Tony Musitano Dies At 72, Did Time For Arson, Extortion, ’83 Toronto Mob Hit appeared first on The Gangster Report.