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  “West Hill had its fill and it is time to look elsewhere,” city councillor Ron Moeser, whose Ward 9 included West Hill, said in 1992. The neediest people had been “shoved” into these townhouses and high-rise buildings and left to fend for themselves, with little in the way of social services, said former councillor David Soknacki, who represented the area until 2006. While most of their clients lived on the edges of the city, the social service agencies remained concentrated downtown.

  “The best thinking of the time was: give people four decent walls and a place to live and they’ll do their best,” Soknacki said. The public housing developments had been built “when saving a few dollars on the short term, by putting more and more social housing units together, seemed to be the way of the future.”

  But as early as 1969, a task force headed by Paul Hellyer, then a Liberal MP, concluded public housing had too many “problem” families with inadequate social services for parents or recreational facilities for their children. Public housing building contracts were awarded to developers with the lowest bids, often leading to “insensitive site selection and poor design,” concluded a 1973 task force on housing in Ontario. “In many areas, the design of public housing projects is incompatible with their surroundings. Marginal sites are frequently employed, in part because developers tend to reserve their prime land holdings for private developments.”

  Years later, John Sewell, who served as Toronto’s mayor from 1979 to 1981 and briefly ran the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority in the mid-1980s, described public housing developments as “social disasters simply because of the way they were built.” He was referring to crowding large numbers of people into buildings and townhouses cut off from the surrounding community.

  The OHC’s mandate to create housing that blended invisibly with the community was a marked failure and contributed to a rise in the stigma of being associated with certain buildings and areas. The YMCA raised a red flag in a 1974 memo about “the increasing alienation of OHC youth and the antagonism between OHC and non-OHC residents” in Scarborough. “These projects have literally become high-rise ghettos in the middle of upper-income families. The hostility, suspicion and fear between these two groups is worsening. The division is particularly glaring in the teenage bracket where ‘gangs’ complete with all the trimmings are a growing trend.”

  Between 1981 and 2001, there was an astonishing 136.6 per cent increase in the number of poor families in Scarborough. And Kingston/ Galloway wasn’t the only area to see an increase in the concentration of poor and low-income families. Malvern, a large square area in the northeastern part of Scarborough, was, like Galloway, also isolated by geography and had limited public spaces and facilities. Locally called the “four corners,” Malvern was to be a model for a suburban community that preserved mature trees, ravine woodlots and parklands. The area bordered the Toronto Zoo, Rouge River and Rouge Valley Park—just north of Highway 401.

  In the late 1950s, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation expropriated the area’s farmland and eventually the province initiated a project called Homeownership Made Easy. The government-sponsored home financing plans allowed for the purchase of detached, two-storey, four-bedroom homes for $15,000 to $20,000 with leasing arrangements for the land.

  In contrast to the mazes of townhouses and high-rises in Galloway, Malvern had a mix of single-family detached homes, semi-detached homes and low-rise garden and high-rise apartments. There were also a number of subsidized units offering rents geared to income. Malvern was supposed to be an opportune place to start a life in multicultural Canada, and predictably it became a magnet for immigrants. After years of planning and construction, the first residents moved into their homes in 1972, and for a time the experiment appeared to be successful.

  But the success didn’t last. Malvern, like Galloway, lacked public services. There was also poor urban planning, which meant residents generally interacted within their own cultural and racial community and had minimal contact with anybody else. Economic conditions were also not in Malvern’s favour and the dream of home ownership for many was short-lived when salaries were frozen by wage controls in the mid-1970s. By 1983, Malvern had only about 13,500 residents, about half the number planners had wanted. There also remained a dearth of services, not enough shopping, schools or transportation lines. Malvern could have been a “model community” but instead was a “planning disaster,” said Dave Warner, a former New Democratic Party MPP for Scarborough-Ellesmere, in 1983.

  Still, not everyone considered growing up in Malvern a bad thing. Toronto-based filmmaker Sudz Sutherland, for instance, said his Malvern of the 1980s was unlike the Malvern it would become. “Back in the day, there wasn’t the trade in guns or drugs like there is currently,” he wrote in a 2009 article published in the Star. “Growing up, the worst we had to fear was that someone was going to try to beat you up.”

  Malvern, though, was never going to be a suburban utopia. Instead of roads designed in circles and crescents, Malvern should have been built on a grid system to allow better bus service. Families without cars were forced to rely on public transit that wasn’t easily accessible, furthering a sense of isolation. Unable to venture far afield, young people stayed in close-knit gangs that took their names from streets: Empz for Empringham, C-Trail for Crow Trail and B-Way for Brenyan Way.

  And, for those inclined, drug dealing was the surest way to make money. The Malvern Recreation Centre and Malvern Town Centre were popular spots to buy crack and marijuana, and the more affluent dealers with cell phones and vehicles did drop-offs outside the community.

  That turned the section of Kingston Road running through Galloway turf into a battleground between the men of Malvern and those who chopped drugs in Galloway. “People would rent rooms and try and sell drugs in the area and mix in to get to know the crowd,” Ellis would explain years later. “And we really didn’t want people from outside the area mixing in our crowd.” Galloway drug-dealing strongholds included a bar called McTaggart’s, located beside a variety store on Kingston Road, as well as the walkway at the townhouse complex where a young Ellis and Riley operated.

  Another Galloway Boy, Marlon Maragh, who shot the peacemaker during that basketball game in Pickering, described the friction between Galloway and Malvern while testifying at his attempted-murder trial in 2002. “People were just fighting over who can sell drugs where, who’s tougher, who’s stronger,” he said. “One person had a problem with another person and they just turned it into one area against another.”

  To protect their turf, the Galloway Boys would do a “G-check,” as a way to identify strangers, particularly members of other gangs. “It is like you are seeing another dog in your cage. Another dog is roaming around your neck of the woods, so you give him a G-check. You try to find out what he is doing in your territory,” Ellis explained. “Then, if he doesn’t want to leave,” he went on, “it could turn into someone getting hurt, getting killed, getting robbed.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Gangbanging and the art of chess

  Youth gangs aren’t new to Toronto or to the rest of Canada.

  In 1940s’ Toronto, for instance, the Beanery Boys were a rough-and-tumble group who used their fists to get a point across. One night, when one of them was refused admittance to a dance at a YMCA in the city’s west end, a high school student received a thrashing because the gang member resented being excluded. “Young people are afraid to go out at night and are afraid to make complaints to the police for fear of the gang lying in wait for them,” Bloor Collegiate principal W.G. Noble said in 1948 after the incident. “The situation is becoming serious.”

  But when much more dangerous gangs were being formed in the latter half of the 20th century, few in Canada were paying attention. One exception was Fred Mathews, one of the first professionals to study the phenomenon when the most exposure Canadians had to street gangs was from such Hollywood movies as Warriors (1979) and Colors (1988), with its iconic tag line: “70,000 gang members,
one million guns, two cops.”

  As a psychologist and program director at Central Toronto Youth Services, Mathews described the lure of gangs for young people in a 1993 report commissioned by the federal government. “They can obtain a sense of power, status, order, safety and communion with others—free from the scrutiny of the adult world,” he wrote in the report titled Youth Gangs. “The powerful draw and influence of peers in early and middle adolescence gives these groups enormous power and influence over young people.”

  Mathews had first-hand knowledge. He had lived in Los Angeles, the gang capital of the United States, in the late 1970s and early ’80s. When he returned home to Toronto to attend graduate school, he noticed something: graffiti. It was 1986 and Mathews began making “field notes” about it and other signs of gang activity, such as clusters of young people congregating at suburban plazas.

  He paid special attention to one group hanging around the St. Clair subway station in the city’s affluent midtown. They called themselves Socias, wore preppy clothes such as Polo shirts, and apparently modelled themselves on the gang in S.E. Hinton’s book The Outsiders, turned into a 1983 movie of the same name directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

  By the late ’80s, youth gangs in Toronto were being blamed for “swarmings”—a downtown phenomenon where a group of kids would surround a victim and steal money or clothes. It was around this time that Mathews “realized we’re on a trajectory of the American gang experience.”

  Others were suggesting the same. The Globe and Mail published an article in 1989 about teen gangs “preying on schools, subways and stores” and quoted unnamed police officials agreeing that crime by youth gangs was on the increase. “There are perhaps 40 emerging gangs in Toronto, with names such as The Untouchables, Band of the Hand, Chinese Mafia, Rude Boys, B-Boys, Posse and Massive.They distinguish themselves by the clothes they wear and their haircuts, as well as the music to which they listen. The Untouchables (mainly white suburban teens), for instance, have a clean-cut preppy look. B-Boys, by contrast, wear baseball caps, track suits and colorful running shoes.”

  These youth gangs augmented their wardrobes by stealing trendy clothes from the Eaton Centre and Scarborough Town Centre. Their most prized swag was Nike Air Jordans and leather jackets. Guns were mentioned just once in the article. The article ended with a warning: Toronto was “ripe” for the formation of well-organized gangs. They included Chinese, Vietnamese and aboriginal gangs defined along ethnic lines.

  At the sentencing of a 16-year-old member of a Vietnamese gang in the mid-’80s, Ontario provincial court judge Robert Dnieper said gangs should be “wiped from society completely.” The judge said the “only answer for him [the accused] is deportation and the suggestion that he try his gang activities in Ho Chi Minh City.” He warned that a failure to act decisively would only lead to the gangs growing “like mushrooms after a rain.”

  Nonetheless, there remained a reluctance to see them as full-fledged gangs like those in major U. S. cities. Patrolling the seedier side of the downtown core in the late ’80s—on his way to becoming Toronto’s police chief in 2005—Bill Blair remembered groups “more or less loosely organized,” operating in some of the low-income neighbourhoods.

  “They competed with each other for drug trafficking and there were rivalries between groups in Regent Park, north and south, and Don Mount, across the river. They were competitive and occasionally violent towards each other,” he told me. These gangs didn’t necessarily “go under a name,” but they recognized each other as part of one group or another. The names, said Blair, came later “with the cultural U.S. invasion.”

  The open border of the airwaves allowed rap music and hip-hop culture to be splashed onto TV screens across Canada. Music videos featured men acting like gangsters and pimps, dressed like gangsters and pimps, rhyming about guns and sex while being fawned over by gorgeous women wearing little to hide their wares.

  Corporate America—and corporate Canada, for that matter—was hardly objecting to the images or lyrics of the songs. Not when there was big money to be made with “Glock squeezed in between Dom Perignon champagne and Victoria’s Secret lingerie,” wrote Canadian social commentators Rodrigo Bascuñán and Christian Pearce in their 2007 book, Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent.

  Cheap Drugs, Fast Money, Easy Sex

  During the 1970s and early to mid-’80s, outlaw motorcycle and Asian gangs, for the most part, controlled the cocaine market with a more affluent clientele that could afford $100 for a gram. But crack—an adulterated form of cocaine—was geared to a low-end market. Its arrival in Canada in the late ’80s was accompanied by the sound of gang gunfire.

  Crack was cheap—a $5 hit bought a twenty-minute high—because it was well diluted. But it was also extremely addictive, which made it especially attractive to street dealers seeking customers coming back for more.

  Jamaica was an important link in the world of cocaine trafficking. As the United States clamped down on the cocaine pathways directly from South America, traffickers turned to Jamaica as a trans-shipment point, putting a new product into the hands of the posses operating there. In the early ’90s, the drugs and posse members were heading north.

  “The major centres are Toronto, New York, London, Miami and Kingston,” the Globe and Mail reported, quoting a Jamaica-based intelligence source. “They’ll operate between any of those five cities and they’ll have links in all of them. They have no roots, none whatsoever. The posse member is like a shallow plant, he won’t own any property and everything he’s got is cash.”

  In Toronto, police identified Jamaica’s infamous Shower Posse—named for showering victims with gunfire—as one of four main criminal gangs controlling the city’s lucrative crack cocaine trade. The gangs operated in the suburbs where there were large clusters of apartment buildings with many Jamaican residents, so they could blend in, police said.

  Vicious turf wars broke out in the city. Members of the Shower Posse were blamed for the killing of a 25-year-old named Anthony (The Fox) Aransibia, a member of the Striker Posse. He was gunned down after being lured to the stairwell of an apartment building in Scarborough. The killing was connected to “a territorial dispute in the crack trade,” the Star reported.

  In 1991, a peak year for violence throughout North America, Toronto had a record eighty-nine homicides, sixteen of them linked to the drug wars involving rival gangs fighting for turf in Toronto housing projects.

  One of the posse leaders ran his Toronto operation from a palatial house in Jamaica. “His bases of operation [in Canada] are a music store and a modest bungalow in a quiet North York neighbourhood,” the Star reported.

  Toronto police chief William McCormack said in 1990 that Jamaican posses were a “grave concern” to his force. But he also distinguished between organized gangs and other groups of young people living in housing developments who were using the name posse as a “scare term. These are simply young hoodlums,” McCormack said. This could have described some young men in southeastern Scarborough calling themselves the Galloway Posse. They were mainly involved in petty extortion, street-level drug dealing, theft and robberies at a time when Tyshan Riley was growing up.

  Elsewhere in the city, gang violence in 1991 reached a deadly apex in downtown Chinatown as Asian gangs battled for control of the lucrative trade in drugs, plus gambling and extortion.

  In 1997, Fred Mathews, appearing at a conference in Hamilton, Ontario, on youth violence, declared that street gangs had become “integral” to youth culture. “The problem will also get worse before it gets better,” he predicted. “Before, it just involved kids on the wrong side of the tracks.” He warned, “gunplay is becoming more common and young people are more accepting of others who belong to gangs.”

  He presciently argued that because governments failed to provide social and recreational services in vulnerable communities in the early 1990s, Canadians would likely pay a price for years to come. “We had
an opportunity to lay the foundation that would have made involvement in gangs far less attractive for kids,” Mathews said. “I think for the foreseeable future we’ll be lucky to get it into a maintenance mode. It will be a number of decades before we can eradicate and remove the criminal elements [of youth gangs].”

  By 1998, Toronto police estimated there were 180 gangs in the city with varying levels of organization. But with fluid memberships, defining and identifying them was difficult. Some—though not all—gangs were violent. A Toronto police map from that time identified dozens of territorial-based crews, posses and gangs throughout the city, largely concentrated in poorer areas with public housing complexes. Many of the names referred to a neighbourhood or specific street. In northwest Toronto, there were the Jane Finch Killaz, Trethewey Gangster Killers and Rexdale Posse. Police identified more than fifty groups in downtown Toronto, including the Regent Park Posse, Christie Boys and B-Boys. In Scarborough, the map showed a cluster of groups called “Kingston/ Galloway,” the Mornelle Court gang and Malvern Posse.

  Some gang members identified themselves by wearing certain colours or clothing, or ball caps with the brim pointing in one direction or pants rolled up on one leg. Some were adorned with jewellery or tattoos with their gang’s name or initials. Others used hand signals to communicate. Some used graffiti to mark turf.

  It was around this time, in the late ’90s, that Toronto police started compiling a gang-member database, the first of its kind in Canada. It included gangsters’ mug shots, street names, identifying tattoos—and their enemies.

  Throughout much of the 1990s and into the next decade, violent turf battles were playing out on some city streets. In Scarborough, two rival gangs made up of Sri Lankan and Tamil youth, AK Kannan and VVT, engaged in a series of shootings. Some of the attacks happened in daylight, such as in early 2001 when a car with a reputed Sri Lankan gang leader was followed to a highway off-ramp and ambushed by gunmen shooting wildly. No one was injured.