Bad Seeds Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Galloway Boys (G-Way) Gang Members and Associates

  Malvern Crew

  Victims and Family

  Police

  Lawyers

  Judges

  GLOSSARY

  CHAPTER 1 - Wrong time, wrong place

  The Day Everything Changed

  Excruciating Pain

  A Gangland Connection

  CHAPTER 2 - Junior and Leo

  “By the Sweat of Your Brow, You’ll Eat Bread”

  CHAPTER 3 - The baddest seed

  CHAPTER 4 - From Scarberia to Scarlem

  A Downward Spiral into Gang Warfare

  CHAPTER 5 - Gangbanging and the art of chess

  Cheap Drugs, Fast Money, Easy Sex

  The Canadian Gang “Problem”

  The Spark that Started the Inferno

  Gang Warfare: The Next Generation

  CHAPTER 6 - Anatomy of a gang war

  CHAPTER 7 - Slipping can be fatal

  The Gangster Game

  CHAPTER 8 - The good kid

  Stop the “Genocide”

  Another Score to Settle

  CHAPTER 9 - Project pathinder: the first big break

  Project Pathfinder Begins

  CHAPTER 10 - Takedown at the mall

  Nowhere Left to Run

  Safer Streets?

  CHAPTER 11 - The wire

  CHAPTER 12 - The cucumber in the freezer

  Casting the Net Wider

  CHAPTER 13 - A rat takes a road trip

  CHAPTER 14 - A sinner comes clean

  CHAPTER 15 - The Crown’s sledgehammer

  The First Move

  CHAPTER 16 - The bizarro world of Marlon Wilson

  Getting Tough on Crime—and Guns

  CHAPTER 17 - Year of the gun

  An Unwitting Source

  An Unwitting Gun-Runner

  Gun-Running for Love

  CHAPTER 18 - Wrapped in time for Christmas

  CHAPTER 19 - Tuco v. the House of Lords

  A Hardliner Heads the Prosecution

  Midanik on Defence

  Fighting for the Cause of Wisdom

  Defending the Third Man

  CHAPTER 20 - The cuffs come off

  Arguing About Arguments

  From Ballroom to Courtroom

  CHAPTER 21 - Roland Ellis makes a grand entrance

  An Insider Takes the Stand

  CHAPTER 22 - Is the sky blue? Mum’s the word

  Legal Wrangling

  A Mother Takes the Stand

  CHAPTER 23 - The verdict: agony and ecstasy

  The Verdict

  CHAPTER 24 - Cool poses and baby mamas

  Where Did It All Begin?

  Canada’s Other “Two Solitudes”

  Is It Getting Better—Or Worse?

  CHAPTER 25 - Forgiveness and thanksgiving

  Galloway’s Legacy

  A Way Forward

  PHOTO/ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  Copyright © 2010 by Betsy Powell

  All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777.

  Care has been taken to trace ownership of copyright material contained in this book. The publisher will gladly receive any information that will enable them to rectify any reference or credit line in subsequent editions.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Powell, Betsy

  Bad seeds : the true story of Toronto’s Galloway Boys Street Gang / Betsy Powell.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-470-84060-3

  1. Galloway Boys Street Gang. 2. Organized crime—Ontario—Toronto. 3. Juvenile delinquency—Ontario—Toronto. 4. Murder—Ontario—Toronto. 5. Murder—Investigation—Ontario—Toronto. 6. Trials (Murder)—Ontario—Toronto. I. Title.

  HV6439.C32T67 2010

  364.106’6083509713541

  C2010-900212-1

  Production Credits

  Cover Design: Adrian So

  Map, p. xxii: Mapping Specialists, Ltd., Madison, Wisconsin

  Interior Design: Michael Chan

  Typesetter: omson Digital

  Printer: Friesens Printing Ltd.

  Editorial Credits

  Editor: Don Loney

  Production Editor: Pamela Vokey

  John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

  6045 Freemont Blvd.

  Mississauga, Ontario

  L5R 4J3

  FP

  DEDICATION

  For Clay and Julie

  FOREWORD

  When my friend Betsy Powell told me she was writing a book about black street gangs in Toronto, I thought: It’s about time. For too long, people in this city, in this country, have lived in blissful ignorance. Gangs were an American phenomenon. Black ghettos were an American problem. Not here. No way.

  Sure, Canadians know there are gangs: Mafia, bikers, Asian, aboriginal, black. But it’s not as if there are drive-by shootings in Rosedale or Forest Hill, Westmount or Shaughnessy. Sure, Canadians know there are racial tensions in their cities. But it’s not as if there are altercations on Bay Street, or St. Catherine Street, or Robson Street. As long as the gangsters are killing each other in their own neighbourhoods, who cares? It’s only when they bring their guns downtown that anybody—the politicians and media that fuel outbreaks of hysteria—notices.

  In Toronto, starting in the early 1990s, there were episodic eruptions: the race riot that the white power structure insisted was not a race riot; the shotgun blast fired by a black robber, killing a young white woman sitting in a trendy café; the 15-year-old white girl gunned down by black kids in a shootout on a busy downtown street. These were the stories that created the boldest headlines—each time young blacks broke the peace in Toronto the Good.

  But this book takes a look at Toronto the Bad, the separate society that exists across an unmarked border, where poverty, drugs and guns create an explosive mix, where people live in fear in their neighbourhoods, where a generation of Canadians has been lost to the lure of crime, where clueless cops sometimes crash the party, and oblivious politicians show up only during an election campaign.

  This is the backdrop for Bad Seeds. But this is not some thumb-sucking dissertation on the roots of poverty or black alienation, though that’s a part of it. It is a true-crime story of how one senseless shooting eventually blew the lid off a shocking spike in gang warfare in Toronto in the early years of the 21st century. It is a sometimes touching, often frightening, tale with real heroes and real villains.

  You’ll meet Brenton Charlton, a young man with a future, murdered in a case of mistaken identity, and his friend Leonard Bell, who still lives with bullets in his body. You’ll meet Tyshan Riley (pictured on cover), the scariest kid on the block, who rises to the top of his unlawful and immoral world, gaining power with the gun to feed his insatiable appetite for money and sex. You’ll meet the man who brought him down, Roland Ellis. He sold drugs with Riley and subscribed to much of his criminal code, but resisted the seemingly random violence that Riley unleashed in their community.

  You’ll meet the cops who turned Ellis into a witness, finally cracking the case of the shooting of Charl
ton and Bell, while employing an extensive network of wiretaps to nail most of the Galloway Boys gang. On these taped conversations, you’ll hear the nearly incomprehensible lingo of the streets, where gang members are known only by a strange assortment of nicknames—one after a bear in a Disney movie—and give pet names to their guns.

  To make sense of all this, Betsy sifted through hundreds of hours of evidence, from wiretaps to police interviews with suspects and witnesses. As a reporter for the Toronto Star, she covered the marathon preliminary hearing that ultimately resulted in murder charges against Riley and two cohorts—and the murder trial that followed. She got to know the families of the victims and the accused, especially Charlton’s mother, Valda Williams, who lost her only son.

  Betsy also often went into their community—the once-sleepy suburb of Scarborough, known as Scarberia and later called Scarlem—to talk to people who knew Riley and Ellis and the rest of the Galloway Boys when they were growing up. In many cases, these citizens were afraid to speak if their names would be attached to their words.

  When Betsy first approached me about working with her on this project, I thought I might bring a certain perspective. As an American who arrived in Toronto in 1975, I had seen some of the signs of the times earlier than my Canadian friends and colleagues. Growing up in New York in the 1950s and early ’60s, I had watched the city slide into the chaos of random violence and racial hatred. As a reporter in New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I had covered riots and slaughter in the streets. When I came to Canada—first Vancouver, then Montreal and finally Toronto—as a correspondent for United Press International, I found an oasis of peace and civility. But I brought my American wariness with me.

  I recall standing on a subway platform at Union Station one night with a fellow journalist who had lived in Toronto most of his adult life. A small group of young black men huddled nearby. It was the spring of 1981, when race riots were sweeping Britain.

  “It’s going to happen here,” I told my friend.

  He laughed. “You’re nuts,” he said.

  “You watch,” I said.

  I was wrong. But I was also right. Over the ensuing decades, crime rates rose, guns arrived by the truckload, and the Canadian security blanket became a bit tattered.

  Many of the characters in this book are as creepy as any you’ll find in the most gang-infested neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, Chicago, Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.

  That prompted me to ask Betsy whether she feared any of the gangsters she was writing about. She told me a story about December 26, 2005:

  It was a relatively quiet day in the Star’s downtown newsroom. So, as the crime reporter, I worked on a feature about evidence police were using to prosecute members of a northwest Toronto gang. It was a DVD called Rapsheet and featured young black men, their faces covered with bandanas, rapping and waving guns in the air. Some of these young men were now facing charges, the police said.

  Around 4:30, quitting time, I left the Star and headed up Yonge Street. It was still light, not all that cold, and I thought I might see if there was anything left from the Boxing Day sales that I probably didn’t need.

  When I got to Shuter Street, between Queen and Dundas, I had a weird feeling. I’m not someone normally given to premonitions, but there was a sense of menace in the air. Was it coming from the clusters of young black men I saw, with their hoods raised? Or did I focus on them because I’d spent the day watching a DVD of young black men waving guns around? What prompted me to cross the street? Or to consider calling the Star? To say what? That I had a feeling there was going to be trouble on Yonge Street?

  At around 5 p.m. I went into the Guess store at Dundas to try on jeans. Music was thumping when I went into a change room at the back. I didn’t buy anything and left the store about twenty minutes later. There were cops everywhere. People were crowded behind yellow crime-scene tape. Some were talking on cell phones, or using them to take pictures.

  Jane Creba had already been taken away. Some of the other victims remained. I was back in the newsroom that night—with others who had jumped in—filing a story for the front page.

  But Betsy wasn’t interested in writing a book about the 15-year-old white girl killed downtown on Boxing Day, the bystander in a shootout between young black kids. It was the exception, the cliché that got the media’s juices flowing. She was more interested in the shooting of Charlton and Bell a year earlier, the black innocents among many black casualties. And she wanted to know more about the gangs that populated her city, the neighbourhoods where she grew up.

  As a fourth-generation Canadian and lifelong Torontonian, Betsy Powell was raised in Scarborough, the daughter of Clay Powell, a celebrated Crown prosecutor who successfully prosecuted such high-profile cases as the one that sent Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard to prison, before switching sides and defending the likes of Rolling Stone Keith Richards on drug charges.

  As Betsy’s editor at The Canadian Press in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I knew the criminal justice system was in her DNA—which is most obvious as she takes the reader through the investigation of the Charlton/Bell shootings, the police tactics in solving the crime and the often outrageous antics of the lawyers involved in the case.

  This is not a bedtime story. But it should be a wake-up call to all

  Canadians.

  Ken Becker

  Mississauga, Ontario

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Crime journalist Lee Lamothe planted the seed for this book when he made the flattering suggestion that I write a book about street gangs. Thank you, Lee. I am also indebted to Wiley editor Don Loney for his unwavering enthusiasm despite the glacial pace of the trial process. Thank you also to Nicole Langlois for her careful and invisible copyediting and Pamela Vokey for shepherding Bad Seeds through the editorial and production process.

  Many people went out of their way to help me, especially Bill Blair, Fred Mathews, John Muise, Pat Monaghan, Richard Schofield, Lew Golding, David Boulet, Luis Carrillos, Frank Skubic, Geary Tomlinson, Kathryn Martin and Andy McKay. Special thanks to Daniel Brown, David Berg, Maureen Pecknold, Emma Rhodes and Rosemary Warren. David Midanik wanted no part of this book. I thank him nonetheless for sharing his insights into the criminal justice system. Also, thank you to Wayne Banks and Dean Burks for their unqualified support and for always returning my calls with alacrity.

  I was privileged to spend time with Leonard Bell, Valda Williams and Uleth Harvey. Through them, I came to know “Junior” and why he was so loved and mourned. I am also grateful to Alice Thomas, who trusted me when others wouldn’t.

  Many thanks to my colleagues and friends for their support and encouragement, including John Ferri, Peter Small, Peter Edwards, Wendy McCann, the courthouse cabal and the indomitable Michelle Shephard, who was writing about gangs long before most of us were paying any attention. Ron Pietroniro, thank you, for not only taking a terrific photo but generously sharing it for the front cover of the book.

  There are a number of people to whom I am indebted but cannot properly acknowledge. I hope you know who you are. I owe inexpressible gratitude to Ken Becker, one of the best who, in a perfect world, would be a media mogul. XO.

  Finally, I am especially grateful to my parents, who graciously proofread Bad Seeds. And, most of all, I am indebted to Jeff, for his love, support and patience through a long process.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Galloway Boys (G-Way) Gang Members and Associates

  Norris Allen: G-Way gang leader shot to death on his driveway in 2002. Street name: Bolu

  Philip Atkins: High-ranking member of G-Way, a lieutenant to Tyshan Riley. Street name: Brub

  Omar Demetrius: G-Way leader who was inseparable with Norris Allen. When he was deported to Jamaica, Allen took over. Street name: O

  Roland Ellis: A leader of G-Way “southside” gang called Mad Soldiers before turning into the Crown’s key witness. Street name: Sledge

  Heather Kerr: G-Way associate.

/>   Maxeen McPherson: Her Scarborough apartment is main G-Way hangout. Street name: Smokey

  Frances Newby: G-Way associate. Street name: Frano

  Gary Reid: Moves to Kingston/Galloway area in late teens, becomes mentor to Tyshan Riley, later an enemy.

  Marie Riley: Mother of Tyshan Riley, and Carl and Courtney Francis, also members of G-Way, and two younger sons.

  Tyshan Riley: Leader of Scarborough street gangs Bad Seeds, Throwbacks and ultimately Galloway Boys or G-Way. Street name: Greeze or Nitti

  Damian Walton: Tyshan Riley’s “secretary,” or runaround guy. Street name: Burns or Smithers