Bad Seeds Page 3
She missed him desperately. “I was counting the days until I could hug my son again,” Williams remembered. Her dream of a reunion was realized when he boarded a plane in Jamaica with his aunt, Uleth Harvey, and once again headed to Toronto. “We both came here with hopes and dreams for a better life,” Harvey said.
This time, Junior seemed to embrace the cold climate, tempered by the warmth of his mother’s love. Her main concerns were that he stay in school and make something of his life. Unlike many teenagers, he did not rebel against her strict rules and “tough love” philosophy. Junior often had friends over and they called Williams “Mom.”
On Sunday mornings, everyone would go to church, including whoever happened to be living in the house. “Junior would tell the roommates, ‘Get up, Mom wants us to go to church,’” she recalled. They would pack into her Toyota Corolla and drive across the top of the city on Highway 401 to a makeshift church in an industrial plaza in the northwest corner of the city.
While attending high school, Charlton started working at McDonald’s. He loved to eat, and his first meal in Canada after arriving the second time was a Big Mac, a favourite. He worked his way up to manager at the food chain’s outlet at Warden and Sheppard avenues. After high school he was assigned to open a McDonald’s outlet at the Toronto Zoo, before taking a job with a catering firm to run a concession stand at the SkyDome. Staff loved his easy-going manner and even temperament. At the time of his death, he was planning to take his girlfriend to Disney World and wanted to return to school. “Just as he was to start his life, it was over like that,” his mom said years later. His aunt Uleth would lament: “I played an instrumental role in Junior’s immigration and have regrets every day for taking him to his death.”
“By the Sweat of Your Brow, You’ll Eat Bread”
Leonard Bell, who was called Leo by his friends, had two choices growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, surrounded by drug dealing and poverty in Wareika Hills, one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Kingston, Jamaica. He rejected the choice of joining the underworld. “It was always, ‘I don’t need this.’”
One of eight children, he was raised with strict discipline and church doctrine. “My mother made the rules, my father enforced them. You didn’t defy him.” His dad, Albert, a plumber, cut an imposing figure, standing six-feet-two and weighing 350 pounds of pure muscle. When young Leo heard his dad speak “it was like thunder.” But Albert Bell was also a big teddy bear, the kind of man who wasn’t afraid to show affection to his children. “He’d take you into his arms and hold you,” Leo recalled. What the family lacked in monetary wealth, it had in love.
Despite their modest home and sizeable brood, Albert and his wife, Loreen, a seamstress, would take in children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them. Bell accepted his father’s credo: “By the sweat of your brow, you’ll eat bread.”
On one occasion, Bell did defy his father. He dropped out of dentistry school because, he said, “I was fascinated by building.” He enrolled in an engineering program at the College of Arts, Science and Technology on the outskirts of Kingston.
Bell was 20 when a drunk driver killed his father, at 58. “I wish every day he was still alive.”
Young Bell learned bricklaying, tiling, carpentry and plumbing and, after leaving school, did contract work. He also opened a small restaurant in the late 1970s, around the time Kingston was awash in violence. Gangs called the Skull Posse and Hotsteppers terrorized his neighbourhood. “When police hear the [gang] names, they run.”
Bell lost count of the people, mostly young men, who died violently during that period, many of them “used” by politicians who created garrison communities by arming supporters. He knew some of the gang members, they would ask him to fix their guns: Bell had trained as an army cadet where he took a course in firearms engineering. “We learned to make weapons from scratch,” he said.
Bell arrived in Canada in 1995, to be closer to a daughter who had moved here with his ex-common law wife. He brought with him “a little money to sustain” himself. It helped, since “finding work was a challenge.” But he never stopped hustling, taking every job he could get.
For a spell, he worked in telemarketing, selling credit protection plans, and out-sold his colleagues. “But that wasn’t for me.” He sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He knocked on doors trying to get homeowners to sign contracts with a natural gas company. “Looking back at that time I laugh about it now,” he would say more than a decade later. “It was a joke. There was no satisfactory pay.”
He eventually established himself as a private contractor, doing renovations, which is how he met Valda Williams in 1998. “I was referred to her by a friend to do her floors,” he said. At the time Bell was shot, he was about to embark on a new business venture with his fiancée, later his wife, providing home care for the elderly. That never got off the ground. “One stupid act can change your life completely,” he told me. “If I wanted to be shot I would have stayed in Jamaica.”
Bell’s ordeal would not end with his release from hospital. And it would be months before he would learn that the shooters included a notorious gang leader whom police considered one of the most dangerous men ever to live in Toronto.
CHAPTER 3
The baddest seed
To be sure, the odds were Tyshan Riley would grow up to become a gangster. He was born into poverty in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Canada; raised by an often absent and erratic mother in an over-crowded ghetto apartment; learned his lessons in the street—how to sell drugs, how to steal—not in school; came to idolize the fiercest guys on the block, and embraced a gang culture ruled by guns and fear, a culture that promised money, sex and respect.
For Riley, taking what he wanted through intimidation and violence became a physical reflex. His “I’m not scared of you” attitude was honed at a young age, when he invited older boys to punch him in the gut and barely flinched. His philosophy was not unlike that of any career criminal or Bay Street hustler—wealth is the only goal.
“I know what I want in life and anything I want I can get,” he would say. “It’s all called progress. Every day you wake up it’s progress. I eat, sleep, shit and talk money. That’s the way to live.”
Tyshan Anthony Riley was born in Toronto on October 28, 1982, when his mother, Marie Riley, was 22, and his father, Wondez East, was 29. Both parents were born in Kingston, Jamaica, but met in Toronto. Marie already had twin boys, Carl and Courtney, born in 1979, with another man. Two more sons, Ishon and Joshua, would follow. Having more children meant bigger welfare cheques.
Since moving to Toronto from Jamaica in her mid-teens, Marie had lived in public housing and relied on social assistance. Combative, fiery and prone to mood swings, her ambition was limited to shoplifting and small-time fraud that lacked sophistication and led to short, intermittent spells in jail.
Tyshan’s early years were spent in a two-bedroom apartment in a dingy brown high-rise in southeastern Scarborough. Seven people shared the unit: Marie, the five boys and, for a time, a boyfriend named Pete.
Marie was a clean freak and didn’t want her sons’ friends—or their bicycles—under foot. She tried to impose curfews yet insisted the twins, in the early days known as Drips and Drops, take their little brothers with them to hang out by the basketball court or nearby plaza. This was when Joshua, whose nickname was Benz, was still in diapers. The twins were essentially “out on the street” when they were 12, said one woman who knew the boys. In her view, “the men in Marie’s life always came first, before the boys.”
While attending public school, Tyshan preferred activities outside the classroom, such as catching crayfish with friends in Highland Creek, which runs through southeastern Scarborough into nearby Lake Ontario. Everyone called him “Ty,” and he was a “cool” little boy who people were drawn to, remembered one childhood friend, Gary Reid, who was a few years older. He called Tyshan his “homey,” or “my little bro.” The boy looked up to him.
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nbsp; “When I first came around that area, he was the kid that was going to the store to buy some bubblegum,” Reid recalled. “But he was a rowdy kid that you saw had enough emotion and stuff in him. So you wanted to talk to him. That ’s what I did—I’d sit down and reason with him, like ‘Listen, man, there are certain ways you can go about things and there’s certain ways you can’t go about things.’” Reid was trying to teach the kid that even on the street there were ways and rules—not all within the law—to be followed. Reid, a talented soccer player, had his life sent on a downward spiral when he was shot in the leg at 15. Instead of starting a career in sports, something he had the potential to do, he spent his remaining teenage years and his early 20s in and out of jail.
Not everyone was enamoured with the brash little boy. One neighbourhood mom remembered an 11-year-old Tyshan as “sneaky and devious. I wouldn’t turn my back on him.” She said the boy was “just like his mother,” constantly demanding a lot of attention. “He was a leader,” she said, “but he was a leader of wrongdoing.” For fun, Tyshan and his little pals would knock on doors and run away, pull fire alarms and hang out in the stairwells in the cluster of rundown high-rises in their neighbourhood. They also played basketball at the East Scarborough Boys and Girls Club on Galloway Road. A mural of children playing is painted in vibrant colours on the exterior of the single-storey building. “A good place to be” is the club’s motto.
Ian Edward, fresh out of university, arrived at the club in the late 1980s to start his career as a youth-development worker. He found a nearly empty building with no equipment, some metal shelving and a couple of threadbare couches. Over the years, the club, opened in 1956, had its ups and downs, largely because of its reliance on government grants and charitable donations. But at the time Edward started, the club was in a period of transition. It had a new and energetic board of directors that saw not only the building’s potential, but also the pressing need to help kids, mainly black, living in a neighbourhood that was becoming more decrepit and more dangerous every day.
Edward and another youth worker—both enthusiastic and both white—developed programs and activities from offices that were essentially converted closets. There was a gym, a games room with ping pong and pool tables, a kitchen, lounge and a computer room where kids could play video games. The youth workers’ dedication paid off. Between 60 and 100 kids were soon turning up at night, taking what Edward called “strong ownership” of the facility.
Staff also recognized they were “a pretty tough, violent group of kids” and took to asking them “to leave their weapons outside,” Edward told me. “We knew they were high-needs, high-risk, involved in things out in the community. But we also knew we created an environment inside where they had enough respect for what we were doing.” Still, on a rainy day after a dance in the gym, the roof leaked because of the bullet holes in the ceiling.
Roland Ellis uses a computer camera
to photograph himself circa 2003.
Tyshan Riley and his half-brother Courtney were regulars at the club. So were some of Riley’s future G-Way gang brothers, including Dwight Wisdom and Roland Ellis. ( Wisdom’s younger brother Jason would be a co-accused at Riley’s 2009 murder trial and Ellis a crucial witness against them.) For Riley and his friends, basketball was one of the few acceptable activities on the right side of the law. This was a time when Michael Jordan was the king of the sports world, a black man who was adored, admired—and filthy rich.
But there was never any chance Riley would use the game as an escape from the streets. He was considered an “average” player and a ball hog. “Tyshan would dribble without passing to anybody,” said someone who watched the games. In most cases, the boys from Galloway turned a game into just another street war. They would play what they called American-style basketball, aggressively and with full contact.
One king of the court was Kareem Brenton Biscombe, who had a mouth full of gold teeth and a wicked temper. And he didn’t like to lose. After the visiting West Scarborough boys beat his East Scarborough team, Biscombe chased the other players out of the building with his gun drawn. “He was defending Galloway,” said the abovementioned observer. Added Edward: “This was their place and their place only.”
(In 1997, Biscombe, then 23, was sentenced to life in prison for murder.)
Riley was clearly in awe of Biscombe and the other older boys who, when not playing basketball, sold drugs, robbed people and carried guns. In particular, he idolized Norris (Bolu) Allen, whose murder in 2002 would eventually touch off the war that brought Riley down. Edward remembered Allen as “powerful, for a skinny kid.” He was also fearless. “He just was in everybody’s face all the time—he wasn’t going to take any shit.” Riley watched and learned how Allen earned respect through intimidation and refusing to back down. And none of the boys was afraid of the police.
The club earned a reputation as a hangout for gangbangers-in-training, and became a magnet for police. One time, officers came to the club looking for Courtney, whom they suspected of stealing a pager from another kid. “He got the shit beat out of him” by the police, said Edward. “They were picking him up and throwing him against a fence.” Edward said he wanted to file a complaint against the officers “but Courtney wouldn’t agree. He knew it would just get him beaten up more the next time.”
Such heavy-handed police tactics only hardened the anti-authority views of Riley and the others. When someone would show up at the club after being in prison, he was treated like a celebrity. Doing time showed he had not been a snitch.
Ellis remembered watching the guys who gave up hoops for selling drugs. “There’s guys there, if you go to them and even talk about sports, they’ll look like you’re crazy, like straight, get home.
“They don’t care about it. They don’t think it exists for them. They don’t believe that they have a shot at making it anywhere in this world . . . I guess they do what they feel they’re good at, what they think they’re good at, at least.”
It was under these conditions that club staff tried to target the kids who showed the greatest potential. Riley was not among them.
When not hanging out at the club, Riley would visit the apartments of friends to play video games—James Bond 007 was a favourite—and watch movies such as New Jack City, New Jersey Drive and Menace II Society, tales of black urban youth standing up to the cops.
These awkward, early teen years were also when Riley became self-conscious about having two extra teeth (later removed) that ruined his smile—at a time when he became interested in girls. He and his friends would attend parties in the “recreation room” of a neighbourhood high-rise known as the Pentagon or “Pent.” During these “rec room jams,” a DJ would spin hip hop, R&B and reggae tunes, by Buju Banton, Beenie Man and Super Cat. Riley loved these and other dancehall artists, though a friend recalled “Ty wasn’t much of a dancer.”
The Pent was also a great place to learn how to “chop” (slang for selling drugs) or pick up pointers on street crime. Once, the twins, for example, had bragged about robbing a pizza deliveryman. The early ’90s saw an epidemic of such robberies, prompting police to initiate “Project Deliverance” in Scarborough, aimed at arresting those responsible for the two-bit pizza heists.
One day, the 13-year-old Riley and four other boys—two of them white, from nearby Orton Park—decided to “get a little money, eat some pizza,” recalled a neighbour. They placed a delivery order and “masked up.” Andre Matthews—who would be slashed to death on a Scarborough street in 1996 at the age of 15—held the driver at knife-point while the others grabbed the pizza and about $30. “Tyshan didn’t touch him,” said the neighbour. They ate the pizza and later spent the cash on action figures at a Woolco store.
It was around this time that Marie sent her rambunctious son to live with his father, Wondez East. He had survived a 1989 shooting and robbery in Regent Park, one of the most notorious crime areas of the city.
(When I first met him in 2009, East, i
n his mid-50s, seemed friendly and mild-mannered, a Marlboro smoker who installed carpets and lived in a bungalow in west-end Toronto with his much younger wife and two young children.)
Tyshan returned to his mother’s home in Galloway and, just before turning 14, started grade 9 at Sir Robert Borden, high school considered a dumping ground for poor students. “Before he got his timetable and attended his first class, he was kicked out,” recalled a friend. That may be hyperbolic but he certainly didn’t last long in school.
He was getting an education, though, watching the drug dealers at the Pent, where guys such as Biscombe were raking in serious cash thanks to the insatiable appetite of customers—they called them “custies”—for crack cocaine and weed. For Riley, “it was the streets or nothing,” said a one-time friend. “He started making fast money and there was no turning back.”
Carrying his signature red cell phone filled with the numbers of custies, Riley hustled hard and understood the value of saving, or “stacking,” money. “The red phone was a start of his destiny,” said a childhood friend. “He wanted to be the man. But while some want to do it and get out, Tyshan took it and ran with it.” He thrived on instilling fear, wanting people to know “when they see my car, don’t bother with me.”
By the time he was 17, Riley would boast he was making up to $3,000 a day. He sold drugs out of a townhouse belonging to Roland Ellis’ mother on Kingston Road, in a warren of two-storey, brown brick buildings. The backyard’s small patch of grass backed onto a tree-lined walking path where Riley and Ellis met their customers. With only one road entering the complex, spotters (younger kids who collected a few dollars for their labour) easily signalled the cops’ arrival.