Serial Box Crime

20 July 2008 98 views No CommentTagged as: artwork • evidence • giovanni costa • innocent • mafia style • murderer • prison • Ricca • riccardo rubmo • serial killer • shotgun • true crime

For years I’ve wondered what was wrong with me.  Ever since I was a kid I have been obsessed with all things true crime.  I wanted to be a lawyer growing up and Law & Order was my favourite television show and probably still is to this day.  I never really knew why I was so fascinated with the subject until today.

When I was 12 years old I witnessed the murder of my friend’s father.  This was a mafia style hit right in front of my house while I was crossing the street with my bike.   In 1991 I lived on a small side street that connected directly with a major road in Thornhill, Ontario, Canada.  While walking across the street I heard a loud bang and turned my head to see one car speeding down the street in the opposite lane and another car had jumped the curb and was running down trees along the boulevard.  As a young kid I had no clue what was going on.  My first instinct was that the car driving along the grass and popped a tire and lost control.  The car crashed into one of the trees and by the time I got there the speeding car was gone.  The dashboard inside the car was covered in blood so I ran inside to get my parents and call 911.

People from the neighbourhood began to gather around to see what had happened.  We had to call 911 twice as the ambulance was taking too long but really it didn’t matter.  Giovanni Costa, a neighbour of mine and my friend’s father had been shot in the head with a shotgun while he was driving home from work.  That was the loud bang I had heard not a tire popping as I had originally thought.  Moments later my friend Barbara and her mother and little brother came walking up the stree to see what the comotion was and became histerical when they realized it was his car.

The only real pieces of information I can find anywhere on the internet to reference this are these two news articles, this news article written by a Toronto Sun reporter in 2007 and this.  As I found out later, the speeding car had Riccardo Rumbo with a sawed-off shotgun ready to take the life of Giovanni Costa.  Stray shotgun pellets sprayed the garage doors of two houses on my street.  Anyone else could have easily been hit and I could have been run over.

An early wake-up call that the GTA was becoming a safe haven for Mafia fugitives came in 1991 – the year Ferraro arrived in Canada – when recent immigrant Giovanni Costa was shot to death in a drive-by shooting near his home. Costa, who moved here from the southern Italian city of Siderno, wasn’t a criminal, but he was related to mobsters involved in a feud with the Commisso crime family over heroin and cocaine trafficking routes. As the feud intensified, Mafia members lashed out at innocent members of rival families, and gangsters went into hiding. Just a month before Costa’s murder, his brother Vincenzo was murdered in Siderno, Italy. There were no suspicions that Vincenzo Costa was a mobster, since he was deaf and mute. Riccardo Rumbo, who lived in York Region and Siderno, was eventually convicted of the murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison in Italy.

I think it is from that point on that subconciously I began to want to learn more about crime starting out with the tv show obsession and later moving to books.  My fascination has turned towards serial killers and serial crime.  I am sometimes afraid to invite people over to my house for fear they might get scared when they see my library collection.  90% of the books I own are true crime and I read a new book every week.

Besides my book collection that is as far as it goes with collecting.  There are a small group of people that I don’t quite understand though and these are the people who collect memorabilia from crime scenes and murderers.  I don’t mean family members of victims keeping items to remember with but total strangers who like to collect and purchase things such as artwork and writings from serial killers, evidence that has somehow made its way onto the market and things like that.

In the past I’ve had two guest posts from other bloggers who’ve given their opinions on what they think about collectors of murderabilia.   I also recently started a conversation on blogcatalog about it as I try to understand people’s positions on this subject.  I’ve seen some interesting points of view.

My two cents? It’s a waste of time. You wouldn’t trust those people in your house, right? Everyone who sees a crazy person on the streets automatically keeps a safe distance. Why would this be any different?

Looking at it from the point of view as police officer, to me…keeping true crime artifacts, its morbid and inmoral and neverless its like tampering with possible evidence. Some people find fascination with it, but at the end, the outcome alway end up in getting money for it. Making money out of others misery or misfortune…..that is a true crime, right there!

What I would be interested in is whether the number of people who collect such things or are otherwise fascinated with serial killers, grisly murders and the like has increased, or there has been a change in the items themselves.

I haven’t yet formed an opinion on what I think about these collectors.  If it is for monetary purposes I am completely against it.  No one should profit from these horrific crimes.

How would your opinion or thoughts be swayed if the collector was a defense lawyer?  This is for a whole other post but if you’d like to read more check this out.  Modesto defense lawyer paints portraits of serial killers as a hobby.  His way of workplace release or something deeper?

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