The Fall of Emperor Pic

Emilio Picariello, a.k.a. Emil Picarello, Emperor Pic, Pick, the Bottle King, family man, entrepreneur, the Godfather of working-class Italian immigrants, an Italian Robin Hood, a murderer—just who was the man?

Since the moment of the crime, many answers to this question have been offered. However, so much myth has grown up around the Emperor Pic that it is, at times, difficult to separate fact from fiction.

Born on November 27, 1879 in Capriglia, Avellino, Italy, by the turn of the 20th century Emilio Picariello was an immigrant living in Toronto, Ontario operating a confectionary store and raising with his young bride Marianino (Mariau) the first of what would be seven children.

Prior to WWI, and perhaps lured by friends and the promise of work in the coal mines of the Crowsnest Pass, the Picariello family moved west, settling in Fernie, British Columbia where Emilio went to work in Mr. G. Maraniro's Macaroni Factory. Known for his astute business sense, Emilio soon expanded his

endeavours, employing women to roll cigars and operating an ice cream and peanut wagon. He also began collecting bottles, which earned him the first of many nicknames, "The Bottle King".

In 1918 Emilio bought the Alberta Hotel in Blairmore and Emilio became the sole agent for Sick's Lethbridge Brewery. When total Prohibition came into effect in Alberta on April 1, 1918, he entered the bootlegging business.

Although there are few factual records documenting Emilio’s career as a whiskey-runner, he was reputed to have considerable wealth from the trade. At the time of the shooting of Constable Lawson, Picariello owned six touring cars, each large enough to be loaded with dozens of cases of illicit liquor and powerful enough to travel at daring speeds.¹ He employed a full-time mechanic and had various drivers on the payroll. At

the time of his arrest, the Lethbridge Daily Herald estimated his assets at $200,000.²

That Picariello profited is a point reinforced by recollections that he was generous with his fortunes, easily sharing with the less fortunate in the community. He handed out packages of food and entertained local children with movie shows. In fact, a certain fondness and respect of the community for the man developed alongside his bootlegging success, and when he made a bid for town council in the early 1920s, he was elected.

Prior to the fateful day in the autumn of 1922, Picariello had experienced encounters with the law, although none were considered serious and generally took the form of raids and seizures of his bootlegging stock. With the shooting of Stephen Lawson, however, this changed. This time he would neither endure the accusations nor survive the punishment.

During the trial, he was noted by the press as being distraught and following the sentencing was apparently treated for depression. Like Florence, following the guilty verdict he consulted with Father Fidelis Chicoine, who took a statement from the condemned man three days before his execution, which once again reiterated what the bootlegger had earlier claimed— he had no intention of shooting Lawson and simply wanted the constable to accompany him to retrieve his injured son, and that the fatal shot was fired not from within the car, but from some distance away. ³

Since the events of 1922-1923, insinuations about Emilio Picariello have ranged from adulterer to master criminal, aspersions that were typically inaccurate. In later correspondence, defence counsel John McKinley

Copy of statement taken by Father Fidelis Chicoine from Emilio Picariello, April 30, 1923.

Cameron pointed out the absurdity of many of the characterizations, noting that to suggest that the bootlegger in someway contrived Florence Lassandro’s part in the crime was ludicrous, as "he had no such cunning brain as would figure the matter out in this way, and subsequent events showed that it was not a cunning calculation at all, besides which Picariello had practically no education and I do not suppose that he could tell you anything about the statistics relating to hangings in Canada, and it is very probable that the matter never entered his head."⁴

To top it all off, Cameron described the allegation that Picariello was a member of an “Italian Murder Society” to be “perhaps the crowning absurdity in the whole story" as “it is absolutely without the slightest foundation, and . . . I have no hesitation in saying that no such society exists in this province, and if any such society ever existed, Picariello would be the last Italian in Canada to have anything to do with it.”⁵