He Wore a Wire Into the Room That Wanted Him Dead
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He Wore a Wire Into the Room That Wanted Him Dead
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He walked into rooms where men would have killed him on sight - for ten years he wore a wire while rubbing shoulders with Jimmy Hoffa, Meyer Lansky, and members of the Papalia and Commisso families. How did Marvin Elkind survive ordered stand-downs by police handlers and keep living long enough to run a final undercover mission at age seventy-five?
In this episode, we tell the life story laid out in the files: his childhood in Toronto, the crimes and connections that carried him into the highest circles of North American organized crime, and the strange ending that reframes everything - what did those final assignments reveal about who he had become?
Person: Marvin Elkind
Date of death: January 21, 2024
Age at death: 89
Final undercover trip: Mexico City, 2009
Prison sentence: 1 year (arrived December 18, 1969; released April 18, 1970)
- He entered Bowmanville reform school on May 1945 and stayed five years, receiving approximately 175 floggings.
- At 18 (circa 1952) he worked as a busboy at the Copacabana and was assigned by Anthony Salerno to drive Jimmy Hoffa for four years.
- In 1954 in Miami Meyer Lansky paid him to lose a boxing match; Elkind accepted the payment.
- Atlantic Acceptance Corporation collapsed on June 14, 1965, after defaulting on a $5,000,000 cheque; it was then the largest corporate bankruptcy in Canadian history.
- In 2009, at age 75, he traveled to Mexico City for a documented undercover operation paid $2,000 and carried no wire.
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