Salvatore “Sammy” Triumbari, a 34-year-old Italian-born man, was killed outside his home in Toronto, Ontario, during the early morning hours of January 6, 1967. Toronto Police Service records the case as the city’s first homicide of 1967. At approximately 6:29 a.m., officers were called to Sherman Court and found Triumbari outside a residence suffering from gunshot wounds. Emergency personnel attempted to save him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Triumbari had immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1960 and was the father of four children. Publicly, he was a businessman associated with Cynar Dry Co., a soft-drink company. Contemporary reporting said he was leaving his home early that Friday morning when he was ambushed and shot four times. A loaded handgun was found in his coat pocket, but there was no indication that he had an opportunity to use it. Police also found another firearm inside his home.
The circumstances immediately suggested to investigators that the shooting had been planned rather than being a spontaneous robbery or confrontation. Two different sets of footprints were discovered leading away from the area, causing police to believe that at least two men had participated in the attack. Investigators also recovered a fedora with a New York City label near Triumbari’s body. More than 35 detectives reportedly became involved in the early search for the two men believed responsible.
At the time, investigators publicly struggled to establish a definite motive. Police described the killing as having the appearance of a Mafia-style execution but initially said they had not been able to establish a connection between Triumbari and an organized-crime group. They examined whether money or a struggle for control of some business or other interest could have motivated the murder. A mortgage-payment demand involving the building that housed his beverage company was investigated but was not believed to have been connected to his death.
As organized-crime investigations developed in the following years, a much different picture of Triumbari emerged. Later accounts identified him as a racketeer associated with the Siderno Group, the Toronto-area organization connected to the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. Historical accounts of the organization describe Triumbari as one of the people involved in establishing its Canadian governing structure during the early 1960s, alongside figures including Michele “Mike” Racco, Giacomo Luppino, Rocco Zito and Filippo Vendemini.
Investigators eventually focused on the possibility that Triumbari’s death resulted from an internal organized-crime dispute. Later accounts say that only a few days before the murder, approximately 30 people connected to the underworld had gathered at Triumbari’s home. Police came to believe that he may have been marked for death around the time of that gathering. Triumbari and fellow organized-crime figure Filippo Vendemini were reportedly accused of having disfigured a rival, an incident later cited as a possible reason for the decision to kill Triumbari.
Other histories of the Siderno organization go further and attribute the sanctioning of Triumbari’s murder to Michele “Mike the Baker” Racco, a leading figure in the Toronto ’Ndrangheta. Those accounts state that Racco sanctioned the killings of Triumbari in 1967 and Vendemini in 1969 because of disputes within the organization. Another account of the two killings says the order originated in Calabria and was allegedly left to Racco to carry out in Canada. These allegations became part of the historical understanding of the case, but they did not lead to a murder prosecution.
Vendemini himself was murdered two years after Triumbari. His death, like Triumbari’s, became associated with the violent internal struggles surrounding organized crime in the Toronto area during that period. The two killings have subsequently been discussed together because both men were connected to the Siderno organization and both were said to have been targeted following the dispute involving the disfigurement of another criminal figure.
Despite the extensive investigation and the later theories identifying people who may have ordered or facilitated the killing, no one was successfully prosecuted for Salvatore Triumbari’s murder. There were no reported arrests, criminal charges, trials or convictions for the homicide. Toronto Police Service continues to classify the January 6, 1967 killing as a cold case and continues to request information from anyone who may be able to assist investigators.
