Man at centre of bizarre underworld plots for years loses fight against Toronto police

Frank Roda has already suffered more than his share of misfortune in Toronto’s lurid underworld, most notably losing a hand and his eyesight to a pipe bomb that exploded prematurely and then being convicted of possessing the explosive.

Roda, 58, has now lost his six-year legal vendetta against Toronto police over allegations of false arrest and perjury relating to a different case — and has been ordered to pay the force $10,000 in legal fees.

The police probe sparking Roda’s lawsuit is fittingly peculiar for a man who has been at the centre of bizarre plots for decades.

This one started with a “street money” loan that spun out to include a discount coffin business, an enormous nightclub sound system and alleged strong-arm threats against a vacuum salesman.

Roda sued police in 2011 after he was acquitted of extortion, forcible confinement and other charges.

The police investigation of Roda began in 2006 when a vacuum salesman complained he was lured to a restaurant where he expected to pitch his vacuum cleaners but, instead, was confined in a room by three men and held until Roda arrived. Fearing for his life, the salesman was forced to sign three documents, he claimed.

When Roda’s name was mentioned, it was not unknown to police. He has been linked to significant Mafia players for decades.

In 1989, police warned Roda that he and a friend, former boxer and mob enforcer Eddie Melo, were targets of a gangland murder plot. Lucky for them, the would-be hit man had become a police informant.

Police dressed up two crash test dummies to look like Roda’s and Melo’s dead bodies and put them in the back of a van. The “hit man” showed the gory scene to gangsters as evidence of his success in the parking lot of a shopping mall. The plotters were then arrested.

Two years later, in what police theorized was part of a revenge plot, Roda and another man were in a car in a lane behind a hair salon on Toronto’s St. Clair Avenue. W. when a bomb they carried exploded. The two men were mangled.

After an investigation, Roda was charged with possession of explosives and a handgun, to which he pleaded guilty in 1994.

Arrested alongside him at that time was his cousin, Gaetano Panepinto, who was a hulking, hands-on gangster and a senior representative in Toronto for Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto.

Panepinto co-owned a discount coffin and funeral accessory business with Roda, opened in 1997. After Panepinto was killed in an unsolved drive-by shooting in 2000, Roda stayed in the casket business, but with a different company and working with his brother.

As the vacuum salesman continued his complaint to police, officers were told two of the documents he was forced to sign related to a festering loan dispute between Roda and an old friend of the salesman’s; the third was an agreement to pay a $12,000 “crematorium consulting fee,” relating to Roda’s casket business, to cover the “costs” of the unpleasant restaurant meeting.

A few months earlier, police learned, Roda had extended a short-term $30,000 loan with a high rate of interest to a Toronto nightclub owner, who described it as “street money.”

The cash arrived in a bag the next day and the deal was sealed with a handshake. Roda says in an affidavit filed in court the club’s massive sound system, worth $300,000, was collateral to secure the loan.

Although the club owner said the loan was repaid, Roda said it was in default and the sound system, nearly filling an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer, was moved to Roda’s casket warehouse.

The alleged signed documents from the vacuum salesman bolstered Roda’s claim to the sound system.

Police raided Roda’s factory-direct casket warehouse on Bartor Road in north Toronto in December 2006, seized the sound system and arrested Roda and three others.

Roda disputed the salesman’s story. He said the two had a pleasant meeting over dinner at his cousins’ restaurant and there were no threats or extortion.

A jury found Roda not guilty on all counts in 2009.

Roda then sued the Toronto Police Services Board, two officers, and two trial witnesses — the nightclub owner and the vacuum salesman. That list was whittled down to just the lead investigator and the police board by the time it went to court.

Roda represented himself.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Sean F. Dunphy lauded Roda for his “passionately held view,” but dismissed his suit last year, saying: “Not every acquittal warrants a claim. There must also be a breach of the standard of care of a reasonable police officer in similar circumstances.”

Not every acquittal warrants a claim.

Ontario Superior Court Judge Sean F. Dunphy

Roda, however, lost none of his passion and appealed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario. 

The appeals court, last week, dismissed his appeal and awarded police $10,000 in costs.

ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter.com/AD_Humphreys

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