Bad Seeds Read online

  Riley and Ellis would sit inside, playing video games until the phone rang. They’d take turns taking “a little walk,” Ellis said in describing their routine. Their clients were the “crack heads on the streets,” Ellis said, “mainly hookers and bums and anyone who walked through the lane.”

  When Ellis’ mother “caught onto the play,” she threw him out. Ellis expected he and Riley would continue doing business, but found himself alone on the street, abandoned by his friend. “He went his own way and just left me, basically,” he recalled later with some bitterness. That rift healed, he said, but the groundwork for payback was laid.

  Still a teenager, the dark-skinned Riley was known on the street as Nitty, a name, some believe, he adopted as a homage to Chicago mobster Frank Nitti—Al Capone’s right-hand man. Riley was also known as Greeze or Greezy Money and was the leader of a young crew that called itself Bad Seeds. Their signature tattoo was a sperm cell.

  While the media give the impression gang membership includes some kind of initiation, in Galloway it was more of an evolutionary process. “We were all school friends, we grew up together,” said Ellis. “We were saying if we know each other for more than six, seven years or whatever, why not just link—because you know we’re all together, we’re probably going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

  Sperm cell tattoo worn by members

  of Galloway gang, Bad Seeds.

  That ethos was passed on from the “original gangsters” in the area, Ellis would tell police. “They would always tell us, ‘You guys are gonna be friends for life and there’s gonna be stuff you guys go through. People are gonna die.’” Ellis called it “a repeat cycle, basically, that goes on in the neighbourhood.”

  Robberies, which they called “grimes,” ripping off rival drug dealers, was the main way to grow the green, especially because these victims generally didn’t call the police.

  To some, it seemed, Riley’s stash of cash appeared overnight. “He still has his guns and stuff but he was hurting like he didn’t have money,” Ellis recalled. “Then, a week later, this guy has gold teeth in his mouth, pushing a Lex [driving a Lexus], money, liquor store trips every second.”

  Riley had grown into a lean six-foot-tall young man who liked to wear his hair braided. In warmer months, he wore sleeveless T-shirts and low-slung jeans. On his back was tattooed the word Life. Gold chains adorned his neck. He had come of age at a time when gang members were getting younger “and more committed to making a statement through extreme violence,” said Lew Golding, an addictions counsellor who grew up in the area.

  In the spring of 2001, when he was 18, Riley was playing a game of pickup basketball in the gymnasium at Pine Ridge Secondary School in Pickering. He was trading trash talk with opponents that included threats to shoot each other. It escalated when Riley threw a punch. A 22-year-old named Teran Richards, who wanted to become a police officer, tried to break it up. That’s when Riley’s Galloway buddy, Marlon Maragh, stepped onto the court and opened fire.

  He pumped three slugs from a .45-calibre handgun into Richards’ back. Richards survived but lost a kidney and part of a lung during life-saving surgery. Another bullet grazed the face of a 15-year-old girl sitting in the stands with about a hundred other stunned spectators. “It’s not just a bunch of kids pushing each other around. I mean, somebody’s shot somebody,” Tom Quinn of Pickering’s parks and recreations program told Oshawa This Week.

  Maragh, then 21, Riley and another man fled the school in a rented Pontiac Sunfire, with police in pursuit. Maragh ended up crashing the car into a van, injuring a man and his two sons. Durham Region police arrested Maragh and Riley at gunpoint. The third man got away and was never identified.

  Riley pleaded guilty to assault and possession of crack cocaine found in a search after the police chase and was sentenced to nine months in jail. Over the next few years Riley would be in and out of jail on charges ranging from break-ins and breaching bail conditions to drugs and firearm possession. Maragh would later be sentenced to eighteen years in a federal penitentiary for attempted murder.

  When he was out on the streets in Galloway, Riley was rolling with Norris Allen, his hero from the Boys and Girls Club, and Gary Reid, his mentor from the streets of his childhood. Both were slightly older dudes, or “niggas,” as Riley called them. He had little time for those who did not share his ambition or cupidity. “Those guys could be chopping [selling drugs] out there for as long as I’m in fucking jail and they’ll still not have nothing, man,” he once said, looking back on his years as a teenager. “Simple and plain, you’ve got to save money. I’ve been stacking money since I was 15 years old. These niggers are just started.”

  Riley solidified his control of Galloway by committing robberies and drug rip-offs, selling drugs and, when in the mood, driving around looking for enemies to shoot, particularly anyone from Malvern. He was the “big dawg” who ordered his soldiers to do his bidding.

  While he always talked the talk, he had inherited his mother’s mood swings and sometimes seemed unsettled by his temperament. “I don’t know what to be pissed off about, I don’t know what to be happy about, I don’t know what to be sad about.”

  Riley also fancied himself a rapper and, with Ellis, booked time to record at the King Turbo studio in Scarborough. His lyrics included: “I’ll fuck up your eyes like the R&B singer music / I got a gun as big as a pool stick.” Some of the recordings were made under the name Throwbacks, which he would later give to his gang.

  As his stature on the block and bankroll grew, so did his attraction for young women. “Money talks,” a childhood friend observed, adding that while Riley wasn’t the “cutest” guy he got the sexiest women.

  But, ever the pragmatist, Riley had a separate standard for his girlfriends. He once told one of them, Ellis’ younger sister, Christine, that he wasn’t interested in “someone who’s dumb or doesn’t have street smarts.” Riley often had advice to offer: “You got to finish school, have a career that you want to pursue and have money. If you can’t do those things, I can’t be with you . . . You need your head on your shoulders, like me . . . I know what I want in life and anything I want I can get it, anything I want. If I want to buy something I can go buy whatever the fuck I want. It’s all about money. You’ve got to have money in the world to live . . . I don’t have no career, okay, I make my money the way I make my money. But with you, my girl is supposed to be some legitimate person, no problems, has a career, has money, she’s good. If, one day, I go flat-ass broke, she’s good. You feel me?”

  Riley was adept at juggling several girlfriends. But there was one who was different, who “he slept with,” while he just “fucked others.” Her name was Dana Lee Williams, and she was the mother of Norris Allen’s two children. News of the relationship between Riley and Williams would rock the Galloway neighbourhood after Allen was killed in 2002.

  But for someone later considered a stone-cold killer, Riley also had a seemingly sensitive side that could be there for friends and family when they were hurting. “I took you in when you needed loving,” Riley once told Williams. While others in Galloway viewed their romance more cynically, Williams regarded Riley as her saviour, getting her through the worst period of her life after Allen was killed. “I’m never leaving this guy for nobody,” she would say. “He was the one who was there for me.” He was also attentive to his grandmother, calling her and dropping by her east-end home with groceries and money.

  But first and foremost, Riley reveled in his image as a fearsome gangster and it continued to get him into trouble with the law.

  On March 12, 2004, nine days after the shooting of Charlton and Bell, Justice Eugene Ewaschuk sentenced Riley to two years less one day, to be served in the community, for possessing a firearm that was found in a car he was travelling in a year earlier. In hindsight, the fact that Riley wasn’t sent to jail seemed to run counter to the judge’s reputation for being tough on gun-toting gangsters. Defence lawyers had nicknamed Ewas
chuk: “You is fucked” and “Tex,” for meting out Texas-style justice.

  As a condition of his release, Riley had an 11 p.m. curfew and was ordered to live with his father and stepmother. He was also forbidden to travel east of Victoria Park in Scarborough unless he was with his father. Justice Michael Dambrot, who would later preside over Riley’s murder trial, would call it a “lenient” disposition, given Riley’s “serious record for violence.” But in 2004, with Riley out on the street, it was too late for Charlton and Bell and for other victims of shootings that would rock Scarborough.

  CHAPTER 4

  From Scarberia to Scarlem

  By the time Tyshan Riley was born in 1982, the area near Kingston and Galloway roads and Lawrence Avenue East was saturated with public housing. The hardscrabble area is in the southeastern section of Scarborough, a vast 186-square-kilometre-borough in the eastern part of Toronto.

  Named after Scarborough, England, variations of its name have over the years been used to capture something of its character. People in Toronto called it Scarberia, as a way to describe the seemingly remote location—at least as far as it related to downtown. Residents were Scarberians, or Scarbs. By the end of the 20th century, the nickname Scarlem was common, referring to the increasing number of black immigrants who settled there.

  Indisputably, the Toronto borough of Scarborough in the late 20th century had evolved into a place with some serious image problems, deserved or not. Some of the blame was correctly placed on the media reporting crime. No matter where an incident took place, it happened in Scarborough, compared to when something happened at Jane and Finch, another high-crime area, which wasn’t identified as the borough of North York.

  But like North York—both boroughs became part of an amalgamated Toronto in 1998—Scarborough had its share of trouble spots: places where lawlessness flourished in grimy ghettos, next to tranquil, leafy residential neighbourhoods with residents living in cookie-cutter bungalows or two-storey homes with backyards, some with swimming pools. Southeastern Scarborough provided those contrasts.

  Riley’s neighbourhood of Galloway was lined with strip malls, small shops, fast-food restaurants, used-car lots and places that charged usurious rates to cash cheques. Yet not far beyond the urban blight were multi-million-dollar mansions and an abundance of green space near the Scarborough Bluffs, which realtors called a “hidden treasure right next to Lake Ontario.” Southeastern Scarborough was as good as any example of Toronto’s widening gap between the rich and poor. (By 2009 there were signs of gentrification: a Starbucks at Kingston Road and Lawrence Avenue, and billboards indicating the construction of “luxury” townhomes was imminent.)

  Just east of Galloway was Guildwood Village, or The Guild, created after the Second World War and still something of a “Pleasantville” by the time Riley was born nearby, though on the other side of the tracks. The Guild was conceived by planners who “dreamed of establishing a community that would combine quality homes with beautiful surroundings,” according to a website run by residents. “Wiring was placed underground instead of being suspended from lighting and telephone poles which would spoil the look of the community.” The Guild even had a coat of arms and a Latin motto, dulce misceatur utili, which translates as: “Let us mingle the beautiful with the useful.”

  Trying to uncover the history of the public housing complexes throughout Kingston/Galloway is, for the most part, futile. The Toronto and Ontario archives have some details, but not many. No one, it seemed, bothered keeping track of who built what or when.

  To some children who were born in the area in the early ’80s, the name Galloway seemed inextricably tied to the word gallows, though the origin of the name was much more prosaic. William Galloway was among the early settlers who owned hundreds of hectares of farmland in the early 19th century. The area’s proximity to the Taber Hill ossuary, a 700-year-old burial ground for nearly 500 Iroquois, was another reason some believed the spectre of death hung over the area.

  Other local lore has it that, viewed from above, Kingston Road looks like a crack pipe, the townhouses burning ash from the dirty white high-rise at 4301 Kingston Road. That building is known as “the pipe.” (The view from a Google Earth satellite photograph doesn’t bear this out.)

  Living in one of the townhouses or high-rises in Galloway fed a sense of being geographically isolated from the surrounding area, another not uncommon feature of Toronto’s subsidized housing stock. Former Galloway gang member Roland Ellis explained to police the disconnection to police: “Any way to get into that area you have to come over a bridge.” He rarely left the area and had no friends in other parts of the city. “I didn’t trust anybody outside of Galloway.”

  A Downward Spiral into Gang Warfare

  A gritty section of Kingston Road near Galloway Road was key gang turf. Long ago a narrow trail winding through the bush above the Bluffs and along the lakefront, Kingston Road was widened to four lanes over the years. It would also become the nexus of two groups of young men living in two different parts of Scarborough.

  At one time, Kingston Road, or Highway 2, was dotted with hotels and motels to accommodate travellers along Toronto’s eastern gateway. That was before multi-lane Highway 401 stretched across the province and siphoned away a lot of the business. Left with empty rooms, motel operators in the 1980s entered into contracts with the city to house homeless families and refugees unable to find emergency shelter. The transient nature of the population further eroded the stability of the area, as did the increasing numbers of prostitutes who plied their trade in the motels on Kingston Road.

  “It used to be a great area, very quiet, and a great place to raise kids. Now we’ve got the drug dealers, we’ve had one unsolved murder, and the prostitutes are hitchhiking all day in the same place,” one long-time resident told the Toronto Star in 1992. “It’s getting to a point where a decent woman can’t walk along Lawrence Avenue without a car stopping and someone propositioning her.” Another resident, who had lived near Galloway and Kingston for sixty years, was stricken about the condition of the cemetery where his wife was interred. “Condoms on my wife’s grave, prostitutes crawling through broken fences to ply their trade on church property and vandalism everywhere is destroying the neighbourhood,” he told the newspaper.

  Nearby was former Scarborough mayor Albert Campbell’s grave at St. Margaret’s Church.

  The area was fertile ground for the growth of gangs. The police response was to increase officer presence around the public housing buildings, fuelling a state of wariness and mistrust.

  Ian Edward, who worked at the Boys and Girls Club, remembered police conducting community sweeps. Officers would arrive en masse, fan out, and question whoever happened to be around, he recalled. “It created absolute pandemonium. It doesn’t matter if you’re on your way to your job and you’re now going to lose your job,” Edward said. “You wouldn’t tolerate that if they came into your community. But it seems to be okay for the police to do it in those communities.”

  Lew Golding, who became an addictions counsellor for black youth at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, grew up in the area and was a member of a community-police liaison committee from 1988 to 1991. He said that by the late ’80s, police switched their attention to Malvern’s emerging gang problems because “Kingston-Galloway was too far gone.”

  By then, the area had an abundance of single moms in similar circumstances: raising children without fathers. “It was a ghetto,” one Galloway resident who moved away told me. That part of Scarborough joined other sections of the city synonymous with crime and ghettos.

  For the first half of the 20th century, Toronto’s impoverished neighbourhoods were concentrated downtown and would lead to the construction of Canada’s first public housing project, Regent Park, in the 1950s. The trend of pushing low-income residents to the suburbs started to accelerate in the 1960s when Toronto was experiencing a critical shortage of affordable housing and the land on which to build it. The Ontario Ho
using Corporation (OHC), the provincial government agency responsible for public housing, had no choice but to look to the fringes of the city. With its large tracts of relatively cheap green space, Scarborough was particularly attractive.

  By the mid-’60s, Scarborough had been transformed from a relatively quiet suburb into Canada’s fastest-growing community, with nearly 250,000 residents, according to A History of Scarborough written in 1968 by Robert R. Bonis. The tide of young families flowing in, many of them immigrants from Europe, settled in the subdivisions and apartment buildings that had sprung up as fast as bulldozers could devour the farmland. And with the population growth came businesses and an ever-growing commercial and retail sector. For those settling in Scarborough prior to 1970, it was a relatively prosperous place thanks to the expanding economy and availability of both white- and blue-collar jobs.

  But change loomed. The federal government’s decision in the mid-’70s to open its immigration policy, while guaranteeing protection for refugees fleeing countries in turmoil, changed Scarborough. Arriving with young children, many of these newcomers from the West Indies, China, South Asia and the Philippines came to Scarborough and its new government housing developments. This influx of visible minorities created tensions.

  Opposition to these developments came mostly from white rate-payers. Politicians, feeling the heat from their constituents, questioned why Scarborough, and its West Hill neighbourhood in particular, was receiving a disproportionate share of subsidized housing. While all of Toronto had ten units of OHC housing per 1,000 people, and Scarborough had eighteen, West Hill, by the early ’80s, had about 174 units per 1,000 people.

  The West Hill area, encompassing the Galloway neighbourhood, had more single-parent families, more people on welfare and more people living in high-rises than the better-known and more infamous Jane-Finch corridor in North York.