In 1997, Giovanni "Boxer" Muscedere joined the Annihilators. Muscedere was born in Windsor in 1959, the son of Italian immigrants, and at the age of 12 his parents moved to Chatham. Muscedere grew up in an Italian-speaking household and he always spoke his English with an Italian accent. which he tried to hide by mumbling. As a child, he was often bullied for being a "wop" and a "dogan" (derogatory Canadian slang for a Roman Catholic), and fought back, acquiring a great reputation as a fighter, which led him to take up boxing as his hobby. Muscedere's friends and family believed the childhood bullying had scarred him, making him adopt a tough persona to hide any weaknesses, which explained his love of boxing and later motorcycles. One who knew him stated: "He didn't really want to be somebody anybody could look down on. He wanted respect". Muscedere enjoyed some success as an amateur boxer, but his early marriage and the birth of his first child prevented him from becoming a professional boxer as he would have liked, requiring him to take a job to support his family. Muscedere worked at a factory making automobile brakes in Chatham from 1979 until his murder, a job he hated as he found it very dull, but it gave him a good salary. After his first and second wives divorced him and were awarded custody of their children, Muscedere took up riding motorcycles, finding in the world of outlaw biking a surrogate family for the families he had lost with his divorces. Muscedere had a strong sense of masculinity informed by traditional Italian values, for instance always paying the child support payments to both his ex-wives on time and in full because it was not honourable for a father to let down his children.