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The Current Transcript for June 23, 2017

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Preventing an individual from marching in uniform in pride is neither tolerant nor inclusive.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: One of the biggest pride celebrations in Canada happens this weekend and the police will not be marching in Toronto. The issue of whether and how police should belong at Pride has been grabbing headlines across the country for months. But it's not the only issue simmering in LGBT communities, racism, ageism an anti-Muslim sentiments are all creating divisions. We'll talk about those issues in just a few moments. Also today, yes it's okay to be a little cheeky when you're talking about shaving.

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If you want to understand the razorblade you call us at the FT, we got smooth chins we got silky legs we really understand the way it all works.

[Laughter]

PC: King Camp Gillette made his first razor about 1900 kicking off more than a century of evolution, imitators and duplicators. But disposable razors have one job and just because they were invented by a man named King should the blades really cost a king's ransom. We'll talk about the latest in the razor wars including why a close shave costs women more. Then from King Gillette to the whiskey king of Canada.

SOUNDCLIP

I really like Rocco when I was very charmed by him I liked how he approached things. Yes there were some convenient murders and deaths around him.

PC: Yes, you know, just some murders and dead bodies. Rocco Perri wasn't a distillery. He was a gangster and a pretty good one at that. Frank Zaneth was the RCMP’s first undercover officer and the man who brought Rocco down sounds like a real page turner. We'll talk to a real crime writer Trevor Cole about his new book and what it says about our country, in an hour. Hi I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. And you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

LGBT activists raise questions about inclusion in Pride

Guests: Doug Elliott, Rebecca Benson, LaLi Mohamed

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The reality is. The way that Pride handles Black Lives Matter Toronto, the way that pide handles blackness, the way that pot goes black LGBT youth is abysmal.

PC: Well that was Alexandria Williams One of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter Toronto talking about last year's Pride Parade. Controversy erupted when the group temporarily shut down the parade to, in their words, challenge Pride's anti blackness. That issue is still front and center in cities across our country. Toronto's Pride Parade is this Sunday and the city's police will not be there in uniform. At Winnipeg's pride parade in June, organizers asked police to march out of uniform saying many black and trans marchers simply did not feel safe around police. Halifax police announced their voluntary stepping away from next month's pride events in their city. But in Vancouver police will march as part of the city's contingent. Police participation isn't the only source of division, across the country. Pride committees have been grappling with how events can better reflect the diversity of the communities they represent and how the movement for LGBT rights should change. Joining us now to talk about this is Doug Elliott a Toronto lawyer and one of the pioneers in Canadian gay rights activism. He's on the line from Elliott Lake Ontario. And with me in our Toronto studio I'm joined by LaLi Mohamed a community activist. And Rebecca Benson who is a Haudenosaunee two spirit community member. And just a warning, there's going to be some frank talk coming up. Hello to you all.

GUESTS: [Cross talking] Good morning. Good morning.

PC: And I should just say off the top the Toronto police are not marching in the parade, doesn’t matter they're not wearing uniform or they are they're not there. Doug Elliott let me begin with you. How has pride changed since its early days?

DOUG ELLIOTT: Well it's changed enormously. I was at the first pride in Toronto in 1981 which was not a parade it was a protest march. We weren't recognized by the City of Toronto until 1992 so it was officially a protest march until 1992. It really morphed into a parade beginning in the 90s and a community festival. And it's now one of the biggest community events in the city of Toronto, one of the largest in the world. A multimillion dollar extravaganza with a very long long parade it's full of floats and big banks and politicians that back in 1981 wouldn't have given us the time of day.

PC: Is it where you would like it to be?

DOUG ELLIOTT: Well it's where it is. You know it doesn't really matter what I like or don't like. It is the way it is I think the thing that I like least about the parade today is the fact that it is now so big and they have these barricades. If you get into the parade it's no nine or 10 hour endurance test in the hot sun to get from one end to the other. So when you get to be my age which is 60, you have to think twice about whether you want to make that kind of marathon commitment. Small communities like Elliott Lake where I am now, it's a lot less demanding, a lot more friendly.

PC: Rebecca Benson you identify as a two spirits just for people who don't know what that term is?

REBECCA BENSON: For sure. Two spirit is a term that comes from the Indigenous community. It's a [unintelligible] term. It's an umbrella term for folks who self-identify both as indigenous and also self-identify on the LGBTQ spectrum.

PC: And how representative do you feel within pride events?

REBECCA BENSON: This year actually we are going to be doing like a power grand entry which is the first year that we're doing that, which is really wonderful it's a really great way of including the Indigenous community. I think that's a complicated question. I think indigenous people are like generally not represented in the ways that maybe they should be can, like considering the history and considering that it's our territory in general so. But I think Pride is like making good steps and I think the grand entry is really beautiful and the idea of having people hand arming is really beautiful which is what's happening this year. But I like, there are other ways. We've come a long way and there is a ways to go.

PC: Okay, LaLi Mohamed where are you on this? What does pride mean to you? How inclusive do you feel it is?

LALI MOHAMED: I think Pride is incredibly important. You know, I have this 13 year love affair with the festival as a quirky queer kid growing up in Etobicoke. Pride was a place where I could figure out myself. It was a place where I can meet you know gay men who looked like me. And so I love Pride, I love particularly black drama in its 19th year. It's a celebration of African black and Caribbean diasporic people living in Toronto and in Canada. And I think you know black folks have this really special way of insisting on carving out spaces for themselves.

PC: Hmm. Let's pick up on what you just said because as you know as we all know that the issue of police at Pride, at Toronto and other cities across country, has become a very big issue. And a large part of that is about racism and trans and black people feeling, in their words, intimidated and don't want police around. How big a problem, LaLi is racism not in mainstream but within the LGBT community it usually communities are a microcosm of larger issues. To how does that go out for you?

LALI MOHAMED: Well I think racism, anti-blackness, anti-Muslim sentiments are pervasive, right? And so I don't think the racism that exists in the LGBT community is somehow exceptional. But I do think it's incredibly disappointing, right? I as somebody who has to navigate and negotiate the terrains of homophobia have to then encounter really terrible sort of racism from the LGBT community and so it's difficult but I don't think it's exceptional, right. I just wish we could do better.

REBECCA BENSON: I think, just to I guess echo LaLi sentiments, in that like there is anti-intuitive sentiment there is like a lack of visibility of two separate people. I think there's not enough done to ensure that racialized indigenous low income folks are included or like. And I think that that's true for a lot of bi-poc folks, like Pride doesn't do enough to do outreach to those communities. Like how can we get people actually in these spaces and how can we not just like get them in this spaces, but how do we design spaces for them. Like who else is…

PC: Why is it important for people like her like you know this is a wonderful celebration of the diversity of the LGBT community. Why do we then need spaces within that celebration?

REBECCA BENSON: I think the question goes back to if we're not creating... like if pride is about… it's like started as a protest like Doug mentioned it started as a protest right? Like pride started as a riot against police brutality. So if you're not paying attention to who are most vulnerable members of our communities are and we're not carving out spaces that will keep them safe then what are we doing?

LALI MOHAMED: But I think these spaces are important because you want to make sure people feel empowered, right. I think Pride is a space where you know young kids from rural Ontario, or you know like Jane and Finch come to experience their full selves. And I think it's so incredibly empowering to be encountering a space where you can hear the kind of music and see the kind of bodies that you don't necessarily see.

PC: Doug Elliott, go ahead.

DOUG ELLIOTT: Yeah I was just going to jump in there and say there's been a lot of controversies over the years about the degree to which we have unified events like the parade, which ought to include everyone and the degree to which we have separate events. You know the date march controversial at one time, the Trans March was controversial at one time. But I think we you know we always have to strike this balance between inclusion, you know it's like the rainbow flag. It's not one color it's a bunch of separate colors but it's all one flag. And I think that's the way Pride ought to be celebrated. I also might just want to jump in as the old guy on this call. You know, there's been a lot of talk about racism but very little talk about ageism as LaLi mentioned. Despite all of the attention that Black Lives Matter brought to the issue of racism last year the fact is that Blackarama has been…

PC: What is Blackarama?

DOUG ELLIOTT: It is, run by blackness. Yes. It is a black community event within the festival. It is very popular and it's been very successful for over a decade. LaLi says 19 years, I'll go with that. Well, this year was the first time that, in the history of pride, that there was an event for seniors. You know, they had an event for dogs last year but this is the first time they've had an event for seniors. So we do have an issue of racism within our community but I think the issue of ageism is the problem that we have yet to really come to grips with. And I commend Pride Toronto for having their first seniors event this year. But it was one tiny event in a very large cat calendar that is mostly focused on people in their 20s and 30s. So just as the commercial life of the LGBT community is focused on those people.

PC: So LaLi, Rebecca, of a different generation than Doug. Is there a generation gap within the LGBT community as you see it?

LALI MOHAMED: Well I think what's really interesting is Blackarama is incredibly intergenerational space. But if I can pivot away from that for a moment, I think that what the word inclusion does is betray the really vile and violent ways in which these groups and these community spaces have excluded people. I think you know the idea of inclusion can't happen until we interrogate the kinds of racism that you know Rebecca and I are speaking about. The kinds of anti-Muslim sentiments that sort of you know like exist in the queer community. I think you know it would be wonderful for us to have one big unified event. But I think until we have honest and candid conversations about the ways in which racism manifests itself in these communities’ places I would love to be free of that for a weekend.

PC: But for people who aren't aware, how does it in your opinion? How does it manifest itself?

LALI MOHAMED: I mean you know I will walk down Church and Wellesley and I will see a man wearing a shirt that says Muslims really want to kill us. Or last night after coming from a really incredible celebration in the Village I was called a nigger. And so I think you know racism exists and manifests the ways in which it manifests itself beyond the borders of Church and Wellesley.

PC: Which is where pride is held in Toronto.

LALI MOHAMED: Yes. And what racism does is I that it makes people feel unsafe. I think it relegates people to the margins and it makes people who are vulnerable even more vulnerable.

PC: And Doug's point about inclusion and exclusion is that, it cuts many different ways in terms of being inclusive. His point is that that there is this generational gap. Do you see it at that, Rebecca?

REBECCA BENSON: I think like the indigenous cultural perspective is really different in that like we like our two spirit elders aren't surviving, like we don't have that many. Like many Chac Abby is coming and she's going to be marching in Pride on Sunday. We have Laureen Blue Waters. We have Albert McLeod. But like we only have a handful cause they didn't make it. So this question of like two spirit elder inclusion, like it is my dream to have a float one day of people who have survived to old age, who are trans and indigenous and two spirit. But they are they're alive but they aren't being uplifted. They're alive but they're there in really sad impoverished situations, their lives are being disproportionately affected by all the things that affect indigenous lives, are going to more so affect two spirit lives. So I think like for me as a two spirit young person, like I'm always thinking about my elders I'm always thinking about the seven generations that came before me, and I am always thinking of the seven generations that will come after me.

PC: So Doug when you hear Rebecca and LaLi, who are of a different generation than you, talk about the issues that are very important to them as one of the pioneers in the gay rights movement in Canada. What do you hear from them? What are you hearing?

DOUG ELLIOTT: Well I think it's refreshing to hear the passion that they have for human rights. It makes me feel comfortable at the fact that I may be able to retire someday. But you know it's not like racism was invented by this generation. My late mentor George Haslop used to say every young gay man thinks he's the first one to discover gay sex, and we forget about the generations before. I think we have a lot to learn from the first nations culture in that regard, by the way I have tremendous respect for it, and it does have a tradition of respecting the wisdom of elders that we can learn a lot about. But I think it's you know it's not like racism was an issue that was unknown to my generation. I mean I'm old enough to remember Martin Luther King's assassination. I was profoundly affected by it. So racism is a problem that has been with us for a long time. I think it's just getting a lot more attention because of changing demographics. When I was born in Toronto it was about 98 percent white and pretty Protestant too, I might add. Today, Toronto and other big cities in our country are you know over 50 percent or more non-European. That's not a bad job but…

LALI MOHAMED: Yes, but I think Doug is right. You know racism wasn't invented in the 1970s by a bunch of white gay men. But I think there's a responsibility to not continue the practice of racism. And I think that's what you know we need to be grappling with. Unfortunately you know while it's both sad and wonderful that Doug was deeply impacted by the assassination of Martin Luther King I do think that's a responsibility for men like Doug to not perpetuate the kinds of racism that existed in the 1970s. And so you know what I would love to see is while absolutely no pride and the largest city could be doing more for gay seniors, I think that's an incredibly important issue. I don't think we should be juxtaposing that with the ways in which we need to tackle and tear down you know like racist systems in the community.

DOUG ELLIOTT: I'm going to just jump in for a second there. The suggestion that I haven't done anything about racism I just would like to clear that up. I did hear for the Canadian Arab Federation in the Sharkawi case challenging anti-Islamic and anti-Arab racism that arose in the wake of 9/11.

MOHAMED LALI: That is wonderful, Doug.

DOUG ELLIOTT: So I have not really been sitting on my butt since Martin Luther King's assassination, just to be clear.

MOHAMED LALI: That's wonderful. Doug thanks for showing up.

PC: Okay, Rebecca Benson, what do you think, I mean clearly there are divisions within the broader LGBT community and we're hearing that today, what needs to be done to make this more inclusive? How do we move forward? This started as a protest movement as you said. I mean should Pride and it has turned by a lot of people's estimation into a celebration, there's a debate over whether it be a celebration or political protest, where do you come in on this?

REBECCA BENSON: Again I'm just going to echo LaLi the sentiments about like this juxtaposition in that like you can have both. [Laughs] You can protest and you can have dancing. You can have revolution and you can have like powerful art and party spaces like all of these. And like partying as politics is like a queer practice because it's like sometimes dance floors and liminal spaces like that the only places where we get to experience like joy in our bodies the ways that like other folks get to all the time, right? So I think like you can have both. We need to tackle racism we need to tackle it in all of its forms. Anti-indigenous sentiment, Islamophobia, and the exclusion of elders and also just to point out that like black elders, Indigenous elders, like folks that have intersectional identities like are going to be disproportionately impacted. So like when you uplift one community you uplift everybody else. So I think in terms of like where do we go from here, we have to have like more spaces for conversation about that.

LALI MOHAMED: And what's really wonderful is I used to sit on the board of the Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Youth and one of the visions for the world was you know we want to live in a world where young people, particularly young queer questioning and trans folks, can live their lives free from fear. And that's where I would love to see, you know in our community, right? Living our best lives without the fear of racism, without the fear of Islamophobia and without the fear of misogyny.

PC: Doug where are you on this?

DOUG ELLIOTT: Well I think there is much work to be done in our community and in our country. You know we are very privileged to be Canadians. All of us, despite all of the challenges we face, we're far better off than most of the people in the world because we can have a civilized discussion about human rights and we can have a gay pride parade which wouldn't be allowed in Russia for example. I think that we do have to confront the historic injustices that have been visited on communities in the past and continue to live with us today including homophobia and Transphobia. I'm all for intersectionality but I just want to make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that homophobia and Transphobia are still important issues and they shouldn't vanish in the debate about other issues.

PC: Okay, we will have to leave it there. Thank you to all three of you.

LALI MOHAMED: Thank you so much.

DOUG ELLIOTT: Thank you.

REBECCA BENSON: Thank you.

PC: Doug Elliott is a trial lawyer and gay rights activist. He was on the phone from Elliott Lake Ontario. LaLi Mohamed is a community activist and he was here with me in Toronto. And Rebecca Benson is a Haudenosaunee two spirit community member. She was also here in Toronto. Well, the CBC News is next, then thinner, smoother, better.

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VOICE 1: Hmm. Now that's a decent sort of a shave.

VOICE 2: When you're a man with real bristle. You need a real man shave, with water, lather and Gillette.

PC: Well from King Gillette to Jacob Chic to just Harry the razor has evolved through the decades and so has the battle for market supremacy. But why are blades so expensive and why do most women's brands cost more than men's. Answers to those questions that's coming up after the news. Want to remind you if you want to get in touch with us at The Current please do. You can tweet us @thecurrentCBC and you can find all the other ways to get in touch with us by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and then clicking on the Contact Us link. I'm here Piya Chattopadhyay. You're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. We're back in just a bit.

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How razors changed the way we shop

Guests: Alan Livsey, June Cotte

PC: Hi I'm Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still to come, how to win friends and influence people gangster style? H

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He was very charming. He understood people he knew how to get people to do things for him.

PC: Rocco Perri was Canada's a bootlegger extraordinaire. During prohibition, he was making more than a million dollars a month. By today's terms, that Zuckerberg money. The editor of Canada's Whiskey King, in a half an hour. But first there just strips of metal set in plastic, right? Not exactly.

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VOICE 1: Have you met Jasmine Strauss our new head of balms and lubricants?

VOICE 2: No, I have not. How do you do, Reggie Perrin.

VOICE 3: How do you do?

VOICE 1: Reggie is our head of disposable razors. He's working on a 10 blade razor. They say it can not be done.

VOICE 3: Can it be?

VOICE 2: No it cannot, actually. [Audience laughs] It’s far too many blades.

PC: The world the razor marketing where you seemingly can never have enough blades. That was the British sitcom Reggie Perrin starring Martin Clunes as the title character, a razor marketing specialist. Since that episode aired there has actually been a huge shift in the disposable razor market, and it all started like this.

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VOICE 1: Hi I'm Mike founder of DollarShaveClub.com. What is DollarShaveClub.com? Well for a dollar a month we sent high quality razors right to your door. Yes a dollar. Are the blades any good? No. Our blades are [beep] great. Each razor has stainless steel blades and aloe vera lubricating strips and a pivot head. It's so gentle a toddler could use it. And do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle, a flashlight, a backscratcher and ten blades? Your handsome ass grandfather had one blade and polio. [Sound: Car Starting] Stop paying for shave tech you don't need.

PC: That was Michael Dubin. Six years ago he launched the Dollar Shave Club a company that lets you order razors online for less. It also allowed subscribers to bypass the shelves upon shelves of blade options at the store. The Dollar Shave Club offered an alternative and in doing so it launched what some have called the new razor wars. Now Gillette, the razor industry Goliath that dominate the market for years, has started a subscription program of its own. This isn't the first time the humble shaving implement has altered buying habits but it is where we are starting today. Alan Livsey writes for The Financial Times he has written about the success of the Dollar Shave Club and he joins us this morning from London England. Alan, hello.

ALAN LIVSEY: Hello.

PC: So after the Dollar Shave Club first posted the ad we just heard on YouTube what happened?

ALAN LIVSEY: He got a lot of attention. And the website I believe crashed, YouTube had a huge amount of hits and he had a lot of interest I think from investors. And you see that once and it really gets your attention and I presume male investors and media if I can be sexist immediately said, “well I completely get the message there.”

PC: So I mean it is one thing to go viral and have a lot of YouTube hits, it's another to monetize to turn that into a business success. How important was it to the Dollar Shave Club success?

ALAN LIVSEY: Well it was very important to get a profile is very important to get attention.

PC: Why do you think in its early days why was it so effective? This ad and then thousands and thousands of people say “yeah I want it. I want that razor.”

ALAN LIVSEY: Men have, and I'm not saying that women have not noticed this too, but we've noticed that the blade model was an important one for Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett invested in Gillette because a long time ago, is because you get understand that people weren't buying the shavers. They didn't have to pay for the services they were buying blades every time. And that was where the margins were. Perhaps there was some complacency with Procter and Gamble later bought Gillette. But there is perhaps a little bit of complacency in the part of the big guys. Prices kept going up. Also it's easy to steal items. Shoplifters were attracted to these more pricey blades and I think the thing came together that certainly in North America it was very difficult to get to go in and just buy some blades. I guess Michael did it, and this Dollar Shave Club tapped into that resentment.

PC: And so when Dubin and Dollar Shave Club come in how much market share do they steal from the established giants?

ALAN LIVSEY: Well Gillette had probably about two thirds of this market which is roughly $15 billion worldwide. In the United States he had zero market share. And suddenly he had, well within a few years he had 1 percent. Now that may not sound like very much but this is a market growing at maybe 2 percent an annum. I think that's a pretty big statement. You know for a small company to make that much of a grab in such a little time.

PC: t was a bit of, it was a disrupter in a sense.

ALAN LIVSEY: Yes and I think he was. I think it was the right message at the right time but also I think let's not underestimate the fact that he did execute well.

PC: I said in the introduction that you know we're on the edge of a razor war so to speak. How has the Dollar Shave Club shaken the razor industry up?

ALAN LIVSEY: Well, maybe how is it shaking up the venture capital industry [laughs]. They probably looked at a few early investors made a fortune. I'm not saying that the founder didn't make any money. One thing I noticed, this is you know spread into different areas, there's copycat models. He wasn't the first. There were others that were trying to come up with a, you know a new approach to shaving. There was king of shaves I think from here. But this didn't catch on or didn't find the right business model and it's still around. I think it will be tough too. You know they're never going to completely take over the Gillette's the Schick razor and Wilkinson and the others like Bic.

PC: But Gillette is running its own subscription service for razors now isn't it?

ALAN LIVSEY: Yeah. I don't blame them. Probably they brought their prices down a little bit so in that sense Dollar Shave Club has done a service to the consumer. Well you, whether it will last, I don't know. It seems as there are other, as I said, other copycats out there and you know. There's Harry's and others that are out there and it's hard to know why. Unilever didn't buy it purely because they desperately wanted a shaving business they didn't really have one. I think they bought it because of the way the Dollar Shave Club connected to the customer.

PC: Unilever bought the Dollar Shave Club nearly a year ago I think for about a billion bucks or something like a billion dollars.

ALAN LIVSEY: About a billion dollars, yes. That would have turned a lot of heads [laughs].

PC: [Laughs] Well let me ask you about that because, you know, as it turned heads how does the success of dollar shape clubs business model lead to shake ups in other industries? You say this is about more than razors.

ALAN LIVSEY: Well I think it's about a stodgy consumer companies sort of waking up to the fact that: A - we cannot be complacent and I'm not suggesting for a moment that they all sit around on their hands doing nothing, by even in an area where you think you have a decent margin business even if it's not growing very fast you can't be complacent. You do need to connect to the customers in newer ways and it's very likely at the top of these companies that you have older executives who are probably maybe a little less ofay with everything from Twitter to Facebook to whatever, Instagram, in how to connect to your customer base.

PC: You know unless all of us humans decide to stop shaving, the razor will be like this ubiquitous product that is around till the end of time. And as you say the big players there is still the Goliath in this industry. How vulnerable are the big companies to an upstart say like the Dollar Shave Club that has up ended their business models?

ALAN LIVSEY: Well look at Tesla the Tesla has market value in the electric car market. Tesla’s market value is bigger than Ford's isn't it? You know it's huge. These to a certain degree, there is an element of fashion and faddism that comes into these things. But there are messages there is a flag that has been raised and it's telling some of the more established companies that they can't be complacent. Does it destroy them forever? I don't know. Certainly in retail we've seen Amazon do a lot of damage to the North American retail stocks and you will see that in everything from Hudson Bay to others. But you know generally if you have a really large market share and good cash flow and a decent balance sheet you're going to be around for a while. So you know that's the challenge now for a smaller maker. And I think that Michael Dubin probably did the right thing in selling out, and his investors did the right thing in selling out when they did.

PC: Alan Livsey, good to talk to you. Thank you.

ALAN LIVSEY: Thank you.

PC: Alan Livsey writes for The Financial Times and we reached him in London, England. A century before the current battle of the blades the razor gave its name to a new economic model. It's called two part pricing but many economists refer to it as the razors and blades model. We have Tim Harford with us to explain what it is and how it works. Tim is the presenter of the BBC podcast 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. One of those 50 things is disposable blade safety razor. He also writes The Undercover Economist column for the Financial Times, and like Alan Lipsey Tim Harford joins us from London, England. Hello.

TIM HARFORD: Hello. Yes a colleague of Alan speaking from a different studio. If you want to understand the razorblade you call it the FT, we've got smooth chins we've got silky legs, we really understand the way it all works.

PC: [Laughs]Well thank you for drawing that picture of yourself for us. Let us talk about the blades and set this up first. What is the razors and blades economic model?

TIM HARFORD: So the razors and blades economic model as Alan alluded to briefly is the idea that you buy the razor cheaply and then when you go back to get more blades they're expensive. And so you know you're sucked in by what seems like a good deal. And then you pay handsomely later on. Where else do we see this? Very famously printers and ink cartridges. Absolutely incredible. The cost of refilling many printers is close to the cost of buying a brand new printer. We see it with computer games console like the Xbox 360 the PlayStation 4. They're expensive but they're actually losing money for the manufacturers. They make it back when they sell the games because they get licensing fees from the makers of the game design companies who publish the games. And more recently coffee with those coffee modules as advertised by George Clooney and other celebrities. So in each of these cases the idea is we are being hooked, we are drawn in and then we don't really realize how much it's going to cost until later.

PC: So in other words when it comes to the razor that plastic crappy stick that the blade attaches to costs nothing. You get that you keep that forever but we're going to hose you for all the blades. The thing that actually does all the work on your legs or face or armpits or wherever else, you use a blade.

TIM HARFORD: Absolutely and that over the lifetime of a razor you might go through a hundred two hundred. I don't know I've not done the math.

PC: Depends on how often you shave my hair, my friend.

TIM HARFORD: Well indeed it does. You go through a lot of razor blades. So it's very much in the company's interest if they can, either because of some legal barrier you know you're not allowed to make a game for X-Box 360 without Microsoft permission, or just because of customer inertia. You know I could buy some non-Gillette blades but I'm kind of sort of stuck for whatever reason. It's very much in company's interests if they can make this stick. And the man who invented the very idea is a fascinating individual called King Cam Gillette. Before he invented the disposable razor blade and made all of this possible, Gillette was this weird utopian dreamer. He published a book in 1894 outlining this vision for this city, not actually not far from where Toronto is, it's going to be powered by hydropower it's going to be on the shores of Lake Ontario it's going to be called Metropolis and the entire population of North America is going to live in happiness and bliss and material comfort and that sort of communist utopia with just a single corporation is going to supply everything. King Cam Gillette dreams up this idea, publishes the book and then it doesn't quite work out. And he goes it goes, well you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to invent a new kind of razor blade. He charges an absolute fortune for these blades.

PC: An absolute fortune on what year? What are we talking?

TIM HARFORD: His blades were developed round about 1900. The Sears catalog was stocking them in 1913 with an apology saying : “Well, other blades are available. But you know we our customers demand these blades and we're allowed to discount them. But if you want to pay…”. Because they were about a third of an average working man's wages to buy the initial razor. So the two part pricing model the razors and blades model, Gillette actually didn't demand that till later. But first he had what he regarded as a superior product and a lot of people thought it was superior which is the disposable razor. That is a new technology. It's only when his patents expires and other people start making the same thing , that he goes, “Well, what am I going to do? How am I going to keep making money?” And that is when he hits upon the two part pricing model. And he seems to be exploiting consumer inertia there. So you could buy your blades and your razors it from somebody else but Gillette introduced the idea and it has been embraced by many industries ever since.

PC: There is an academic from the University of Chicago Law School, Randy picker who has argued that the story of Gillette and the two part pricing you know is the thing of myth. It has become so mythologized that the facts on how the model worked are actually a bit fuzzy. How central is the origin story of razors and blades in the history of economics? I mean you gave examples of where we do it now. But how important is it?

TIM HARFORD: So we economists are not great at history and I find it fascinating. And when I was researching all of these different inventions for this series you mentioned 50 things that made the modern economy, I'd often find “Wow there's an amazing economic story” but the actual historical details are not what I imagined and not what I expected. Gillette did pioneer to part pricing. But many economists think he did so when he had the patent and this was the thing he immediately did, because he had market power. He had the intellectual property. And I think a surprise to discover that he came up with it rather, you know in many years later under competitive pressure. But the actual importance of the model, you know it's a very widespread model around the economy. And economists sometimes struggle with the idea of consumer irrationality, the idea that we know we can't see through the pricing. I mean we sort of know that the razors are going to be expensive so we are still struggling to update our economic prize and to introduce psychological factors into economics. But I don't there's any doubt that you know this is an important part of the way certain markets work. And you see it even beyond the narrow concept in our idea of the razors and the blades or the printer and the printer ink. You see it for instance with hotels and hotel mini bars. So that's not quite the same thing but it is a shrouded, it was called shrouded pricing. So you know you're going to be charged a lot for drinks in the minibar. You know you're going to be charged a lot for Wi-Fi. And yet when you're on the comparison Web sites trying to choose which hotel to book you don't see all that stuff. You can't easily measure it you can't easily find out what it is. So you have no choice but to just compare the headline prices. So you booked the hotel with a cheap room and then the hotel screws you over as you knew they were going to.

PC: Tim thank you very much and thank you for your shorn face description I appreciate it very much.

TIM HARFORD: My pleasure.

PC: Tim Harford is the presenter of the BBC podcast 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. He also writes the undercover Economist column for The Financial Times. Tim Harford was in London, England. Call me old fashioned but I still buy my razors at the store where there are a lot of options then blades, multi blades, moisturizing strips, vibrating handles. But another important distinction is gender.

SOUNDCLIP

[Song]

I am your Venus. I am your fire, your desire.

VOICE: Introducing Venus from Gillette. The first razor designed to make you feel like a goddess. Protective cushions around three blades with the closest shave ever in just one stroke. So close your skin stays smoother longer. And that's something all goddesses are entitled to. Now individually sealed blades are easy to store easy change. Venus. Reveal the goddess in you.

PC: Well as that classic Gillette commercial shows the message used to sell razors to women is much different than for men. But even if the product is virtually identical, women often pay more. And that's led to questions over why gender based pricing persists for some consumer products. June Cotte is a marketing professor at the Ivey School of Business at Western University. She joins us from another London this time. It's London, Ontario. Hi, June.

JUNE COTTE: Hello.

PC: How common is gender pricing?

JUNE COTTE: Oh it's very common. And even though we've seen a lot of news and press coverage on it in 2017 for example in Canada a study showed that women are generally paying about 43 percent more for personal care products. Interestingly on a product category basis you know women pay more, 56% of the time and men pay more about 13% of the time. So there are gender differences both ways but women generally pay more often. So there is definitely gender segmentation based on that.

PC: Where did the raiser's fit in so this because they're often used as a key example right because exact same thing that we need the blade to do on our bodies whether you're a woman or a man, where do razors fit in.

JUNE COTTE: Right. So they are one of the poster children for this. If you think about services like haircuts it's a lot easier to see that well maybe women's haircuts should cost a little bit more, but with razors you know people can actually hold them. It is razors and pens or the ones that are, people say you know what I really needed a pink razor versus a blue razor. And the answer is no, you don't. But you know companies recognize that segmentation works. There's a certain segment of women that actually want a pink razor or they might want a certain smell in the strip with the razor. And you know if they're willing to pay more companies will charge more. I mean that is the key bottom line here. You don't have to have a pink craze or you can go you know a couple of aisles over and buy the blue version. But there is always a segment of women that will pay more, that are less price sensitive. And so companies will continue to charge differential pricing.

PC: There have been as you said we've been talking about the gender price wars for some time now there is an awareness of it. There have been campaigns against gender pricing online and IRL in real life. What effect have those kinds of campaigns had?

JUNE COTTE: Well I don't have data on it but I think that the general awareness is higher. So my guess is you know and you can read a lot of blogs and commentary on this that it's really up to female shoppers. We have agency. We don't have to, you know, it is not like we are trapped into this. And so I do think there's a higher awareness that you know, things like Dollar Shave Club that we're talking about earlier you know they're just as open to women. We don't have to necessarily pay more. So I do think there's a much higher awareness amongst at least some women to think about this before they buy.

PC: Okay, so I'm guilty as charged because I know that I get charged more and yet I can tell you right now my handle of my disposable razor at home is purple, meaning I probably paid a ton more than my husband's black or blue one. Wow. So help me understand myself. Why don't I just buy that the cheaper one?

JUNE COTTE: Well habit is very powerful. And so my guess is you go to the same aisle of the same store. Most of the time that you need blades and you won't see the men's version right there. That's key because if you could see both versions right side by side you'd probably be cued to consider changing your behavior. But because you don't see that even though if you were to reflect for a second you might consider it you actually have to move different aisles and it sounds a little bit reductionists but habit is very powerful. And so we just continue to replace things. And in the grand scheme of things there's a segment of consumers and you would be one of them. That really doesn't care all that much about a product that they don't buy that frequently and then when the price difference, it is large percentage wise, but in terms of dollars and cents it's not very large and so it's not worth it to reconsider their purchasing habits.

PC: I do care about and I think the point you made to me about me is that I'm just lazy. I don't go searching in the other aisle. So [unintelligible cross talking] they send me down the pink lady isle.

JUNE COTTE: So habit is a nice way of saying lazy. But you know marketers count on habit. It's very powerful. You know if you were to arm yourself with a list that actually told yourself in the future don't forget to go to the men's aisle. You probably would.

PC: I think I'm just publicly out of myself and I have to now go to the men's isle to buy razor blades, which leads me to this question because I am aware of we're getting hosed as women. This is gender pricing and I could just go buy this other blade and yet I don't do it. So it's not just about me but, how likely are we to see the end to gender pricing writ large.

JUNE COTTE: Oh we're not.

PC: [Laughs]

JUNE COTTE: I don't think we are. But I think you have to put it in a bigger context. We have differential pricing in all sorts of industries. So seniors get a different price for a movie ticket. Business travelers who book late pay a different price to sit in the same seat. So differential pricing will not go away. It is the backbone of dynamic pricing and marketing strategies. As long as someone is less price sensitive there will be a product for that less price sensitive group. So it's not necessarily a gender, in this case it is, but it's not only gender. It's difference price sensitivities lead to marketers to offer different products and services and pricing bundles.

PC: I know someone would say to you: “June, this isn't about differential pricing this is about discriminatory pricing,” that there is a difference.

JUNE COTTE: Well and I think that's a much stronger case when you're talking about things that you can't choose a very good example would be discriminatory pricing in things like dry-cleaning. You know I can't walk in and say I'd like to get the men's shirt price for this women's blouse. And yet most of us say those prices should be the same. And so in places like New York that are sort of leading the way New York City. They actually have outlawed discriminatory pricing on things such as services haircuts, dry cleaning etc. but in the case of razors there actually is a choice right there. So nobody is actually saying you must buy the pink one. You can buy the cheaper one. And so in that case you see a far less regulatory push because it would be very difficult to do and because consumers have a choice. So that's why I say it's differential pricing rather than discriminatory, in the same way that we recognize that you know discounts on certain services for certain groups, we are perfectly comfortable with. You know kids get a cheaper price. Seniors get a cheaper price. We are okay with that. In this case we feel like we're getting a higher price. And so they don't for example say there's a discount for men's razors. They say women's razors will cost more.

PC: June Cotte, thank you for your perspective I appreciate it.

JUNE COTTE: Oh you're welcome.

PC: June Cotte is a marketing professor at the Ivy school of business at Western University and she was in London, Ontario. Well if you want to tell us about the blades you use to get rid of your unwanted hair if you do that, you can tell us. We're excited to hear from you. You can tweet us @thecurrentCBC. You can find us on Facebook Facebook.com/CBCthecurrent or you can e-mail us by going to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And once you're there click on the Contact Us link. And we'll have more talk about unwanted hair. A little later on The Current. Okay, well coming up before that in our next half hour the rise and fall of a Canadian gangster.

SOUNDCLIP

It was a very corrupt time and Rocco had all the police in Hamilton on his payroll.

PC: Rocco Perri was a moonshine mogul, the rich Raja of rum runners, the Baron of bootlegging. I could keep going, The Sultan of smuggling. His larger than life story is up next and it's a goody. I am Piya Chattopadhyay and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. We're back in just a bit.

[Music: Theme]

Author Trevor Cole on the rise and disappearance of Canada's Whisky King

Guest: Trevor Cole

PC: High I am Piya Chattopadhyay and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: You are the king of the bootleggers. that's what they say you should know.

VOICE 2: They called me King of the Bootleggers. The uncrownd King [laughs].

VOICE 3: Well, what about all these murders?

VOICE 2: My men do not carry guns.

VOICE 3: Oh, really no guns?

VOICE2: Yes. If I find that they do. I get rid of them. I provide them with high powered cars. If they cannot run away from the police, it is their own fault. But guns make trouble. My men do not use them. There is no business. I don't care what you name in which honesty is more important factor than the bootlegging business.

PC: Well that was from the radio drama King Of The Bootleggers which ran on CBC Radio's morning side back in 1986. It told the story of Rocco Perri and his common law wife Bessie Starkman who became the most famous gangster couple in our country. Perri has been gone for 73 years and well, by gone I don't necessarily mean dead, but probably. The thing is that no one knows what actually happened when Rocco Perre disappeared from the streets of Hamilton, Ontario back in 1944. Trevor Cole maps the mobster's incredible rise and fall in his new book The Whiskey King The Remarkable True Story Of Canada's Most Infamous Bootlegger and the Undercover Mountie on His Trail. Trevor Cole is with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

TREVOR COLE: Hello.

PC: Your book is about two guys, two men from Italy who make their way to Canada in the early part of last century. So let's start first with the so-called Whiskey King Rocco Perri. What was life like for him during his first two years here?

TREVOR COLE: It was fascinating because he came over as a young man. He was 16 when he arrived in North America from Calabria, Italy and he was poor then he only had $20 in his pocket when he arrived. But he had connections he had people who he knew could help him. He arrived first in, landed in Boston made his way to Messina in New York. But he was very ambitious. So he came north to Canada. There was a lot of activity in Montreal he first checked up Montreal and then he came west into Ontario, had some connections with underworld figures in Toronto and then he went north to Parbold during the Silver fever and Parbold in the early 1900s. So he was scrabbling he was making connections and getting into some trouble. There were some events early on connected to the black hand, at that time people didn't use the term mafia. It was the black hand when everyone wanted to talk about the Italian underworld. That was the term they used. Rocca was connected. But Rocco was a different kind of guy. He wasn't brutal and violent the way a lot of men in that line of work were. He was very charming. He understood people who knew how to get people to do things for him. And so he, and he had a vision. I think he knew what he wanted to do. And it was just a matter of all the right things coming together

PC: That dude in nice attitude.

TREVOR COLE: Kind of yes. I mean I really like Rocco. As I was researching this book, I was very charmed by him I liked how he approached things. Yes there were some convenient murders and deaths around him that seemed to help him. But you know for somebody in that line of work I think he was the best example of that.

PC: Okay. And then he goes on. eventually he meets a woman her name is Bessie Starkman and things get complicated between them.

TREVOR COLE: Yes. I mean Bessie was a very ambitious woman she was, when they met was 1912 I think 1912, 13 and they met in Toronto and she was married she had two children. He, Rocco was getting out of harm's way and something bad happened in Elk Lake in Northern Ontario that he was involved and he came down got lost in Toronto in the ward and he needed a room to rent. He rented a room from Bessey and her husband and over of course of a few months moved her away from her husband and family. And they they left together and settled in St. Catherine's. And there was a lot of black hand telling crime in the Welland, St. Catherine's area because of immigration.

PC: So Rocco marries Bessie. She's not Italian, she's Jewish. That's complicating as well, at that time.

TREVOR COLE: Yes.

PC: And they start a business venture to… She is not a gangster, either.

TREVOR COLE: That's right. And you know it's very interesting. First of all it says a lot about Rocco. At that time, Italian underworld figures tended to stick very close to the people that they knew from their original village in Italy. They did not have a wide circle and Rocco was unusual in that. He once said on the stand at a trial “all Italians are my friends”. He made connections with anyone who could help him and that included a Jewish woman. It was very unusual to have a woman involved in a in an Italian criminal organization. So Rocco was unusual in that way and also the fact that she was Jewish as was different unusual. Rocco was able to make use of people and he was able to see outside the usual prejudices and you know isolationist qualities of that group.

PC: So gangster marries innocent woman and they started this business venture together.

TREVOR COLE: Right.

PC: So tell me that trajectory of the business. What do they do? How much money do they make?

TREVOR COLE: Well they made a lot of money. They you know they started out very poor when they when they first moved to the well-and area. They were in rags. They actually lost a child due to poverty, the terrible conditions they were living in. They moved to Hamilton started to get involved in… they created a brothel with at least one girl maybe two. Rocco got into the numbers racket and handling gambling. And he started to build his network of men. And by the 19 mid 1920s thanks to prohibition which came into Canada in 1916, suddenly there was a vast amount of money to be made in illegal liquor. So by 1924 they were making grossing about a million dollars a month, which in 1920s money is you know, huge. And Bessie was somebody who loved to wear diamonds. She was called by her jeweler a diamond fiend. She just couldn't get enough diamonds and she loved high style people. People, you know the press loved her they loved both of these people. And whenever there was something that brought them into the public sphere like a trial or a Royal Commission in 1927 when they had to testify, they would report on and Rocco and Bessie as if there were Hollywood celebrities.

PC: So they're making money off of a bootlegging. How else do they make, you gave the number, there is a lot of money is it just off booze?

TREVOR COLE: That's just off booze. Yeah we don't know exactly how much money they were making of other parts of their business. And Bessie wanted to pull the gang into narcotics she saw the future I think in a way that Rocco was not comfortable with the world of narcotics, partly because there was a difference in the way the authorities viewed it. The authorities were quite happy to turn a blind eye to bootlegging and also to take payoffs. It was a very corrupt time and Rocco had all the police and the Hamilton on his payroll, the important ones on his payroll. But narcotics was different. They didn't want to turn a blind item on our narcotics in the same way. So Rocco was reluctant to get into drugs. Bessie saw the money to be made and she pulled them into that as early as the early 1920s.

PC: What kind of drugs?

TREVOR COLE: We're talking cocaine, opium, morphine and eventually heroin. And by 1929 the Perri gang was the biggest importer of drugs into Ontario.

PC: Okay, then you introduce us to the other protagonist in our book in your book, another immigrant from Italy a guy named Frank Zaneth. What is Zaneth’s story? Tell us about his early life in Canada.

TREVOR COLE: Frank came from the north of Italy and he was like the flip side of the Italian experience. Frank came as a child and he was a really earnest and honest man, hardworking and wanted to do right. And he started in Springfield with his family Springfield Massachusetts. Unfortunately as a as a young man he got a girl pregnant and married her. She had a child named Rena. None of this has been written about before. And Frank wanted to start a new fresh life with his bride and child. And at that time in Canada governments in the West and the prairies were trying to populate the prairie provinces, trying to get people to come North and break the land. And so they would send emissaries out to talk to people and groups to try and convince them that their future lay north of the border. And Frank was in one of these meetings in Springfield and he heard about the opportunities in Moose Jaw. So he decided that they would be homesteaders in Moose Jaw.

PC: Saskatchewan?

TREVOR COLE: That's right. Came north, it did not go well for the for the Zaneth family. Originally they were called Zanetti and that name evolved into Zaneth. And Frank's wife left him, took their child. His life was a real shambles for a while. But while they were in Moose Jaw, Frank had heard about the Mounties and heard about that lifestyle. The Royal Northwest Mounted Police. And it intrigued him and he again wanted to redefine who he was in the world after he had failed as a husband and a farmer. And he decided to join the Mounties in 1917. And this is interesting because in 1917 what was happening overseas was the Bolshevik Revolution and the RCMP and the government had an idea they were going to create a secret service. So even though Frank was, he was a short guy he looked a little bit meek and mild and he was not tall enough to be a Mountie, but he knew a few languages and the head of the RCMP decided he would be a perfect undercover cop. So Frank became the first undercover Mountie and got involved in infiltrating socialist and communist groups in Western Canada. And then he ended up getting involved in trying to take down big narcotics drug gangs.

PC: So he at one point and he goes undercover tries to infiltrate the mining union in Drumheller, Alberta and he loses a lot of money working for the Mounties for Frank.

TREVOR COLE: Poor Frank. He had he had trouble with money throughout his career. And and again he was a guy who was trying to do the right thing, all the time. So he was scraping by, you know at this point now he's got an ex-wife and a child that he's got to be sending money to, and the pay for an undercover constable in the RCMP was miserable. And when he was infiltrating the unions in Drumheller he was making more money as a minor than he was as a constable. But he had to give all that money that he was making as a minor to the government. That was not his to keep. And it really irritated him but he kept doing it because it was the right thing. You know and eventually when he was working to take down drug kings he would be offered bribes, huge bribes which he turned down. But it was so hard to turn down all that money.

PC: So basically he's making like a buck a day. Yeah. You know working for the Mounties, then you have Rocco Perri Bessie her doesn't make him you know heaps and heaps of money. Prohibition helps them make their fortune. And it gets dangerous, pretty dangerous. I'm not going to qualify. It gets at the time. So why don’t you tell the story about what happened when police discover a big shipment of whiskey coming into Toronto.

TREVOR COLE: So that's that's the scene that opens the book. This happened in 1923 and at that time bootlegging required shipments of liquor by boat. And these were daily shipments of hundreds of cases of liquor and Ashridge’s Bay was one of the dropoff points.

PC: That is in Toronto?

TREVOR COLE: That's right. And it was at that time very undeveloped kind of muddy mucky shores. And at midnight, one night in the fall of 1923 there was a shipment being unloaded and the police had gotten wind of this. And it was the first time they had an opportunity to catch what they figured were bootleggers in the act. So they came roaring down onto the scene. Rocco was there with his men unloading the Rocco's not doing any of the work. He's overseeing it. “Please come down”, lights blazing. They've got flashlights, they've got guns and. And they see Rocco immediately knows this is trouble. He tries to get his men to just stop what they're doing and give in. Because at that time Rocco had, as your clip showed, Rocco had learned to have his men leave their guns at home. Guns make trouble. There were times in his in his past when guns had had caused trouble. So by this point they're unarmed. All these men are unarmed. But the cops came down and they started shooting at this boat. And they said they were trying to sink it but there was no way they were going to sink it with these guns. But they did manage to kill. They wounded several men and killed the young man who was sort of leading this team on the boat, John go go. And he died in his father's arms on the shores of Ashbridge’s Bay.

PC: I want to play another clip from the radio play King of the Bootleggers from 1986.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I'm not doing any more time in jail. No dope. No one likes a liquor control board. Dope is a whole different kettle of fish. We're still selling lots of booze. Let's not talk business, eh? [Laughs]

Here's the keys. Ask Han to put the coffee on. Put the car in the garage.

VOICE 2: Okay, dear.

VOICE 1: And maybe we can get a Rolls Royce.

[Sound: Gunshot]

VOICE 2: [Screams] Ah. [Cries]

VOICE 1: Bessie!

VOICE 2: [Cries]

[Sound: Gunshots, Glass shatters]

VOICE 1: [Whispers]They are in the garage and the gun is in the house.

[Sound: Dog barks]

[Sound: Gunshots]

VOICE 3: Hold there, Rocco. Stop.

VOICE 1: [Panting] Oh dear. Help me. My wife, my wife she has been shot. Help me Mr.

[Music]

PC: Okay, Trevor Cole, maybe some dramatic radio drama there but it sounds like Bessie Starkman comes to pretty end a pretty violent one. What happened?

TREVOR COLE: Well she got a foul of the wrong people. There was a… she was working at that time with connections in New York and New Jersey and there was a buffalo gang that was trying to control the drug trade. And it seems that she was in the way. And this is…It is kind of a… it's a wonderful murder mystery in the middle of the Whiskey King because I think I figured out who was responsible.

PC: Who did the hit?

TREVOR COLE: Who did the hit, or at least who ordered the hit. And the big question is whether Rocco was in on it, whether he knew about it. And I think I figured that out as well. But it's fascinating to see this. You know this very dramatic scene unfold. It was nothing like this had occurred in Toronto or in any other city. This happened in Hamilton and it was a sensational event when she was killed in her garage. Rocco was there in the in the garage. The two men were hiding behind there of the Perris’ other car in the garage. And they came out with these shotguns, three quick shots, it didn't happen quickly in the play. But did Rocco know? And who was responsible? were the big questions. But what was fascinating was because the Perris were such huge figures in Hamilton and Ontario at that time. A huge number of people came to her funeral. First of all they came to see her lying in state and thousands of people came. And then on the day of the funeral 30000 people an estimated 30000 people…

PC: 30000?

TREVOR COLE: Which was like a quarter of the city's population, came out to see Bessie's casket drive by.

PC: Who do you think done it?

TREVOR COLE: Well there were lieutenants in the Perri gang who were starting to be turned by this buffalo gang. And so I think it was the Ross brothers, specifically Frank Ross who wanted this done. He was trying to take over the narcotics trade in Hamilton. And I kind of feel as though Rocco knew and allowed it, too. This was the best solution to a problem. Even though he was devastated by her death.

PC: There world of gangsters.

TREVOR COLE: Yes.

PC: Okay. So Bessie is out of the picture. And then Rocco Perri becomes a target of Frank Zaneth.

TREVOR COLE: That's right. Well Frank tried several times to get Rocco. The first was in 1929 when he was trying to infiltrate the gang. And Rocco was very careful they knew exactly what they were doing and they did, you know, it was quite an elaborate tale of Frank trying to get win their trust. And then about 10 years later, after Bessie is gone Rocco has remerged as a bootlegger again. And he is even though prohibitions over, both north and south of the border. There's still a lot of illegal liquor running over the border. And Frank tried to catch Rocco and his gang in the corruption scheme that they had created in the West or the Windsor border. And that's a fascinating tale because really the RCMP messed it up in a big way. They could have had them and did not.

PC: Eventually the Mountie get men. How does he do that?

TREVOR COLE: Well they he did it, they did it by a cheat. Very shortly after this conspiracy trial the Italian dictator Mussolini did the RCMP a big favor by declaring war and the RCMP realized this was their chance to round up all of the Italian gangsters that had been eluding them to that point, and Rocco being chief among them. So they drew up a list of criminals they labeled fat fascists and rounded them up one night, 600 men and sent them to internment camp in Petawawa, most of them in Petawawa. And Rocco was one of the very first to be arrested and he was one of the very last to be released.

PC: For how many years?

TREVOR COLE: He was there for more than three years. And over those three years what had been this elaborate network in Ontario and into Buffalo, New York essentially was taken over by the Buffalo gang the Maggadino gang. And Rocco came back to a very different world.

PC: He gets out he go. He gets released, gets out of interm and he goes back to Hamilton.

TREVOR COLE: That's right.

PC: So then what does he find because he's left Hamilton still 10 years before, then gets in turn and then now he comes back what he comes to?

TREVOR COLE: He comes back. The woman he had been with Ann Newman is also in prison for another scheme. So he is without his chief partner. And also all of his lieutenants are many of them have been sort of absorbed by this big buffalo gang. And Rocco finds himself without a network and without a without a circle around him. So he slowly starts to make for ways and try to tries to resuscitate what he had. And it seems that was not going to be tolerated by the gang that had now taken control. And so the question is whether rocker was assassinated or whether he managed to escape?

PC: Because he disappeared. This is what year?

TREVOR COLE: It is 1944. One day he just walks out of the house where he's staying and was never seen again. So was he killed and his body dumped in the bay? A lot of cops at that time thought that it was what happened.

PC: Killed by the Buffalo gang or some other …

TREVOR COLE: Yes, assassinated. And because several other people in Rocco circle were assassinated in the days and weeks prior to this so this seemed to be sort of the culminating assassination.

PC: So one theory is: Gunned down by some kind of rival.

TREVOR COLE: That's right, and then his body made to disappear. Or he got wind of this imminent assassination and was spirited away by friends and taken to Massena in New York and then from where he made his way to Mexico for a while. This is the other major theory. And it seems that that is probably what happened. That's my guess although I try to lay it out in the book that in a way that allows people to sort of form their own judgment.

PC: But you say he was in Mexico?

TREVOR COLE: Well you see I don't know. I don't know. But maybe it's a romantic desire to see Rocco survive in some way. That's what I'd like to think.

PC: Why at the end of the day, Trevor Cole, do you think this is important story for Canadians to know? What to Rocco Parry and Frank Zaneth Bessie Starkman tell us about you know the war years and prohibition and what it contributed to the Canadian story?

TREVOR COLE: There's so much of Canada's history that is tied into these events. You know Frank's part of it touches on a lot of political action in Western Canada and also gives us insight into how the government was thinking, and you know the major federal police force and their concerns and anxieties. And then the world of the Italian gangster was very formative, bootlegging and prohibition led to a lot of the laws that we have today the very fact that we have an LCBO and other organizations government control liquor, you know stems from those times and the fact that you know in 1926 there was a huge poisoned liquor crisis in Ontario that killed 44 people in a couple of days. From that came the desire to control the access to liquor and have some sort of government oversight. A lot of what we live with and take for granted now comes from events in these days.

PC: Trevor Cole good to talk to you. Thank you.

TREVOR COLE: Wonderful to be here.

PC: Trevor Cole's new book Is The Whiskey King the Remarkable True Story of Canada's Most Infamous Bootlegger and the Undercover Mountie on his Trail. Trevor Cole was in Toronto. And if you happen to know what happened to Rocco be sure to drop us a line cbc.ca/thecurrent is where to find out all the ways to get in touch with us. Well that is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio 1 for q. Sofia Coppola’s career has been bumpy at times but after winning the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it's once again trending upwards she will be talking with Tom Power to talk about the beguiled and the feminist themes that run through her work. Well earlier today we touched on sexism in the marketing of razors, and shocker, there's a whole lot more of it at play when it comes to women's body hair in general. This Sunday at 11 in my regular gig as host of CBC Radio's Out In The Open we will be diving into why we care so much about body hair. I'll be speaking with Emer O'Toolewho came to be called the international face of female body hair after she stopped shaving for six months. Emer O'Toole gets our last word today. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay. I thank you for letting us your ear here on The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

If it's a choice could you choose the opposite? What would it look like if you chose the opposite? And when you started making that choice like shaving your legs What was the alternative? Was it being laughed at by everyone else in school, being told you were disgusting when you went swimming? Not getting a partner? Like what was the alternative to you making that choice? Like, okay, none of the choices are completely unconstrained or free. But I didn't really make the choice to shave. I was excited to start shaving because it was like a step into adulthood, right? A step into womanhood and I wanted to be sexy and I'd grown up. But it's not really a choice. And what I would say to the people who have been doing it their whole lives and have never tried not doing it but still insist that it is their choice and not like a social imposition, just for six months. Try not doing it. I know you don't want to and you will be like: “Eww” but like try not doing this and see how people react see how your lovers react. And your mom reacts and then come back to me about the idea that it's a choice

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June 23, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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