John Gordon Harris

John Gordon Harris (15 November 1947 – 10 September 2019) was a Canadian policeman, widely regarded as one of the most honored officers of the Hamilton Police Service.

Football player Harris was born in Toronto, the son of a policeman. As an youth, he dreamed of being a football player for the Toronto Argonauts. In the 1970s, Hamilton was known as "Bomb City" owing to the frequency which Hamilton businesses that were late in paying or had refused to pay extortion money were blown up by the Wild Ones outlaw biker club, which was working for the Musitano family. Harris recalled about the Musitano family: "You couldn't help but bump into them on James Street North. They were never rude because they didn't want any more attention than they were already getting".

In 1984, when Parente shot and killed Jimmy Lewis, Harris received a call that a man had been killed outside of the Outlaws' clubhouse. Harris stated that he thought at the time: "That could only be one person". When Harris arrived at the crime scene, a police officer told me: "They call this guy 'The Wop'? Do you know him?" Harris laughed and said he knew him very well, so much so that he guessed that Parente had almost certainly gone to the house of a friend in St. Catharines. His assumption proved to be correct, and Parente was arrested by the Niagara Regional Police later that night at the house where Harris said he would be.

Harris was also involved in investigating the Papalia family. In an attempt to gather evidence to charge Johnny Papalia, secret microphones were planted in Papalia's office for the Galaxy Vending company on Railroad street. To avoid the bugs, Papalia took to having his meetings with other gangsters while walking up and down Railroad Street, which led Harris to have bugs planted in the parking meters on Railroad Street. Harris also tried unsuccessfully to have the Canadian Army plant bugs in the trees in Central Park, which was at the bottom of Railroad Street, which also a favorite meeting place for Papalia. Harris had video cameras installed on the top floor of the Bell Canada building on Railroad Street and on the roof of the Sir John A. MacDonald high school which overlooked Papalia's offices in an attempt to gather intelligence and evidence about Papalia. Harris pressured several criminals into wearing a wire while meeting with Papalia, but he was always very careful with his words and there was never enough recorded to lay charges. However, Harris did foil several of Papalia's schemes by "unofficially threatening" gangsters by telling them he knew precisely what Papalia had planned to do to a specific person and that if anything happened to that person, he would "come down hard" on the gangsters, a tactic that is believed to saved several lives. In 1985, Harris was involved in the effort to stop Papalia from his netting what he called his "retirement fund" by defrauding mortgage companies of some $10 million by having dummy corporations apply for mortgages to develop property in Hamilton, which Papalia planned to keep for himself after the loans were issued. Though there was not enough evidence to lay charges against Papalia, the mortgage companies were warned about Papalia's scheme.

Illness and recovery In 1991, Harris was promoted from constable to sergeant.

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