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The Mystery of the Great Antonio, the Montreal Giant Who Could Pull Buses

How one of Canada’s legendary figures turned self-invention into an art form

The Mystery of the Great Antonio, the Montreal Giant Who Could Pull Buses

How one of Canada’s legendary figures turned self-invention into an art form

Published 6:30, JULY 30, 2026

There’s a story my mother has told so often it’s burned into my brain and has become a family legend. In 1980, when I was four, I was walking with her on avenue Papineau in Montreal, eating ice cream. A shadow fell over us: a mammoth of a man with an iron towing chain around his neck, his long, matted dreads interwoven with rope and capped with electrical tape. My mother was afraid and yanked me back but wasn’t quick enough to stop his giant hand from alighting on my head—with a softness that rivalled hers.

What happened next is my addition to the story. He turned left on rue Beaubien and found his true target: a bus full of passengers stopped at a red light. Seeing noses pressed to the glass and onlookers starting to gather, he attached his chain to the bumper, barked at the driver to put the gear into neutral, and started to pull. The light turned green, but traffic didn’t dare move. At first, the wheels didn’t turn, but he kept rocking. The bus finally gave, first a few inches and then a few feet. The giant opened his mouth to the sky and let out a victory shout.

Meet Antonio Barichievich, a.k.a. the Great Antonio. The strongest man in the world.

At least, that’s what he called himself. Sometime in the early 1950s, the Great Antonio began pulling trains, cars, and buses in Montreal—either empty or full, with a chain or with his hair—and lifting whatever else he could. He travelled Canada throughout the late 1950s and ’60s, fighting bears, resisting horses, and wrestling up to ten men at a time and claiming to have never lost. He and his sweetheart and manager, Jeannine Larue, repeated these shows across the United States, including at Madison Square Garden, several times.

The job of a strongman is to sow fear and awe, and the media played along. When he made extravagant claims, journalists took it as fact. Stories pegged him at six feet four, between 210 and 225 kilograms (at his peak), and wearing a size twenty-eight shoe. Pre-internet, exaggerations couldn’t be fact-checked as easily as they can be today, and journalists tended to report them with a wink. Or sometimes they inflated Antonio’s proportions intentionally, depending on that day’s need to inject fantasy and wonder into the news cycle. “Half man, half beast—you must see it to believe it,” declared the Portland Press Herald. Starting in the ’60s in Japan, wrestling promoters dragged him by a chain around his neck as he parted crowds, growled unintelligibly, and scattered chairs like kindling before stepping into the ring and laying waste to his opponent.

He reminded anyone who’d listen that he’d been on The Tonight Show and on the popular news programs Real People and You Asked for It. He had unhealthy obsessions with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Clint Eastwood, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, Sophia Loren, Luciano Pavarotti, and other stars, believing he was best friends with them. He would lie in wait outside dressing rooms to pose for photos together.

Antonio was the king of braggadocio. If he said 4 million people saw him at an event in Japan, that later became 5 million. We are to believe that he hit a golf ball two miles, ate 413 eggs in one sitting, and was a millionaire. For a while in the ’80s, he convinced the press that he was cast as the Abominable Snowman in a forever-upcoming film co-starring Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and Elizabeth Taylor. He waxed endlessly about a biopic of himself that he demanded $100 million to appear in. It never came to be.

All the while, his story changed whenever interviewers asked where he was from. It was either Russia, Siberia, Yugoslavia, or Italy, and finally—once they had asked too many times—from outer space. And who wouldn’t believe that?

He kept office hours at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street from his apartment in a building on rue Beaubien. With powdered sugar on their fingers, the staff collected his mail and took phone messages for him. Antonio would return calls from a nearby payphone, easily the busiest in the world. He died in 2003, too weak to perform feats of strength, waiting for the glory he believed would one day return.

What I’ve given you is the most repeated narrative of Antonio Barichievich’s life. But where was he really from? What did he believe about himself, and how much of it was an act?

When a public figure cultivates an aura of mystery, the easiest option is to ignore our curiosity and believe every word. The decision to probe deeper often comes down to motive. As for mine, I’ve always been drawn to people whose history is more complicated than it seems. I can’t shake my questions, much like I can’t shake the feeling of Antonio’s hand on my head.

I made a list of his many names: Antoine, Tonio, Tony. The Grand Antonio, Antonio the Great, Narcissus. The Italian Giant, the Mighty Bobo, Earthquake Man. Mother’s Little Boy. Could there be a version of the story for each of these men?

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My 2015 novel, Mouthquake, featured Antonio as an ancillary character. He befriends a boy who stutters, who connects with the bizarre way Antonio speaks. A few months before the novel’s publication, I visited a writing residency in Croatia. By that point, I’d learned Antonio was born in the region of Istria, on a Croatian island, in 1925. Croatian folklore abounds with giants who live in hills, caves, and forests—beasts who could eat and drink superhuman amounts and are feared. Motovun, a conical hilltop village to the north, has a central cut-stone staircase that ascends, seemingly, into the heavens. The legend is that a giant named Veli Jože built the village and would sit on the plaza that crowns the town and cool his feet in the Mirna River below. Not far from Motovun is Veli Lošinj, where........

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