by Janet Bagnall

This story was originally published on Sunday, August 31, 1997

On the cover of the book devoted to her life, Monica Proietti lies still and pale, a bullet hole through her left breast, her lacy pushup bra startlingly white against a black background.

"What you don't see,'' said the book's author, Montreal journalist Georges-Hebert Germain, "is a man's foot, pushing her head. You can see it in the original photo. It was a terrible image, so full of contempt. We couldn't put it on the cover.''

Proietti was Montreal's own Machine Gun Molly, shot dead by police at age 27 after a wild, guns-blazing, high-speed chase through the streets of the city's north end.

It was on Sept. 19, 1967, and she and two companions had just robbed a caisse populaire of $3,082. This was to be her last heist, the one that would finance her escape to Florida and a life of respectable tranquillity with her children.

Instead, Proietti died staring into the eyes of the young policeman who shot her dead.

In death as in life, Proietti was sheathed in the spurious glamour of a gangster. Barely over 5 feet tall and weighing less than 100 pounds, she was an improbable crime boss, all the more reason for the media to follow her every exploit during that glorious summer of Expo 67.

Germain, 53, a well-known Quebec journalist who is also author of Overtime, a biography of hockey star Guy Lafleur, spent three years researching the story of Montreal's most famous female gangster.

This spring, he launched Souvenirs de Monica, his semi-fictionalized account of Proietti's short life. The 382-page book promptly moved on to the best-seller list.

It is a whole netherworld that Germain conjures up: the red-light district, the hookers, the hoods, the east- and west-end gangs, Monica's lover Richard Blass who died in a hail of police gunfire in 1975, the drug-trafficker Roger Provencal who protected her, the poverty-stricken families who had to use cardboard to insulate their apartments.

It was Tim Burke, writing in the Montreal Star, who first called her Machine Gun Molly. Other reporters told of her icy resolve and also of her generosity to impoverished friends and neighbours. By the time she and her two companions had robbed 20 banks, Proietti had become a female Robin Hood, saviour of the poor and downtrodden.

"She would read the newspapers after every robbery to see what they said about her,'' said Germain. "I think she became trapped by the image of Machine Gun Molly.

"According to her brother, Mario, she was looking for death. She wanted to die. She never really believed that she would escape the poverty she had grown up in.''

She may have been right not to believe it. Very few members of her family ever escaped the squalour in which they were raised. Theirs was the world of the red-light district in the '40s and '50s, the tough downtown district crowded with petty criminals and families moving constantly from one condemned tenement to another.

When Germain set out to find the people who had known Monica, he found them clinging to what was left of the sleazy neighbourhood after it had been razed to make way in the late '50s for high-rise housing that was meant to improve them morally and socially.

Today, those still alive among Monica's friends and family live in basement apartments, cases of beer stacked in the kitchen, men and women full of anger and disappointment and heartbreak.

Monica's brother, Mario, who once did so well from robberies that he could afford several mistresses at a time, today lives on welfare and goes to AA meetings. He thinks of himself as a mutant. He thinks the family should never have left Italy at the turn of the century.

That was their downfall, leaving their natural environment. That was why they had all become criminals, why the Proietti family could claim four generations of thieves and thugs, starting with Maria, Monica's and Mario's grandmother, sentenced at age 60 to 12 years in Kingston prison for women for receiving stolen goods. She was also accused of running a school for crime for the local children and training them in theft and prostitution.

One of Monica's sisters - there had been nine children in the family - agreed to meet Germain if he brought beer.

Half an hour into their interview, she asked him if he wanted to see her scars. Germain already knew about the terrible fire in 1958 that had taken the lives of Monica's mother, three brothers and a sister.

This sister, whom Germain calls Paula in his book, was only 13 years old when the family's tenement exploded in flames. She suffered third-degree burns over half her body, and spent two years in Ste. Justine Hospital recovering.

"She was 51 years old when we met,'' said Germain, "a fairly big woman who had never gone in for jogging or anything like that. She didn't wait for my answer. She just took off her clothes and turned around so I could see the scars.

"I have never seen anything like it. She was horribly burned. The skin is hard and rippled and different shades of brown.''

Mario later reassured Germain that his sister showed everyone her scars - to impress them.

Germain spoke to Monica's Scottish gangster husband, Anthony Smith. He was 33 to Monica's 17 when they married. He used to dream of the big score - the $1-million heist - and would sneer at Monica's brother and friends with their little corner-store robberies. Today, at age 74, he lives on a small pension in Worthing, England, despised by the two children he had with Monica.

"I went to see Monica's son Tony in prison,'' said Germain. "He came into the room and put his finger to his lips. He motioned up to the ceiling, whispering to me that there were microphones everywhere in the room. He thinks people are conspiring against him.''

But at least one person in the Proietti family has made it through to the side of the "legits,'' said Germain. (It is Mario, Germain explained, who divides the world between legitimate people - those who have jobs, families and homes - and the losers, among whom Mario counts himself.)

That person is Monica's daughter, Ginette Smith, now 38 years old, a customer-service officer in a bank. She is mother to an intellectually impaired daughter, 17 years old.

It was Ginette who prompted Germain's interest and sympathy in the story of Machine Gun Molly and it is through her eyes that he tells most of the tale.

Ginette was only 8 years old when her mother was shot to death on the streets of Montreal and for many years she pretended to herself that it was not her mother who had died, but someone else, an imposter. Her mother, a master of disguise with her blond wigs and dark glasses and makeup, was just in hiding, Ginette told herself, until it was safe to come and get her and her two younger brothers.

After her mother's death, Ginette and Tony were sent to live with Smith in England. Smith was deported from Canada in 1962.

"I had a terrible childhood,'' said Ginette Smith. "My father was a cold, violent man. My brother and I were never allowed to talk about my mother. England was for me a foreign country where I suffered discrimination. I used to run away from home and was finally sent to reform school there.''

At age 19, Ginette returned to Montreal and to her shock found that her mother was still - 11 years after her death - a media star. In one particularly bizarre turn, the Journal de Montreal ran a full page of photos of Monica for Mother's Day.

"I decided to co-operate with the book because I thought if the story was told for once and for all, it would be over. I was fed up with hearing about Machine Gun Molly.''

Barely five months after the book came out, Ginette is not sure she did the right thing.

"Maybe I should have left the whole subject taboo,'' she said. "Let the dead be dead. Sometimes, I regret the book.''

Monica's family is furious with her, Ginette said, and accuses her of having blackened the Proietti name along with her own mother's. They no longer speak. Ginette does not even speak to her brothers.

 The family's attitude is one of the reasons, said Germain, that his biography of Monica is partly fictionalized.

"Monica's uncle Alfonso kept sending me lawyer's letters, telling me to stop. When I agreed to change the family name from Proietti to Sparvieri, everything was fine. The problem for Alfonso was his mother, Maria. Alfonso would not have anything said against her. In his eyes, she was a saint.''

Ginette feels very little sympathy for her Montreal family. "They never helped me. I was here on the street and pregnant and they did nothing.

"I don't think my mother really loved us,'' Ginette added. "If she had, she would have swallowed her pride and gone on welfare. Then, my brothers and I would have been together, a family. We would have had a real childhood. Our mother would still be with us. Maybe I would have been a lawyer.

"What happened to me is what happens to the children of criminals,'' she said. "It's the children who pay.''

Ginette Smith changed her whole life the week after the book came out, said Germain. She left her husband and her neighbourhood in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district and took her daughter to live in a new house in the Riviere des Prairies area

"I decided I would live for myself,'' said Ginette, "not for other people. My daughter comes before everything else, but after that, I want to live for me.''

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