The Portrayal of Florence Lassandro in Canadian Popular Culture

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2018-06-06 “They seem to know the story better than I do myself”: The Portrayal of Florence Lassandro in Canadian Popular Culture

Woroniuk, Rory Arthur

Woroniuk, R. A. (2018). “They seem to know the story better than I do myself”: The Portrayal of Florence Lassandro in Canadian Popular Culture (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/31973 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106745 master thesis

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“They seem to know the story better than I do myself”: The Portrayal of Florence Lassandro in

Canadian Popular Culture

Rory Arthur Woroniuk

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JUNE, 2018

ABSTRACT

In 1922, a court sentenced Florence Lassandro and Emilio Picariello to death for the murder of Alberta Provincial Police (APP) Constable Stephen Lawson in Coleman, Alberta. She was the only woman hanged in the history of the province. This thesis examines the relationship between

Florence Lassandro and her representation in Canadian popular culture from 1922 to the present.

Many historical works have sensationalized her role in the murder. By placing cultural productions in historical context, this thesis identifies and analyzes important social, cultural, and political moments in Canada’s history to argue that they have driven and altered the image of Lassandro in popular culture considerably more than the facts of the crime. The lack of her own voice has allowed people to mould her persona to fit their agenda. During her trial, newspapers reinforced nativist beliefs. Next, Phillip Godsell used her story to justify the internment of Italian-Canadian citizens in WWII because the public feared they would rise up against the Canadian government.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government’s introduction of multiculturalism as an official policy and an increased emphasis on women’s history influenced authors to frame her as an innocent victim. Most recently people have used her story to attract cultural tourists to southern

Alberta. Nevertheless, her voice is lost in all reinterpretations of her life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Janovicek for being my supervisor. She was always welcoming, and she offered constant encouragement and reassurance. Dr. Janovicek challenged my thought process and helped me complete a project that I am profoundly proud of. Additionally, I would like to thank my committee members: Dr. Campbell, Dr. Timm, and Dr. van Herk. They took time out of their busy lives to offer guidance. My gratitude extends to The Eleanor Luxton Foundation who awarded me a scholarship in 2017. Also, thank you to the Government of Alberta who awarded me a Queen Elizabeth II Scholarship in 2017. Their funding helped to ease my financial burdens.

I am grateful to my family for their endless support and unwavering encouragement throughout the project. When my wife and I relocated to Calgary the Marchuks allowed us to invade their home for over a year, while my parents and nephew watched over our house back in

Saskatchewan. My wife, Wendy, is amazing. She took a leave of absence from her own career and encouraged me to live out a dream. I cannot imagine my life without her.

Lastly, the University of Calgary’s Department of History is full of incredible professors.

Their seminars are challenging and engaging. Also, I was lucky to have an amazing cohort. We supported each other in class and spent fun times together off campus. I wish all of them the best.

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DEDICATION

To my brother, Chris, whose life, like the lives of

Lassandro, Picariello, and Lawson, ended too early.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………….….ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...iii

Dedication…...…………………………………………………………………………………...iv

Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………...v

Note on Names…………………………………………………………………………………..vii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1

A Historiography of Women’s Criminality and Prohibition……………………………………...8

Sources and Methodology……………………………………………………………………….19

Overview of Thesis………………………………………………………………………………23

Chapter One: “He is dead and I am alive. That’s all that matters”: A Recipe for Prohibition and the Murder of APP Constable Stephen O. Lawson………………………..26 The History of Prohibition in Western Canada Prior to 1916…………………………………...28

Prohibition Laws in Alberta……………………………………………………………………..38

The Creation of the Alberta Provincial Police…………………………………………………..46

The Crowsnest Pass Italian Community………………………………………………………...48

The Murder of APP Constable Stephen O. Lawson: The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh’s Summary………………………………………………………………………………………...51 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………55

Chapter Two: “They seem to know the story better than I do myself”: The Portrayal of Florence Lassandro in Newspapers, True Crime Stories, and Other Narratives, 1920 to 1943……………………………………………………………………………………………...57 Three Strands of Nativism and Their Impact on Lassandro……………………………………..61

The Portrayal of Immigrants in Alberta Newspapers……………………………………………68

Formulaic Murder Reports and Lassandro’s Persona …………………………………………...71

“I Forgive You All:” News Reports of the Execution…………………………………………...80

The Portrayal of Lassandro in the CPWA’s Pamphlet “Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down”………….84 “Murder In The Crow’s Nest”: The Depiction of Florence Lassandro in a 1940s Canadian Pulp Magazine…………………………………………………………………………………………87 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….91

Chapter Three: “Erring and Victimized Women”: A New Vanguard?…………………….93

Lassandro’s Place in Canada’s Masculine Wild-West…………………………………………..98

Female Perspectives: Giving Back Lassandro’s Agency?……………………………………...107

The Economic Benefits of Whodunit Narratives……………………………………………….120

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...128

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..130

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………..139

NOTE ON NAMES

After reading through the source materials for this thesis it is apparent that there is no agreed upon spelling of the historical actors’ names. People have used Filumena, Philomena, and

Florence interchangeably as well as Lassandro, Lossandro, Losandro, and Lasandra. Emilio’s given name is sometimes shortened to Emil and his surname appears as either Picariello or

Picarello. As well, people have recorded Constable Lawson’s given name as either Stephen or

Steven, while Picariello’s son is known as Stefano, Steve, or Stephen. This has caused some authors to mix up the given names of Lawson and Picariello’s son. This thesis uses the same names consistently: Florence Lassandro, Emilio Picariello, Stephen Lawson, and Steve

Picariello. Following Amantea, I chose to use Lassandro’s anglicized first name because it reflects the ruling class’ assimilationist agenda.

vii

INTRODUCTION

“Please, father, wipe away my tears… Picariello, he lied. I didn’t hurt anyone, ever. I will not forgive any of you for doing this to me.”1 Historical fiction author Jock Carpenter wrote that these were some of the last words of Florence Lassandro, convicted of murder, as she and her alleged accomplice, Emilio Picariello, faced the Fort Saskatchewan Gaol’s gallows on 2 May

1923. On the other hand, the Lethbridge Daily Herald’s correspondent reported on the day of the execution that Lassandro “cried in a wild farewell, ‘I forgive you all,’” to the small assembled crowd.2 These conflicting accounts demonstrate how authors have transformed Lassandro’s words to fit their personal agendas. Lassandro immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1909 and settled in the

Crowsnest Pass, home to a large Italian immigrant community. When the Government of Alberta passed Prohibition in 1916, Lassandro became a rumrunner. On 21 September 1922, Lassandro and Picariello confronted Constable Stephen Lawson, a World War I veteran and member of the

Alberta Provincial Police (APP), who had injured Picariello’s son in a rumrunning related shootout earlier in the day. A struggle ensued, and someone shot Lawson. The bullet entered through his right shoulder and stopped underneath the skin of his left breast. He died soon after. The APP, assisted by other agencies, arrested Picariello and Lassandro the next day and charged them with murder. The trial lasted six days. At its conclusion, the jury rendered a verdict of guilty for first degree murder, condemning them to death by hanging. Lassandro was the only woman hanged in

Alberta’s history (see figure 1).

1 Jock Carpenter, The Bootlegger’s Bride (Edmonton: Gorman & Gorman, 1993), 317. 2 “Another Version of the Hanging,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 2, 1923; “Slayers Protest Innocence Just As Trap Sprung,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 2, 1923.

Figure 1. Florence Lassandro’s police photograph. The Glenbow Museum and Archives, NA- 3282-2.

Although Lassandro’s story is well-known in western Canada, she is all but forgotten in the dominant national historical narratives. However, when her life story appears, her voice is absent. Her voice is lost because very little evidence or documents of her life survive, causing her true identity to remain a mystery. Consequently, her legacy has become a source of contention. In the 1940s, authors cast Lassandro as an evil “other” and as a puppet of Picariello. Forty years after the trial, cultural producers began to recast her as a heroic victim. The various interpretations of her life show the dominant cultural group’s power to silence, mould, and transform Lassandro’s persona to fit their agendas of power and hegemony. Alternately, marginalized groups have used her tragedy to challenge steadfast norms and viewpoints. What has resulted is an interplay between nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs, and masculine dominated wild-west histories and feminist narratives. Recently these narratives have played out in a regional creation of the Pass’ identity during Prohibition, with Lawson’s murder being a key aspect, to strengthen its economy by promoting cultural tourism. It makes one wonder whether Lassandro would recognize herself in any of these portrayals.

Grace Marks’ assertion, “They seem to know the story better than I do myself" in Margaret

Atwood’s historical fiction novel Alias Grace inspired the title of my thesis.3 The novel’s main character Grace Marks is representative of women like Lassandro whose voices are absent from accounts written about their lives. Both were domestic servants whom authorities accused of murder. They were then subjected to salacious and discriminatory attacks from the media and the public. Cultural producers have continuously debated their roles in the killings: Were they instrumental in the murder? or Were they unwitting accessories? Artists and popular historians have fashioned numerous interpretations of their lives based on primary sources combined with their own imagination. As a result, Canadian popular culture has clouded Marks and Lassandro’s true nature. These changing ideas reflect shifting tides within Canadian politics.

Nativism was the mainspring behind early journalistic representations of Lassandro. In

Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta, historian Howard Palmer defined nativism as “opposition to an internal minority on the grounds that it posed a threat to Canadian national life.”4 Palmer noted that nativism included a strong dislike of other races as well as Europeans who belonged to an ethnic or religious minority.5 He categorized three strands of nativism: Anglo-

Saxon, anti-Catholic, and anti-radical nativism. All three strands increased British-Canadians’ anti-immigrant response and, therefore, affected the depiction of Lassandro in Canadian popular culture well into the 1960s.

Nativism was present in several of Canada’s public institutions. All three levels of government, with varying degrees of success, coerced newcomers to adapt to the customs of their

3 Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1996), 41. 4 Howard Palmer, Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1985), 7. 5 Ibid., 7.

new country. Police officers like Lawson played a vital role in encouraging their adjustment. The police and Canadians who had an affinity for the British Empire aligned their goals and campaigned to, as the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire put it, “propagate British ideals and institutions,” to “banish old world points of view,” and to make new Canadians “one hundred percent British in language, thought, feeling, and impulse.”6 In 1919, a commission authorized by the Canadian government recorded that approximately 90 percent of the Crowsnest

Pass’ working-class was immigrant and that Anglo-Saxons were in the minority.7 Even though

Anglo-Saxons dominated the province’s political, economic, and social hierarchy they were cognizant of the increasing numbers of continental Europeans who moved into the region. Their fear of being besieged by people who did not share the same ideals fostered nativist sentiment. The fear of the “other” has appeared often in Canadian society, and it reveals the public’s changing political, social, and economic concerns.

Authors like Phillip Godsell capitalized on the public’s wartime fears in 1943 by reinterpreting Lassandro’s role in Lawson’s death and then publishing it in a popular pulp magazine called Feature Detective Cases. During World War II, Canadians began to feel threatened as they heard news of the militaristic ambitions of Japan, Germany, and Italy. The fear of an internal uprising led by either Japanese or Italian-Canadians replaced the public’s perception of a distant war. To pacify the public’s fear, the Canadian government forcibly relocated or interned people whom they deemed national threats. During the war, the government sent approximately six hundred people of Italian heritage to internment camps. Around one hundred were Italian merchant marines who were on ships anchored in Canadian ports when Italy declared

6 Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. Cited in Clifford J. Jansen, Italians in a Multicultural Canada (Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 5. 7 Adriana A. Davies, The Rise & Fall of Emilio Picariello (Fernie: Oolichan Books, 2015), 12-13.

war against Canada. The others were Italian-Canadians that held Fascist League memberships and whom the Canadian government labelled as dangerous to “public safety or the state.”8 Godsell’s

“Murder in the Crow’s Nest Pass” reawakened nativist anxieties about male Italian “gangsters,” like Picariello, who were prone to the use of violence, and “lecherous” Italian women, like

Lassandro, who used their sexuality for sinister reasons. Godsell also used his story to warn

Canadians of the looming problems that certain wartime refugees would bring to Canada if the government did not vet them before they entered. “Undesirable” refugees would further dilute

Canada’s Anglo-Saxon qualities. Post-war social, cultural, and political trends would somewhat ease the public’s fear of the “other” but it has never been fully erased.9

Since the late 1960s several cultural and intellectual developments such as the government’s implementation of its multiculturalism policy, the revival of women’s history, and cultural tourism have altered the narratives of Lassandro. These developments stimulated Canada’s ethnically diverse and marginalized populations to reinterpret their role in the building of the nation. They also encouraged the citizens of economically stagnant regions or regions that wanted to diversify their economy to write historical interpretations that would attract tourists. Popular historians depicted the Prohibition era and its participants as characters who lived in the wild west.

In this setting women and men could become morally corrupt if economic gain was within their sight. The narrative often overemphasized the use of violence as a way to settle matters of love, jealousy, or revenge. Western Canadians recognized Lassandro’s downfall as “a good,

8 Luigi Bruti Liberati, “The Internment of Italian Canadians,” in Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 86-87. 9 Franca Iacovetta’s Gatekeepers focusses on the Canada’s treatment of immigrants during the Cold War. Canadian society only began to accept immigrants when they willingly took jobs that Anglo-Canadians did not want. However, Anglo-Canadians always attempted to Canadianize them. I discuss this further in chapter two.

melodramatic story when they saw it.”10 Similarly, as Peter Gossage has argued in his study of murderer Marie-Anne Houde’s representation in Quebec popular culture, “someone understood the mass appeal of this frightful tale and wagered, correctly, that a good deal of money could be made by telling and retelling it.”11 These narratives often sensationalized real events and focused on the rugged masculinity of the West and the excitement of the police chase. Each failed to reflect the realities of Lassandro’s life.

In contrast, cultural producers from marginalized groups have countered these narratives that cast their communities in a negative light. Immigrants, whom earlier authors identified as a threat to British society, were now reinterpreted as victims who faced discrimination because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or social class. In 1968, Frank Anderson argued that bootlegging and rumrunning were not crimes committed only by “undesirable” immigrants.

Instead, the authorities’ chief targets were “undesirable” immigrants while “respectable” citizens were left alone.12 Feminist historians argued that women played a larger role in the history of

Canada’s West. They became protagonists and not accessories, and they did not show fear when they tested the established norms. Aritha van Herk contended that Alberta’s history was filled with mavericks, which she defined as “people who step out of bounds, refuse to do as [they] are told, take risks, and then laugh when [they] fall down and hit the ground.”13 According to this definition,

Lassandro was a maverick because she tested gender and class boundaries and became involved in an activity that those in power deemed illegal. However, she did not laugh when her executioners

10 Peter Gossage, “La marâtre: Marie-Anne Houde and the Myth of the Wicked Stepmother in Quebec,” The Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1995): 584. 11 Ibid., 584. 12 Frank W. Anderson, The Rum Runners (Calgary: Frontiers Unlimited, 1968). 13 Aritha van Herk, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2001), 2.

led her to the gallows, but if she had been re-tried (her lawyer did appeal the sentence) tears of joy would have equaled a laugh.

Demands made by Lassandro’s lawyer and the public for a re-trial have encouraged several cultural producers working in multiple genres to focus on the inconclusiveness of Lassandro’s murder case. Whodunit narratives engage audiences to scrutinize and deduce the crime from three perspectives: Lassandro was the murderer; Picariello was the murderer and Lassandro took the blame; Lawson’s nine-year-old daughter, Pearl, witnessed the murder but her testimony left several questions unanswered. Whodunit narratives capitalize on the mysterious nature of the murder and draw interested persons to museums like Calgary’s Glenbow or Coleman’s restored

Alberta Provincial Police Barracks Museum, which is now a national historic site. Both offer opportunities for visitors to re-try Lassandro based on information provided by the exhibits’ curators. The uncertainty of and the interest in some of the murder’s circumstances also helped to attract crowds to temporary stand-alone exhibits, like Gisele Amantea’s The King v. Picariello and

Lassandro, which was made into a graphic novel, or Fernie’s An Immigrant History. History walks such as Fernie’s Rum Running and Whiskey Six, also engage summertime tourists in an ongoing discussion of the crime’s circumstances and a debate about who pulled the trigger and whether justice was properly administered. The play Whiskey Six Cadenza and the opera Filumena, which recently relaunched in Calgary to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial, have also commented on the political climate in Alberta during Prohibition and the outcome of the trial. Lastly, patrons can contemplate who the guilty party was over a meal at Coleman’s Rum Runner Restaurant. Yet, most of these interesting and engaging methods lack Lassandro’s perspective; so, she becomes what historical and cultural curators wish her to be.

While completing the research for this thesis, I grappled with Lassandro’s role in Lawson’s murder, and I still have not reached a final verdict. I have supported all three perspectives presented in the whodunit narratives. In addition, I have considered the theory that a clandestine third-party fired two shots from an alleyway near the APP barracks killing Lawson. J. McKinley Cameron, one of Lassandro’s lawyers, and most recently historian Adriana Davies have posited this theory, but popular historians have yet to take up this narrative. The uncertainty of the circumstances surrounding the murder is one reason why I, as well as numerous others, find the story of the murder so compelling. Secondly, I am attracted to Lassandro’s story because of the sorrow I feel for her. She was only 23 years old when the government carried out her death sentence; therefore, she died with little experience of life’s joys. Many cultural producers have diminished what joy she did experience by turning her into a vixen and/or a heartless murderer with little to no supporting evidence; at other times she is completely forgotten. The either/or argument presented by these narratives simplifies the human condition and negates compassion.

A Historiography of Women’s Criminality and Prohibition

The upsurge in female crime rates post-WWI and the discrepancy between the number of men and the number of women executed in Canada have caused considerable debate among scholars. Between 1922 and 1930, convictions of women increased by 65.3 percent.14 From 1867 to 1976, authorities hanged approximately 19 percent of the women and 47 percent of the men who had received death sentences.15 Judges primarily gave death sentences to people whom juries convicted of murder. However, the justice system has hanged people convicted of rape, burglary,

14 D. Owen Carrigan, Crime and Punishment in Canada: A History (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 266. 15 Lorraine Gadoury and Antonio Lechasseur, Persons Sentenced to Death in Canada, 1867-1976: An Inventory of Case Files in the Fonds of the Department of Justice (Ottawa: The National Archives of Canada, 1994), 26.

or high treason, too.16 Researchers have interpreted these percentages differently. Some have argued that the increase in women’s conviction rates was a result of social and cultural changes, while others have argued that the justice system was more lenient towards women criminals.17

More recently, Carolyn Strange, Karen Dubinsky, and Franca Iacovetta have argued that some women may have received lenient treatment from judges and juries, but these women were often part of the white middle-class.18 According to Strange, “the lottery of death reflected and reinforced inequality on the basis of class, race, sex, and a host of other factors, including age religion, and region.”19

The main themes that appear in the literature regarding women accused of murder focuses on gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Debates about the gendered nature of crime and the treatment female criminals faced in a patriarchal justice system have occurred since the mid-to-late- nineteenth century, and this debate has influenced how academics and the public perceived female murderers. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, society believed that women, because of their biological makeup, were less likely to commit crimes. This resulted in a disproportionate number of convicted men in comparison to women.

In his 1950 study The Criminality of Women, sociologist Otto Pollak disputed the long- held “cultural stereotype” that women were biologically and socially less criminal than men.20 He countered this myth by arguing that both sexes committed crimes, but the justice system was less

16 Gadoury and Lechasseur, 5. 17 Carrigan; Otto Pollak, The Criminality of Women, 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977). 18 Carolyn Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History, eds. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911-1922,” The Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (December 1991). 19 Carolyn Strange, “The Lottery of Death: Capital Punishment, 1867-1976,” Manitoba Law Journal 23, no. 3 (1996): 599. 20 Otto Pollak, The Criminality of Women, 2nd ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), xv-xvi.

likely to prosecute female criminals because “the crimes to which women are particularly addicted are those which are most easily concealed and which most rarely lead to trial.”21 Additionally, their other offenses remained almost entirely unprosecuted because of chivalric attitudes held by men.22 Pollak contended that since society considered women as weak, defenceless, and less responsible, men often forgave them for their transgressions. However, academic Joseph

Greenberg reviewed Pollak’s book and commented that society was going to witness an increasingly higher female crime rate as the “demographic trend towards a surplus of women throughout Western civilization, and the growing economic, political, and other opportunities for this sex” transpired.23 The crimes that Greenberg predicted women would progressively be associated with were offences related to trickery and deceit.

Early newspaper reports of Lawson’s murder reflected pre and post-Pollak arguments.

Journalists penned Picariello as the murderer and Lassandro as the accomplice, since a woman would not kill unless the situation forced her to preserve her womanhood. When Lassandro initially confessed to killing Lawson, journalists changed their stance and reckoned that Picariello must have coached her to do it. A few days before her execution Lassandro confessed a second time and declared that Picariello convinced her to take the blame for the murder. The Canadian government and the press dismissed her new confession as trickery and desperation¾a common occurrence in later accounts, too. Even though it had been a focus throughout the trial, newspapers and their readership finally concluded that her Italian characteristics and her immorality caused her to commit murder.

21 Pollock, 2. 22 Ibid., 2. 23 Joseph H. Greenberg, review of The Criminality of Women, by Otto Pollak, American Sociological Review 16, no. 2 (April 1951): 265-266.

Feminist scholars have refuted Pollak’s “The Masked Character of Female Crime” theory because gender was the only factor he used to undermine the stereotype.24 Feminists deconstructed

Pollak’s position by arguing that female criminals who benefitted from male chivalry were almost exclusively white, middle-class women who functioned within the prescribed boundaries of their gender.25 The way that academics have interpreted the trials of women murderers is important to our understanding of how producers of popular culture framed Lassandro’s crime. Other prominent women tried for murder around the same time included Hilda Blake, Clara Ford, Carrie Davies,

Angelina Napolitano, and Marie-Anne Houde. These five women became the focus of academic studies written by Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, Carolyn Strange, Franca Iacovetta and

Karen Dubinsky, and Peter Gossage, and they helped to further deconstruct Pollak’s argument.

This thesis contributes to the dismantling of Pollak’s theory as well.

Kramer and Mitchell’s study of the hanging of British immigrant Hilda Blake for the murder of her matron Mary Lane in Brandon underlined how public sympathy for a murderer could be generated when deep-seated conceptions of gender and class vulnerability collided with a perceived absence of a middle-class, Anglo-Saxon man’s manners. Even though Blake confessed to the murder, refused counsel, failed to answer any questions during her trial, and asked for the harshest penalty, the public still sympathized with her. They sympathized because Blake had privately hinted that Robert Lane slept with her and then promised marriage if she killed his wife.

Blake refused to admit this in the drama of the courtroom, therefore she sacrificed herself to save

24 This is the title of Pollak’s first chapter. 25 Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” 150- 151.

her lover’s dignity and life. For the public this was the grandest romantic gesture she could offer her lover, and their reaction encapsulated cultural attitudes towards women.26

Historians have demonstrated that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, juries and judges based their rulings not only on gender but also on class and race.27 Carolyn Strange argued that the public supported the acquittals of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies, who both confessed to separate murders of wealthy Anglophone men in Toronto, for multiple reasons. First, they were members of the working class and the men who they killed were upper-class gentlemen. However, society questioned their respectability because they used their social position to assault women of a lesser rank. Clara Ford said she killed Frank Westwood because he raped her, but her lawyer silenced her voice when he changed her charge to sexual assault and improper relations. Her lawyer altered the charge because he felt that a jury would never believe that a white upper-class man would rape a multiracial woman. Carrie Davies was accused of killing Bert Massey, but he too was not considered a gentleman because it was public knowledge that he liked fast cars and beautiful women even though he was married and had a son.28 Davies’ lawyer also changed her story, so it was less about the sexual assault and more about maintaining the qualities of Britain’s empire.

Lassandro’s lawyer silenced her too, by not allowing her to testify. Secondly, Ford was multiracial and, therefore, the public believed investigators might have tricked her into confessing the murder.

Social Darwinist theory is the source of this belief. During Davies’ case, the newspapers emphasized that she was a British immigrant whose boyfriend was fighting overseas during WWI.

If the judicial system was going to “ignore the plight of a beleaguered British ‘girl’ in Toronto in

1915, it would have bordered on treason,” since she was helping “to keep the home fires burning”

26 Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899 (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 169. 27 Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” 151. 28 Ibid., 155.

while also upholding the same British principles that Canadian soldiers were fighting to maintain.29

Thirdly, both women committed murder because they were protecting their womanhood. Ford’s victim overpowered her, and she had to kill him to prevent being further assaulted. Davies had to commit murder because she was protecting her chastity until her boyfriend returned from war and they could be married. Fourthly, the gentlemen of the jury could not hang Ford whose only

“downfall” was her multiracial background, while hanging Davies would make them as cruel as the Germans.

Angelina Napolitano’s ethnic background was important in her trial, too. The murder trial of Napolitano, prosecuted in 1911, is important to consider in comparison to Lassandro’s trial because both were Italian. Napolitano confessed to murdering her husband with an axe. She stated that she killed him due to prolonged abuse, which included being stabbed nine times by him, and because he attempted to force her into prostitution. Therefore, she murdered him to protect her virtue. During the investigation the detectives discovered that she had had an affair with a boarder after her husband had abandoned the family. Since she and another man were intimately involved, the judge informed the jury that her immorality made her testimony questionable. Additionally, the judge said that the jury could not consider the earlier stabbing incident when they determined their verdict. The jury convicted Napolitano of murder, but they recommended clemency. Her sentence was not commuted to life in prison until clemency campaigners successfully argued that hanging a pregnant Napolitano after she gave birth to her child in jail would be inhumane and cause her child lifelong damage. Clemency campaigners also relied upon expert medical evidence that argued pregnant women often acted irrationally, even hysterically; this they argued led

29 Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” 170- 171.

Napolitano to kill her husband.30 Napolitano lobbied on behalf of herself, too. She wrote numerous letters to the Justice Department asking for her freedom, which she was finally granted in 1922.

Dubinsky and Iacovetta concluded that Canadian popular culture has remembered her not as an abused woman but as a doomed mother.31

The lawyer who represented accused murderer Marie-Anne Houde nine years later would also use insanity caused by pregnancy as a mode of defence. Peter Gossage traced how Houde was portrayed in Quebec popular culture over a seventy-five-year period. In 1920, a jury convicted

Houde of murdering her ten-year-old step-daughter Aurore Gagnon. The government changed her death sentence to life imprisonment because she gave birth to twins in jail and so it would be cruel to hang a nursing mother.32 Gossage discovered that two common themes emerged from the multitude of genres that retold the murder: firstly, the victimization of Gagnon and, secondly,

Houde’s cruelty.33 The legacy of Houde plays “a role in the ‘functioning of popular morality’ in

Quebec, and ‘the source of inspiration in a recreation of collective myths’” and its popularity drew upon the classic pop culture trope of the “wicked stepmother.”34

These five cases show that the historiography of female murderers has moved away from gender being the only contributing factor in a woman’s treatment by the judicial system. This trend is similarly reflected in the ongoing discussion of Lassandro. It is now clear that gender was the least important factor in her trial. Instead, she was a member of the “dangerous class” whose way of life did not mesh with Anglo-Saxon concepts of civility.35 Furthermore, the police accused her

30 Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911-1922,” The Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (December 1991): 512, 515, 527-528. 31 Ibid., 527. 32 Gossage, 571. 33 Ibid., 563. 34 Gossage, 564. 35 Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Peril and the Pleasures of the City, 1880-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 55.

of killing a well-respected man who had volunteered to protect the British Empire during WWI and who then, as a member of the APP, worked to reinforce Canada’s Britishness.

My thesis builds on the work of Strange, Gossage, Dubinsky, Kramer, and Mitchell who examined the role gender, race, ethnicity, and class had on the public’s reception of female murderers in Canada. Their work has demonstrated that the judicial system did not treat all women the same, as Pollak argued. Instead, the jury and the public judged each accused according to the day’s social and moral codes. While men used chivalry as a logical reason to pardon women who stepped far outside socially prescribed gender roles, society discussed why a lack of gentlemanly qualities could warrant murder. However, if a female immigrant murdered a well-respected gentleman, nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs greatly affected the perceptions of the jury, judge, and public.

Lawson was an upstanding citizen whom Anglo-Saxons revered because he was a father, police officer, and war hero. Unlike Ford and Davies’ victims, the public characterized Lawson as a gentleman who embodied everything that Albertans wanted society to associate their province with: he projected the morals and values that made the British Empire dominant, civilized, progressive, and modern. In contrast, Canadians did not place equal importance on Lassandro’s life. They treated her as a second-class citizen because she was Italian, worked as a domestic servant and caregiver, had no children, took part in criminal activities, and many believed she was an adulteress. The importance of being a life-creator rather than a life-taker cannot be underestimated. Lassandro’s fate would most likely have been different if she had children or was an expecting mother, as demonstrated by the justice system’s treatment of Napolitano and Houde.

There are many accounts of the murder of Constable Lawson. The earliest versions come from newspapers printed during the trial. Soon after the trial new analyses of the event replaced

journalistic versions. Yet, these accounts still suppressed the hardships marginalized peoples faced. Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past argued that some historians just worry about writing a “good story” not really caring about “whether it is true or not.”36 His statement is very applicable to recent accounts published as chapters in cheap paperbacks, which the public can buy at gas stations or from tourist booths. Additionally, post-colonialist historians believe the public needs to remain aware that “history is a discourse which is ‘culturally motivated and ideologically conditioned’ in the present.”37 Few, if any, of the interpretations are the same as many of them contain added details manipulating the tragic event’s sequence. The narratives about Lassandro shift between history and fiction and this makes it difficult for the reader to know under which heading the account fits. It is clear that the clichéd “line between history and fiction” was crossed several times in both directions. The line shifted according to social, political, and cultural trends, which had a direct impact on the historiography. Some of the trends include nativism, the termination of Prohibition, the effects of WWII and the Cold War, the acceptance of oral testimony as a legitimate historical source, and the shift towards integrating and analyzing the histories of marginalized groups through multiple lenses.

Several historians’ research provided background information on the rise of the temperance and prohibition movements and the organizations that society’s leaders created to enforce its laws.

James Gray and Craig Heron’s surveys offered background information about western Canada’s earliest prohibition legislation adopted in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories during the 1870s and the prohibition movement’s ongoing impact during the interwar period. To further personalize

Prohibition’s regional narrative, William Cousins’ work offered a micro-analysis of Prohibition in

36 Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 10. 37 Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, practice, politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 112.

the Crowsnest Pass and demonstrated that a cross-section of the public consciously broke

Prohibition laws. His study showed that Prohibition’s enactment did the opposite of what legislators intended; it increased alcohol consumption in the Pass. Rising crime rates paralleled the increase in consumption. Policing the Wild North-West by Zhiqiu Lin proved that Prohibition was not easy to enforce. His book detailed the problems the North-West Mounted Police had in applying Prohibition laws, which ultimately led to the APP’s formation in 1917. The newly created, but very small force, became responsible for policing Prohibition in Alberta. However, research completed by R.C. Macleod and Sean Innes Moir, and the diaries of Mountie Sergeant

Clarke, revealed that while reformers expected the Anglo-Saxon dominated police force to civilize the West, alcohol abuse was rampant among their rank and file. Thus, Clarke’s 1876 to 1886 diaries showed how prejudices clouded reality because he wrote his diaries at the same time

Manitoba’s legislators argued that respectable British-Canadian men were one of the few groups who could handle alcohol consumption.

Howard Palmer highlighted the roots of nativism in Alberta and how some citizens used it to validate their discrimination. Tamara Palmer’s work on social themes found in novels about

Prairie Canada showed that authors entrenched nativism within Canada’s popular culture as early as 1900.38 This was also apparent in Rifkind’s examination of Mountie novels written in the early

1900s. Between 1890 and 1940, Canadian and American publishers printed 150 Mountie novels.

The novels presented them as the frontline soldiers in Anglo-Canada’s civilizing mission.39 People following Lassandro’s trial would have grown up surrounded by this literature. This thesis argues that the novels would have affected their view of the events and the accused, and it is possible that

38 Tamara Palmer, “Ethnic Character and Social Themes in Novels About Prairie Canada and the Period From 1900 to 1940,” (master’s thesis, York University, 1972), 23-41. 39 Candida Rifkind, “When Mounties were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Refrew of the Mounted,” English Studies in Canada 37, no. 3/4 (2011): 124-127.

people who the novels influenced worked for newspapers, testified at her trial, or served on the jury.

Fulcher’s examination of murder reports that involved “uncivilized individuals” published in The New York Daily-Times in 1851 and 1856 demonstrated that crime reporting was formulaic.

Each report’s goal was to legitimize the punishment handed down by the ruling class, so they could maintain order by educating “others” about the consequences of breaking their moral code.40 Even though Fulcher focused his study in the United States, reporters’ tactics were similar across the border. I read the Lethbridge Daily Herald, the Blairmore Enterprise, and the Calgary Daily

Herald as primary sources because they provided the most coverage of the trial. The articles written about Lawson’s murder trumpeted nativist views and approved of the accused’s death sentence. I also used a few articles from Edmonton’s Morning Bulletin to demonstrate that bias towards Lassandro was province wide.

In addition to newspapers, authors used true crime stories to underscore Canadians’ faith in the justice system. True crime magazines became popular in Canada during the 1940s, and authors described their stories’ criminals using racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes.41 The criminals’ looks matched their sinister behaviours and differentiated them from the Anglo-

Canadian characters. The murderers featured in the magazines always received a guilty verdict and their executioners hanged them to “restor[e] social harmony and reset moral values.”42 These stories also reflected the fears Canadians were experiencing at the time they were written.

40 James Fulcher, “Murder Reports: Formulaic Narrative and Cultural Context,” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 31. 41 Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004), 7. 42 Ibid., 7.

Sources and Methodology

The primary sources used for this thesis are not exclusively archival. This study tracks and analyzes the representations of Lassandro in popular culture and, therefore, is less dependent on sources like trial transcripts, affidavits, lawyers’ correspondence, and photos of the crime scene. I did refer to these sources to gain a better understanding of the event, but they play a minor role in the final analysis. This thesis’ primary sources are not relegated to the time under study or to paper mediums. They include what many other studies would categorize as secondary sources and they span decades and genres. The earliest primary source that I used was a news article printed in the

8 March 1873 edition of the Manitoban and Northwest Herald, while the newest was a song written in 2017. Cultural creators who operate in several fields, including English, History, Drama, music, opera, memory studies, art, and film, were interrogated as primary sources. The richness and multitude of primary sources available for this thesis testifies to the interest in Lassandro,

Picariello, and Lawson.

This thesis relies on Judge Walsh’s case summary, which he submitted to Minister of

Justice Lomer Gouin, to describe the murder. This was a common practice after all capital cases.

Other sources that I used to describe the murder include the preliminary inquiry and trial transcripts. However, I do not claim that any of these sources are absent of bias. Iacovetta and

Mitchinson warn historians about the necessity of being careful when reading case files. They defined case files as “records generated by political, social, legal, and other institutions entrusted with categorizing and assessing certain populations, usually with the purpose of supervising, treating, punishing, servicing, and/or reforming individuals or groups deemed in some way

deviants or victims.”43 Borrowing from Michel Foucault they argued that people in positions of power could unknowingly influence society by helping to define the “standards of conduct [thus] shaping social and moral behavior.”44 As a result, the case files “describe certain people in words and categories that serve the official purposes of other people.”45

Walsh’s summary and the trial transcripts were undoubtedly biased. Since Judge Walsh’s account is a summary, he chose the details he felt were the most important. Additionally, Walsh included his personal opinions, which may have influenced the government’s decision to not commute Lassandro’s death sentence. For example, Walsh commented, “I think the jury very properly decided that this shot was not fired in self-defence,” even though he knew the jury included members of the Masons and that Lawson was also a Mason.46 Moreover, Walsh stated,

“In my humble opinion there should be no commutation of the sentence. The killing of this man seems to have been a cold-blooded deliberate affair for which there was absolutely no excuse.”47

But it was never determined who actually fired the fatal shot. Walsh also reminded Gouin that

“The only thing that can be said in favor [sic] of the prisoner, Lassandro, is that she is a woman.”48

However, he still believed that the authorities should hang Lassandro even though he questioned the chivalric consequences of her execution.

Work by Anderson, van Herk, Amantea, and Davies displayed a substantive change in how popular culture portrayed Lassandro. Anderson and Davies challenged the idea of the immoral

43 Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, “Introduction: Social History and Case File Research,” in On the Case: Explorations in Social History, eds. Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 3. 44 Ibid., 10. 45 Ibid, 13. 46 The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh, Report on Capital Case of Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro, December 4, 1922, pp. 8, Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta. 47 Ibid., 9. 48 Ibid., 9.

immigrant and the moral Anglo-Saxon. Van Herk grounded her interpretation using a combination of fact and fiction because she refused to believe that the trial records were a truthful source.49

Instead, she had a conversation with Lassandro in which she imagined how Lassandro would respond to her questions. This method, called life-writing, figuratively gave Lassandro her voice back. Amantea interpreted Lassandro’s story through the multiple lenses of ethnicity, gender, and class. All of these interpretations recast Lassandro as a heroic victim and they counter masculine dominated wild-west histories.

I also integrated the oral history projects ManTrip (1989) and Talking With History (1984).

While there are concerns with using oral history as a source, it is “most informative when used to consider shared meanings and remembered images.”50 These interviews were used to demonstrate how popular culture can influence a person’s memory to the extent that they can no longer separate myth from reality. For example, in her interview for the ManTrip Project, Mildred Holstead thought that Lassandro was pregnant at the time of her execution. Lassandro’s supposed pregnancy was a fictitious claim that Godsell made in his true-crime story to add suspense. Whether Holstead read Godsell’s story or an acquaintance read it and then transferred the knowledge to her remains unknown, but it still influenced her recollection.

The final category of popular representations caters to the sensationalized narrative of

Canada’s wild West. The influence these accounts, written only by men, could have on audiences today is worrisome. Sources published by Brian Brennan, Ted Ferguson, M.A. Macpherson, and

Gord Steinke are all presented to the average reader as well-researched accounts of the murder,

49 Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dicken, eds., Great Dames (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 13. 50 S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c. 1880-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19. Cited in Thomas E. MacGrath, “Sacrifice, Fate, and a Working-Class Heaven: Popular Belief in the Crowsnest Pass,” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2017), 18.

but the authors filled their versions with inaccuracies and exaggerations. Brennan, whose version is the tamest and shows the least bias, referred to Picariello as the “godfather” and claimed his status gave him the right to sleep with Lassandro on her wedding night.51 The opera Filumena also hinted at a similar interaction. Ferguson claimed that Lassandro and Picariello were lovers for years and he promised her a new life as they boldly “strolled the streets of Blairmore…his arm encircling his mistress’ shoulder.”52 Macpherson portrayed Lassandro as a submissive woman who did anything Picariello told her to do, which included accompanying him to seek revenge against

Lawson. “He will pay,” Picariello said, “A bullet for a bullet.”53 Steinke fabricated the most outlandish description of the police chase by claiming that “Lawson grabbed his Harley-Davidson motorcycle with its sidecar and gave chase” in pursuit of Steve Picariello.54 In reality, Lawson and

Constable Houghton requisitioned a local man’s car and chased young Picariello into British

Columbia. Similar to Godsell these historians appeal to the popular audience because of their melodramatic accounts and, as a result, the new myths they create or the old ones they restate become even more solidified in the public’s consciousness.

A large segment of the historical works about Lassandro focus exclusively on the murder, police chase, and trial. However, by interpreting the popular culture interpretations developed for a broad audience, this thesis identifies and analyzes important social, cultural, and political moments in Canadian history to examine how these flagship moments have driven and altered the

51 Brian Brennan, “Emilio ‘Emperor Pic’ Picariello and Florence Lassandro,” in Scoundrels and Scallywags: Characters from Alberta’s Past (Calgary: Fifth House Ltd., 2002), 52. 52 Ted Ferguson, “The Bootlegger’s Paramour,” in Strange Days: Amazing Stories from Canada’s Wildest Decade (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2011), 99. 53 M.A. Macpherson, “Flowers for Florence Lasandro, Killer or Dupe,” in Outlaws of the Canadian West (Edmonton: Lone Pine Publishing, 1999), 207. 54 Gord Steinke, “Murder in the Mountains: The Story of Emilio Picariello (1879-1923) and Florence Lassandra (1901?-1923),” in Mobsters & Rumrunners of Canada: Crossing the Line (Edmonton: Folklore Publishing, 2004), 193.

image of Lassandro in popular culture considerably more than the facts of the crime. Because they rarely heard her own voice, people have been able to mould her persona to fit their own agendas.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that Lassandro has been re-tried and hanged from the 1920s to the present through the narratives about the female rumrunner from coal country Alberta. This is the first extensive study of her changing persona, which was shaped by the shifting forces of popular culture.

Overview of Thesis

This thesis explores how political, social, and cultural movements in Canada have shaped

Lassandro’s legacy in popular culture from 1922 to the present. Chapter one examines

Prohibition’s emergence in western Canada and how those who held power used it as a mode of racial and ethnic control. Canadian institutions and organizations governed by white Anglo-Saxon

Protestants attempted to assimilate other immigrants, whom they believed were less civilized.

Reformers branded immigrants who rejected this intrusion into their lives as lawless and immoral.

Different levels of government created the Mounties and later the APP¾both of whom recruited their members from the dominant class¾ to help enforce assimilationist policies. One immigrant group subjected to this belittling was the Italians who populated the Crowsnest Pass in considerable numbers. Thus, the increasing number of racial policies implemented by the ruling class shaped portrayals of Lassandro. The chapter concludes with a summary of the murder.

Chapter two examines how journalists who reported on Lassandro’s trial used their newspapers to proliferate nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs that cast Lassandro as immoral and abnormal. The three nativist strands all worked against her and persuaded citizens of her guilt even before the start of her trial. Petitions to move her trial to a more neutral site due to the bias that

appeared in southern Alberta newspapers were rejected because of the cost. Newspaper articles written from 22 September 1922 until Lassandro’s hanging on 2 May 1923 constructed a personal attachment between the reader and the newsmakers. Reports also created suspense and focused on the uniqueness and oddity of the alleged murderer in an attempt to make a wider statement about the type of immigrants the government should and should not allow into Canada. This chapter also includes an analysis of a Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association pamphlet that asked for the removal of Lassandro’s death sentence based on the argument that civilized nations do not hang women. Lastly, Godsell’s story reflecting wartime fears is analyzed.

Chapter three argues that cultural producers have continued to re-try Lassandro for

Lawson’s murder. Some have used her character as a way to support the narrative of Canada’s rugged and masculine West. Male authors used this storyline in attempt to displace the myth of

Canada’s “mild-West” by making it similar to the American “wild-West.” Other producers have reinterpreted her life from a feminist perspective. They have pushed back against the dominant narrative of rugged masculinity to give women a more prominent role in Alberta’s past. Lastly, new depictions of Lassandro, using whodunit narratives, have emerged to capitalize on the amount of money tourists bring to Alberta. These narratives draw Albertans and others into a discussion of the crime by capturing their imagination by means of engaging mediums.

Altogether, these chapters show that people and institutions have modeled Lassandro’s life into something it may not have been. They have studied Lassandro with disparate agendas and purposes. Lassandro might not recognize herself in these narratives, but they have caused Canadian society to reconsider her legacy. While some creators have used her legacy for positive purposes others have used it as a way to make money or to comment on how they believe Canadian society should look and act. However, for many Lassandro remains less important than Picariello. His

story is more thoroughly covered largely because he was a public figure and artifacts of his life remain. This past summer while taking part in the history walk Rum Running and Whiskey Six, the walk’s leader commented on Lassandro’s lack of importance and how she was, as the cliché goes,

“just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” These sentiments illustrate the ongoing belief that the history of a select few is important, mainly famous men. This thesis will show what feminist historians have argued for a long time: everyone’s life matters.

CHAPTER ONE: “HE IS DEAD, AND I AM ALIVE. THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS”: A RECIPE FOR PROHIBITION AND THE MURDER OF APP CONSTABLE STEPHEN O. LAWSON

A visitor to the APP barracks in Coleman, Alberta, which was restored to celebrate

Canada’s sesquicentennial and the APP’s centenary, will find the panel A Recipe for Prohibition on display in the barrack’s former kitchen. The recipe, composed by the Crowsnest Historical

Society for the exhibition, reads:

The death of Constable Lawson wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Prohibition, but Prohibition itself was the result of a complex mix of factors. - Take one long-standing Temperance campaign - Add a measure of votes for women - Mix in some old-time religion and moral reforms - Put it in a melting pot with a dash of prejudice and stir vigorously - Bring to a boil over a Great War Serves one dry province.1 At first this recipe may seem humorous, and I am sure that a few tourists have laughed at its tongue- in-cheek manner. But the recipe accurately outlines tensions that existed across Alberta, especially in the Crowsnest Pass, lasting from Prohibition’s reinstatement in 1916 until its repeal on 24 May

1924. These ingredients created an identity crisis for the region and the province that tested

Canada’s nation-building project and its march towards progress. Reformers believed that sobriety was an essential feature of civilization, and those who opposed it jeopardized the creation of a new nation that incorporated the best aspects of the old world while excluding its negatives.2 The Pass’

Anglo-Saxon residents wanted the rest of Canada to perceive the area as an integral part of

Canada’s new and prosperous West. They imagined an Eden wherein British values triumphed

1 Wall text, A Recipe for Prohibition, Alberta Provincial Police Barracks: Coleman National Historic Site, Coleman, Alberta, [2017]. 2 Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between The Lines, 2003), 168.

over barbarity and where a modern and temperate middle and working-class ensured its economic longevity and social propriety.3 In reality, Anglo-Saxons living outside the Pass regarded it as a lawless and iniquitous area, overrun with eastern and southern European immigrants who rejected the repeated attempts made by federal, territorial, and provincial governments to control and assimilate them. The murder of APP Constable Stephen Lawson helped to reinforce the area’s negative image.

On 21 September 1922, witnesses alleged that Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro, both Italian immigrants, fired numerous gunshots from the car Picariello was driving, killing

Constable Lawson in front of Coleman’s APP barracks.4 One witness, Lawson’s nine-year-old daughter Pearl, who was standing behind the car, saw the struggle between her father and Picariello and the fatal shot that she testified Lassandro fired. The following day the APP, with the help of a town constable and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, arrested Lassandro and Picariello approximately six kilometers away in Blairmore, where they both lived. Beginning on 27

November and lasting until 2 December, their trial was held at the Supreme Court of Alberta in the Calgary Provincial Court House. Hundreds of eager men and women arrived early for the first day of the trial, hoping to get a seat for the spectacle. The front-page headline in the Lethbridge

Daily Herald read, “Hundreds Turned Away from Picariello Trial,”5 and the Calgary Daily Herald reported that throngs of curious people filled the courtroom to capacity. In fact, the judge had to order the corridors blocked to keep the swelling crowd under control.6 Many of the hopeful attendees were not there to see Picariello. Rather, it was Lassandro’s arrival that piqued their

3 Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West. 1856-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 4 Who fired the shots and how many they fired is a contentious issue. The statement is based on the trial’s testimony. 5 “Hundreds Turned Away from Picariello Trial,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, November 27, 1922. 6 “Jury is Secured in Trial of Picariello and Mrs. F. Lassandro, Accused of Murder,” Calgary Daily Herald, November 27, 1922.

interest, because it was rare for the police to charge a woman with murder. Over thirty witnesses would be called to testify in Capital Case 978: Rex vs. Emil Picariello and Florence Lassandro, leaving no doubt concerning their presence at the crime scene.

However, even before the jury heard any of the evidence, the fate of the two Italians was determined. This is not a claim many Canadians, past or present, would feel comfortable admitting.

Lassandro and Picariello’s ethnicity and occupation clashed with the principles of British superiority and propriety. As well, their murderous actions denigrated the sacrifices made by

British-Canadian soldiers and their parents during the Great War to build a healthier and morally sound society. Yet, these were not the only events that influenced the trial. Since Confederation, the state, controlled by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, implored institutions such as the church, public education, the police, and the media to create the narrative of a British-Canadian colonial mission to civilize and stabilize Canada’s West. Their task was to remove the bedraggled layers, exposing the core elements, they believed, citizens of the “new” West needed. Anglo-

Saxons justified their paternal and discriminatory treatment of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other minority groups as a must if they were going to accelerate a successful march towards progress.7 Therefore, although testimony proved that Lassandro was at the scene of the crime, we must confront the ingredients in A Recipe for Prohibition before we can understand the fate of

Lassandro and the impact the ingredients have had on her portrayal in Canadian popular culture.

The History of Prohibition in Western Canada Prior to 1916

Media has glorified the 1920s as the beginning of Prohibition, a time when bootleggers, gangsters, and blind pigs were the norm. Popular culture has fomented this myth by erasing from

7 Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

the collective memory of Canadians the social tensions that existed due to alcohol consumption prior to the outbreak of the Great War. So, even though people have depicted the 1920s as synonymous with Prohibition, its actual origins in western Canada were in the 1870s. In the 8

March 1873 edition of the Manitoban and Northwest Herald, an article reported on the current

Liquor License Bill debate. Legislators discussed, to great cheer, a proposal to introduce a liquor license system they hoped would alleviate the “weal or woe of society.”8 During the debate, politicians considered several issues including what races they should allow to sell and purchase liquor and the amount of property someone needed to own before they could apply for a proprietor’s license. Additionally, legislators understood that if they enacted prohibition laws, they would need a police force to administer them. This came to fruition that same spring when

Parliament established the North-West Mounted Police. Prime Minister Macdonald’s government instituted the Mounties to explicitly control the overabundant use and misuse of liquor that many people felt caused the West’s lawlessness and hindered its progress. Manitoba’s legislators worried that an all-out ban of liquor would be hard to pass, so instead the Honorable Mr. Clarke moved:

In the meantime,…we can make it so difficult to get a license that the low and degraded will be kept out of the business; we can confine it to respectable men, who will not sell to those who cannot take care of themselves (cheers). This Bill provides that no man will be allowed to sell unless he can prove that he is of good moral character and temperate habits; that he has at least four separate beds in his house, apart from those occupied by himself and family; and that he has a stabling of at least ten horses. Two of his neighbors must testify under oath that they know the applicant to be of temperate habits, and that he has the accommodations required by law. He must get thirty voters in the electoral division to certify that he is of temperate habits and has never been convicted of a felony. No hotel or saloon keeper shall allow any loose, idle or disorderly persons, prostitutes, or habitual drunkards to loiter in or about his place of business.9 Clarke’s encompassing litany demonstrated that a hierarchical society existed based on race, ethnicity, and class, and that these three elements predetermined a person’s morality and place in

8 “The Parliament: Legislative Assembly,” Manitoban and Northwest Herald, March 8, 1873. 9 Ibid.

society. This was one step in creating a Canadian identity that had nativism and Social Darwinism as its core beliefs. Yet, while these social hierarchies existed, they evolved and changed overtime.

Another reason for establishing a professional police force was to maintain peace by protecting citizens from the categories of people society’s leaders labeled dangerous.10 The influence of nativism and Social Darwinism was rampant, and it played an important role in how

English-Canadians viewed and reacted to Indigenous peoples, eastern and southern Europeans, and Asians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Albertans feared that the ethnicity and race of newly arrived immigrants cast them as people who were less than desirable because of their criminal and violent inclinations. Zhiqiu Lin, as well as Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, described the impact these perceived truths had on Alberta’s settlement, the Royal North-West Mounted Police

(RNWMP), and later the APP. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) believed that they personified the highest form of civilization because their social, economic, political, and technological achievements had allowed them to rule over a vast empire. They ranked all other groups by how easily they could be assimilated, and they believed that as you moved further away from the British Isles the races were far less evolved, advanced, and, therefore, harder to anglicize.

Howard Palmer identified the interconnection between Social Darwinism and nativism in his study of Alberta. Anglo-Saxon Protestants living in Alberta were not only racist, they feared other

Europeans and religious minorities because they “posed a threat to Canadian national life.”11 If they could not keep them out of Canada or assimilate these minority groups, Canada would become, as a reporter in the Calgary Daily Herald claimed, “a veritable dumping ground for the

10 Zhiqiu Lin, Policing the Wild North-West (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), 21. 11 Howard Palmer, Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1985), 7.

refuse of civilization.”12 This anxiety was widespread, and their fear, which was rooted in nativist and racist dogmas, directly fostered social tensions in the Crowsnest Pass.

Canadians involved in the trifecta of social and moral movements in Canada¾Social

Gospel, prohibition, and the woman movement¾stated that “foreign” immigrants were more open to participating in societal vices such as prostitution, drinking, and gambling. Until the mid- 1900s many Canadians believed that Italians were hotheaded, and this trait made them more violent and criminal because they were known to willingly use a gun or stiletto to solve arguments, especially when they were consuming alcohol.13 During Angelina Napolitano’s murder trial, in 1911, the

Sault Star republished an editorial from Toronto’s Sun newspaper that linked the cause of the murder to her readiness “to use the knife, the pistol, or any other weapon that lies at hand, as a means of redressing real or fancied wrongs” and that the government needed “to repress the blood of the hot-blooded Southerner.”14 The “real or fancied wrongs” were the nine stab wounds her husband inflicted upon her and his insistence that she sell her body for money to the help the family. Eleven years later Lassandro was accused of using a gun to kill Lawson, which only further proved the associated Italian characteristics of violence.

Anglo-Saxon Canadians reasoned that the Europe immigrants furthest from the ideal included those from southern, central, and eastern Europe: Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Poles,

Romanians, and Italians. They were inferior and dangerous because they did not understand the concept of laws. Consequently, British-Canadians needed to educate and anglicize them if they

12 Calgary Daily Herald. Cited in Palmer, Patterns of Prejudice, 29. 13 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between The Lines, 2006), 205. 14 Toronto Sun published in Sault Star, 1 June 1911. Cited in Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911-1922,” The Canadian Historical Review 71, no. 4 (December 1991): 517-518.

wanted them to follow their laws. Reformers made no correlation between an immigrant’s criminal behaviour and their living and working conditions. The psychological effects of few job opportunities, poor housing, separation from family, isolation due to language, and constant discrimination were not considered as possible causes of violent and/or criminal activity. In the case of murder, the act was always caused by “an uncivilized individual rather than a flawed civilization.”15 The fact that crimes committed by members from the dominant class were less publicized and often not prosecuted to the same extent was never mentioned in the newspapers.

Since the police were a separate body from the ruling government, the government could deny that they held influence over them. In addition, the police promoted themselves as an unbiased organization whose only loyalty was to the citizens whom they promised to keep safe.

This claim allowed them to focus on categories of people who society labelled dangerous by asserting that they were only protecting the interests of the community. A majority of the Mounties and APP members came from the Anglo-Saxon Canadian community. Historian R.C. Macleod addressed this issue in his study The North-West Mounted Police and Law Enforcement, 1873-

1905 arguing, “The idea of a classless society in western Canada was completely foreign to the officers of the Mounted Police. They saw the Canadian West as having a definite upper class.”16

Mounties felt that they were part of the elite class because their job plus their place of birth garnered them status. Between 1888 and 1895 the percentage of non-commissioned officers and

15 James Fulcher, “Murder Reports: Formulaic Narrative and Cultural Context,” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 31. 16 R.C. Macleod, The North-West Mounted Police and Law Enforcement, 1873-1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 79.

constables who were from the United Kingdom or were Canadian-born ranged from 89 to 94 percent. The remaining men’s birthplace was unknown or labeled as “other.”17

The requirements to enter the police force included a minimum age of eighteen, a height of at least five feet ten inches, physical fitness, an above average ability to read and write in either

French or English, and experience in riding a horse. Patronage also played a major role in recruitment. The force picked many new recruits purely because their local Member of Parliament included their name in a list of acceptable candidates.18 Suitable applicants were not men from the lower class—mostly foreign immigrants—because of their propensity for committing crimes; instead, candidates were Anglo-Saxon and Protestant just like the MPs who endorsed them. The police used every available opportunity to impose their values on foreigners by patrolling ethnic gatherings and hangouts to observe their behavior. They also encroached on the home lives of immigrants. If English-Canadians were going to Canadianize the children of “foreigners,” the children would have to attend school where English was the only spoken language. Therefore, children too became a target of the state.

Reformers worried about foreign children’s sporadic school attendance, so they introduced the 1910 Alberta Act Respecting Truancy to remedy the problem.19 The Act made it possible for law enforcement to prosecute parents who failed to send their children to public school. Public school teachers taught their pupils about the virtues of temperance and prohibition, while Sunday school educators, like those at Calgary’s Hillhurst Presbyterian Church, also used their pupils to

17 Macleod, 82. In 1888, 33 percent of the non-commissioned officers or constables were born in the United Kingdom and 56 percent were born in Canada. By 1895 the percentage of Mounties from the United Kingdom increased to 61 percent while the percentage of Canadian born decreased to 33 percent. 18 Ibid., 84. 19 The Truancy Act, SA 1910, 2d sess, c 8.

publicly promote prohibition and temperance.20 The Women’s Christian Temperance Union

(WCTU) created a division within the organization that was responsible for public school education called The Scientific Temperance Instruction. This division successfully lobbied boards of education to include temperance education in the curriculum. By the early 1890s several provincial and territorial boards introduced classes that taught students about the harmful effects of alcohol consumption.21 In 1896, students in the Northwest Territories began to take mandated classes that used William Nattress’ Public School Physiology and Temperance as the textbook.22

Students who listened to their teacher lecture from the textbook or students who read the textbook themselves would have been disturbed by its contents. Chapter two ended with:

It has often been observed that children of intemperate parents frequently fail to develop into manhood or womanhood. They may not be deformed, but their growth is arrested, and they remain small in body and infantile in character…Such are examples of a species of degeneracy, and are evidences of the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children, which may extend even into the third and fourth generations.23 English-Canadians used phrases similar to “infantile in character” to describe Indigenous peoples and minority immigrant groups. Since they were childlike, someone needed to watch over and teach them to be proper. When Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905, temperance education continued. Thus, it is evident that public institutions, such as policing and education, aligned their beliefs with the leaders of the prohibition and temperance movements. Furthermore, it is likely that many pupils exposed to and impacted by this education, as adults later, became engaged with Lassandro and Picariello’s trial.

20 Hillhurst Presbyterian Sunday school group promoting prohibition/temperance, Calgary, ca. 1912-1916, photographs, NA-1639-1, NA-1639-2, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta. 21 Nancy M. Sheehan, “The WCTU and Educational Strategies on the Canadian Prairie,” History of Education Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 103. 22 Ibid., 103. 23 William Nattress, Public School Physiology and Temperance (Toronto: William Briggs, Wesley Buildings, 1893), 38. Cited in Sheehan, 104.

On 8 April 1875, the ratification of An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws respecting the North-West Territories made it illegal to manufacture liquor and other intoxicants in the region unless the Governor in Council granted permission.24 In addition, it became a criminal offence to import or bring liquor into the Territories unless the Lieutenant-Governor provided special written permission. This Act reaffirmed earlier legislation that controlled society’s access to liquor.

Indigenous and Métis leaders welcomed the prohibition laws because liquor had caused health and social problems, as well as conflicts within and between tribal groups. Even though reformers and missionaries welcomed these laws, the laws themselves were hypocritical.25 Anglo-Saxons believed that some races were able to handle drinking alcohol whereas others, such as the

Indigenous peoples, were primitive and incapable of self-control. Historian Stan Horall argued that

Canada’s early form of prohibition was a mode of racial control that “had its origin in the widely held assumption that liquor reduced the Indian to a violent and unmanageable savage who had to be protected from his own predilections for alcohol.”26

However, these laws did little to stop alcohol consumption in western Canada. Bootlegging continued due to the limited number of police that the government made available to patrol the

West’s vast expanses. Moreover, the profits were significant for anyone willing to meet the public’s demand; the same motive was present a few decades later. The introduction of The

Canada Temperance Act in 1878 further weakened the Mounties’ ability to uphold Prohibition because it allowed people to vote on their municipality’s liquor laws.27 Consequently, dry and wet

24 An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws respecting the North-West Territories, SC 1875 (38 Vict), c 49. 25 Sean Innes Moir, “The Alberta Provincial Police, 1917-1932,” abstract (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 1992), 26-27. 26 Stan Horall, “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one: The Mounted Police and Prohibition in the North-West Territories, 1874-1891,” Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba Transactions 3, no. 30 (1973-1974): 5. Cited in Moir, 27-28. 27 The Canada Temperance Act, 1878, SC 1878, c 16 (“Scott Act”).

municipalities could be located next to each other, allowing a thirsty citizen in a dry municipality to simply visit their neighboring municipality to obtain liquor.

Enforcing Prohibition took up most of the Mounties’ time, and, increasingly, they became targets of public outrage over how they administered the law. Historian James Gray argued that most white people living in the West were not upset with the laws. In fact, most of the homesteaders and Protestants living in urban areas supported Prohibition if the police enforced the laws against the Indigenous peoples, Métis, and other non-Anglo-Saxon “subspecies” and not against them.28 The public turned against the Mounties when they discovered that the young recruits covertly indulged in the alcohol that they purchased or acquired during busts and apprehensions. Incensed Calgary citizens wrote to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald asking for the withdrawal of Mounties from the city because of the double-standards in the law’s enforcement.29 Alcoholism became so widespread in the force that if officers caught members breaking the liquor laws they charged them one month’s pay, but this did not stop the problem.

The journal of Sergeant Clarke, who joined the Mounties in 1876 and was stationed throughout southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, testified to the problem of alcoholism in the police force. It provides evidence that contradicted the righteous claims made by English-Canadians about the enforcement of alcohol legislation during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Clarke wrote numerous entries that recounted rampant drunkenness in the Mountie ranks. In an entry written on

2 February 1878, Clarke stated that they had a “jolly good time” drunk on Jamaican Ginger and

Alternatives at a “half-breed” dance.30 Additionally, Clarke listed several current and former

28 James H. Gray, Booze: When Whiskey Ruled the West (Calgary: Fifth House Ltd., 1995), 27-28. 29 Macleod, 138. 30 Typescripts of Clarke’s Diaries, 1876-1886, M-229-2, Simon John Clarke fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta.

members of the force apprehended for bootlegging and illegally possessing liquor. Their arrests resulted in fines, imprisonment, or expulsion from the force. For example, Clarke and his comrades arrested former Mounties Jem Murray and Bob Watson on separate occasions for smuggling whiskey from Fort Benton, Montana, into Canada. Also, Mountie turned bootlegger Tony

Lachapelle sold liquor to Clarke and his comrades. Later they fined Lachapelle for selling liquor to someone else. Clarke professed that when the government ration of two-to-five gallons of alcohol ran out they turned to patent medicines, extract of lemon and vanilla, and Hot Drops. He wrote that they drank “anything to make a person feel good and drunk.”31 His journal is an important record because it delegitimizes the overarching claims made by reformers based on nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs. Also, during Lassandro’s trial, the media portrayed the APP and other law enforcement agencies as morally superior, even though Lassandro’s lawyers questioned the professionalism of some of the officers involved in the investigation.

By 1891 the Northwest Territories’ government repealed the Prohibition section of The

Northwest Territories Act of 1875, and in 1892 they began to regulate the sale of liquor in saloons.

This allowed easier access to liquor.32 Mounties were no longer responsible for enforcing liquor regulations, and, instead, liquor enforcement became the responsibility of the Northwest

Territories Liquor Inspectors and the local police. The new enforcement agencies lacked the necessary means to enforce the laws. Subsequently, it became the norm to ignore liquor violations in hope that the problem would just go away. The problem of few men and material resources to enforce liquor laws was a commonality during every decade of Prohibition. When Prohibition was once again enacted by the Government of Alberta in 1916 and Saskatchewan’s government in

31 Typescripts of Clarke’s Diaries. James Gray and R.C. Macleod also discuss the Mounties abuse of alcohol. 32 Gray, 39. Bartenders no longer needed to worry about who they sold liquor to, and the Métis were able to buy liquor for themselves and their Indigenous friends.

1917, the Mounties remembered the public backlash they had previously faced and declined to enforce it. As a result, this caused both provincial governments to create their own provincial police units.

Prohibition Laws in Alberta

Interest in reestablishing prohibition laws corresponded with several factors, including the introduction of Social Gospel, the women’s suffrage movement, WWI, and the influx of immigrants to western Canada in the early 1900s. The following statistics demonstrate the population increases in the prairie provinces: in 1911, thirteen Prairie cities had populations of more than five thousand compared to zero in the 1870s;33 from 1891 to 1911, Saskatchewan’s population increased by 1,124.77 percent;34 between 1901 and 1911, Calgary’s population swelled by 1,000 percent;35 and in 1901, the Crowsnest Pass’ population was 4,267 and by 1921 it grew to

16,104.36 Prohibition once again became an important national identity project. Anglo-Saxon

Canadians continued to educate new immigrants about Canadian values, morals, and behaviours, hoping to transform them into hardworking Canadians who would contribute to the building of the nation. In a 1922 article from the Lethbridge Daily Herald the editor, W.A. Buchanan, wrote:

We don’t want the man from Europe who thinks more of his native home than the land that has given him his shelter and occupation. We don’t want people who flock together in colonies, live their European life and talk their European language and absolutely refuse to

33 Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, “Urban Society and Labour in Prairie Canada,” in The Prairie West, Historical Readings, eds. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1992), 511. 34 Randy William Widdis, “Saskatchewan Bound: Immigration to a New Canadian Frontier,” Great Plains Quarterly, (Fall 1992): 257. 35 “Calgary: Development,” The Canadian Encyclopedia Online, s.v., last modified October, 24 2017, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/calgary/. 36 1901 and 1921 The Population of the Crow’s Nest Pass —Dominion Census. Cited in James Cousins, A History of the Crow’s Nest Pass (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1952), 136. This represents a 377 percent increase in the population.

be assimilated. Such people will never make Canada what it should be…[Canada] needs to get the finest type of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian settler for our western farms.37 Reformers wanted sustained contact with the newly arrived immigrants so they could urge assimilation and guide single men, who they feared would succumb to their masculine desires using the wages they made in the mines.

The Crowsnest Pass was an important stopping point for promoters of prohibition and temperance because they worried about men being tempted by the offerings of frontier town life, which would inhibit the creation of the ideal West. The 1891 and 1911 Canadian Censuses indicated that approximately 45 percent of pre-WWI immigrants to Canada were single men.38

Others were husbands and/or fathers who came to set up farms or make money working in mines prior to the arrival of their families. Many immigrants settled in the area, and their habits of drinking, crime, and communist sympathies cast them as “undesirable.” Many men viewed alcohol as inseparable from their working lives. Their affinity for drink encouraged men to publish open letters in newspapers demanding that the provincial government reinstate their right to acquire alcohol at an affordable price after the government passed Prohibition in 1916. Men living in the cities and towns worked long hours, and after they received their pay they frequented bars, which also offered a cheque-cashing service. Cashing their cheque in a bar was partly done out of necessity since the banks were all closed before the end of their shift. However, bar owners were reluctant to offer this service because of the amount of cash they had to carry from the bank and then keep in their establishment. This made them easy targets for thieves.39 Of course, men also frequented taverns simply to drink. They craved the companionship that accompanied drinking

37 Lethbridge Daily Herald, March 1, 1922. Cited in Howard Palmer, “Nativism and Ethnic Tolerance in Alberta: 1920-1972” abstract (PhD diss., York University, 1973), 23. 38 Statistics Canada, Population, by marital status and sex, census dates, 1871 to 1976, last modified July 2, 2014, https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-516-x/sectiona/A110_124-eng.csv. 39 Gray, 78.

because it temporarily allowed them to forget their loneliness and reaffirm masculine bonds. Men who worked together often drank together in a social space purposed only for them, and the

“absence of women enhanced a fragile sense of independence from their masters, parents, and, eventually, wives.”40 Some men knew their limits and would leave, but others chose to spend their entire wage in the bar, causing social, familial, and criminal problems. In the mining areas of southern Alberta paydays meant an influx of miners into Lethbridge for a three-day binge.41

Crusaders grimaced at the drinking habits of these immigrants because they did not fit the

Canadian identity they were trying to establish.

In an attempt to increase support for total prohibition, advocates started the Banish-the-Bar movement to strengthen, for the public, the link between humanity’s evils and the sale of alcohol.

The Moral Reform Society released a statement proclaiming: “[Liquor] is the source of all political corruption, causes of war and pauperism, the lawlessness and crime, of immorality and vice, of disease and death, of ruined homes and blighted souls.”42 The Society’s decree was backed by their estimation that alcohol consumption was the root cause of 90 percent of the court cases in

1914.43 Therefore, they argued, if they criminalized alcohol, crime rates would decrease by the same percentage. They ignored other extenuating circumstances people who were not as privileged as they were faced with. Initially, supporters of the movement demanded that all bars be closed and that liquor purchases only happen in government-run liquor stores. Their crusade won the support of the Saskatchewan government, and on 1 July 1915, the government closed all saloons.44

The sale of liquor was allowed only in government-run liquor stores located in municipalities

40 Heron, 36. 41 Gray, 81. 42 The Moral Reform Society. Cited in Hugh A. Dempsey, “The Day Alberta Went Dry,” Alberta History 58, no. 2 (March 2010): 11. 43 Frank W. Anderson, The Rum Runners (Calgary: Frontiers Unlimited, 1968), 5. 44 Gray, 88-89.

where the majority voted to remain wet as set out in The Canada Temperance Act. However, in

1916 the liquor stores were also closed after a second plebiscite. This officially made

Saskatchewan a dry province on New Year’s Day 1917.45 These two temperance victories were important, demonstrating that this movement was publicly supported across the Prairies.

After Saskatchewan passed its initial temperance legislation, Alberta’s temperance crusaders called for a plebiscite to introduce prohibition. Under Alberta’s Direct Legislation Act of 1913, advocates could recommend prohibition legislation if they presented a petition to the government signed by at least 20 percent of the eligible Alberta voters from 85 percent of the province’s electoral districts.46 They were successful. The WCTU, the Temperance and Moral

Reform Society, the United Farmers of Alberta, and the United Grain Growers worked together to rally support for prohibition. The movement faced opposition from newspapers in Calgary, the

Licensed Victuallers Association of Alberta, the bartender’s union, and the Alberta Federation of

Labour. The day before the plebiscite, the Edmonton Daily Bulletin’s front-page headline announced, “Monster Parade Three Miles Long With Banners and Flags Flying Stirring Appeal

For Prohibition” and reported that approximately ten to twelve thousand “citizens of every walk in life and of all ages” marched through the streets of Edmonton in support of the dry vote.47 A story on the front page of the Calgary Daily Herald reminded citizens of the vote’s importance by publishing the time the polls opened and closed. But the paper’s bias in favour of the plebiscite’s defeat was obvious because the article first informed voters how to enter a NO vote.48 Strategically positioned close to this story was a report about the hardships of travelling in Saskatchewan

45 Heron, 179. 46 Direct Legislation Act Section 6. Cited in Sarah E. Hamill, “Prohibition Plebiscites on the Prairies (Not-So) Direct Legislation and Liquor Control in Alberta, 1915-1932,” Law & History Review (May 2015): 382. 47 “Monster Parade Three Miles Long With Banners and Flags Flying Stirring Appeal For Prohibition,” Edmonton Daily Bulletin, July 20, 1915. 48 “Stage Now Set For Big Battle of Ballots On Liquor Question,” Calgary Daily Herald, July 20, 1915.

because prohibition legislation had drastically cut into hotel profits forcing many to close.49 The subtle inclinations published in the Herald testify to the division prohibition caused in Alberta and to the impending problems the police were going to have enforcing the legislation if it passed.

The referendum was held on 21 July 1915, and the results were heavily in favour of the dry campaign. Of the 140,000 eligible voters, 58,295 voted for the proposed legislation and 37,509 voted against it. Of the fifty-five electoral districts in Alberta, forty-one voted for the ban.50 All of the coalmining towns in Crowsnest Pass chose to stay wet;51 so too did Pincher Creek, Bow Valley, and Lethbridge.52 St. Paul, Victoria, and St. Albert, all located in the northern half of the province, also voted against prohibition.53 However, the Liquor Act of 1916 was all-inclusive, and the areas that voted to stay wet were not allowed to, as the previous The Canada Temperance Act, also known as the Scott Act, had permitted. Entrepreneurs would soon exploit the perceived injustice, but this only increased reformers’ fanaticism for their mission to cure the erring.

Albertans who voted against prohibition used several arguments to support their reasoning.

One argument was that they believed prohibition was anti-British, since, in Britain, the public voted to reject prohibition because it infringed upon people’s freedom and sense of responsibility.54 Soldiers returning from Europe argued that one of the central tenets of the war was the fight for freedom, and prohibition contradicted their sacrifices.55 In contrast, supporters thought that returning soldiers deserved to come back to a Canada cured of the social evils caused by alcohol. Their assumption was proven wrong again when, in 1916, soldiers stationed in Calgary

49 “Looks Blue For Travelling Public In Saskatchewan,” Calgary Daily Herald, July 20, 1915. 50 Dempsey, “The Day Alberta Went Dry,” 11. 51 Cousins, 65. 52 Gray, 88-92. 53 Anderson, 7. 54 Heron, 193. 55 Ibid., 231.

rioted because of the lack of liquor. The rioters were additionally upset because due to bureaucratic incompetence they were excluded from voting in the plebiscite.56 Self-identified responsible drinkers argued that the actions of the minority punished them. Still others swore that prohibition would increase the crime rate because producing alcohol would not seem immoral in areas where people voted against prohibition.57 Some believed that prohibition was a way for the elite to stop the working class from buying liquor, since they could not afford to import it from sources outside

Alberta.58 Lastly, for many farmers and immigrants, making their own homemade liquor was a tradition that they had practiced for decades.59 Thankfully for those who wanted to keep drinking, holes in the legislation would grant them their wish.

When Alberta’s prohibition rules came into effect on 1 July 1916, several loopholes existed. While many Albertans took advantage of them, the loopholes would have drastic consequences for Lassandro and Picariello. The law earmarked intoxicating liquor as any drinkable liquid that contained more than 2.5 percent alcohol. Brewers could still produce and sell

Temperance Beer in public places as long as its alcohol level was under 2.5 percent, but often hotels also had barrels of illegal liquor on hand. They simply turned the keg’s valve when the police arrived. This trick was the partial focus of one of the scenes in the opera Filumena.

Secondly, an individual could keep and consume one quart of hard liquor or one gallon of beer above the 2.5 percent level in their home if they purchased it by mail-order from suppliers, brewers, or distillers outside of the province. This loophole supports the previous claim made by the working class regarding the affordability of imported liquor. A third gap in the law allowed the

Lieutenant Governor in Council to appoint suitable wholesalers who could keep liquor in their

56 Anderson, 8. 57 Heron, 197. 58 Ibid., 229; Gray, 149. 59 Heron, 240.

warehouses and distribute it to people who required it “for medicinal, mechanical, scientific, and sacramental purposes.”60 The vendor provided alcohol to people who were mechanics (clerks and skilled workers), scientists, druggists, physicians, dentists, veterinarians, or ministers. Calgary lawyer H.H. Gilchrist stated that “all a customer had to do was become ill, as well as thirsty, and get a doctor’s prescription that was filled by an accommodating druggist. The doctors were always accommodating at $1.00 or $2.00 a throw for prescriptions.”61 The police knew that doctors and druggists were some of the worst offenders of the liquor laws; however, because of their status in the community few were ever charged. If the police charged them, they received fines that paled in comparison to those given to bootleggers and rumrunners.62 This was forgotten in early musings about Lassandro, Picariello, and prohibition. In 1968, Frank Anderson finally emphasized this discriminatory practice in his book.63 Another ambiguity was that brewers and distillers in Alberta could still manufacture and export liquor for out-of-province customers. This left the possibility open for a person who desired a nip of alcohol to obtain it from an unscrupulous employee.

Anyone caught breaking the liquor law could be fined, and if the fine went unpaid, they were subject to imprisonment. For bootleggers and rumrunners, the fines were minute in comparison to their profits. Consequently, the system of fines did little to deter the liquor trade even after an amendment to the Act in 1917 doubled them. Bootleggers could make a bottle of liquor and sell it for ten times their cost.64 Rumrunners’ cars—many used the Buick “Whiskey”

Six, the fastest car at that time—could transport thirty to forty cases of liquor in one trip, making them thousands of dollars in profit. Picariello often travelled with several cars, increasing his

60 Government of Alberta, The Liquor Act 1916 Section 4. 61 H. H. Gilchrist, “Personages We Have Met: Picariello and Mrs. Lassandro,” Information File: Picariello, E. and Mrs. Lassandro (murder case), Alberta Provincial Archives, Edmonton, Alberta. 62 Lin, 137. 63 Frank W. Anderson, The Rum Runners (Calgary: Frontiers Unlimited, 1968). 64 Lin, 123.

profits exponentially. It was not only bootleggers and rumrunners who made profits; business owners and public administrators did, too. In 1922, two years before the end of Prohibition, the

APP estimated that up to 40 percent of the pool halls and 30 percent of the cafes in Alberta were selling liquor that exceeded the legal limit.65 Other bootlegging proprietors included the Mayor of

Coleman who was twice convicted of selling liquor and St. Albert’s police chief.66 Some estimates suggest that up to 65 percent of Albertans broke the liquor laws and that the illegal booze industry generated $7 million in economic output.67 As well, the mail-order system did little to decrease people’s alcohol consumption. In A History of the Crow’s Nest Pass William Cousins found evidence of 1,500 to 2,000 bottles of “joy juice” passing through Coleman’s Dominion Express

Office every month.68 Express companies opened separate offices, just so they could handle the number of packages they received. Cousins surmised that people were consuming more alcohol than before Prohibition, since each package could contain almost one litre of alcohol.69 When the government postponed the legal importation of liquor into Alberta on 24 December 1917, normally law-abiding citizens resorted to buying alcohol illegally from rumrunners and still operators who eagerly filled the gap. Importing liquor into Alberta became legal again in January 1920 but then, to the glee of bootleggers, in February 1921 the government reverted the law.

Even though glaring problems existed, the supporters of the Liquor Act still felt that its enforcement would lead to the creation of a model society. Society would consist of exemplary citizens who could be proud of their place in the British Empire; an empire that God had anointed to rule the world.70 By ridding Canada of alcohol, the marginalized would become civilized and

65 Heron, 253. 66 Lin, 127. 67 Aritha van Herk, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2001), 234. 68 Cousins, 65. 69 Ibid., 65. 70 Heron, 168.

modern, leading to a more stable and wealthy society. A modernized and industrial society needed workers who were efficient at their jobs, not workers who were corrupted by alcohol. Continued enforcement would Canadianize the ever-increasing onslaught of newcomers and rid them of the violent and depraved tendencies that led to social problems.

The Creation of the Alberta Provincial Police

Historians do not agree about why, in 1917, the Mounties chose to end their policing contract with the Alberta government. Howard and Tamara Palmer insisted that the national police force refused to place their members in the same predicament they encountered while policing earlier prohibition laws.71 Zhiqin Lin, however, argued that WWI, not pride, had more to do with their exit from Alberta. He believed that the Mounties did not have enough members to effectively control the liquor trade because war demands stretched the force too thin. There was a shortage of experienced officers and new recruits since many had chosen to volunteer overseas. Also, an increased demand to protect Canada from an internal or external attack caused a shift in policing priorities.72 Both arguments have merit, but, nonetheless, the Mounties’ departure required the

Alberta government to form the APP eight months after instituting Prohibition. The first official day of the new police force was 1 March 1917, and during its existence the formation’s commanders divided the area into five divisions and staffed them with an average of 181 members.73 The area covered by its Lethbridge Division, which Lawson was a part of, stretched between the Saskatchewan and British Columbia borders, northward as far as Vulcan, and

71 Howard Palmer and Tamara Palmer, Alberta: A New History (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1990), 176. 72 Lin, 35. 73 I used the chart “APP Annual Manpower, Detachment, Transportation Levels and Case Load,” found in Sean Innes Moir, “The Alberta Provincial Police, 1917-1932,” abstract (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 1992), 276.

southward to the forty-ninth parallel. In 1922, the year of Constable Lawson’s murder, the

Lethbridge Division had forty-five APP officers.74

Stephen Oldacres Lawson was the ideal recruit for the province’s new police force. Lawson was born in Brixton, Surrey, England, on 18 June 1880. He attended school in London, and after completing his studies he spent two years traveling the world. Finding his life unfulfilling he emigrated to Canada in 1903. Shortly after his arrival he began to farm near Killarney, Manitoba, and then moved to Macleod, Alberta, where he ranched. However, his ranching career did not last long as he joined Macleod’s police force in 1907, becoming the Chief of Police the following year.

In 1908, Lawson married Margaret Mackenzie, who was from a well-known family in

Macleod¾another factor that worked against Lassandro. They had five children: Stephen,

Margaret also known as “Peggy”, Mary whose nickname was “Tibby”, Dorothy Pearl, and

Kathleen.75

When Lawson enlisted to serve in WWI, the Town of Macleod promised him his position as police chief would be waiting for him upon his return. During the war Lawson served with the

13th Canadian Mounted Rifles and the Fort Garry Horse. In 1918, the army awarded him the

Military Medal for his heroic actions during an attack on Bois-du-Mont-Aux-Ville Wood. During the assault he reportedly killed several Germans and captured seventeen prisoners.76 When the war ended Lawson returned to Alberta regarded as a hero, a family man, and protector of Anglo-Saxon values. He resumed his role as Macleod’s Chief of Police and stayed in that role until 1920. Lawson moved his family to Fernie, British Columbia, to become their police chief, holding this job there

74 Moir, 80-81; Carpenter, 66. 75 Davies, 45-46. 76 Wall text, Courage Under Fire, Alberta Provincial Police Barracks: Coleman National Historic Site, Coleman, Alberta, [2017].

until March 1922. He then joined the APP, and they stationed him in Coleman where he served until his death six months later.77

The Crowsnest Pass Italian Community

Many Italians moved to British Columbia in the early twentieth century because of the job opportunities in the mines and with railway companies. Several felt confident that western Canada was a place where they could make their fortune through hard work. Fernie’s large Italian population was a draw for many newcomers. By 1910, due to chain migration, Fernie had an Italian population somewhere between six hundred and one thousand. The 1911 census identified 10 percent of Fernie’s population as Italian. The Italian population on the Alberta side of the Pass numbered 682, or 13.5 percent of the total population, and it increased to 14.5 percent by 1919.78

In 1919, 55 percent of the working population of the Crowsnest Pass consisted of immigrants from mainland Europe, while another 34 percent were British immigrants, and 1 percent were American.

The ethnic makeup of continental European workers in the Crowsnest was as follows: 23 percent

Slovak, 14.5 percent Italian, 7 percent French and Belgian, 2 percent Russian, and 8.5 percent

“other European”.79 These statistics indicate that the number of mainland European immigrants was close to double the number of British immigrants, and this visual must have felt ominous to

English-Canadians. Lassandro’s family was part of this unsettling influx.

There are few traces left of Lassandro’s early life. She was born in either 1900 or 1901 in

Italy. In 1909, her family emigrated to Fernie from Cosenza, located in the southwestern province of Calabri. Like many towns and cities, some citizens of Cosenza acquired a reputation from rival

77 I took parts of this paragraph from Lawson’s obituary published in the Blairmore Enterprise, October 12, 1922. 78 Patricia K. Wood, Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia (Montreal: Queen’s University Press, 2002), 24. 79 Davies, 12-13. In her footnotes Davies stated that she took her numbers from the Arthur L. Sifton Commission (1907) and the John T. Stirling Commission (1919).

towns. Their rivals described Consenza women as being “loose.”80 The town’s reputation may have followed her to the Pass because pop culture has cast her as an adulteress even though there is no evidence to support this accusation. When her family first arrived, her father, Vincenzo

Costanzo, worked on the railroad but soon took a job in a coalmine. At the age of fourteen, her father arranged for her to marry Carlo Sanfidele, a man nine-years-older than her. Arranged marriages were common in the Italian community and this tradition lasted into the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, according to English ideals, this type of marriage was considered to be barbaric. After their wedding the couple moved to Pennsylvania, but they soon returned with the new surname, Lassandro. They settled in Blairmore where he was reemployed by Picariello. She found a job helping Picariello’s wife, Maria, look after their children.81

Picariello emigrated from Italy to the United States in 1899. In 1902, he moved to Toronto and then to Montreal, finally settling in Fernie in 1911. Picariello was an industrious and entrepreneurial man. He owned several businesses, including grocery stores, a cigar factory, a bakery, a macaroni factory, and a clothing company. One of his most lucrative businesses was his brick-and-mortar ice cream parlor and its accompanying mobile unit. He allowed children to pay for an ice cream with empty bottles, which he then resold to breweries and distilleries for a large profit. This is how he received the nickname “The Bottle King.” His most lucrative business was his Alberta Hotel in Blairmore. It became the hub of his rumrunning operations. His estimated worth at the time of his conviction was $500,000. After Judge Walsh sentenced Picariello, he warned the Minister of Justice: “It is altogether likely that if any ground can be found for a reserved

80 Franc Sturino, “Italian Emigration: Reconsidering the Links in Chain Migration,” in Arrangiarsi: The Italian Immigration Experience in Canada, eds. Roberto Perin and Franc Sturino (Montreal: Guernica, 1992), 77. 81 Davies, 16-20; Carpenter, 9-11; Neil B. Watson, “COSTANZO, FILUMENA (Florence) (Sanfidele (Lassandro)),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 15, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 13, 2018, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/costanzo_filumena_15E.html.

case an application for one will be made. The accused…is reported to be a man of considerable wealth and will doubtless spend any amount of money that may be necessary to bring the case before the Appellate Division.”82 Due to the discriminatory mentality of many Albertans, it would have been hard for them to believe that an Italian immigrant could have access to such a large amount money unless he acquired it illegally. Their mistrust of immigrants who were financially stable was directly related the passing of the Liquor Act. After legislators passed it, the media immediately associated immigrants with bootlegging, rumrunning, and all other vices involved with alcohol.

The areas that voted to remain wet during the plebiscite were publicly demonized as lawless and teeming with “foreign” immigrants. The media began to print articles, which proved that the Crowsnest Pass was not representative of the more British, and, thus, more civilized areas of the province. Since the government forced a law upon people who did not want it, the Crowsnest

Pass gained notoriety as the crux for bootleggers and the illegal liquor trade. An article from the

Blairmore Enterprise published on 28 September 1922, emphasized this characterization when it reported on the murder of Constable Lawson. It stated that his murder “in connection with the enforcement of the Alberta Liquor Act adds another page to the history of crime which has branded this district.”83 Two weeks later, to counter this slanderous view, Mr. Putnam, who identified himself as one of “the old residents of this district,” wrote a letter to the editor of Innisfail’s newspaper, which the Blairmore Enterprise also published, upset that its editor condemned the citizens of the Crowsnest Pass “as being lawless foreigners.”84 Putnam countered, “There is nothing like the lawlessness, in proportion to the population of the Pass, as there is in other districts

82 The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh, Report on Capital Case of Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro, December 4, 1922, pp. 1, Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta. 83 “A.P.P. Constable Murdered At Coleman,” Blairmore Enterprise, September 28, 1922. 84 “The Responsibilities of Citizenship,” Blairmore Enterprise, October 12, 1922.

of the Province of Alberta.”85 Mr. Putnam provided no evidence to support his argument; nor did the editor who initially vilified the region. Both men based their opinion on their view of what they thought Alberta should be, and the murder of Lawson intensified this debate.

The Murder of APP Constable Stephen O. Lawson: The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh’s Summary

The following narrative of Lawson’s murder comes from Judge Walsh’s report that he sent to the Minister of Justice Gouin in December 1922, shortly after Lassandro and Picariello’s trial concluded. Because it is a trial summary, Walsh only included the information he felt was pertinent. The summary also contained several of Walsh’s opinions, which showed his bias and his unwavering faith in the justice system. His report was likely used as the basis for later reinterpretations of the murder because it provided the essential plot elements an author would need to pen a thrilling story: the attempted arrest of Steve Picariello; the threats Emilio Picariello directed towards the police; Lawson, Picariello, and Lassandro’s confrontation outside Coleman’s

APP barracks; the police’s arrest of the accused; and the jury’s verdict.

During the afternoon of 21 September 1922, an informant forewarned the APP that cars driven by Picariello, his son, and his mechanic would travel through Coleman. His son’s car carried alcohol acquired legally from a liquor warehouse in Fernie, but they were going to illegally sell their load in the Alberta Hotel.86 Following orders, Lawson notified the APP in Blairmore when the rumrunners’ vehicles passed through Coleman. When Picariello reached the Alberta Hotel, the

APP presented him with a warrant to search it for the illegal liquor. Picariello honked his car horn

85 “The Responsibilities of Citizenship.” 86 Transporting liquor in an automobile was legal according to The Canada Temperance Act as long as the liquor was directly delivered from the warehouse to a licensed vendor. What often happened was that the carrier redirected the shipment to another location where they sold it illegally.

to notify his son that the police were present. His son heard the signal and headed back towards

Coleman with his load of liquor, hoping to return to British Columbia safely. The Blairmore APP warned Lawson of the younger Picariello’s imminent return, and he waited on Coleman’s Main

Street to arrest him.

As his car approached, he ignored Lawson’s demand to stop. Lawson fired two shots either at the car or in its direction—this was never determined¾then Lawson and Coleman Town

Constable Houghton pursued him briefly into British Columbia. During the chase Lawson fired at

Picariello’s car tires attempting to flatten them but he was unsuccessful. This allowed the younger

Picariello to elude the police. On Lawson’s return trip to Coleman he met the “The Bottle King” and Lawson warned him that he needed to bring his son back to Alberta or else he would bring him back himself. While searching for his son, Picariello met some men—witnesses said they looked like Italians—at the Crow’s Nest railway station. Prosecution witnesses stated that they saw Picariello kiss his gun and heard him brag that if his son was hurt by one of Lawson’s bullets he would “kill Lawson that night.”87 Picariello later made a similar statement to APP Sergeant

Scott.

Inconclusive evidence suggested that at 6:45 p.m. Picariello received a phone call from his son informing him that Lawson had shot him in the left hand. George Allan testified that Picariello then announced, “I do not like this shooting business. If they start shooting I can shoot too.”88

Fifteen minutes later Picariello decided to go to Coleman to “get” Lawson.89 Lassandro asked to

87 The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh, 3-4. 88 Ibid., 4. 89 Ibid., 5.

accompany him and she brought a .38 calibre revolver with her.90 When they reached Coleman they went to the APP barracks, which was also the Lawson family home. Picariello shouted from his car for Lawson to come out and he did. Lawson stood with his hands folded against Picariello’s car. He and Lawson began to struggle, and someone fired shots outward from the car (see figure

2). The fatal shot hit Lawson in his back near his right shoulder and passed through his body stopping beneath the skin on the left-side of his chest. Lassandro and Picariello then left the crime scene and headed back to Blairmore.

Figure 2. Photos of the crime scene. The Glenbow Museum and Archives, NA-4691-2, NA-4691- 3. Coleman photographer Oscar Brindley took the pictures of the crime scene. The photo on the right is a re-creation of where Picariello may have parked his car.

When the police arrested Picariello the following day, he surrendered and stated to the them that they need not worry because he would do them no harm. The police told him that he should have given Lawson a chance to defend himself. He responded that Lawson had a gun or that Lawson tried to shoot them. The judge ruled that Lassandro killed Lawson because the bullet taken out of Lawson’s body was a .38 calibre bullet matching Lassandro’s gun, and she also

90 When the police seized the car a .32 calibre casing was found in it and several more were found on the ground outside the APP barracks. However, the prosecution provided no evidence proving that Picariello armed himself, even though he had a permit to carry a .32 calibre automatic gun.

admitted to firing the fatal shot. Judge Walsh surmised that if Lassandro fired the fatal shot,

Picariello knew she was going to do it because he counselled her to do it or “aided and abetted” her in doing it.91

Judge Walsh did not mention Lassandro’s arrest in his trial summary. This clearly showed the lack of importance that was given to her soon after the murder. When the police finally arrested her and retrieved her gun, she mistakenly identified the murder weapon as an automatic. Historians

Brennan, Carpenter, and Macpherson have all used this fact as evidence to prove Picariello persuaded Lassandro to take the blame for the murder because he convinced her that a woman would never hang in Canada.92 Furthermore, several letters in support of Lassandro’s clemency based their demand on her being duped by Picariello. Another contentious issue is that when

Sergeant Scott heard Lassandro’s confession, in his kitchen and without witnesses, she claimed to have shot Lawson in the stomach. More concerning was that Scott did not record her confession as police procedure required. Ten days lapsed from the time he heard her confession until he made mention of it at the preliminary inquiry. However, Judge Walsh and the newspapers that covered the trial ignored these facts and, instead, focused on Lassandro’s response to APP Constable

Moriarity. When Moriarity arrested her, he told her, “Don’t be afraid.”93 Lassandro responded, “I have nothing to be afraid of. He is dead and I am alive. That’s all that matters.”94 This phrase became the backbone of the prosecution’s case and fodder journalists, true crime writers, and

91 The Honourable Mr. Justice Walsh, 7. 92 Brian Brennan, “Emilio ‘Emperor Pic’ Picariello and Florence Lassandro,” in Scoundrels and Scallywags: Characters from Alberta’s Past (Calgary: Fifth House Ltd., 2002); Jock Carpenter, The Bootlegger’s Bride (Calgary: Gorman & Gorman, 1993); M.A. Macpherson, “Flowers for Florence Lasandro, Killer or Dupe,” in Outlaws of the Canadian West (Edmonton: Lone Pine Publishing, 1999). 93 The King vs Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro. -- 1922. -- Transcript of evidence, Volume IV (461), M6840-364, pp. 634, McKinley Cameron fonds, The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta. 94 Ibid.

others used it during the interwar years and the 1940s to justify their salacious and degrading attacks of Lassandro and other Italian immigrants.

Conclusion

The focus of this chapter centred on the beliefs English-Canadians held concerning

Indigenous peoples and immigrant minorities, of which Lassandro was a member. They branded them as barbaric and childlike beings and these contorted views, established long before the murder of APP Constable Lawson, would later impact the popular media’s portrayal of Lassandro.

Beginning in the 1870s, reformers began to impose their version of morality upon the marginalized using paternalistic legislation that regulated who could and could not access alcohol.

As historian Stan Horall argued, this early form of prohibition was one of Canada’s earliest examples of racial control. Temperance education soon became a part of public school education in the Prairies. Students’ textbooks warned them that if their parents consumed alcohol they would not properly develop into adults and, instead, they would “remain small in body and infantile in character.”95 Students carried these lessons forward into adulthood and some of them would later read about, comment on, attend, or participate in Lassandro’s trial.

The reemergence of temperance and prohibition fervor during WWI exacerbated tension in Alberta. In 1916, citizens of Alberta voted on a prohibition plebiscite, and the prohibitionists won with an overwhelming majority. However, towns in the Crowsnest Pass, with large Italian and eastern European populations, went against the tide and voted to remain “wet.” This angered

Canadians of British descent because they feared their immoral counterparts would encumber the region’s ability to become a vital part of Canada’s march towards progress. Soon the Pass became

95 Nattress, 38. Cited in Sheehan, 104.

the hub of the illegal liquor trade and the struggle between the reformers and the unreformed reached its pinnacle when Lawson was murdered on 21 September 1922. The popular press rapidly filled its pages with stereotypes about Italians to reaffirm their “otherness” and to legitimize the media’s voracious and nativist attacks on Lassandro, Picariello, and other marginalized immigrant communities. Their nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs would last well past WWII.

CHAPTER TWO: “THEY SEEM TO KNOW THE STORY BETTER THAN I DO MYSELF”: THE PORTRAYAL OF FLORENCE LASSANDRO IN NEWSPAPERS, TRUE-CRIME MAGAZINES, AND OTHER NARRATIVES, 1920-1943

I think of all the things that have been written about me – that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder…And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?1 - Grace Marks in Alias Grace

In 1996 McClelland & Stewart published Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Her novel, based on the real-life murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery by Grace Marks, interwove fact and fiction. The quotation above attributed to Marks by Atwood is relevant to this study because journalists and true crime writers similarly scrutinized Lassandro¾they made her many things at once by creating her voice and her place in society. The earliest newspaper reports of Lawson’s murder unsurprisingly focused on Picariello’s part in his death while they dedicated little space to Lassandro’s role. There are two reasons for her absence. First, unlike Picariello,

Lassandro was not a public figure until after the murder. Traces of her real life were and remain hard to find. This directly affected how newspapers wrote about her because journalists relied heavily on speculation, local gossip, and bias, which resulted in fearmongering, demonization, and downright false depictions. They crafted an identity for Lassandro that most Canadians judged as unacceptable and immoral. Secondly, even when Lassandro confessed to killing Lawson, the public believed that the blackguard Picariello must have coached or manipulated her—a belief that is still produced in popular histories today. Newspapers vigorously attacked Picariello and downplayed Lassandro’s role while at the same time condemning her for her supposed ignorance.

1 Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1996), 23.

From September until her sentencing in December the newspapers, indirectly and directly, attacked and shaped Lassandro’s character by appealing to the public’s desire to create an idealized

Canadian society based on British Protestant values. During the 1800s and early 1900s constructing a personal attachment between the reader and the newsmaker(s), creating suspense, and focusing on the uniqueness or oddity of a murder, were all common methods used to write murder reports.2 These reports often vilified the accused before their trial took place by identifying their “otherness” and their inability and/or undesirability to adapt to Canadian norms. At the same time, the reports sanctified Anglo-Canadians and their institutions. Journalism professor Judith

Knelman stressed, “In the frontier society that was most of Canada in the nineteenth century, it was the newspapers’ function to assert standard moral values and to back up the authority of the justice system.”3

Arguably the Crowsnest Pass was still a frontier society in the early twentieth century.

Even though settlers had colonized the area and businesses were developing the economy, people still viewed it as a place that teetered on the fringe of society because the majority of the population consisted of central and eastern European immigrants who, according to Anglo-Saxons, were still uncivilized. Additionally, Knelman stated, “By depicting behavior as wicked, dangerous, bizarre, or even amusing, and above all unacceptable, crime reporting underscored the values of the establishment. Not only did reports of trials suggest that murder would be found out, but detailed stories of executions depicted the process of expiation as therapeutic.”4 Similar warnings or lessons

2 James Fulcher, “Murder Reports: Formulaic Narrative and Cultural Context,” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 4 (Spring 1985): 31-42. 3 Judith Knelman, “Transatlantic Influences On the Reporting of Crime: England vs. America vs. Canada,” American Periodicals 3 (1993): 6. 4 Ibid., 6.

were found in other popular forms of literature during the time under study and they would have influenced the people who participated in Lassandro’s trial.

Mountie novels like Benton of the Royal Mounted (1918), Bulldog Carney (1919), and the eight Renfrew of the Mounted novels published from 1922 to 1941 represented the struggles

Canadian society continued to experience as it modernized its economy and Canadianized its immigrants. These novels had little to do with the realities Mounties encountered.5 They positioned

British civility against uncivilized Indigenous peoples and rogue European immigrants who pushed back against the demands of the dominant class. The impact of these novels on how people viewed and interpreted the murder of Lawson cannot be quantified but they were overwhelmingly popular in Canada, as demonstrated by the publication of 150 Mountie novels between 1890 and

1940 and “the firm grasp of the popular fiction market” this genre had by the 1890s.6 Therefore, several factors and influences, separate from the actual murder, had a bearing on the public’s perception of Lassandro. In popular culture the dominant class ideals of order, peace, and modernity always replaced chaos, violence, and primitiveness.

Articles and editorials about Lawson’s murder attempted to create a sense of fear and personal connection by having readers superimpose their own family upon the Lawson family.

Newspapers also created suspense by continuously debating who fired the fatal shot, speculating on Picariello and Lassandro’s relationship, and publishing summarized trial testimony. Editors and journalists eagerly foisted their agenda upon their readership by choosing whose testimony and the specific parts of the testimony to publish. Newspapers screened the information that they believed the public wanted and needed to know and this information always broadcasted

5 Candida Rifkind, “When Mounties were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Renfrew of the Mounted,” English Studies in Canada 37, no. 3/4 (2012): 128. 6 Ibid., 126.

prejudiced attitudes. Lastly, newspapers increased interest in the trial by commenting on the oddity or novelty of the crime. It was not often that authorities charged a woman with murder¾the murder of a police officer was even more rare¾or that a southern European immigrant, like Picariello, acquired such incredible wealth in a relatively short time period. The Calgary Daily Herald pointed out that in just a few years Picariello evolved from a poor man who pedaled ice cream into a man who was worth over $200,000.7 This is a $300,000 difference compared to the claim made by Judge Walsh in his correspondence with the minister of justice. However, the papers ignored the reality that for many working-class immigrants, bootlegging and rumrunning were one of the only ways they could make enough money to improve their economic position, due to the racial and other discriminatory practices that occurred in local labour markets.8

Although newspaper editors were unable to tell the readers how to feel about Lassandro, they were excellent at telling them what to think about her threat to Canada’s nation-building project and her willingness to break normalized social and gender conventions. Readers devoured this information. Each week the Calgary Daily Herald published its circulation numbers, and as the story of the murder unfolded in their newspaper these numbers increased. In the week prior to the murder the public purchased 161,908 papers and by the end of the preliminary inquiry, during the first week of October, the recorded circulation was 168,073.9 Newspapers influenced the public’s perception of Lassandro.

The public forgot Lassandro’s story for approximately twenty years until the Government of Canada introduced the War Exchange Conservation Act in 1940, which banned the importation

7 “Picariello Still at Large, Though Police Confident of Effecting His Arrest Today,” Calgary Daily Herald, September 22, 1922. 8 Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003), 244. 9 “Circulation Of The Herald,” Calgary Daily Herald, September 22 and October 9, 1922.

of luxury goods into Canada from the United States. Included in the government’s ban were cheap magazines that contained “detective, sex, western, and alleged true or confession stories.”10

Canadian publishers quickly filled English-Canada’s desire for the magazines, and by 1945

Canadian companies produced so many pulp magazines that they began to export them. The true crime stories within the magazines, “featured edgy dialogue and gumshoe argot but they remained within, and helped to define, the boundaries of heterosexuality, the racist moral hierarchies, and the certitude of explicable crime.”11 Many of the stories were reinterpretations of famous crimes set in northern or western Canada where, according to Anglo-Saxon standards, Indigenous people and other ethnic groups were still not civilized. True crime magazines provided a platform for

Phillip Godsell to author a story using Lassandro that reaffirmed the otherness of Italian-Canadians and warned of their threat to the state during the war.

Three Strands of Nativism and Their Impact on Lassandro

Lassandro provided two confessions of her role in Lawson’s murder. Her first confession was not recorded by Scott upon her arrest, but her statement to APP Constable Moriarity, “He is dead and I am alive. That’s all that matters,”12 was widely scrutinized by the police, newspapers, and public. Lassandro gave a second confession a few days before her execution in which she claimed that Picariello pressured her into taking blame for the murder. The lack of importance given to her second confession is not surprising, for the same reasons the media chose to focus on her statement to Moriarity. Nativist beliefs dictated that Canadians could not trust Italians because

10 Statutes of Canada, 4-5 George VI, Chapter 2, “An Act Respecting the Conservation of Change,” 1940. Cited in Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, “From Hewers of Wood to Producers of Pulp: True Crime in Canadian Pulp Magazines of the 1940s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 12. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 “Report of Preliminary Trail,” Blairmore Enterprise, October 5, 1922; “Lasandro Woman Joked About Crime After Her Arrest by Sergeant Scott,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, October 2, 1922; The King vs Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro. -- 1922. -- Transcript of Evidence, Volume IV (461), M6840-364, pp. 634, McKinley Cameron fonds, The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta.

of their lawlessness, trickery, and lack of morals. Howard Palmer categorized three strands of nativism present in Alberta used to discredit and condemn immigrants’ morality: Anglo-Saxon, anti-Catholicism, and anti-radical nativism. The interconnectedness of all three nativist strands worked against Lassandro.

Lassandro was an immigrant from an ostracized group. If the court carried out her sentence it would act as a warning to other European immigrants that they needed to follow the laws of their adopted country. Reformers would not tolerate acts outside the social and moral codes, and if a person committed an incorrigible act the law would swiftly and fully punish the accused. If the government decided to commute her sentence to life in prison it would have further emblazoned the public’s belief in the lawlessness of the Pass and its rule by “foreigners.” Emily Murphy, who was a political and legal reformer, wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King that “If Mrs.

Lasandra [sic] escapes the extreme penalty of the law it must naturally follow that the murders of police officers will in the future be carried out by women instead of men. Many of these women are of weak mentality, and may easily become the tools or agents of outlaw liquor interests.”13

Furthermore, the crime and Lassandro’s impending execution helped the cause of reformers who demanded a more stringent pre-selection of immigrants because “many in the first place were not the of a type or class to succeed in this country.”14 The newspaper article, “Raising New Canadians

Through A Means Of A Broad Immigration Policy,” made it clear that Canadian authorities needed to be more selective of European immigrants. Its author claimed that 99 percent of the less desirable races who arrived on their own were immoral.15 Similar editorials written by reformers

13 Emily Murphy, January 2, 1923, Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta, Canada. 14 “The New Immigrant,” Blairmore Enterprise, September 28, 1922. 15 “Raising New Canadians Through A Means Of A Broad Immigration Policy,” Blairmore Enterprise, September 28, 1922.

were commonplace and they continued to demand increased background checks and the pre- selection of immigrants from the preferred races. This was especially true after 1918.

The social changes that occurred in interwar Canada alarmed many British-Canadians because female crime rates ran parallel to expanding opportunities for women. From 1922 to 1930 convictions of women increased by 65.3 percent and summary crime convictions of females sixteen years-of-age and older increased by 127 percent.16 Influential doctors and other experts claimed that areas with high immigrant populations faced higher crime rates, and that crimes committed by females were a result of their lack of emotional relationships, female role models, and their failure to accept their sexual and domestic role. Crime was likewise linked to a woman’s immorality and her mental defectiveness.17 The drastic rise in female crime alarmed Canadians; therefore, the law needed to make an example of Lassandro to warn other women about the consequences of stepping out of line. Joan Sangster argued that the image of a “liberated flapper” is the ideal but is not entirely correct. Those in power maintained the codes of sexuality; they did not disappear during the interwar period.18

The way Lassandro dressed and her after work activities did not suit a moral woman who was a domestic worker and caregiver. Her appearance compared to Lawson’s, at the crime scene, was a focus of many articles and remains a focus of recently published accounts. Newspapers reported that Lassandro wore a green coat and red tam-o’-shanter while the unarmed and unsuspecting Lawson only wore his underwear, breeches, gaiters, and boots. Lassandro’s clothing was important not only because it placed her at the crime scene. It was important for two other

16 D. Owen Carrigan, Crime and Punishment in Canada: A History (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 266. 17 Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario, 1920-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 135-137. 18 Ibid., 87.

reasons. First, it reminded the readers of Lawson’s vulnerability and the horrendousness of an attack perpetrated against a family man who laboured to protect society. Second, it pressed upon readers Lassandro’s attempt to act outside her social position. In her analysis of the trials of Clara

Ford and Carrie Davies, Carolyn Strange discussed the importance placed on the dress of murderers Clara Ford and Carrie Davies in news reports. Society felt that virtuous women wore practical clothing that conformed to their social position. Both women claimed they killed to protect their womanhood from upper-class men who had assaulted them. Ford often wore men’s clothes, so the public had a hard time believing her story. However, the public trusted Davies’ story because she dressed how a woman in her position¾a servant¾should dress.19 On 16

November 1899, the day of Hilda Blake’s murder trial, the Winnipeg Morning Telegram dedicated almost half of their coverage to her appearance. The article, “The Menial Attires Herself in Purple and Fine Linen,” implied that her dress did not match the seriousness of her crime nor her position in society.20 Lastly, throughout Marie-Anne Houde’s trial for the murder of her stepdaughter, journalists focused on her habit of wearing a black veil that she had to remove each time the prosecution asked a witness to identify her. Journalists wrote that she used it to hide her wicked personality.21 Even though all of these trials took place before Lassandro’s, Canada’s white middle-class continued to enforce the same morality laws.

Significantly, Lassandro drove a car, and authors have interpreted this in different ways.

Carrigan has argued that the public believed men used cars as tools to steal a woman’s virtue.22

19 Carolyn Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History, eds. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 162. 20 Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell, Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899 (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 143. 21 Peter Gossage, “La marâtre: Marie-Anne Houde and the Myth of the Wicked Stepmother in Quebec,” The Canadian Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1995): 575. 22 Carrigan, 265.

Anastakis discussed the automobile’s importance in creating Lassandro’s personality stating, “For a young woman like Filumena, and for so many women of her generation, driving the powerful

McLaughlin Six meant nothing less than a form of liberation, if not equality.”23 The automobile is used as a celebration of liberation in van Herk’s portrayal of Lassandro in “Driving towards

Death,” which I discuss in chapter three. Lassandro was often seen driving with men other than her husband, and her employer was a well-known and powerful rumrunner. Additionally, women drinking and smoking in public was increasingly common but linked to less virtuous women. It is important to remember that Lassandro’s place of employment was at Blairmore’s Alberta Hotel, where the Picariello family lived. Citizens who did not frequent the business would have speculated about her activities inside the hotel, which also housed Picariello’s fleet of cars and a bar.

The second strand of nativism in Alberta was anti-Catholicism. Lassandro was a devout

Catholic, and the Catholic chaplain who acted as her religious consul during her incarceration in the Fort Saskatchewan Penitentiary heard her new confession a few days before her execution. The degree to which her religion had an impact on the government’s decision not to commute her sentence will never be known; nor will the impact her religion played in the minds of the public.

But we know that it must have been on the minds of many, possibly to the extent that Albertans felt Father Fidelis influenced her to recant her original confession. A Lethbridge Daily Herald correspondent, who was in Ottawa the day before her execution reported, “The cabinet sees no ground for reversing its decision. Both were in the crime and both fired shots.”24 This statement is misleading, however, because it was never proven that Picariello fired a gun while Lassandro

23 Dimitry Anastakis, Death in the Peaceable Kingdom: Canadian History Since 1867 Through Murder, Execution, Assassination, and Suicide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 122. 24 “Will Not Interfere,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 1, 1923.

incorrectly identified the murder weapon she claimed she fired. On 2 May 1923, the day of her execution, the Lethbridge Daily Herald ran an article about the petitions the government received that supported the carrying out of Lassandro’s death sentence. The article emphasized:

While on the one hand, there were the customary pleas for clemency, especially in the case of the woman, petitions were also received, it is stated, urging that the law should be permitted to take its full course. Representatives against clemency are very unusual, especially in the case of a condemned woman, and the signatories in some cases were women.25 The WCTU never petitioned for Lassandro’s clemency, clearly because of the members’ nativist opinions. A comparison between Lassandro and Blake’s murder convictions justifies this argument.

Lassandro was the first woman hanged since 1899 when Blake, also a domestic servant, killed her matron Mary Lane in Brandon, Manitoba. The WCTU circulated a petition that pleaded for Blake’s clemency even though she confessed to the crime, pleaded guilty, and refused counsel.26 The orphaned Blake was a British immigrant brought to Canada by the Self-Help

Emigration Society, which was associated with The Church of England. Before she confessed to the murder, Blake acted on western Canadians’ nativist beliefs. Historians Kramer and Mitchell demonstrated that by claiming the murderer had a foreign accent and had “muttered a few words in a foreign language,” Hilda Blake, “added to the murderous wandering tramp, the equally incendiary image of the foreigner—of the tramp as a racial threat. It was common knowledge that immigrants to North America came here without proper gratitude or civility.”27 Since the WCTU was a middle-class, Anglo-Saxon society, they saw no reason to fight for Lassandro’s life. In fact,

Emily Murphy wrote a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King on 2 January 1923

25 “Petitions Both For and Against Hanging,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 2, 1923. 26 Knelman, 8. 27 Fulcher, 31-42. Cited in Kramer and Mitchell, 113.

stating, “Unless the police officers feel that they are supported by the Government in grappling with these desperate criminals…we cannot possibly hope to enforce our laws with any degree of effectiveness.”28 Later on, Murphy proclaimed, “I also desire to protest against the pernicious doctrine that because a person who commits a murder is a woman that person should escape from capital punishment.”29 For Murphy and other reformers, ethnicity, race, and religion were important factors in their consideration of whose clemency they should support.

It could be argued that the WCTU did not support Lassandro’s clemency because she was a rumrunner, which conflicted with one of the WCTU’s primary goals. However, it is important to remember that the WCTU had a history of supporting women’s clemency campaigns despite the murderers’ moral flaws. Secondly, when Lassandro recanted her original confession, claiming

Picariello framed her, one would think WCTU members would have rallied to support her, especially since a clergy member avowed her new claim.

Anti-radical nativism was the third strand of nativism in Alberta; 90 percent of the workers in the Crowsnest Pass were immigrants, and 14.5 percent of the immigrants were Italian.30 Miners in the Pass formed labour organizations to stop the erosion of their rights by English and French- managed mining companies. Segregation by class and ethnicity was very apparent in towns whose main industry was mining. British-Canadians maintained that their economic dominance had separated them from the poorly paid immigrant workers they employed or supervised.31 Between

1918 and 1922 mineworkers in Drumheller, Lethbridge, and the Crowsnest Pass led province-wide

28 Emily Murphy, January 2, 1923, Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta, Canada. 29 Ibid. 30 Howard Palmer, Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1985), 76. 31 Ibid., 74.

militant strike actions.32 Lassandro and Picariello’s execution, even though neither was a miner, sent a warning to the larger immigrant population that British-Canadians were not going to tolerate subversive behaviour. The Pass would not be a region in which immigrants dictated social, economic, and political realities. It was an area that was an integral part of the national-building project. Even if immigrants from undesirable nations became Canadianized, the dominant class still viewed them as subordinate citizens.

The Portrayal of Immigrants in Alberta Newspapers

In her historical fiction account of Canadian murderer Grace Marks, Margaret Atwood pens a poignant reflection that pertains to this study. Atwood wrote that Marks pondered why no written account ever included her view, but instead focused on the testimony of outsiders. Marks declared to her doctor, who is curious about her conviction: “You won’t believe me, Sir, I say.

Anyways it’s all been decided…and what I say will not change anything. You should ask the lawyers and the judges, and the newspaper men, they seem to know the story better than I do myself.”33 Lassandro most likely felt the same way, since her attorney called neither on her nor on

Picariello to testify in their inquiry or trial. In fact, the defence called no witnesses to the shock of the prosecution and the public. Thus, Lassandro’s lawyer did not allow her to tell her story; instead, others put words in her mouth, making it even more difficult for historians to accurately reconstruct her life.

What we can understand from the newspaper articles published around the time of the murder is the disdain Albertans had for the accused. From August 1920 until the end of the trial

32“ALHI Provincial Timeline,” Alberta Labour History Institute, last modified January 12, 2005, http://albertalabourhistory.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ALHITimeline2005.pdf. 33 Atwood, 41.

there were numerous articles that sought to turn public opinion against Lassandro and Picariello.

Mr. Dillingham, the editor of the Blairmore Enterprise, wrote an opinion piece on the heels of the

Bellevue Café murders, which also involved the killing of police officers by eastern European immigrants who had unsuccessfully tried to rob Picariello. In his editorial titled “Stand Up For

The Law,” Dillingham dictated how important it was for Canadians to follow the law. He feared

Canada would become a lawless nation like the United States. However, Dillingham felt confident this would not happen because Anglo-Canadians possessed cool heads and followed laws, not like

Americans who relied on mob-justice and lynching because of the “lack of public confidence in the machinery of justice.”34 In the same edition, the article “The Lessons of the Crows’ Nest Pass” admonished the foreign population—mostly Italians and Austrians—of Bellevue, Coleman,

Hillcrest, and Blairmore who outnumbered the Anglophone population, for their lawlessness. The unknown author, who originally published their opinion in the Macleod Times on 19 August 1920, stated that the foreign population had complete disregard for the law and that a more direct and forceful application of the law was the only way to maintain order in the district. Furthermore, the author claimed the Bellevue Café murderers’ “lawless natures were only impelled to greater lawlessness when they saw the law being so openly violated” and the authorities doing so little to stop it.35

Dillingham’s negative attitude towards the Pass reappeared in 1922 when, as the editor of the Innisfail Province, he wrote an editorial shortly after Lassandro and Picariello’s preliminary inquiry. He once again depicted the area as a beehive of illegal and immoral activity. This editorial, entitled “Responsibilities of Citizenship,” received harsh criticism from a Crowsnest Pass resident

34“Stand Up For The Law,” Blairmore Enterprise, August 26, 1920. 35 “The Lesson of The Crows’ Nest Pass,” Blairmore Enterprise, August 26, 1920.

who protested, “It is very annoying to old residents of this district that such unjust remarks are given such undue prominence in a newspaper such as you published and which undoubtedly has a large circulation…In fact it is deplorable to think that such articles would appear in any paper anywhere.”36 The unknown author of the letter to the editor was incensed because he worried that no unbiased jury member would be found due to the slanderous material newspapers published.

Mr. Fabro, an Italian-Canadian citizen, also wrote a scathing reply pointing out the absurdity and irony of the following comment made by Dillingham: “One must consider the larger part of the population of Blairmore is foreign born, whose standards of morality are lower than many of the beasts of the field.”37 Fabro accused Dillingham of buying liquor from bootleggers and reminded him of the “British traditions of fair play and justice.”38 If Dillingham believed in fair play and justice, these traditions only applied to those at the top of the hierarchy. Albertans who promoted nativism were in the majority, unlike Fabro and the unknown author.39

Historian Karen Dubinsky contended that anti-immigrant attacks published in newspapers were common. Dubinsky argued, “In crime reporting, the racial or ethnic background of protagonists was made prominent in the matter ranging from the patronizing to the vicious. The exception to this rule was when crimes were committed by Anglo-Saxons.”40 A day before

Lawson’s murder, the Blairmore Enterprise ran a story titled “Alien Drug Traffic,” which supported deporting immigrants whom the courts convicted of a drug offense. The public viewed

36 “Responsibilities of Citizenship,” Blairmore Enterprise, October 12, 1922. 37 “Italian Citizen Replies To Dillingham,” Blairmore Enterprise, October 12, 1922. 38 Ibid. 39 I could not locate Mr. Dillingham’s original articles “Responsibilities of Citizenship” and “Hell’s Kitchen” published on Thursday, September 28, 1922, in the Innisfail Province. The Glenbow Archives microfiche is missing editions from 14 September to 5 October 1922, as is the University of Calgary’s copy. The Glenbow Archive’s Librarian informed me that this is likely the case for all copies of the microfiche since the same company produces them. 40 Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 139-40.

drug dealers, as well as those who used the drugs, as criminals, and the enforcement of drug laws focused on imprisoning rather than treating offenders. The article described the increased drug use in Canada and announced that the police had arrested numerous doctors, druggists, and veterinarians. The article did not mention the offender’s ethnicity, only their profession, because they were valuable members of a modern Canadian society. However, the article made it clear that authorities had arrested 634 Chinese men.41 Although the Blairmore article did not directly identify

Italians, the author established that immigrants were to blame for the attack on Canadian morality.

An article published soon about the murder of an Anglo-Saxon police officer, war hero, and family man by suspected Italian rumrunners would have increased the tension between and abhorrence for certain immigrants by the dominant class. The same year, Emily Murphy’s The Black Candle exacerbated the public’s dislike of immigrants by linking white slavery to undesirable immigrants, in particular Chinese men, who provided drugs to white women.

Formulaic Murder Reports and Lassandro’s Persona The study of newspaper reports reveals much about societal concerns. Sociologist James

Fulcher’s study of articles written about vigilante murders in California during the 1850s showed that murder reports were formulaic because they always mentioned the weapons that criminals used, the witnesses, and the race and ethnicity of the accused and the murdered. Interestingly, the reporting also followed a set of stages. First, reports stressed the shocking nature of the murder and the nationalities of the murdered and the accused. Next, reports of the inquest focused on the cause of death and reiterated the victim’s and the accused’s nationality. Third, they reported the trial. Trial testimony made up the bulk of the report and, of course, again mentioned the ethnic and racial background of the people involved. Fourth, journalists reported on the sentence, including

41 “Alien Drug Traffic,” Blairmore Enterprise, September 21, 1922.

the judge’s opinion regarding immigrants. Last, newspapers published articles about calls for clemency.42 To make readers feel more engaged in the case, journalists used a combination of

“identification, suspense, and interest.”43 The articles written about Lawson’s murder and

Lassandro and Picariello’s subsequent trial followed these same five stages and used the same journalistic tools to magnify reader engagement.

On 5 October 1922, the Blairmore Enterprise created suspense in the minds of the readers of what was about to unfold in a rare murder case involving a police officer and a foreign female murderer when it announced, “The largest gathering in the history of the Pass was present to hear the proceedings.”44 The emotions of citizens who were in the Blairmore Opera House for the preliminary inquiry were prominently featured. The journalist reported that the crowd cheered loudly after Crown Prosecutor McGillivray fervently stated to Lassandro and Picariello’s lawyer that “[he] would not stand for any witnesses being bullied.”45 Constable Moriarity added to the case’s oddity when he testified that during her arrest Lassandro stated, “He’s dead, I’m alive— that’s all there is to it.”46 Furthermore, when she ate supper that night, Moriarity asserted that

Lassandro was “very giddy and laughed and talked,” forcing him to remind her of the seriousness of her charge.47

Journalists frequently referred to Lassandro as Picariello’s daughter or his paramour; others said that she was Steve Picariello’s wife, his nursemaid, or his paramour; and some correctly identified her as the wife of Charles Lassandro. The fuddling of her physical and familial identity

42 Fulcher, 32-35. 43 Ibid., 35. 44 “Report of Preliminary Trial.” 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid.

was common in the Calgary Daily Herald. An article published a day after the murder referred to

Lassandro as Picariello’s daughter but later in the same report called her Picariello’s wife as well as the wife of Charles Lassandro, her actual husband, who the police had in custody for questioning.48 The paper carried the identity crisis into the next day’s edition too, once again incorrectly identifying her as Picariello’s daughter but correctly identifying her as Charles

Lassandro’s wife.49 The suspense created in the minds of the readers as they contemplated who

Lassandro was would have only supported those who questioned her morality.

The everlasting influence newspaper reports had on readers was well documented in memory and oral history projects completed approximately sixty years after the trial. Residents of the Pass continued to contest Lassandro’s personal life long after her death and often made it the focus of their interpretation; they clouded out all other factors. Memories recorded in the

Crowsnest Pass Museum’s oral history project Talking with History, produced in the 1980s, demonstrated this as some continued to refer to her as “Pic’s girlfriend.”50 The 1989 ManTrip

Project, a second oral history project that documented life in the Crowsnest Pass, also featured interviews with locals who speculated about Lassandro’s personal life. On 23 October 1989, Gloria

Baker interviewed Mary Yates for the project. On the day of the murder, Yates was taking her baby to Coleman’s hospital, which shared a laneway with the APP barracks. On her approach to the hospital she noticed the accused and Lawson talking, and after she entered the hospital she heard gunshots.51 Yates, who testified in Calgary during the trial, believed that Lassandro married

48 “Picariello Still At Large, Though Police Confident of Effecting His Arrest Today.” 49 “Picariello Surrenders Meekly To Police When Found; Story Of Crime,” Calgary Daily Herald, September 23, 1922. 50 Interviews with Ed Ledieu and Mr. and Mrs. Harrison, 1984, Talking With History, Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta. 51 Mary Yates, 1989, ManTrip Project, Crowsnest Pass Eco-Museum Trust Society, Bellevue, Alberta.

Picariello but “could not swear to it.”52 Yates hesitantly talked about the relationship because she did not want to “harm the Picariello family.”53 She still subscribed to nativist beliefs, albeit by defending Picariello and Lassandro, stating, “You know the Italian people are really hot-headed.”54

Mildred Holstead cautiously claimed that Lassandro and Picariello were expecting a child “but I don’t know.”55 This could not have been true since the government spared children, the elderly, the insane, and pregnant women from execution.56 For example, Angelina Napolitano was seven months pregnant when she killed her husband with an axe in 1911. Before the jury began to deliberate the judge informed them that if they found her guilty she would not hang until after giving birth.57 Later, her pregnancy was the leading factor in her death sentence being commuted to life in prison. Similarly, Marie-Anne Houde had her death sentence commuted after she gave birth to twins in prison. Clemency campaigners successfully argued that it was inhumane to hang a nursing mother.58 The testimony of Yates, Holstead, Ledieu, and the Harrisons is not surprising because the muddling of the relationship status of accused and convicted female murderers was common. During Clara Ford’s trial, in 1894, the public created a romantic melodrama, popular in the theatres at the time, by imagining the possible motives for the murder, which must have included love, jealousy, or revenge.59 Likewise, decades of portrayals of Lassandro in popular culture have skewed her memorialization by focusing on her intimate life. Her ethnicity, religion, and gender has helped to shape this construction.

52 Mary Yates. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Mildred Holstead, 1989, ManTrip Project, Crowsnest Pass Eco-Museum Trust Society, Bellevue, Alberta. 56 Carolyn Strange, “Stories of Their Lives: The Historian and the Capital Case File” in On the Case: Explorations in Social History, eds. Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 33. 57 Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911-1922,” The Canadian Historical Review 71, no. 4 (December 1991): 515. 58 Gossage, 571. 59 Strange, “Wounded Womanhood and Dead Men: Chivalry and the Trials of Clara Ford and Carrie Davies,” 157.

When Lassandro withdrew her original confession, she claimed that Picariello convinced her to take the blame because the authorities would never hang a woman. The newspapers reported her confession but dismissed it as a last-minute attempt to save herself even though Father Fidelis had sent a telegram to the minister of justice that proclaimed he was “absolutely convinced of innocence of Florence Lassandro.”60 Fidelis, along with the Attorney General J.E. Brownlee, heard her new confession on 28 April 1923, four days before her execution. In his study of crime and punishment in Canada, Carrigan explained that historically Canadians believed women were not

“naturally criminal” and that women who committed murder suffered from a “moral failing or character defect.”61 Failings or defects included alcoholism, prostitution, or having affairs with multiple men. Popular culture has cast Lassandro as an adulterer, and even though there is no evidence that the public thought she was an alcoholic, she was a bootlegger’s apprentice. As a result, her word was suspect and, additionally, open to manipulation by Picariello, especially if she was suspected of being in an illicit sexual relationship with him.

Newspaper publishers made it easy for readers to identify with Constable Lawson’s murder by emphasizing his family’s heartbreak and by contrasting the loss of a valuable member of

Alberta’s society to the increased number of undesirable immigrants. A day after the murder a

Calgary Daily Herald report focused on the tragedy of nine-year-old Pearl witnessing the murder of her father who “was English, and a fearless military officer for the Fort Garry Horse and a war hero.”62 The author also highlighted the emotional attachment women attendees at the trial had with the Lawson family, to underscore the cruelty of the accused Italian murderers. When the

Herald chose to publish the testimony of Lawson’s thirteen-year-old daughter Peggy, it

60 Father Fidelis, April 28, 1923, The Crowsnest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta, Canada. 61 Carrigan, 478. 62 “Picariello Still At Large, Though Police Confident Of Effecting His Arrest Today.”

highlighted her breakdown on the witness stand and the palpable reaction of the “scores of women” who had to use handkerchiefs “to stop the welling of tears.”63 When Mrs. Lawson took the stand the reporter described her as being very nervous while the “prisoners broke down and cried.”64

The press interpreted the prisoners’ emotional reaction as a sign of guilt. Other reports identified

Lassandro and Picariello as “Italians” and that some residents of the Pass had attempted to stand up to his lawlessness but suffered retributions.65 However, the public had nothing to fear because law would be re-established. The reporter’s tone made it easy for readers to distinguish between citizens who stood for justice versus those who pandered to Picariello.66

It was easy for journalists to stress Lawson’s role as a protector of society. An article published on 28 September 1922 pronounced that Lawson’s murder was a response to him enforcing The Alberta Liquor Act. It identified Picariello as “The King of Bootleggers,” who made his entire fortune by bootlegging.67 This created further resentment towards the accused. The article recounted the entire lead up to the murder in riveting detail. Reports like this one helped to publicly convict the accused before their trial even began. News reports created so much bias that the defence demanded the trial be moved to Edmonton.68 Yet, Edmonton’s Morning Bulletin reported on Emily Murphy’s 27 September visit to the city’s Kiwanis Club, six days after the

63 “Little Daughter Of S.O. Lawson Testifies In The Picariello Murder Trial,” Calgary Daily Herald, November 28, 1922. 64 “Report Of Preliminary Trial.” 65 “Picariello Still At Large, Though Police Confident Of Effecting His Arrest Today.” 66 Ibid. 67 “APP Constable Murdered At Coleman,” Blairmore Enterprise, September 28, 1922. 68 File 79.285/2 located in the Alberta Provincial Archives contains several affidavits in support of moving the trial to Edmonton. Macleod resident George Skelding testified to the great amount of prejudice and bias in the community due to articles published in the Calgary and Lethbridge papers. MLA Phillip Christophers said that several mobs in Blairmore were looking to settle the score. Alexander Morrison of Coleman claimed there was great bitterness and resentment towards the accused. The Mayor of Pincher Creek and the Mayor of Blairmore testified of the hatred towards the accused in their towns. Several other residents from Lethbridge, Stavely, Nanton, Claresholm, Granum, Bellevue, Hillcrest, and Lundbreck also wrote affidavits in support. The court finally decided that the trial would be held in Calgary because they deemed the cost of bringing more than thirty witnesses to Edmonton was too expensive. Also, the court believed that citizens of Calgary were less bias because of their distance from the crime scene.

murder, where she said, “Unless we put a stop to [drugs], the Anglo-Saxon race is doomed.”69

Murphy reasoned, “Ninety percent of all drug addicts are Anglo-Saxons, while 90 percent of the peddlers are foreigners.”70 Even if the court had moved the trial to Edmonton, negative feelings towards the accused and the immigrant community would have been present there too.

Throughout the preliminary inquiry and subsequent trial, journalists’ interpretations of

Lassandro’s physical features and mental state attempted to elicit negative reactions from the paper’s audience. Journalists transitioned from describing Lassandro’s arrogant confidence in

September to recounting her emotional strain and utter collapse by December. Before the preliminary hearing, the police detained Lassandro in Calgary’s jail. When she arrived, Calgary’s

Daily Herald described her as “dark and sharped featured” but unnaturally and improperly

“talkative and decidedly perky” even though she had just committed a murder.71 Furthermore, her independence was celebrated because she did not listen to the “despondent and cowed” Picariello, who had supposedly ordered her to remain silent.72 However, the newspaper disregarded the information she provided to the police as extraneous; thus, legitimizing her as a secondary and ignorant protagonist while at the same time emasculating Picariello. In contrast, Lassandro’s independent nature was not celebrated on the first day of her trial. Instead, reports described her as a “pale and worn” woman who “did not speak…except to answer, ‘Not guilty.’”73 On 4

December when Judge Walsh sentenced Lassandro, she “faced the judge bravely, though it was apparent by the manner she clutched the rail, that she was suffering from the deepest emotion.”74

69 “Drugs Threaten Country States Judge E. Murphy,” Morning Bulletin (Edmonton), September 27, 1922. 70 Ibid. 71 “Mrs. Lassandro, Murder Suspect, Is Brought Here,” Calgary Daily Herald, September 25, 1922. 72 Ibid. 73 “Jury Is Secured In Trial Of Picariello And Mrs. F. Lassandro, Accused Of Murder,” Calgary Daily Herald, November 27, 1922. 74 “Picariello and Lassandro Sentenced To Be Hanged On February Twenty-first,” Calgary Daily Herald, December 4, 1922.

Later that day on her way to the Ft. Saskatchewan Jail, she “sobbed audibly.”75 Lassandro’s demonstration of sorrow and remorse helped to further legitimize her sentence because it proved her guilt. She was no longer the carefree braggart that journalists reported in the news, when she first confessed her guilt to Moriarity and Scott.

In addition, the profile pictures newspapers printed of the accused supported claims of their devious and mysterious nature. The two accused wore dark clothing and the lighting obscured their facial features. The undated picture of Lassandro that appeared in the newspaper a day after her arrest showed her with what could interpreted as a death grin, since the editor located it beside an article that claimed “she laughed at the police when they arrived” to arrest her.76 The same article included a picture of Lawson staring directly into the camera as if he had nothing to hide. All his facial features were clearly distinguishable, and his uniform added to his importance and the community’s sense of sorrow (see figure 3).77 Lassandro’s appearance in her mugshot is very different compared to her earlier profile picture. In her mugshot Lassandro showed care for her appearance, and her expression depicted her acceptance of her fate. It is as if the mugshot exposed her true character.

75 “Picariello and Lassandro Sentenced To Be Hanged On February Twenty-first.” 76 “Picariello Surrenders Meekly To Police When Found: Story Of Crime,” Calgary Daily Herald, September 23, 1922. 77 Editors published the pictures on the front page of 23 September 1922 edition of the Calgary Daily Herald, the 25 September 1922 edition of the Lethbridge Daily Herald, the 4 December 1922 Lethbridge Herald article announcing that “The Slayers Of Constable Lawson Both Found Guilty Of Murder,” and the 2 May 1923 Lethbridge Herald, which reported that the justice system carried out the execution.

Figure 3. Calgary Daily Herald, September 23, 1922.

When the six male jury members, all of whom were Masons, announced the verdict of guilty, newspapers celebrated justice’s victory. The Calgary Daily Herald reported that Judge

Walsh congratulated the jury, saying, “I must express concurrence with your verdict. If any other decision had been reached, it would in my opinion, have been a grave miscarriage of justice.”78

On the front-page of 4 December edition of the Daily Herald, Attorney General Brownlee expressed great pleasure with the verdict and bragged about the swiftness of the Canadian justice system because it only took nine weeks from their arrest to their sentencing. Brownlee pronounced,

“It is believed that the death sentence upon the offenders in the present case will impress upon

78 “Picariello and Lassandro Sentenced to Be Hanged On February Twenty-first.”

other lawbreakers or would-be lawbreakers the fact that it is the government’s intention to carry out the law of the land.”79 Albertans not only witnessed strong support for the verdict in the newspapers but also in other public spaces. On 6 December 1922, Fernie lawyer Sherwood

Herchmer wrote a letter to Lassandro and Picariello’s lawyer, J. McKinley Cameron, that recounted his post-trial train trip from Calgary to Fernie. While on the train Herchmer overheard several men in the smoker car who declared “as far as the public of Calgary were concerned the verdict was a very popular one, and one of them claimed to have been in the Allen theatre [sic] when the result of the trial was thrown on the screen and claimed there was not a person in the audience who did not vociferously applaud.”80 Now the public only had to wait for news reports of the convicted murderers’ execution.

“I Forgive You All”: News Reports of the Execution

In 1869 John A. Macdonald, who was both prime minister and minister of justice, recommended abolishing public executions in Canada. The Cabinet enacted Macdonald’s recommendations in an Order-in-Council. Since executions were no longer a public spectacle the government still needed to include the public in the execution or else the performance’s message would become irrelevant. Therefore, the government allowed a small number of respectable citizens to attend hangings, so they could help to communicate the event to a wider audience.

Reporters used the testimony of these pillars of society as well as their own imagination to fill the void by providing the readership with vivid details that made them feel as if they were there.81

79 “Picariello Trial Will Be Lesson To Lawbreakers,” Calgary Daily Herald, December 4, 1922. 80 McKinley Cameron fonds, The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 81 Ken Leyton-Brown, The Practice of Execution in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 8-10. Leyton-Brown ignored the public execution of eight Indigenous men on 27 November 1885 at Fort Battleford. The government hanged them for their role in the Frog Lake killings during the 1885 Resistance. Sarah Carter argued that their hangings were also meant to “convey a clear message as to who was now completely in control.” See Sarah Carter,

The depiction of Lassandro at the beginning of May 1923 was choreographed to meet the public’s expectations of an execution as a legitimate restoration of order. As Macdonald hoped, the press actively warned those who felt they did not need to adapt to Canadian values and lifestyles, and those who challenged the power structure, of the consequences. Leyton-Brown’s study of executions in Canada demonstrated that each hanging “reinforced an existing social order and existing power relations…Society was reconstituted in a very intended way each time an execution took place.”82 Newspapers followed the condemned from their confession until a physician signed the Certificate of Execution. The certificate was the last piece of evidence, which confirmed for the public, that the government hanged the right person.

In murder cases, it was important that the courts attained a confession at some point prior to the prisoner’s death. At first Lassandro satisfied this need by confessing shortly after her arrest.

The testimony of several witnesses made it clear that Lassandro was in Picariello’s car when the murder occurred. Her defence lawyer did not argue this point. News reports published from

September to the first week of December established that not only were the guilty in custody but that they had accepted their fate. If the government acknowledged Lassandro’s new confession, given days before her execution, it would have been unsettling because the public would have questioned the mechanics of a purportedly superior justice system. Accordingly, it is understandable why the government and newspapers interpreted Lassandro’s second confession as a last-ditch attempt to save her life.

When Lethbridge’s Daily Herald reported her new confession, the word “confession” appeared in quotation marks, which illustrated their skepticism. Second, to further dissuade public

“Turning Point: 1885 and After” in Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 150-175. 82 Leyton-Brown, 8.

sympathy for Lassandro, the paper interviewed Mrs. Filafilo, whom Lassandro said would corroborate her new statement, and found out that she had nothing new to add to the case. But the newspaper still used the chance of clemency to sell its product. Their front page headline broadcasted: “Mrs. Lassandro In State Of Utter Collapse In Death Cell.”83 The accompanying article conveyed the excitement in the “little village of Fort Saskatchewan” as well as “the fever pitch throughout the province” and that “the tension under which the sheriff and the jailors are labouring has become acute.”84 On the day of the execution, the Lethbridge Daily Herald ran an article about the Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association’s final appeal to Prime Minister

Mackenzie King in which the Association argued that the hanging of a woman was a “revolting spectacle.”85 The newspaper countered the Association’s argument by informing the public that the hangman was well experienced having previously hanged two people and that the sheriff

“received a number of applications for the position of executioner.”86 This was a clear attempt to calm the public’s fear of Lassandro suffering a slow and painful death while also validating her execution because a large segment of the population still believed in her guilt.

The Lethbridge Daily Herald praised the swiftness and righteousness of the justice system a day after the execution when it boldly announced, “LAW TAKES ITS COURSE --- LAWSON

MURDER IS EXPIATED.” Even though the correspondent reported that Lassandro pleaded

“Picariello lied” until the very end, they also focused on “her wild eyes” and that “the hanging went without a hitch” as “both prisoners went to their death in good mental and physical condition and the woman seemed to have the most fortitude and vitality. Both ate a normal breakfast and

83 “Mrs. Lassandro In State Of Utter Collapse In Death Cell,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 1, 1923. 84 Ibid. 85 “SHOULD NOT HANG A WOMAN,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, April 30, 1923. The Association was okay with Picariello being hanged. 86 Ibid.

spent a good night.”87 Then, “just before the trap was sprung she forgave everybody.”88 To further legitimize the punishment the media made it known that a small number of respectable members of society were present at the execution.

Oddly, a second melodramatic version of the hanging also appeared in the paper that officially cemented the legitimization of the hanging for the public. Suspense was created when the reporter reminded the readers of “the gruesome bungle” that took place the last time a hanging occurred at the jail. However, they also assured the readers that Lassandro would not suffer since her professional hangman was using a “double noose.”89 Yet again, the newspaper repeated that the pair met their “fate with fortitude,” and as Picariello walked towards the scaffold that “drop of about eight feet” his “eyes followed the flight of the birds” as they flew out of the prison yard.90

The drama continued as “the rope, yellow and new, swung idly in the vagrant breeze. ‘Ha, ha,’ the grisely [sic] scaffold seemed to laugh. ‘Come here, all you who are tired of life. Here is death— death sudden and sure. ‘Mount, mount, and ride.’”91 Still, “neither prisoner offered the least resistance when their hands were tied and the black caps fitted” with Lassandro uttering “I am ready.”92 The reporter questioned Picariello’s masculinity by making sure the readers knew that

Lassandro “showed more vitality in spite of her frail figure, taking eleven minutes to expire” compared to Picariello who only took “ten minutes.”93 Her vitality proved that she was not a normal woman, and his lack of vitality showed that he was not a vigorous man. Their acceptance

87 “’Pic, He Lied, And Lied, And Lied!’” and “’Is There Anyone Here Who Has Any Pity?’ Last Words of Mrs. Lassandro,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 2, 1923. 88 “‘Is There Anyone Here Who Has Any Pity?’ Last Words of Mrs. Lassandro.” 89 “Another Version of the Hanging,” Lethbridge Daily Herald, May 2, 1923. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid.

of their fate proved that the law tried and punished the correct people to atone for the brutal slaying of an unassuming Anglo-Saxon patriarch.

Lethbridge’s newspaper showed the most interest in the execution whereas the Calgary

Daily Herald and the Blairmore Enterprise published fewer but similar reports. Not much was different in these papers as they followed the same themes of the unquestionable power of the law and its restoration, the legitimization of the hanging, the instantaneous death of the condemned, and retribution for a cruel and unprovoked murder.94 Approximately a month after Lassandro’s death the Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association published their own account of her execution.

Their account framed Lassandro as a victim because of her gender but made no connection between her ethnicity and the hanging.

The Portrayal of Lassandro in the Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association’s (CPWA) Pamphlet “Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down”

The purpose of the CPWA, formed in 1919, was to better the lives of prisoners by giving them a voice and by providing them with financial assistance. The goals of the association were: the ending of the death penalty in Canada; the introduction of an International Charter for

Prisoners; the payment of fair wages for prisoners’ labour; the creation of adult probation; and juvenile court systems, and to take “up individual cases of outstanding importance.”95 In February

1922, the CPWA petitioned for Lassandro’s clemency because her trial fit under two of their goals: the abolishment of the death penalty and that it was an unprecedented case. The CPWA wrote two letters, one to the Canadian Minister of Justice Gouin and a second to Member of Parliament

94 “Picariello and Lassandro Die on Gallows; Say Innocent,” Calgary Daily Herald, May 2, 1923; “Picariello and Mrs. Lassandro are Hanged,” Blairmore Enterprise, May 3, 1923. 95 Charles A. Mullen and John Kidman, “The Howard League in the Dominions: Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 2, no. 4 (June 1929): 362-364.

Walter Mitchell, who represented the riding in Montreal where the CPWA’s office was located.

Both letters stressed the organization’s repugnance for Lassandro’s death sentence and their hope that the government would soon abolish capital punishment.96

Even though the CPWA was one of the few groups that publicly lobbied on behalf of

Lassandro, its lack of acknowledgement of her religion and ethnicity as contributing factors to her execution demonstrated that they too were only concerned with using her as a tool to create their idealized Canadian society. They compared the public’s reaction to Lassandro’s hanging to the reaction of a recent hanging in Britain that caused mass outrage. However, the CPWA failed to differentiate between hanging an Anglo-Saxon woman in Britain and hanging an Italian immigrant in Canada. The British public’s outrage was solely based on the gender of the executed whereas the lack of reaction in Canada was a result of Anglo-Saxon values.

“Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down,” written after Lassandro’s execution, depicted Lassandro as a victim of a barbaric justice system that continued to use the death penalty to control its population. It also described her as a victim of her ethnicity. In a letter written to Lassandro’s lawyer, J. McKinley Cameron on 28 May 1923, the secretary of the CPWA, John Kidman, stated,

“I have drawn up some material in which we stress the sentimental side of the hanging of this woman, and would like your legal advice on the safety and the wisdom of making some of the statements.”97 Kidman also noted that the information the CPWA used to create their pamphlet came from a hired reporter. The reporter based their story on the testimony of a railway employee, who claimed he watched Lassandro’s execution from atop a railway car. Lastly, Kidman confessed

96 Robert Bickerdike and John Kidman to Walter G. Mitchell, February 13, 1923 and John Kidman to Sir Lomer Gouin, February 15, 1923. The Crownest Museum and Archives, Coleman, Alberta, Canada; 97 John Kidman to J. McKinley Cameron, May 28, 1923. McKinley Cameron fonds, The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

that some of the claims made in the pamphlet were false such as “the woman had cocaine injected into her before the ordeal.”98 Therefore, it is clear that the CPWA gave little consideration to the accurate portrayal of Lassandro, nor did it attempt to reveal her authentic voice. The organization used her story to provoke a public outcry that they hoped would help them accomplish their goals.

The CPWA blamed Lassandro’s execution on a justice system dominated by men, the failure of women reformers in Alberta to protest the death penalty, and all other Canadians who idly stood by as the barbaric event took place. While it is true that she was a victim in many ways, the CPWA also stereotyped her as a weak, tragic, and ignorant “little Italian woman.”99 In contrast to the newspapers, which described her acceptance of her fate, the pamphlet stated that a physician had to inject cocaine into her veins before her executioners could drag the “pathetic and lonely figure” to the gallows.100 The morose narration continued as they described Lassandro seeing her empty coffin and the coffin in which Picariello lay, how Picariello had duped and threatened her into confessing the murder, and how her parents forced her to become a “little child-wife.”101 The underlying message was that if Canada was going to remain one of the Empire’s civilized nations, it had to uphold its Christian values and align its morals with Britain’s changing morals. Shortly after her execution, the public forgot Lassandro’s story. Approximately twenty years later these themes would reappear and reiterate the importance of maintaining Anglo-Canada’s sense of social harmony and moral values, in the form of pulp magazines.

98 John Kidman to J. McKinley Cameron. 99 The Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association, “Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down,” McKinley Cameron fonds, The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid.

“Murder In The Crow’s Nest”: The Depiction of Florence Lassandro in a 1940s Canadian Pulp Magazine

True crime stories became a popular form of entertainment for Canadians in the 1940s because they allowed Canadians to forget the hardships of the previous decade’s economic depression and the new realities of a wartime Canada. Many of the stories retold famous crimes from Canada’s past by following a formulaic pattern of a police chase, a trial summary, the inevitable outcome of a guilty verdict, and ultimately the hanging of the convicted criminal, which

“restored social harmony and reset moral values.”102 Additionally, authors enlivened their stories by adding a large dollop of sex to the violence.103 The murder of Constable Lawson fit all the elements needed to attract readers, making the publisher and the author a fine profit. Canadian true crime writer Philip Godsell did not miss his opportunity. Income was the primary motivation for

Godsell, but his story also re-established nativist beliefs and reaffirmed to Canadians the relative safety of their own country in the face of the brutalities overseas. However, Godsell warned readers that Italian-Canadians still remained a threat to the nation, as did the possible influx of wartime refugees.

In 1943, the pulp magazine Feature Detective Cases published Godsell’s story “Murder in the Crow’s Nest Pass.” Godsell played heavily on the stereotypes Canadians still held about immigrants, such as their sinful nature, animal like characteristics, and their primitiveness in comparison to English-Canadians. In his story, the police only included men from stalwart backgrounds who felt bound by duty and personal conviction to keep Canadians safe. Godsell wrote, “Respectable women, forced to live in this hotbed of iniquity, dare not venture from their

102 Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004), 6. 103 Ibid., 9.

homes at night.”104 The lawmen tamed the uncivilized fringe regions of Canada using their pronounced detective instincts, which allowed no criminal to feel secure. The murder of a police officer for revenge was one of the greatest social evils, and cop-killers could only expect “state vengeance, in the form of imprisonment and execution.”105 The police and the courts could use violence because it was for the greater good of society.

Godsell began by reminding Canadians of the beauty of the Rocky Mountains but also of the criminal European races that used to lurk within its “saw-toothed” jaws.106 He described

Cossack and Sicilian men who had previously lived there as “dark eyed, soft-spoken gangsters” who were “crafty and lecherous” and “hatchet-faced.”107 He claimed the “gorilla-like” Picariello had made his money by “assuaging the thirsts of the hordes of foreign-born labourers toiling in the mines with bootleg hootch and pandering to their hot-blooded desires,” and that the “entire foreign population was hand in glove with the racketeers.”108 Like many people in this time period, true crime writers used Social Darwinist theories that linked a person’s physical appearance to their behavior and their race. Such damning dialogue would have only reinvigorated social tensions and fears by recertifying Anglo-Canadians’ distaste for certain European groups, while at the same time reminding the targeted groups that they did not belong in Canada. Godsell wrote his story for a specific segment of the population, and his words warned them of the possible influx of wartime immigrants into Canada. Although Godsell and other authors crudely stereotyped immigrant men

104 Philip Godsell, “Murder In The Crow’s Nest,” Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. M433-177 n.d., 15. 105 Strange and Loo, 17. 106 Godsell, 1. 107 Ibid., 7-12. 108 Ibid., 2.

as violent criminals, they went even further and typecast immigrant women not only villains but as ravenous flirts who used their sexuality to denigrate Canadian society.

The portrayal of Lassandro was different compared to European men because it took on this added dimension, not present in earlier newspaper reports. Godsell not only cast Lassandro as a villain but also as a vixen who attempted to use her feminine qualities to get away with murder.

When the police discovered that Lawson’s murderer was possibly a woman they reacted with disbelief. They thought it must have been a male gangster whose red beret was mistaken for a woman’s tam. But, when it became apparent that they had to arrest Lassandro, they came face-to- face with a

radiant smile from the long-lashed, flashing dark eyes of a slender, olive-cheeked girl with neatly marcelled black hair who lolled indolently among the cushions of an overstuffed divan reading a magazine, displaying a pair of shapely legs. Lifting a cigarette nonchalantly from her rouged lips the elegant bit of bobbed hair femininity blew a wisp of smoke towards the ceiling.109 To the officers’ amazement, but probably not to the readers’, she asked them to join her on the couch. Consequently, Canadians now had to worry about the amalgamation of immigrant treachery and sexuality within its borders.

In Godsell’s imagination Lassandro’s looks could not hide her perfidious personality, her vanity, or her ignorance. When she appeared in court she “swept with queenly grace into the crowded courtroom, kissed some of her friends and with radiant confidence threw a ‘Don’t worry,

I’ll soon be with you!’ to others.”110 Godsell further attempted to diminish any sympathy readers had for Lassandro when he wrote that while she was in her death cell she “laughed, joked with her guards and preened herself like a canary in a cage” thinking that she would still get away with

109 Godsell, 13. 110 Ibid., 17-18.

murder.111 Her final sinister deed occurred minutes before her hanging, when she once again tried to use her femininity to save herself. First, she lied and claimed she was pregnant and when that stunt failed she recanted her original confession with tear-filled eyes and argued that Picariello had framed her.112 It is possible that Godsell had heard about cases in which convicted women murderers received clemency because they were pregnant. So, to add dramatic flair he added this element to his plot. Nevertheless, “law had come to Crow’s Nest. The rule of Emperor Pic was over. The killing of Constable Lawson had been avenged!” after their hanging.113 The execution of the two Italians remedied the negative qualities that Canadians attributed to the Crowsnest Pass.

It was now a civilized and colonized place where Anglo-Canadians no longer had to fear for their lives.

Godsell’s rendition was published during a period of considerable concern about Italians in Canada as demonstrated by the Government of Canada’s internment of Italian-Canadians during

WWII. Even though “Murder in the Crow’s Nest Pass” was not published as official government propaganda, it assumed this role in an unofficial capacity. In 1940, a report produced by the

Department of Justice identified 115,000 Italians who lived in Canada, and within this group they determined that 3,500 of them were fascist league members. The government classified approximately five hundred of the fascist members as threats to “public safety or the state” and placed them in internment camps.114 The government based their internment largely on the

111 Godsell, 20. The comparison of Lassandro to a caged bird influenced several later interpretations including the opera Filumena, John Kerr’s film The Emperor, Jock Carpenter’s romance novel The Bootlegger’s Bride. 112 This anecdote is a possible source for the rumours of Lassandro’s pregnancy, which Mildred Holstead mentioned in her oral account for the ManTrip Project. 113 Godsell, 23. 114 Luigi Bruti Liberati, “The Internment of Italian Canadians,” in Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad, eds. Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin, and Angelo Principe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 86-87. The government placed an additional one-hundred Italians in the camps, but they were merchant marines who were on ships anchored in Canadian ports when Italy declared war on Canada.

populace's fear of an Italian “fifth column” rising up and fighting a clandestine war within Canada, but the government had no proof to substantiate this accusation.115 The majority of Canadians supported actions like this during the war, but in the war’s aftermath they became controversial.

When multiculturalism became an official Canadian policy in 1971, academics began to reinterpret

Canada’s treatment of its immigrants and their role in the history of the nation. This spawned new interpretations and stories of Lassandro and Picariello.

Conclusion

Canadian journalistic and social reform representations of Lassandro are largely ungrounded in reality. The WCTU and CPWA used her to further their causes, newspapers used her to sell copies and to promote nativist beliefs, the court system made an example of her, and a true-crime writer used her story to make a cautionary tale about the impending influx of wartime immigrants into Canada who would once again bring lawlessness to a law-abiding nation. Few traces of Lassandro’s own voice exist. Her lawyer never called her to the witness stand and when she did confide in Father Fidelis and Attorney General Brownlee, the majority of the public disregarded her confession as an eleventh-hour life-saving attempt.

Lassandro’s depiction was eerily similar to the real-life character of Grace Marks from

Atwood’s historical novel Alias Grace. Even though Atwood based her book’s plot on somewhat fictitious evidence, Atwood characterized Marks as a victim because others silenced her. The absence of her voice allowed outsiders, like the media, to craft their distorted version of her life story. They described her as many things she was not. We can say the same about Lassandro. How could Marks and Lassandro be so many things at once? Lassandro’s enemies and friends labelled

115 Liberati, 76.

her a paramour, a liar, an ignorant immigrant, a free woman, an entrapped woman, a cold-blooded killer, and a victim. At the beginning of her trial journalists described her as confident and guiltless, then she became meek, and finally she submitted to her guilty conscience and forgave Canadian society for hanging her.

This demonstrates the paradox of women’s lives and history. Traditionally, WASP men who dominated the fields of academic and popular history have dismissed women as trivial. Often, women only became well known when their names appeared in the legal record because of a crime they committed. Even though researchers rediscover their names, it remains difficult to reconstruct their lives since few primary sources exist. As a result, history and fiction intermingle and the most shocking versions of their life rise to the top. The story is then added to, reconstructed, and retold by those in power. It was not until the marginalized were given back their voice that their version of their own history was heard. Starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian academics from ethnically and socially diverse backgrounds began to reclaim and reinterpret the histories of their communities. This was when historians rejuvenated Lassandro’s life story. However, this does not mean that fact replaced fiction, creating a more accurate account. Instead, multiple versions viewed through multiple lenses provided alternatives to the previous interpretations.

CHAPTER THREE: “ERRING AND VICTIMIZED WOMEN”: A NEW VANGUARD?

If human condition amounts to living in a world not of our own making, then erring and victimized women are further disadvantaged by the production of stories not of our own telling.1 Carolyn Strange’s analysis of “women in the shadow of the law” says volumes about the various cultural producers who have created narratives of Lassandro’s life and her death. Her contemporaries as well as recent historians have remarked on how they believed Lassandro erred: she got involved in bootlegging, she was allegedly part of a love triangle, she pushed the boundaries of her station in life by the way she dressed and through her public activities, she asked to accompany Picariello on his journey to confront Lawson, and she voluntarily took the blame for the murder. Of course, she was and still is a victim of circumstance. In interwar Canada, many believed she was a casualty of her barbarous and backward Italian upbringing, which made her a deviant and immoral person. In the 1940s, true crime magazines rewrote her as a cruel and conniving vixen at the same time as Canadians worried about the Italian Fifth Column.

Since the end of the 1960s, each new reinterpretation continued to reflect the shifting political, social, and cultural realities Canadians faced. The introduction of multiculturalism and women’s studies, constitutional debates, Free Trade, and the increased reliance on cultural tourism, all impacted Lassandro’s portrayal in Canadian popular culture. In some portrayals she takes centre stage and in others she plays a minor, but still important, role. The dominant cultural producers of narratives about Lassandro remain men. They continue to portray her as a sexualized and culpable individual by using their position in society to formulate stories for their own benefit or agenda, perpetuating her victimization but not giving her agency. At the same time, scholars who study

1 Carolyn Strange, “Casting Light on Women in the Shadow of the Law: Toronto at the Turn of the Century,” in Great Dames eds. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dicken (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 99.

gender, social, and cultural history understand that Canada’s legal system was unjust, nativist, and patriarchal and so have started to portray her differently. They argued that factors beyond

Lassandro’s gender affected the public’s treatment of her. Also, feminist scholars have asserted

Lassandro’s voice. This does not mean that their interpretations are more accurate; rather, they add to the breadth of analyses.

In October 1971 the Liberal government recognized the importance of multiculturalism as an official government policy. The policy’s intent was to protect all cultural groups in Canada and highlight the country’s immigrant history. This policy resulted in funds for research projects and publication, and the establishment of institutions dedicated to the study of immigrant and minority histories.2 Previously, works of Canadian history perpetuated the interpretation of what was then considered Canada’s charter members¾the British and the French¾ignoring the contributions of

Canada’s Indigenous peoples and immigrant and minority groups. This resulted in academics treating the non-charter groups as “nothing more than a footnote to the historical narrative.”3

School curriculum reinforced this attitude since Anglophones sought to assimilate immigrant and

Indigenous children, a continuous trend that built on the 1913 Alberta Act Respecting Truancy and, in 1920, the implementation of the mandatory residential school system. An interest in retooling the education system began in the 1960s when other “ethnocultures” and languages began to find a place in Canadian schools.4

However, nativism and ethnocentrism were not the only reasons why some historians treated non-charter groups as historical footnotes. Factors such as a lack of secondary language

2 Howard Palmer, “Canadian Immigration and Ethnic History in the 1970s and 1980s,” The International Migration Review 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 473; Alan Gordon, Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 259. 3 Jonathan F. Vance, Maple Leaf Empire (Don Mills Ont.: University of Oxford Press, 2012), 3. 4 Palmer, “Canadian Immigration and Ethnic History in the 1970s and 1980s,” 477.

skills and scholarly incentives, a deficiency in archival resources, and publisher disinterest also provided scholars with motives to not engage in this work.5 After Trudeau’s announcement in

1971, and with assured funding sources, a new generation of Canadian academics set out to break historical conservatism and, accordingly, reinterpret and revitalize Canada’s past by infusing it with immigrant stories. Their infusion forced Canadians to recognize that Canada was similar to the United States: racism, prejudice, and nationalism had been and were still present in both countries and this affected the lives of immigrants and other minorities. With the government’s formal acknowledgement of multiculturalism and with a personal interest in their own ethnic backgrounds, a plethora of new and energized scholars focused on immigration history to explain their role in building Canadian society and identity. They turned away from the idea that Canada was only British. The 1971 Canadian Census reaffirmed this as approximately 25 percent of

Canadian citizens were neither British, French, nor Aboriginal.6 Living history museums also appeared after The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism finished its work, as local communities started to narrate their own stories to stake their claim in Canada’s history.7

Uncoincidentally, in 1973 the Crowsnest Historical Society, which houses an extensive exhibition and archive dealing with Lawson’s murder, formed.

Politicians, however, still promoted the idea that, unlike the United States, Canada had always welcomed immigrant differences. In 1973, New Democratic Party MP Stuart Legatt stated in Parliament that “Canada is not a melting pot…They (various ethnic groups) continue to contribute in many interested ways to the mosaic and originality of this country” while Progressive

Conservative MP Paul Yewchuk claimed that “Multiculturalism is a uniquely Canadian concept

5 Palmer, “Canadian Immigration and Ethnic History in the 1970s and 1980s,” 472. 6 Ibid., 471. 7 Gordon, 259.

and represents the traditional difference between the American melting pot and the Canadian mosaic.”8 Identifying Canada as un-American became a common trend in Canada’s historical and cultural narrative. Yet some popular histories written by Canadians did the exact opposite. Some popular historians impressed upon the public that Canada was and is not boring. They argued that we have a wild and interesting history that rivaled the United States.

Seven years before the government’s announcement of the multiculturalism policy,

Carleton University sociologist John Porter challenged Canadians’ perceived exceptionalism when he questioned the notion that Canada was a free and democratic society. In his 1965 book The

Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, Porter countered John Murray

Gibbon who, in 1938, popularized Canada as a cultural mosaic.9 Porter argued that Canada remained a country influenced by a class system that continued to uphold inequalities, which consequently negated democracy. He argued that historians contributed to the myth of Canadian equality since they promoted a maudlin image of the past or golden age that many Canadians revered as the model way of living.10 This myth allowed Anglo-Saxon Canadians to retain control of all major economic and political decision-making processes, since they had likewise been in control during the golden age. Their power was further sustained through higher-level educational and occupational opportunities, which resulted in them holding the most elite positions in

Canadian society. They used mass media to fashion Canada’s image of an ideal middle-class

8 Cited in Tanya Sabena Khan, “A Part of and Apart from the Mosaic: a Study of Pakistani Canadians’ Experiences in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2012), 117. Emphasis is mine. 9 Gibbon did not come up with this comparison. American travel writer Victoria Hayward first used it in her book Romantic Canada, which recounted her travels across Canada in 1922. In 1926, Canadian Kate Foster used Hayword’s phrase in her book Our Canadian Mosaic, which described how immigrants contributed to the building of Canada. Cited in Ryan McKenney and Benjamin Bryce, “Creating the Canadian Mosaic,” Active History, accessed February 15, 2018, http://activehistory.ca/2016/05/creating-the-canadian-mosaic/. 10 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 3.

society in which everyone owned the same products, earned the same amount of money, and had equal opportunities. Porter proved that this myth was false when he compared the census data of

1931 to 1961 and verified that the social mobility of various immigrant groups had only slightly changed over the thirty-year period. The English, Scottish, and Irish still held the higher status jobs while the Italians, Poles, and Ukrainians were only slightly better off than the Chinese and

Indigenous peoples who remained at the bottom.11 Also, the anglophone-controlled media promoted the false impression that there were no societal barriers that prevented people from gaining a higher education or a better job. Rather, people who were not successful were simply lazy, and this mindset, Porter argued, could not be disputed in Canadian university classrooms as few, if any, academics came from the working class.12

In Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada, Franca Iacovetta supported the findings of Porter. According to Iacovetta, Italians were finally accepted into

Canadian society only when they willingly took jobs that Anglo-Canadians did not desire.13

Moreover, during the Cold War, Canadians increased acceptance of immigrants corresponded with a rise in public fear. Anglo-Canadians worried that if immigrants remained segregated they would hurt the nation’s morale, drain government resources, or turn to communism. Some even feared that immigrant men would begin to prey upon Canadian women who had previously rejected them.14 One government official compared the need to integrate immigrants to a salad: Anglo-

11 Porter, 86. This stratification is still clear in today’s Canada. In their study “Ethnic Inequality in Canada: Economic and Health Dimensions,” published in 2007, Ellen M. Gee, Karen M. Kobayashi, and Steven G. Prus concluded that people whose native language is not English still face economic disadvantages in Canada, but that economic inequality is now more strongly linked to gender and not ethnicity. Therefore, a non-Anglophone woman is even at a greater disadvantage. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe this oppression. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Sumi Cho, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs 38, no. 4 (June 2013): 785-810. 12 Porter, 4. 13 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006), 26. 14 Ibid., 54.

Canadians would still make up the bulk of the salad, while all the other immigrant groups would make up the tasty bits. This was much better he said than “a menu that consisted solely of canned tomato soup.”15 This comparison was exhaustively similar to Gibbon’s, as many still viewed non-

Anglophone immigrants as secondary citizens, meant to entertain and not influence the Canadian state. Nonetheless, the new policies resulted in an increased number of research projects related to marginalized Canadian women who were immigrants and/or criminals.16

Since 1968, accounts of Lassandro’s life have appeared in conventional and graphic novels, newspapers, non-fiction books, comic books, movies, museum exhibits, an opera and just recently a song titled “Ms. Lassandro,” which was a finalist for the 2017 All-Albertan Song Contest. By studying these primary sources three historiographical trends become apparent: masculine driven wild-west narratives that counter the myth of Canada’s mild-West; the integration of feminist narratives that give Lassandro agency; and the emergence of whodunit narratives that have helped to create a tourist economy focused on the murder. Even though several newer narratives have framed Lassandro in a positive manner, this does not mean that they are any more accurate than their counterparts. Therefore, Lassandro’s voice is still absent from the historical record.

Lassandro’s Place in Canada’s Masculine Wild-West

In the mid-1960s popular historians started to depict Prohibition as Canada’s wild-West era. They used the story of Lawson’s murder as a tool to challenge the belief that Canada’s history was uneventful compared to the history of the United States. Frank Anderson’s The Rum Runners, published in 1968, was the first narrative that conveyed this sensationalized version of Prohibition.

15 Iacovetta, 81. 16 Gail Cuthbert Brandt, “Postmodern Patchwork: Some Recent Trends in the Writing of Women’s History in Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 441-442.

His wild-west framework became the template that several other popular historians used in their books: Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada (1987), Outlaws of the Canadian West (1999),

Scoundrels and Scallywags: Characters from Alberta’s Past (2002), Mobsters & Rumrunners of

Canada: Crossing the Line (2004), and Strange Days: Amazing Stories from Canada’s Wildest

Decade (2011).17 The titles are all fittingly similar, as are the sensationalized stories that make up the books’ pages. Authors who followed this narrative never offered new insight or information.

Many just took Anderson’s narrative and reworded it. Each narrative repeated the chase, the arrest, the trial, and the execution. The element authors changed was the part of the story they emphasized.

Social, cultural, and political changes that were taking place in Canadian society influenced their emphasis. Three of the most important works are Anderson’s The Rum Runners, the short story compilation Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada, Vol. 3 (editor is unknown), and Ted

Ferguson’s Strange Days: Amazing Stories from Canada’s Wildest Decade. While all three follow the wild-west trope they each offer a different interpretation of Lassandro.

The Rum Runners was similar to the masculine dominated westerns Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and The Wild Wild West, popular among television audiences during the 1960s. It is no surprise that Lassandro played a supporting role. Anderson’s version of Lawson’s murder created a formula that many masculine-dominated narratives would follow afterwards: the harrowing police chase, the struggle outside the APP barracks, the escape and capture, the trial followed by stays of

17 Phillip H. Godsell, “Emperor Pic and the Girl in the Scarlet Tam,” in Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada, Vol. 3, ed. Unknown (Surrey: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 1987): 102-115; M. A. Macpherson, “Flowers for Florence Lassandro, Killer or Dupe?” in Outlaws of the Canadian West (Edmonton: Lone Pine Publishing, 1999), 194-213; Brian Brennan, “Emilio ‘Emperor Pic’ Picariello and Florence Lassandro,” in Scoundrels and Scallywags: Characters from Alberta’s Past (Calgary: Fifth House Ltd., 2002), 51-63; Gord Steinke, “Murder in the Mountains: The Story of Emilio Picariello (1879-1923) and Florence Lassandra (1901?- 1923),” in Mobsters & Rumrunners of Canada: Crossing the Line (Edmonton” Folklore Publishing, 2004), 181-206; Ted Ferguson, “The Bootlegger’s Paramour,” in Strange Days: Amazing Stories from Canada’s Wildest Decade (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2011), 98-104.

execution, and the retributive hanging. Since Anderson cast Lassandro as a secondary character it was easy for him to make her the innocent victim. Anderson wrote that even though Lassandro insisted on going with Picariello to confront Lawson, they never intended to kill him. Anderson claimed that as Lassandro watched the struggle between the two men unfold and “as shots were flying and she saw the gun muzzle swing towards her, [she] fired at the constable, who had both arms around Picariello’s neck.”18 Lassandro, he maintained, “fired in fear and panic” and Picariello was solely at fault because he “unreasonably insisted” that Lawson go with them to get his son.19

Moreover, he made his audience aware of the unjust legal system, stating, “had the fervour of

Prohibition been missing, both would have and should even then have received commutations.”20

In 1967, a year before The Rum Runners’ publication, Canada had suspended the death penalty.

Even though his popular history was melodramatic, it cast marginalized immigrants in a more reasonable manner for several reasons. First, it came on the verge of Canada’s acknowledged absence of immigrants in the historical record. Second, Anderson could personally relate to his research subjects, not through ethnicity as he was Anglophone, but through shared social class and hardship. He was an orphan, he grew up in reform schools, and he went to prison. While in prison, the courts sentenced him to death for the murder of a prison guard, but unlike Lassandro and

Picariello, they changed his sentence to life in prison.21

In Anderson’s prohibition setting mostly men and a few women, no matter their ethnic background, were willing to break the law because they simply did not support prohibition. This is what made western Canada wild. A wild-west narrative had to include intriguing characters and

18 Frank W. Anderson, The Rum Runners (Edmonton: Lone Pine, 1991), 49. 19 Ibid., 49. 20 Ibid., 51. 21 I took several parts of this paragraph from the “About the Author” section found in the newest edition of The Rum Runners (Edmonton: Lone Pine, 1991).

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locations if it was going to spark interest, create suspense, and feel grandiose. In Rum Runners,

Anglophone sounding names like Smith, Pace, and McLaughlin appeared beside Bassoff,

Bronfman, Salini, Picariello, and Lassandro. The regions infested with immoral people expanded outside the Pass’ boundary too. For example, George Packwood, an Anglophone man from

Calgary, owned the largest still discovered in Alberta. He operated it out of his basement in

Calgary’s exclusive neighborhood of Mount Royal.22 Anderson also alleged that the Calgary

Baptist Church’s caretaker made raisin wine in the organ loft and then sold it to parishioners.

Authorities located a still in a Methodist Church at Ranchville, Saskatchewan, and grandmothers made beer in their kitchen sinks.23 Additionally, Anderson claimed the APP charged a former

German spy named Von Koolbergen with bootlegging in Calgary, golfers found stashes of whiskey in sand traps, tunnels were dug to blow-up streetcars, train robbers and gangs ran rampant, and officers caught a one-legged man smuggling liquor in his hollowed out leg.24 It seemed as though the only Albertans who did not participate in the illegal activities were those who passed

“their law.”25

Anderson also attacked the righteousness of the police, saying that even they did not fully commit to policing their law. The police recognized and treated Picariello and other “criminals” as a legitimate businessman. They did not interfere with their business as long as the businessmen followed the unwritten rules: “owning one’s own equipment, refraining from violence if accidentally caught, and refraining from stealing cars for transportation or theft of liquor from legal outlets.”26 These rules allowed the police to quietly aid in the illegal economy until they had

22 Anderson, 53. 23 Ibid., 36, 38. 24 Ibid., 24, 25, 41-42, 51. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Ibid., 34. The Mavericks exhibit at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary mentions this, too.

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to save face through a public display of force. Anderson declared that the police were so much a part of the illegal web that when they opened Picariello’s safe after his death, “numerous notes from police officials in the Pass giving the dates of upcoming weddings, reunions and other celebrations, together with suggestions as to the beverages that might make the occasions more spirited” were found.27 Unfortunately, these names, to my knowledge, were never made public.

Society has erased them from the historical memory, relegating this anecdote to the status of a legend. As we know, in Lassandro and Picariello’s case, some legends are more widely accepted than others.

The 1987 version of Lassandro’s story showed a shift in who Canadians perceived as a threat to the nation. The menace came from the United States, not from southern or eastern

Europeans. In 1987 the Canadian and American governments agreed on a free trade deal that would create greater cross-border trade. Some Canadians feared that the deal would lead to a reduction in Canada’s sovereignty and cultural independence.28 The anonymous author of the introduction to Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada reflected this fear. In the introduction, the author made no reference to unruly European immigrants of southern Alberta who opposed Prohibition, like so many authors had before. Rather, they politely mentioned that the APP viewed policing

Prohibition as a “distasteful task” as did “many citizens,” which caused “open warfare” to loom until Albertans voted to repeal Prohibition.29 The author identified Americans as the worst criminals. The author stated that they came into Canada during the gold rush, “all armed with a six-gun, sometimes two, a rifle and a Bowie knife” and caused troubles for British Columbia’s

27 Anderson, 43. 28 Bruce W. Wilkinson, “Free Trade,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified on March 12, 2014, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/free-trade/. 29 Anonymous, “Western Canada’s First Police Forces,” in Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada, Vol. 3 (Surrey: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 1987), 6-7.

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small police force.30 The book was a cultural celebration of Canada’s early police officers. The book’s short stories retold tales of their keen ability to quickly solve crime and keep Canadians safe.

Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada contains an altered version of Phillip Godsell’s

1943 short story “Murder in the Crow’s Nest,” now titled “Emperor Pic and the Girl in the Scarlet

Tam.” Not only did the title change but its contents did, too. Godsell died in 1961 and it is likely that Art Downs, the possible editor of Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada, made changes because the book’s audience was different, as was Canada’s social and cultural attitudes. The author of the new version gave Lassandro a minor role in the new interpretation. In similar fashion to news articles published in the 1920s, she was incorrectly identified as the wife of Picariello’s mechanic and as Picariello’s daughter. However, taking into consideration the wider purpose of the book, these minor mistakes did not matter. It was not just Lassandro who played a secondary role, Picariello did as well. “Western Canada’s pioneer lawmen,” whose cunning investigative talents quickly led to their arrest and the solving of the crime, overshadowed Lassandro and

Picariello.31 Hence, the title’s focus on Lassandro’s hat.

Instead of launching into an overtly sexual and anti-immigrant diatribe like Godsell did in his previous version, Godsell and/or Downs tamed the egregious description of Lassandro. It still encapsulated Canada’s masculine wild-west. In the new version, the APP officers were simply

“greeted with a smile from a slim, long-haired girl reclining on a sofa” when they showed up to arrest her for the murder.32 The author also presented her as a shrewd woman who hatched a plan

30 Anonymous, 5-6. 31 Outlaws & Lawmen of Western Canada, Vol. 3, (Surrey: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 1987), Front Cover. 32 Godsell, “Emperor Pic and the Girl in the Scarlet Tam,” 110. This is a revised version of his original short story “Murder In The Crow’s Nest,” published in pulp fiction magazine Feature Detective Cases in 1943.

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to confess to the accidental murder of Lawson, so the justice system would set Picariello free and not hang her. The description of Picariello was also friendlier. They described him as a man who loved life, worked hard, and who had “never shown any disposition to be an assassin [but] endeavoured to maintain amicable relations with lawmen” even having previously assisted them.33

Another change was that the author admitted Prohibition had led to the “corruption of officials” because the illegal liquor trade was so lucrative.34 They did not mention any names, nor did they mention the questionable tactics of APP officers like Scott. The goal of the book was to commemorate men who were an integral symbol of Canadian culture.

The dramatic change in how the authors perceived Lassandro and Picariello can simply be attributed to their desire to make money. In 1943 Godsell recognized his audience and framed the story according to what he thought they wanted to read. In 1987, the author changed the interpretation of Lassandro and Picariello because Canada identified itself as a multicultural country; assimilationist Americans threatened its way of life, whereas in 1943 the Canadian public was experiencing wartime fear. Once again, Lassandro’s voice was absent but Godsell and/or

Downs used her legacy to support a political agenda. She was no longer a hindrance, but a vital part of a cultural institution.

Ted Ferguson’s Strange Days, published in 2011, is the third important reinterpretation of

Lassandro because it is the most outlandish and sexually charged wild-west narrative. This narrative reflected society’s increasing sexual objectification of women. There is no denying that he crossed the line from fact directly into fiction, as his only worry was to create an interesting story. Before Ferguson became a popular historian, he was a news and sports reporter, television

33 Godsell, “Emperor Pic and the Girl in the Scarlet Tam,” 109. 34 Ibid., 102.

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critic, and freelance writer.35 The tone of his narrative “The Bootlegger’s Paramour” is very similar to the tone found in newspaper reports written at the time of the trial, and in true crime stories of the 1940s. In other words, his story is ethnocentric and degrading. However, his narrative does have its supporters. Bestselling author Terry Fallis testified that Ferguson, “sets fire to the myth that Canadians are boring. His whirlwind tour of Canada in the Roaring Twenties will leave you breathless and shaking your head in amazement.”36 While completing his “research,” Ferguson concluded that “the 1920s were vibrant, brassy, and occasionally brutal¾a powerful refutation of the global misconception that Canada was a poor, pitiful thing, a bore’s paradise.”37 Ferguson decided that there were many interesting stories that he needed to revitalize for the public’s benefit.38

Contrary to his claim, Ferguson filled his depiction of Lassandro with exaggerations that are not supported by archival sources. One indication of his lack of regard for accuracy was that he failed to capitalize Lassandro’s given name¾spelling it “filumena.”39 A second indication is that he gave his readers the impression she was nothing more than a paramour. He alleged

Lassandro “grew up pining for prosperity” and “regularly entertain[ed] the bootlegger in her bedroom” while Maria, Picariello’s wife, “acted as though it weren’t happening.”40 Ferguson asserted that the lovers became so brazen that they regularly “strolled the streets of

Blairmore…[Picariello’s] arm encircling his mistress’ shoulder” promising her she would no longer have to take care of his children or clean his family’s floors.41 He also presented an equally

35 “Biography: Ted Ferguson,” NeWest Press, accessed April 15, 2018, https://newestpress.com/authors/ted- ferguson. 36 Terry Fallis quoted in Ferguson, Back cover. 37 Ferguson, 14. 38 Ibid., 14. 39 Ibid., 99. 40 Ibid., 99. 41 Ibid., 99.

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demeaning depiction of Picariello saying, “contrary to appearances, Picariello’s goal in life wasn’t impregnating his wife as many times as humanly possible; it was amassing a fortune.”42

Ferguson undoubtedly described Lassandro and Picariello in this fashion because he knew sexual intrigue made crime plots and wild-west narratives popular. However, Ferguson’s use of the police in his storyline is in opposition to how other authors characterized them in their accounts of Canada’s wild-West. He described the APP officers as unthreatening because they “were incredibly stupid and easy to hoodwink.”43 Ferguson provided only one example to illustrate his accusation. He retold a local legend of when the APP, without knowing it, helped Picariello to free his booze laden car from being stuck in the mud. Ferguson, like countless others, ended his story with the hanging of Lassandro, but his narration was different because he did not focus on

Lassandro’s plea of innocence nor her proclamation of forgiveness. Instead, he reemphasized her willingness to become a paramour to improve her social status: “And that is how the King of the

Bootleggers and his young lover went to their deaths, pitiful final curtain for an operatic duo who stumbled and fell chasing the immigrant’s dream of prosperity and wealth.”44 Ferguson’s account is short in length and focus, and it excludes many details. His story does “leave you breathless and shaking your head,” but in disbelief.45

All three-masculine dominated wild-west narratives speak volumes about the power authors have to influence the historical record. Their audiences may have purchased or borrowed their books based on an attention-grabbing title or cover; thus, they are not interested in separating fact from fiction. The casual reader of history may believe in the truthfulness of these accounts.

42 Ferguson, 100. 43 Ibid., 102. 44 Ibid., 104. 45 Terry Fallis quoted in Ferguson, Back cover.

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Ultimately, the public circulates these narratives, and they become solidified as truth. Both positive and negative interpretations share one commonality ¾Lassandro’s voice is still not central to the story. Even though some Canadians may consider the public’s increased engagement with their history as positive, some gains, measured in dollars, come at too huge a cost.

Female Perspectives: Giving Back Lassandro’s Agency?

During the 1970s and early 1980s the study of women’s history in Canada gained momentum because the Humanities and Research Council of Canada started to offer grants to academics who explored the relationship between women and a number of social and cultural institutions including paid and unpaid work, politics, the law, religion, and sexuality. L’histoire des femmes au Quebec depuis quatre siècles (Quebec Women: A History) published in 1982 was the first major work dedicated solely to women’s history, followed by Canadian Women: A History six years later. During the same decade history journals dedicated to women’s history topics appeared, too. In the 1990s, women’s historians started to unravel the dichotomies of women’s public and private roles, find examples of feminism in English and French-Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and analyze the significance of class, gender, and ethnicity on women from a range of backgrounds. Women’s historians were interested in women’s agency.46

Even though recent interpretations are still not of Lassandro’s own making, women scholars have provided alternatives to the cruel and deviant person earlier stories presented. In

Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society historian Lesley

Erickson argued that Lassandro’s social status, ethnic background, and her murder victim equally

46 Gail Cuthbert Brandt, “Postmodern Patchwork: Some Recent Trends in the Writing of Women’s History in Canada,” in Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 442-445.

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played a role in her demise.47 Her statement qualifies the justice system’s treatment of Lassandro and pre-1960s interpretations of Lassandro. Cultural producers based their interpretations on gossip, bias, and fear, not fact. Godsell’s “Murder in the Crow’s Nest Pass” immediately comes to mind. News articles in the 1920s only provided snippets of information about her, which required people to read around terse information to gain a greater understanding. Sharon

Pollock’s 1980 manuscript for Whiskey Six Cadenza, a play that Theatre Calgary first performed in 1983, went in an entirely different direction when Lassandro¾whose pseudonym was

Leah¾became a protagonist.48

When I first read Pollock’s play, published in 1983 by NeWest Press, the script, loosely based on Lawson’s murder, seemed to focus on conflicts amongst settler communities during

Prohibition and the different types of relationships women had with male family members.

However, I later discovered that Pollock wrote and published the play three years earlier. This is significant because in 1980 Canada was fraught with political turmoil due to the first Quebec

Referendum. Therefore, Pollock’s script reflected a contemporary issue as well: the tension between Anglophone and Francophone Canada and uncertainty about the outcome of the referendum. In an interview conducted by Canadian actor R. H. Thompson for Theatre Museum

Canada, Pollock spoke about her love of history and how she used history to understand contemporary issues.49 Thus, the link between Lawson’s murder and the Quebec Referendum makes sense. Pollock stated,

47 Lesley Erickson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, The Law, and the Making of a Settler Society (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 224-227. 48 Canadian Stage Theatre Archives (University of Guelph), and Sharon Pollock, Whiskey Six Cadenza, 1980; Sharon Pollock, Whiskey Six Cadenza (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1983). 49 Sharon Pollock, interview by R. H. Thompson, Theatre Museum of Canada Presents The Legend Library, YouTube, July 6, 2012, accessed May 1, 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k7ddUUH3iE&list=PLCDA61BCFCC60B38F.

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I write the same play over and over again…A play in which there is a central character who is unable to conform to the expectations of their society or of their family or in a private and public arena, and some type of critical decisions come up and they make that decision. And quite often it seems it turns out, whether I want it to or not, badly for them…So I am interested in authority and who has the voice of authority and what does an individual do when confronted with it…I’m interested in surface and substance. What things appear to be and what they really are.50 The political sparring that took place before and after the referendum divided the country along ethnic and linguistic lines much like Alberta’s 1915 Prohibition Referendum. The circumstances surrounding the Quebec Referendum and Lawson’s murder had many similarities: the uncertainty of the referendum’s outcome and the uncertainty of Lawson’s murderer; the societal division created by the 1915 and 1980 referendums; the need to end a patriarchal relationship; the search for a better existence; the inability to forget the past; and the battle against the forces of assimilation.

Pollock listed her characters’ nationalities as Canadian except Dolly Danielle, identified as

Francophone Canadian and Sergeant William Windsor, who was British. While Pollock created new characters and personas, others remained similar to their real-life counterparts. Picariello became Mr. Big, but he was still a businessman and a rumrunner who refused to be pulled into the drudgery of working in the coalmines. Picariello’s wife, Maria, became the complicit Mama

George who did nothing to prevent her husband from having sexual relations with his adopted daughter.51 The Bigs saved Leah at a very young age from a life on the streets, but her previous circumstances remained vague, just as Lassandro’s role in Lawson’s death does. However, Pollock gave Leah agency, as demonstrated by her budding romance with the character Johnny Farley and her courageous determination to break from her father’s lascivious bonds by running away with

50 Pollock, interview by Thompson. 51 Pollock, Whiskey Six Cadenza. Ted Fergusson portrayed Maria Picariello in a similar fashion, claiming that she knew a sexual relationship was occurring between Lassandro and her husband, but she decided to ignore it.

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her new sweetheart. This is representative of Lassandro’s desire to escape her life of domesticity, caregiving, and an unloving marriage. Leah’s rejection of patriarchy was also similar to the

Québecois’ rejection of continued Anglophone domination. Unfortunately, Leah’s plan failed when Mr. Big shot her in the back as the play’s lights faded away. Her unknown fate reiterates the vagueness of Lawson’s murderer and the uncertainty of the outcome of the Quebec Referendum.

But if Leah did die, her death provided her with freedom from her father’s bondage, like Canada’s breakup would for the Québecois.

The characters Johnny Farley and Polly Yakimchuck stood for the hopes of people who emigrated from their homeland to Canada, the Francophones who wanted to separate, and the

Anglophones who wanted the country to stay united. Johnny returned to the Pass after he failed to get a job in Toronto. Toronto represented his failed dream to find something better than a life stuck in the Pass’ coalmines. Farley refused to become a miner like his father and brother, but very few options existed other than being a rumrunner for Mr. Big. Toronto likewise symbolized a fractured

Canada because Francophones felt that the promises made by the Canadian government remained unfulfilled. Polly Yakimchuck, like Farley, left the Pass for Toronto, but also returned home. While living in Toronto, Yakimchuck changed her name to Dolly Danielle and became a Francophone.

Her change in identity retold Filumena’s transformation into Florence and the struggle

Francophones faced to preserve their identity.52

The characters Sergeant William Windsor, also known as Bill the Brit, and Johnny’s mother Mrs. Farley embodied the Canadian government’s attempt to hold the country together¾during Prohibition and the Quebec Referendum¾by getting rid of dissidents who did

52 Pollock, Whiskey Six Cadenza.

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not want to follow the rule of law. Mrs. Farley was the family’s matriarch and her husband feared her because he secretly continued to consume alcohol even though his wife was a devout prohibitionist. Mrs. Farley tried to keep her family safe by helping Windsor root out the bootleggers and rumrunners who had great influence over people, including her husband and son, in the Pass. Windsor, just like Lawson, was the tool of colonial authorities and his job was to maintain colonial power and prevent dissention at all costs, although his actions are quite opposite to the traditional narrative of Lawson. Whereas narratives consistently portray Lawson as a morally upstanding citizen, Windsor was evil, and willfully abused his power.53

Even though Pollock provided an alternative to the nasty and abnormal person earlier stories presented by giving agency to her version of Lassandro, her heroic interpretation is just as incorrect. It further erased Lassandro from the narrative by not only removing her name but also her voice and ethnicity. Furthermore, it continued to focus on Lassandro’s sexual life by evoking an incestuous relationship. Of course, Pollock was not the first person to do this, but its repetition remains unjustifiable. Pollock does present opportunities for political discourse about power and hegemony, but she does so at the price of historical accuracy. The public may not have known that

Lassandro was an inspiration for the play; Picariello was more obvious. In a brief one-paragraph summation of Whiskey Six Cadenza historian Adrianna Davies commented, “[for] Mr. Big, bootlegging becomes a way of empowering downtrodden miners and defying authority.”54 The rest of Davies’ summation neglects to mention Lassandro or that Mr. Big was a lecher who attempted to keep his daughter under submission.

53 Pollock, Whiskey Six Cadenza. 54 Adriana A. Davies, The Rise & Fall of Emilio Picariello (Fernie: Oolichan Books, 2015), 112.

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The trend of casting Lassandro as a protagonist and romanticizing her relationship with

Steve Picariello continued in narratives even after Whiskey Six Cadenza. This trend has resulted in the creation of a mono-dimensional character persistently treated by cultural producers as a victim and not a person with agency. Interestingly, in the 1990s the perpetuation of the myth of her romance with the younger Picariello was no longer viewed as immoral. Popular historians framed it in a romantic context, reflecting the changing moral and gender standards within Canadian society. In 1993, Canada was at the tail end of a rapid decline in the annual number of marriages.

The decline began in the 1970s and it coincided with an increase in the divorce rate. The 1985

Divorce Act aided the increase because it allowed for “faster marriage dissolution.”55 1993 was also the seventy-year anniversary of Lassandro’s hanging.

A narrative that reflected these changes in Canadian society and that highlighted the anniversary was Jock Carpenter’s 1993 book The Bootlegger’s Bride. Carpenter likely became interested in Lassandro’s story because of her grandmother, Marie Rose Smith. Smith was Métis, and in 1877 her family sold her to a trapper who she then married. She was only sixteen years old.

Hence, Smith and Lassandro came from marginalized communities and had both married at a young age. In addition, Smith and her husband lived in Pincher Creek when the police accused

Lassandro of killing Lawson, and she told Carpenter stories about Picariello and Lassandro.56

Thus, Carpenter’s family history as well as changes in Canadian marriage practices influenced her portrayal of Lassandro.

Carpenter’s work of historical fiction commented on the role of marriage in the Italian community during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A commonality found in other

55 François Nault, “Twenty Years of Marriages,” in Health Reports 8, no. 2 (1996): 39-41. 56 Jock Carpenter, The Bootlegger’s Bride (Calgary: Gorman & Gorman, 1993), Epigraph, 321; Biography and Summary of Contents, M-1154, Marie Rose Smith fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta.

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narratives was to attack the cultural practices of Italian immigrants by focusing on Lassandro’s marriage, at the age of fourteen, to Carlo Sanfidele. Carpenter, and later Amantea, attempted to rectify earlier attacks on the Italian community where it was common for parents to marry off their daughters at a young age. Neither condoned the practice, instead they placed the act in its historical context and did not judge it by contemporary standards or through an ethnocentric lens. Amantea wrote, “Custom, poverty, xenophobia, and large families often necessitated that the oldest girls in the family were literally treated as chattel. It was not uncommon for a young girl to be won or lost in a card game.”57 For Italian families who emigrated to Canada from southern Italy, marriage was not considered a personal affair. Rather, it was a bond brokered between families. Parents taught their children that loyalty to their family was paramount and everything else, like happiness, was secondary.58 Carpenter addressed the pressure Lassandro faced to please her father. For example, when her father informed her of her upcoming wedding she pleaded with him because she did not want to marry a man she did not love, nor did she want her schooling to end. However, she realized she could not shame her father.59

Immigrants from regions of southern Italy, like Calabria where Lassandro was born, were commonly peasants whose families had lived in poverty for generations. Descriptions of Calabrian homes, which only had one room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and stable, and no running water or indoor toilet, illustrate their poverty. These conditions existed past the middle of the twentieth century. A marriage allowed the parents to reduce the economic and social stress their children placed on a household. At the same time, it provided the parents with hope that their child’s life might improve. The promise of a better life through marriage was also the impetus for

57 Gisele Amantea, The King v. Picariello and Lassandro (Toronto: The Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian Studies, 2007), 47. 58 Clifford J. Jansen, Italians in a Multicultural Canada (Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 79-84. 59 Carpenter, 23-25.

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emigration, and many Italian families followed this way of thinking until the 1960s.60 Carpenter’s historical novel explored the cultural pressures of marriage because of Lassandro’s family’s poverty. When Lassandro’s father stormed out of the kitchen after he and his daughter argued about her upcoming marriage, Carpenter described the scene as follows:

Angela (the wife and mother) kept stirring the evening meal of soup made from a pig’s knuckle. It was heavy with beans, bought at a reduced price from the grocer, and greens from the small garden. There was very little meat now and the family had been existing on pasta and vegetables...‘It is better.’ Angela spoke slowly and with finality. ‘You a big girl now. Sanfidele, he makes money. October. In October, you marry.’61 Even though Carpenter’s novel is only partially based on fact it effectively represented some Italian immigrants’ economic reality.

The quotation above comes from her chapter titled “A Silent Cage” a metaphor used to symbolize Lassandro’s marriage and a metaphor that reflected the rise of Canadian divorce rates in the 1980s. Carpenter used the metaphor of Lassandro’s wedding dress as her “silent cage.”62

After her wedding she had to bow to the whims of her abusive husband; she “learned early in her marriage to submit quietly to what she could not avoid…She was afraid of him and wondered how often she could get away.”63 Carpenter portrayed Lassandro’s husband as so willing to please his boss that he allowed him to sleep with Lassandro on their wedding night. He also forced her to move to the United States, and when they moved back to the Crowsnest Pass, he kept her entrapped in a bootlegging lifestyle even though she pleaded that they move again and start a new life.

The caged bird narrative has had a long-lasting impact on representations of Lassandro in

Canadian popular culture as demonstrated by its reappearance in John Kerr’s 2001 film, The

60 Jansen, 79-84. 61 Carpenter, 23-24. 62 Ibid., 9. 63 Ibid., 33.

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Emperor, which is on continuous play in the APP museum in Coleman. At the beginning of the film, Kerr compared Lassandro’s life to a little pet bird in its cage, which caused her great sadness.

The caged bird became agitated foreshadowing her imminent demise. At the time of her execution

Kerr replaced the small bird with a crow, representing bad luck, death, or destiny.

Although Carpenter’s interpretation offered a new version of Lassandro’s life story, influenced future storytellers, and commented on the need to place Lassandro’s marriage in historical context, it was still a cultural production shaped by the attitudes of the time period in which she created it. The novel’s focus was on the rumoured romance between Lassandro and

Steve Picariello, which many narratives had echoed. In the Forward of her book, Carpenter admitted that her account was a mixture of “truth and legend” and that some of the truths came from sources who wanted to remain anonymous.64 People use a statement like that to create suspense and legend, rather than truth. Carpenter even contradicted her definition of truth when she stated that her book was only based on her interpretation, “the true facts having been taken to the grave.”65 This proves that she was more worried about writing a “good story” and did not care so much about “whether it [was] true or not.”66 How Lassandro felt about her marriage and the relationship she had with Steve Picariello will never be known, and popular historians should lay the speculation to rest. Carpenter’s story would be more convincing if she had produced her sources. In her defence, her inability to produce her sources may have been out of her control. Her novel only compounds the problem the myth created.

64 Carpenter, Forward. 65 Ibid., Forward. 66Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 10.

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In 1997, Aritha van Herk, professor of English at the University of Calgary, countered the male-dominated interpretations of Lassandro by asserting her voice using “life-writing.”67 Life- writing is an attempt to reclaim a marginalized subject’s agency by scrutinizing how race, gender, and class impacted their life. Life-writing is often linked to feminism because, as Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dicken argued, “it is a way of telling women’s story, of re-making a female story, creating a new tradition and mode of interpretation of writing for women silenced by institutionalized, monologic discourse…[It] enacts feminism’s strong exhortation to women to break the silence, to claim language and validate their unique subjective experience.”68 The use of life-writing by van Herk differed from early interpretations because she asked Lassandro questions that she knew she could not answer, while dissecting the answers offered by others. She demonstrated that cultural producers have hijacked Lassandro’s voice by providing their own responses to similar questions, and that their responses were not supported by evidence.

In her reinterpretation of Lassandro, van Herk made Lassandro the focus of the story. Her version provides a sense of intimacy, as if they were sitting across a table from one-another in conversation, or, perhaps, talking while driving in a car. The questions van Herk asked are often the answers that the media provided to explain Lassandro’s personality and the circumstances of the crime, trial, and execution. The following example illustrates the dialog that took place:

Florence, could you feel the British scorn, their condescension, the way that you were painted as a moll, a paramour, out for the race, fast cars, excitement, new clothes? The gangster’s moll, the Bottle King’s mistress or housekeeper or even ‘daughter,’ as if the connection with Pic was variously detextable, irrevocable. But whether you were Pic’s mistress, or Steve’s mistress, or Charles’s wife, or just a gullible girl, it was all the same to them. You were a woman with her finger on the trigger.69

67 Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dicken, eds., Great Dames (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3. 68 Susan Green, “Genre: Life Writing,” mETAphor 2 (2008): 52. 69 Aritha van Herk, “Driving towards Death,” in Great Dames, eds. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dicken (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 66. Van Herk used the italics to distinguish between her dialog with Lassandro and the facts she took from the case.

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The quotation above indicates that van Herk analyzed Lassandro’s plight through multiple points- of-view. She hinted at nativism by using the phrase “British scorn,” morality by using “moll,”

“paramour,” and “mistress,” and gender norms by using “housekeeper,” and then contrasting it with “out for the race, fast cars, excitement, new clothes.”

Van Herk addressed the media’s speculation about Lassandro, but she herself does not fall into a speculative trap. In “Driving towards Death” van Herk made sure that her audience understood that Lassandro’s voice was absent from earlier accounts by using words and phrases to denote the events speculative nature. The words she used included “unclear,” “no answers,” “no way of knowing,” “another gap,” and “lost.”70 When she did offer an answer to a question, she based it on the facts taken from the trial’s transcripts. For example, she asked Lassandro, “What did you think of Florence, the two men [APP officers Moriarty and Scott] in their multipocketed uniforms and brimmed hats, what did you think of their questions, their hands?” To which van

Herk answered, only using fact, “Sergeant Scott fried eggs and then asked her questions…but Scott was too busy listening (too interested in the conversation) to write her words down.”71

Unsurprisingly, the Glenbow Museum’s exhibit Mavericks, inspired by van Herk’s work, carried forward her discussion surrounding the uncertainty of the murder and the power of the myth. The exhibit houses a gun that James Michael Maybie donated to the museum. He claimed that the gun was the .38 calibre murder weapon. Maybie said that he received the gun from a man to whom

Lawson’s parents had given it. The curators offered their “verdict” on the likelihood of it being the actual murder weapon stating, “This is not the murder weapon” because the gun does not match the brand used in the murder, and “it is also difficult to imagine the murder weapon would have

70 van Herk, “Driving towards Death,” 55-69. 71 Ibid., 65.

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been given to the victim’s parents.”72 Van Herk and the curators’ questioning of fact, fiction, and myth has led to an additional category of narrative called whodunits, which I will discuss in further detail later.

Lastly, van Herk replaced the sensationalized narrative with a narrative that empowered

Lassandro by focusing on her love of driving despite the disapproval she would receive from the public because she was a woman. Van Herk hypothesized that Lassandro was at the scene of the crime because she loved cars not because she was in search of revenge, and that a different outcome might have occurred if she had been driving that night and not Picariello. Her love of driving was at the root of van Herk’s willingness to later define her as a maverick: “There was Florence at the wheel, and not asleep, oh no, awake, wide awake¾before Bonnie and Clyde, before Thelma and

Louise, before the idea of a woman at the wheel (permission or not).”73 Van Herk, like Pollock, has created a new feminist narrative that stressed Lassandro’s agency. Even though it is a friendlier narrative the narrative is also questionable because we do not know how much she drove, nor do we know if she would be comfortable with herself as a Bonnie or a Clyde-like heroine.

In 2007, Gisele Amantea, a former professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University, used an unconventional medium to analyze Lassandro’s life and argue that the roots of nativism were firmly established in Alberta by 1922. She presented her assessment in a graphic novel based on an art installation she displayed about Picariello and Lassandro, in 2002, at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina. Amantea explored the ethnic tensions in the mines and towns of the Crowsnest Pass, immigration trends, the link between labour and racism, marriage customs, and prohibition law enforcement. She then analyzed how these factors interacted with the tragedies of Lawson’s death

72 Wall text, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, [2006]. 73 van Herk, “Driving towards Death,” 55.

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and Lassandro and Picariello’s hangings. Amantea noted in an interview about her graphic novel that she wanted to put her research into an appropriate form “that accounts for the ways that popular culture affects the construction of memory and identity, creating myths through genres like the gangster film and epics like The Godfather, or romance novels like The Bootlegger’s

Bride.”74 To avoid the perpetuation of myths, Amantea used primary sources to highlight the discrimination that was prevalent in Canada. The primary sources included newspaper articles printed during Picariello and Lassandro’s trial, government communications, memos in the British

Columbia Attorney General’s fonds at the British Columbia Archives, trial reports, and personal letters. Amantea did not simply place pictures of the original documents in her novel; instead, she redrew them to make them visually agreeable with the style of a graphic novel. Even though she interjected little of her own written interpretation in an attempt to let the facts tell the story, she still chose which visuals to include. The impact is emotionally powerful and visually appealing, and it demonstrates the aversion British-Canadians had for immigrants who were not like them.

Amantea’s work offers little new information and she did this on purpose. She is Italian and, therefore, wanted to examine how her community was a part of Canada’s nation-building project. Her father grew up in Fernie and faced discrimination because he married an English

Protestant woman. Her goal was to reveal “a parallel between this century and the last one…[and] how popular fiction and political agendas affect justice, history, and cultural perceptions, and how these impact individuals and cultural communities.”75 Amantea critiqued historical injustices through several modes of interpretation, ultimately leading to Lassandro’s plight being viewed as a result of nativism, paternalism, physical abuse, and sexism. Her methodology demonstrated a

74 Nancy Tousley, “Gisele Amantea: Tracing a History,” in Canadian Art 20, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 63. 75 Amantea, Acknowledgments.

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shift in how Canadians interpret and understand their history. The majority of Canadians no longer view immigrants as a dangerous class. Instead, they now recognize the discrimination and injustices immigrants and other marginalized people faced in Canada and how people in control of the news and other forms of media promoted public distain for them.

Pollock, Carpenter, van Herk, and Amantea’s interpretations offer alternatives to male- dominated narratives, but they still represent the minority. There was no clear progression from masculine dominated depictions to feminist interpretations or vice versa. They now coexist and both narratives are still produced today.

The Economic Benefits of Whodunit Narratives

Since the end of WWII, many urban and rural centres have relied on tourism to bolster their economy. According to American historian David Glassberg, “a sense of history and sense of place are inextricably intertwined; we attach histories to places, and the environmental value we attach to a place comes largely through the historical association we have with it.”76 Cecilia

Morgan in Creating Colonial Pasts, stated that the word “environmental” should be replaced with

“tourist” to explain how communities attempt to attract visitors by promoting a history that distinguishes them from their neighbours.77 Alan Gordon made a similar argument in his study of the rise of the living history museums in Canada during the mid-twentieth century. Communities that suffered from economic stagnation, Gordon argued, built living history museums because of the money tourists would bring to the area.78 The narratives communities created, and how they

76 David Glassberg. Cited in Cecilia Louise Morgan, Creating Colonial Pasts: History, Memory, and Commemoration in Southern Ontario, 1860-1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), loc. 201 of 4696, Kindle. 77 Morgan, loc. 201 of 4696, Kindle. 78 Gordon, 5.

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were used was integral to their political, cultural, and social character.79 The legitimacy of the narratives and the living museums that present the stories is “rooted in popular culture.”80 Thus, communities cultivated the narratives using travel promotions, by selecting and disbursing archival material, publishing materials, broadcasting ideas, and through education.

The impact public history has had on the portrayal of Lassandro in popular culture since the late 1960s is emphasized by accounts that challenge the jury’s verdict. Three competing viewpoints comprise these narratives, referred to as whodunits: Lassandro was the murderer;

Picariello was the murderer and Lassandro took the blame; and Lawson’s nine-year-old daughter,

Pearl, witnessed the murder but her testimony may have been inaccurate. Cultural creators have used several different genres to express each viewpoint, and their narratives have contributed to southern Alberta’s tourism industry. These narratives have also contributed to the ongoing public discussion about refugees entering Canada.

Gordon’s Time Travel explored the reasons behind the creation of living history museums during the mid-twentieth century, and it provides useful insights to this thesis. Towns, cities, and regions created living history museums to bring about economic revitalization or to diversify their economy by capitalizing on people’s post-WWII enthusiasm for tourism.81 Two major museums popular with tourists in Alberta have created exhibits that feature the murder. Mavericks: An

Incorrigible History of Alberta is a permanent exhibit in downtown Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.

Lassandro, Picariello, and Lawson are prominently featured in it. Visitors can view several artifacts related to them, including the supposed murder weapon, Prohibition paraphernalia, clothing, and pictures. They can also watch the video The Fall of Emperor Picariello and cast a

79 Morgan, loc. 215 of 4696, Kindle. 80 Gordon, 10. 81 Ibid., 5.

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ballot that asks “Are Picariello and Losandro [sic] innocent or guilty?”82 The exhibition’s curators’ provide six points of evidence they believe voters should consider before they cast their ballot (see figure 4). The evidence demonstrates the uncertainty of the murder.

Figure 4. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. The Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta. Author’s photograph.

A panel in the exhibition characterizes Lassandro as a victim. It downplays her participation in rumrunning by claiming she was “in the wrong place and in the wrong company” and that she was not a “gangster’s moll, but a good Catholic girl, shy and deeply religious.”83 The panel also highlights the discrimination that Lassandro encountered and mentions her troubled marriage. The curators challenge the rumours of Lassandro and Steve Picariello’s romantic relationship and label it a legend because so little is known about her.84

82 Wall text, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, [2006]. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid.

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The Crowsnest Museum in Coleman also houses a permanent exhibition complete with personal effects and trial documents. Just down the street from the museum is the Alberta

Provincial Police Barracks: National Historic Site housed in the APP barracks where Lawson lived, worked, and died. The historical society opened the newly restored barracks in 2017 to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial and the APP’s centenary, cementing the importance of the murder to the region’s history. The exhibit sought to achieve a balance between education and tourism. Its seven rooms tell the story of Prohibition, the murder, Lassandro and Picariello’s conviction and their subsequent hangings, and the impact the event had on the families and other community members. The display does not glorify the murderers or Lawson. Instead, it shows empathy for all three families affected by the events. Thus, it avoids what Gordon termed the

Disneyfication of a historical event or era because it does not judge using today’s standards, nor does it ignore the negative aspects of the past to make history seem more pleasant.85 The wall text

A Recipe for Prohibition, which I introduced in chapter one, is part of the exhibition and, thus, further demonstrates the museum’s openness to dialog about the area’s nativist past.

The barracks museum places Lassandro’s story within the context of the time period and uses her story to promote a whodunit narrative. Even though her voice is absent, the exhibition’s curators have given her the same amount of coverage as Picariello and Lawson. She is not treated as an outsider because of her gender or ethnicity. The museum also features John Kerr’s short film,

The Emperor. The film capitalizes on the power of the whodunit narrative by filming the murder through Pearl Lawson’s obscured view, Lassandro’s flashback while waiting in her death cell, and

Picariello’s recollection while climbing the scaffold.86 His film has a tangible and quantitative

85 Gordon, 6. 86 John Kerr, The Emperor (Calgary: Crowsnest Films, 2001), 18 min. https://vimeo.com/12243400.

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impact on visitors’ perceptions of Lassandro. At the exhibit’s conclusion the museum asks visitors to respond to one simple question. The responses are then put on display in a glass enclosed case.

The question asks, “Was justice served?” The answers to this question differ, proving that this historical occurrence remains controversial (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Alberta Provincial Police Barracks National Historic Site, Coleman, Alberta. Author’s photograph.

Gordon argued that “travel promotions reveal to the world what local societies regard as their most attractive and marketable characteristics.”87 The Glenbow Museum is an obvious tourist attraction and tourists would visit it even if it did not tell the story of the murder. However, if you look at the museum’s website it validates the marketability of the Mavericks exhibit and the importance placed on Lassandro and Picariello in Alberta’s history: “Meet some the fascinating

87 Gordon, 5.

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people who shaped the history of Alberta! This dynamic gallery tells our province's history through the stories of 48 mavericks - men and women who shaped Alberta with their ingenuity, ambition and adventurous spirit. Mavericks offers an experience of what it means to be Albertan.”88 Visitors do not need to worry about getting lost driving to the Crowsnest Museum or the APP barracks because the Pass’ tourism council made sure both stops are on their well-signed Crowsnest Pass

Heritage Driving Route. A video located on the barracks website states that the goal of the region’s historical society is to “share the infamous story with future generations”89 and make the APP barracks, which is part of the Crowsnest Museum and Archives a “must-see attraction within southwest Alberta.”90 The power of Lawson, Lassandro, and Picariello’s marketability is further proven by the use of their profiles on the front page of the 2017 pamphlet advertising The

Crowsnest Pass Open Doors & Heritage Festival (see figure 6). Ninety-six years after their hangings, they are finally accepted, and Canadians treat them as integral parts of Canada and

Alberta’s history.

88 “Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta,” Glenbow Museum and Archives, accessed April 18, 2018, http://www.glenbow.org/exhibitions/permanent.cfm. Emphasis is mine. 89 “Last Run,” Alberta Provincial Police Barracks, accessed February 23, 2018, https://www.appbarracks.com/lastrun. 90 Ibid.

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Figure 6. Crowsnest Pass Doors Open & Heritage Festival, 2017. Found at http://nebula.wsimg.com/1742ab13ea00beac24682fb1bc2fc4ba?AccessKeyId=A870EF723D1FF 4887882&disposition=0&alloworigin=1.

The importance of whodunit narratives to the history and the economy of the Pass is further proven by the extent to which other Pass attractions have also used it to attract tourists. In 2016,

The Frank Slide Interpretative Centre began to produce a comic book that offered their reinterpretation of the crime. The authors of The Shooting of Constable Lawson avoided laying blame as to who fired the fatal shot, and, instead, used two children’s perspectives to tell the story of the tragedy: Pearl Lawson and Carmine Picariello. A caption on the back of the comic states that “two fathers and two families are shattered by the terrible tragedy.”91 This caption indicates a complete dismissal of the impact the tragedy had on Lassandro’s family. In addition, the medium of a comic book underscores two opposing philosophies. First, the interpretive centre has used the comic to engage a younger audience with Alberta’s history. Second, their attempt to give a

91 Monica Field, Joey Ambrosi, and Myriah Sarafena, The Shooting of Constable Lawson (Frank Slide Interpretative Centre, 2016), Back Cover.

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balanced account bypassed discussion about the tensions that existed in the Pass. This is the

Disneyfication of the story.

The popularity of librettist John Murrell and composer John Estacio’s opera Filumena resulted in its relaunch to celebrate Canada’s 150 anniversary. The relaunch came at a time when

Canadians debated whether the government should or should not allow refugees into the country.

The opera impressed on the audience the uncertainty of Lassandro’s guilt when it showed her attempting to prevent Picariello from firing his gun while in a physical struggle with Lawson.

However, when the gun accidently went off she was left holding it. Near the end of the opera

Lassandro confessed to Maria Picariello that her husband wanted her to take the blame for the murder. Picariello’s son also tried to get Lassandro to take the blame. In melodramatic fashion,

Lassandro asked God to forgive the Picariellos while Picariello asked God to forgive Lassandro.

The opera ended with Lassandro praying, “come death and set me free.”92

Florence is the main character in the opera and even though she exudes agency it is questionable whether she would feel comfortable in the centre stage position. Little evidence of her life exists but what does remain indicates that she was, as the Glenbow’s Maverick exhibit states, “shy and deeply religious”93 despite her love of driving and colourful clothing. But operatic conventions confined Murrell and Estacio to the narrative of a tragic tale of love and death in which a female lead is a necessity. Thus, once again the supposed relationship between Lassandro and Steve Picariello becomes the most integral part of her life story.

92 Act Two, Scene Five, Filumena, directed by Eric Till (Edmonton: Filu Productions, 2007), DVD. 93 Wall text, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, Glenbow Museum and Archives, Calgary, Alberta, [2006].

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Conclusion

Since 1968 three common portrayals of Lassandro have dominated the historiography.

First, many authors have created masculine dominated wild-west narratives that rival the histories written by their American counterparts. Canadian authors attempted to persuade their audiences that Canada’s history was just as interesting as the history portrayed in American popular culture.

While these narratives were interesting and exciting because they included dramatic details of the murder¾the car chase, the trial, and the execution¾they often gave Lassandro a secondary role and sensationalized the story. The secondary role Lassandro was given cast her as an innocent victim or the paramour. Her voice was often silenced, giving her no agency.

At the same time, female cultural producers were creating counter portrayals in the form of plays, romance novels, graphic novels, or life-writings. They were interested in Lassandro’s agency and thus portrayed her in a kinder manner. However, Lassandro’s real life cannot be known and as a result, these depictions were no more accurate than the wild-west narratives. Pollock’s play erased Lassandro’s name and ethnicity and replaced her with Leah. Carpenter’s focus on

Lassandro and Steve Picariello’s romance propagated a myth that many authors have used to prove her immorality. Van Herk addressed all the myths by having a conversation with Lassandro that focused on the facts. Van Herk described Lassandro as a maverick because she was willing to break gender conventions by driving. Yet, we are unsure how much she drove and whether

Lassandro would consider herself a rebel. Amantea analyzed Lassandro’s life through several different lenses. Her reliance on primary sources attempted to use Lassandro to reconstruct the forgotten marginalization of the Italian community.

The most recent portrayals of Lassandro focus on the uncertain role she played in Lawson’s death. These portrayals are available for consumption using many genres, including books,

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museum exhibits, a film, and an opera. Whodunit narratives look at the murder from the perspectives of three key players: Pearl Lawson, Picariello, and Lassandro. These narratives involve their audience and challenge them to use their investigative instincts. Whodunit narratives have supported the creation of a cultural tourist economy and Lassandro. While she might not recognize herself in these narratives, they provoke a discussion about her role in the murder and have exposed Alberta’s discriminatory past.

On the surface many of these narratives seem to only represent the characters and circumstances of the tragic event that took place in Coleman on the 21 of September 1922. Yet, there is more to the story. Each of the narratives also spoke about the social, cultural, and political events that were shaping Canada when the makers created them. People used the story of

Lassandro as a tool to speak about changing views towards immigrants in the 1960s, the Quebec

Referendum, Free Trade, and increasing divorce rates in the 1980s, the added focus on women’s history and falling marriage rates in the 1990s, and the need to diversify floundering rural economies after 2000. We can view, categorize, and analyze the events and issues from multiple perspectives, just like Lassandro’s legacy.

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CONCLUSION

They came straight from Blairmore, Knocked upon my door They said woman: don’t you be afraid. There’s not much to be afraid of. See I’m among the living Can’t say the same of your friend, for who I have ridden.1

This verse from Keegan Shaw’s “Ms. Lassandro,” a finalist in the 2017 All-Albertan Song

Contest, demonstrates the continued interest cultural producers have about Lassandro. Like others,

Shaw used the notorious phrase Lassandro uttered to APP Constable Moriarity to characterize her.

Only after editors publicized her confession in their papers did she become a public figure. Ninety- six years later, her notoriety has made her a part of southern Alberta’s cultural fabric. However, unlike many other famous people, we can hardly imagine that this is the legacy Lassandro wanted to leave. Just like accused murderers Carrie Davies, Clara Ford, and Hilda Blake, Lassandro was a servant. Hard work and little spare time filled their days and weeks. It is unlikely that any of them had the time or energy to record their dreams or fears on paper. If Lassandro did, history has stolen them.

It is evident that popular historians based their portrayal of Lassandro on more than just the facts of the crime. Even though her persona has evolved and changed according to political, social, and cultural trends, she still remains a captive of cultural producers. Quite often they treated her as an object rather than a subject ¾she is analyzed, but rarely speaks. Since 1922, popular historians and others have re-tried Lassandro frequently, and they have not reached a common understanding. Reinterpretations continue to arise because of the uncertain circumstances surrounding Lawson’s death and the absence of Lassandro’s voice. This ambiguity has aided in

1 Keegan Shaw, “Ms. Lassandro,” Song, All-Albertan Song Song Contest, 2017.

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creating an industry based on his murder, an industry that spans multiple genres and multiple geographic locations.

As I argue in Chapter One, nativism and Social Darwinism prevented Lassandro from receiving fair treatment from the media or her peers even before the start of her trial. Since the

1870s, Anglo-Saxon legislators in western Canada created a narrative that distinguished between the type of citizens the “new” West needed and those who would benefit from paternalism.

Legislation led to the discriminatory treatment of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other minority groups because Anglo-Canadians deemed them as “infantile in character.”2 Anglo-

Saxons regarded the marginalized groups as barriers to Canada’s growing importance in the British

Empire and a blot on its evolving national self-image. According to reformers’ ideals, a progressive and civilized society, which Canada was striving to become, was temperate. Therefore, the distribution of alcohol became tightly controlled by those with power. They identified the groups they believed were incapable of consuming alcohol and barred them from obtaining it.

Liquor legislation passed in Manitoba in 1873 stressed Anglo-Canadian efforts to create a hierarchical society based on race, ethnicity, and class. These three elements predetermined a person’s morality and social standing. Historian Stan Horall posited that this legislation was one of the earliest examples of racial control within Canada. It resulted in a black market for alcohol, which then led to the North West Mounted Police’s conception. Ironically, the Anglo-Saxons who largely made up the Mountie ranks proved themselves just as “infantile” as those the government instructed them to protect. Drunkenness was rampant amongst its membership. Yet, novelists

2 William Nattress, Public School Physiology and Temperance (Toronto: William Briggs, Wesley Buildings, 1893), 38. Cited in Nancy M. Sheehan, “The WCTU and Educational Strategies on the Canadian Prairie,” History of Education Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 104.

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never popularized this aspect of the force in books like Benton of the Royal Mounted, Bulldog

Carney, or Renfrew of the Mounted.

The influx of immigrants to Canada from places other than Britain worried Anglophones in the early 1900s. Reformers increasingly ostracized “foreign” immigrants because they believed that they were heavily involved in prostitution, drinking, and gambling. Anglo-Canadians stigmatized Italians because, according to Social Darwinism, their race was impulsive. Their brashness made them likely to partake in criminal activities involving guns and knives because they were known to readily use these weapons during alcohol infused arguments. The murder case of Angelina Napolitano in 1911 reinforced this claim, as did Lassandro and Picariello’s trial in

1922.

The friction between Alberta’s Anglo-Saxon and marginalized communities would come to a head during the prohibition referendum held on 21 July 1915. The referendum’s results favoured prohibitionists, but the towns in the Crowsnest Pass voted to stay wet. Supporters of

Prohibition quickly branded the Pass as a lawless region because its largely immigrant population contested their moral authority. Nevertheless, Alberta became a dry province on 1 July 1916. Once again, bootleggers and rumrunners willingly met the public’s call for alcohol.

In 1917, the Government of Alberta formed the APP to enforce Prohibition as the Mounties were unwilling and unable to administer its renewal. Stephen Lawson joined the APP in 1922. He was a well-respected man because he embodied the virtues British-Canadians living in the West idolized. He was Anglo-Saxon, a war hero, a devoted husband and father, and the son-in-law of a highly respected Macleod, Alberta, family. Tragically his APP career did not last long. On 21

September 1922, Lawson’s young daughter witnessed the murder of her father in front of the APP barracks in Coleman, Alberta. Newspapers soon published articles that made it clear the accused

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murderers symbolized characteristics that were in direct opposition to Lawson. They were Italian immigrants who the public knew were heavily involved in the illegal liquor trade.

Sensationalized reports of the murder created hysteria in southern Alberta and the trial became one of the biggest spectacles the Pass had ever seen. Their preliminary inquiry took place at the beginning of October while the trial commenced on 27 November and lasted five days. The jury pronounced a verdict of guilty at the trial’s conclusion and the judge sentenced both of the accused to death. Their hanging would be delayed twice before they met their fate on the Fort

Saskatchewan Gaol’s gallows on 2 May 1923.

Chapter Two argued that the media’s portrayal of Lassandro was highly orchestrated to validate nativist and Social Darwinist beliefs. In 1915, “as British ties loosened and autonomous

Canada began to emerge, newspaper proprietors and editors were as important as politicians in shaping the national self-image,” wrote Charlotte Gray in her study of the portrayal of Carrie

Davies.3 Newspapers followed a crime reporting template that originated in the United States in the 1850s. During the preliminary inquiry, reporters focused on Lassandro’s ethnicity and race, the weapon she used, and the clothes she and her victim wore at the time of the murder. Reports written during the trial stressed again and again that she was Italian and described her physical features in a way that made her seem devilish. She was further demonized by reporters who described her laxity towards the crime the police accused her of committing. Furthermore, journalists tried to create a link between the Lawson family and their readership by focusing on the testimony of Lawson’s children and wife. They also created suspense by incorrectly identifying

3 Charlotte Gray, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Country (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2013), loc. 1523 of 3963, Kindle.

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Lassandro’s relationship with Picariello and his son. The unspecified nature of these relationships reaffirmed her immorality and lack of virtue.

In the lead up to her execution, editors praised the righteousness of the legal system and the surety of Lassandro’s guilt. A few days before her execution, Lassandro recanted her original confession, claiming that Picariello convinced her to take the blame for the murder since authorities would never hang a woman. Editors gave no credence to her new confession, brushing it aside as a last-ditch attempt to save her life. Reporters also did not give credibility to her new confession because it would call into question the mechanics of the Canadian justice system.

Statements made by Attorney General Brownlee and Judge Walsh shortly after the trial reaffirmed the institution’s practices.

Dailies publicized the clemency campaign launched on behalf of Lassandro, but statements made by WCTU member Emily Murphy countered their rally cries. Her comments warned

Canadians about the forthcoming death of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the need to treat all murderers the same regardless of their qualities. Her insistence that Lassandro be treated the same as a male murderer persuaded her to write a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. J. McKinley

Cameron and Lassandro’s supporters successfully delayed her hanging twice but failed to spare her from the gallows. The reported number of people who applied for the job of executioner underscored the public’s continued support for her execution.

The narrative of Lassandro’s execution calmed the public’s trepidation that she would suffer a long and painful death. Writers made known the hangman’s experience and his professionalism because he used the most reliable type of noose. They claimed that the inmates were well nourished and showed great vitality. Most important, journalists reported that Lassandro

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forgave them for executing her. Writers reasserted her and Picariello’s abnormality when they wrote that it took her eleven minutes to expire while he only took ten.

Lassandro’s story was not only used by newspapers to trumpet nativism but was also used by others for their own agenda. The Canadian Prisoners’ Welfare Association used her hanging to comment on Canada’s lack of civility and the need to end the hanging of women. If Canada was going to remain one of the Empire’s civilized nations, it had to uphold its Christian values and align its morals with Britain’s changing morals. In 1943, the editors of Feature Detective Cases published Phillip Godsell’s reinterpretation of Lawson’s murder as the short story “Murder in the

Crow’s Nest Pass.” Godsell was likely influenced by the Canadian government’s internment of

Italian-Canadians during WWII. The tale also warned of the government’s need to vet wartime refugees before they entered the country and further diluted Canada’s Anglo-Saxon qualities.

The last chapter explored postwar and more recent interpretations of Lassandro. Authors continued to frame their narratives according to social, cultural, and political trends that were occurring in Canada. In 1968, Frank Anderson’s The Rum Runners created a template that influenced later narratives, which asserted that Canada’s history was just as unruly and exciting as that of the United States. These wild-west narratives were masculine dominated and sensationalized the chase, the arrest, the trial, and the execution. Lassandro played a secondary role to German spies, train robbers, and cunning detectives. Some of these interpretations, especially Anderson’s, deconstructed the myth of limited participation by Anglo-Saxons in the making, selling, and consumption of alcohol during Prohibition. Almost all Albertans had taken part other than those who were unquestionably devoted to Prohibition.

Women academics and popular historians formulated a second group of narratives that attempted to give Lassandro her voice back. Sharon Pollock recast Lassandro as Leah. Leah

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showed agency by choosing to escape the clutches of Picariello¾alias Mr. Big¾with her sweetheart Johnny Farley. Jock Carpenter focused on the relationship between Lassandro and

Steve Picariello. Artitha van Herk challenged all the myths created about Lassandro and concentrated on her fascination with driving. Gisele Amantea used multiple categories of interpretation to understand how Lassandro was treated by her contemporaries. The increasing amount of importance given to women’s history and events including the 1980 Quebec

Referendum, the surge in Canadian divorce rates, and the desire of Canadians from varied ethnic backgrounds to search out the role their ancestors played in Canada’s creation, influenced their interpretations.

Whodunit stories make up the third collection of narratives. These narratives have helped to create a cultural tourism industry based on Lawson’s murder. They question the accuracy of the jury’s verdict and look at the murder from three perspectives: Pearl Lawson’s, Picariello’s, and

Lassandro’s. These interpretations are strewn across many genres and geographical locations. A segment of the Crowsnest Pass’ tourism industry uses the mysterious circumstances of Lawson’s death to draw tourists to Coleman’s Crowsnest Museum and the Alberta Provincial Police Barracks

Museum; Fernie offers a summer walking tour. The Mavericks Exhibition at Calgary’s Glenbow

Museum allows visitors to cast a ballot as to whether they believe Lassandro was guilty or not.

John Estacio and John Murrell premiered their opera Filumena in 2003 and relaunched it in 2017 to celebrate Canada’s 150 birthday. Lastly, John Kerr made his film, The Emperor, and then sold it to the APP museum. Some have compared Lawson’s murder to “a story line from The Sopranos

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or a Scorsese film,”4 while Fred Bradley, the chairman of the APP Barracks restoration project, commented, “This was the O.J. Simpson trial of the 1920s across Canada.”5

The lasting legacy of the murder is still used to comment on events in today’s Canada.

Recently journalists, with the help of historians, have used Lawson’s murder to frame a discussion about the problems of policing prohibition and the impending legalization of marijuana. Since provinces will once again be allowed to make their own laws, historian Dan

Malleck has warned that people will purchase marijuana legally until what they demand is unavailable in their provincial stores. Then they will turn to the black market to fulfill their needs.6 Additionally, historian Daniel Francis stated that, “The end of prohibition was brought about because people began to recognize that the cure, as it were, was worse than the disease.”7

By supposedly eliminating organized crime from the marijuana industry, but by allowing provinces to create their own laws, the outcome remains unknown, but it seems as if previous lessons have not been used to inform the present.

A 19 April 2018 article published by The Legal Archives Society of Alberta’s website put an end to the myth that Lassandro and Picariello still rested in unmarked graves. Justice Kevin

Feehan’s article informed the readership that the locations of the graves were in fact known and that he had helped to place tombstones on them in December 2011 (see figure 7).8 Modris Eksteins

4 Bob Clark, “A life the size of storms,” Calgary Herald, January 26, 2003. 5 Global News, “Prohibition brought back to life with new exhibit in the Crowsnest Pass,” Global News Calgary, June 30, 2017, https://globalnews.ca/news/3569529/prohibition-brought-back-to-life-with-new-exhibit-in-the- crowsnest-pass/. 6 CBC News Calgary, “As pot becomes legal, parallels are drawn to the waning days of prohibition in Alberta,” The Canadian Press, December 8, 2017, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coleman-prohibition-alcohol-pot- marijuana-black-market-alberta-1.4439532. 7 Ibid. 8 Kevin Feehan, “After Word: The Conclusion of the Emilio Picariello and Florence Lassandro Story,” The Legal Archives Society of Alberta, last modified April 19, 2018, http://legalarchives.ca/after-word-the-conclusion-of-the- emilio-picariello-and-florence-lassandro-story-by-justice-kevin-feehan/.

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assertion, “For facts to become memorable, an element of fiction [is] essential” is highly applicable to this narrative.9

Figure 7. Photos courtesy of Cameron Connelly. Taken from http://legalarchives.ca/after-word- the-conclusion-of-the-emilio-picariello-and-florence-lassandro-story-by-justice-kevin-feehan/.

After analyzing numerous journalistic and popular culture interpretations of Lassandro, the answer to the question “I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?” is clear.

People have made Lassandro a paramour, a heroine, a maverick, a murderer, and a shy Catholic girl because they need to, so they can fulfil their agenda. There were both positive and negative agendas depending on Canada’s social, political, and cultural climate, as identified throughout this thesis. Lassandro may have recognized herself in some of the narratives and she surely would have objected to others. However, we will never know because history has lost her voice. What cultural producers should strive for is the creation of the most accurate narrative that demonstrates both compassion and decency for her, Picariello, and Lawson.

9 Modris Eksteins. Cited in Charlotte Gray, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial that Shocked a Country (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2013), XVI.

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