You have 0 items in your cart
Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli (February 9, 1904 – September 17, 1973) was a notorious American gangster and bootlegger active during the Prohibition era. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he, along with his brother Peter Joseph Licavoli and cousin James Licavoli, collaborated with Jewish gangsters to seize control of illegal gambling operations in St. Louis. Eventually, the Licavoli family expanded their criminal activities to Detroit, Michigan, where they dominated organized crime in both Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, throughout Prohibition. The following is the story of Licavoli’s Colt 1911 firearm.
It was in the early hours of the morning of September 8, 1927, that “Yonnie” Licavoli and his associate Frank Cammarata found themselves in trouble with the Canadian Law. It seems the boys had just returned from a trip to St. Louis and had crossed into Windsor when it all started.
A phone call came to the Ontario Provincial Police headquarters at Windsor through the night from a roadhouse on Riverside Drive. The report was to the effect that a party of men were roughing the place up and it was thought that some of them were armed. Provincial Constable Rowe along with Constable Sidney Oliver (later district inspector) visited the roadhouse only to learn the party had left. They obtained a description of the car and the men and after a lengthy patrol of the area found the car parked opposite the Prince Edward Hotel in Windsor. From information received at the desk, they learned that two men answering the description had registered and were occupying connecting rooms. The two O.P.P. officers then obtained the services of two Windsor detectives, Duncan McNab and Jim Campbell, and crashed the two rooms at the same time. The two detectives took one room and the O.P.P. officers the other. Rowe and Oliver found a man in bed with a .45 Colt automatic under his pillow. The magazine was fully loaded with live ammunition. It wasn’t until the next day that they learned the man they had arrested was the notorious Yonnie Licavoli.
McNab and Campbell also found a man in bed, who turned out to be Frank Cammarata. He was unarmed but a search of his car turned up a loaded .38 Colt revolver in the side pocket.
A few days later Frank and Yonnie appeared in Supreme Court in Windsor, presided over by Mr. Justice Wright. The charges read “Possession of offensive weapons for a purpose dangerous to the public”. The boys were convicted and each received a sentence of three years in Kingston Penitentiary.
An appeal was made against their sentence but was unsuccessful. Mr. W. B. Common of the Attorney-General’s Dept. appeared for the crown against their appeal. They finally made application for leave to appeal to the Privy Council in London, England, which was unsuccessful. These attempted appeals indicated there were large sums of money available to pursue legal proceedings.
Following the arrest and imprisonment of Licavoli in 1927, Deputy Attorney General William B. Common, with consent of the then Attorney General, added the gun to his personal firearm collection. The gun remained in his collection from 1928 until 1969 when he presented it to a collector in Orangeville Ontario. The new owner spent the next thirty years researching the gun and Yonnie Licavoli, sending request for information out to all the major law enforcement agencies. Among the responses he received was a signed letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informing him that because of the bureaus confidentiality regulations he could not share any data on Licavoli, as well a detailed incident report from Ontario District Inspector Sidney Oliver, who lead the 1927 raid resulting in the confiscation of the firearm. The firearm, and now a binder full of accompanying documentation, remained in the collection of the Ontario collector until it was auctioned in the Spring of 2009, where it then became part of the Bash Collection.
