Thursday 22 May 1997

Staff Reporter The Province

Joe Philliponi, pictured in his office at the Penthouse nightclub on Vancouver's Seymour Street in 1977: A few years later he was murdered in the same room. Staff File Photo by, John Denniston

Joe Philliponi was killed with a single shot through the head at close range in his office at Vancouver's Penthouse nightclub on the night of September 18, 1983.

That single shot still rings through Vancouver's underworld.

Philliponi's murder has never disappeared from the collective consciouness thanks to the daughter of one of the men convicted in the first degree killing.

Tami Morrisroe has fought virtually since that September night to clear the name of her father Sid.

Now Tami -- and by extension Philliponi's murder -- is back under the white-hot glare of publicity with her revelations in The Province of her part in an RCMP undercover operation into a series of Lower Mainland murders connected to an organized drug cartel.

And today Tami is in Federal Court, under the witness protection program, still fighting to have her father freed.

The circuitous story began long before the murder.

The Philliponi brothers, Joe, Mickey, Jimmy, and Russ, ran the Seymour Street Penthouse Supper Club, opened in 1947, as a kind of gathering place for hookers, rounders, lawyers, cops, reporters and late-night romantics looking to nuzzle the city's real and imagined underbelly.

Legend and myth have now hardened into historical fact: There was bootlegging. There was loan sharking, and women for hire, and payoffs to police. And bundles of money hidden in Joe's safe.

Joe and Sid went back a long way, to Sid's youth. And after, to when Sid was a Golden Gloves boxer. In his later years Sid often said that Joe had forced him to throw a fight on a $10,000 bet and then stiffed him for the $100 he'd promised. The family denies it happened.

The two men remained friends. They were close -- "like family" -- Sid says.

"Philliponi knew my dad and he knew my mother. Hell, I boxed for him for years."

Sid would hang out at the Penthouse after a hot day at Exhibition Park or a day as owner of his own plumbing company in Burnaby.

The two would tell lies and laugh -- Sid was accomplished at both -- especially when frequently fortified with enough liquor to drop another man. And Sid admits he owed Philliponi $6,000.

Then, that September night, there's the 71-year-old Philliponi, dressed in his bad suit, pockets riffled, lying on the green carpet of his tiny office with a .22-calibre bullet in his head, shot dead as his 92-year-old mother slept in the room below the office.

And Sid is charged. What happened?

What's known for sure is that Scott Ogilvie Forsyth of Smiths Falls, Ont., pulled the trigger. Forsyth admits that much.

Forsyth, who had met Sid at the racetrack, was arrested on October 1 at the racetrack. He blabbed to an undercover cop in his cell that he had killed Philliponi.

At first he said he'd acted alone. Later, he changed his story and implicated Sid, saying Sid planned for the pair to rob the nightclub owner and that Sid said he'd kill Philliponi in the bargain.

Forsyth said Sid backed out of the Sunday night robbery. But Forsyth decided to go ahead, adding the murder was not planned. He said Sid supplied the gun. Sid denies planning the robbery, supplying the gun or talking about murder.

"I'm no killer, I'm innocent," he still says.

Forsyth found $1,144, including $60 in dimes in the safe. He had expected millions.

Sid, who was going through a bitter divorce, was picked up by police September 22 while drinking at a Burnaby nightclub. He was held for 12 hours and released.

Police said they'd spent the day "proving him innocent" and that Sid was "simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

But in the end charges were brought and Sid was convicted for in the first-degree murder for planning the killing.

Then in 1991 and 1992, a key witness at the trial, Sid's stepdaughter Denise MacKinnon, recanted her testimony that Sid had told her he was coming into money and "something big is coming down . . . unfortunately a couple of people have to be blown away."

Tami used Denise's recantation, along with a string of other new evidence, including a letter by Forsyth that Sid was not involved, to launch a bid for a new trial.

That bid was unsuccessful when Forsyth denied writing the letter; Denise took back her recantation. and justice ministry investigators rejected the other points made in the application.

"Mr. Morrisroe did not provide any new information of significance that is reasonably capable of belief," the ministry wrote. "Much of the new information was expressly refuted by the very people who were said to be its source."

Other legal routes to free Sid were tried, including a recent application for clemency which is expected to be broached again today in Federal Court. All have so far failed.

And there have been other, extra-legal attempts. Tami says she became involved with Salvatore Ciancio, a former cellmate of Sid's, when he told her he knew Sid had been set up in the murder.

She eventually married Ciancio, she says, in an effort to tape him repeating the allegation.

Tami was placed in the witness protection program after wearing a concealed transmitter to tape Ciancio. He was charged with six weapons offences.

She is now living in an undisclosed location -- and still fighting for her father's release.

As for Sid, he's been moved for his own safety from Ferndale, a landscaped, minimum security prison that he had the run off, to an undisclosed high-security prison.

"If I'd have known she was going to get into the trouble that she's in, I would never have appealed my sentence," said Sid. "It has destroyed her whole life."

THE END

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