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The bells rang when Marco Muzzo died on Monday: not those of the picturesque village churches of his native Friuli, the region of northeastern Italy that has produced a disproportionate share of modern Toronto's master builders, but ring-tones chiming from one end to the other of the 100-mile city on the north shore of Lake Ontario that he did so much to build.

"The message was, the king is dead," said one among the huge network of colleagues Mr. Muzzo cultivated in his 55-year career in construction and development. "He was the No. 1 guy."

Mr. Muzzo not only ranked as the richest of the immigrant builders and developers who built postwar Toronto, he was also first among the legends of that colourful group of competing and co-operating Italian and Jewish families. He was a latter-day Bronfman who came to prominence in a rough business -- using bribes as necessary, he once told a public inquiry into construction violence in the booming 1960s -- and continued on to dominate the new and lucrative local business of industrial-strength suburbanization.

Rarely working alone, always soliciting partners and keeping a low profile behind dozens of shifting corporate names, Mr. Muzzo became the dean of the regional development industry -- the one partner everyone wanted. "If Muzzo had 1 per cent of a deal or 100 per cent of a deal, he did it the same way," his oldest partner, Rudy Bratty, said yesterday. "His honesty is irreproachable and his reputation as a genius is unparalleled."

By the end of his career, another colleague noted, Mr. Muzzo "had a little piece of quite a bit." One survey ranked him among the 50 richest men in Canada, although his local mystique rested partly on the fact that nobody really knew. He was famous for his privacy. "Unless you knew who he was," his colleague said, "you really didn't know who he was."

Despite his open distaste for publicity, Mr. Muzzo found himself at the centre of more than one political controversy centring on his ties to prominent politicians. Never shy about donating to favoured politicians, he became the largest political benefactor in the country by the late 1980s.

Mr. Muzzo was close with former Ontario attorney-general Roy McMurtry -- the lawyer who defended him at the construction-industry inquiry in the 1970s -- as well as former premier Bill Davis. When David Peterson's Liberals took office, Mr. Muzzo came to their aid, buying the Peterson family company for almost $10-million, $3-million of which landed in the premier's blind trust.

A plasterer by trade at the time of his immigration, Mr. Muzzo quickly embraced drywall and, with his brother, built what was said to be the largest drywalling business in the country, using cheap immigrant labour to replace the tradesmen whose skills were made obsolete by the new technology. But his real genius emerged when he turned to land development, according to Mr. Bratty, who boasts that he owns the last house Mr. Muzzo ever plastered.

"He would have quiet insight into things," Mr. Bratty said. He was a workaholic "who would look into matters more deeply than others." Along with Mr. Bratty and their frequent partner, Alfredo De Gasperis, Mr. Muzzo bet heavily on the potential of unchecked suburban sprawl north of Toronto and won handsomely.

Far more than any public bodies or policies, he and his partners designed and built modern suburbia. He was the epitome of the successful developer, defined succinctly as somebody who gets what they want.

Mr. Muzzo also led the development field in philanthropy, helping to found the Villa Charities in 1977 and continuing to earn plaudits for increasingly low-profile and generous charity work. "He would always donate," said Dino Chiesa, current chair of the Villa Charities and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

"He would never say no to you, but he never wanted any recognition. He never demanded naming rights. He really wanted nothing."

But what he and his colleagues have left behind is an entire city.

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