THE DARK SIDE OF T.O.

The Dirty Job of Narcotic Policing

Shirley Gillis stands on the road beside the police cruiser with head
bowed and hands cuffed behind her back.

And she cries.

There's no "get out of jail" card for the street sex worker who says
she relapsed to her heroin habit about a month ago.

She's working and using again, she tells Det. Howie Page, because she
can't deal with the pressure of having a teen daughter she says is dying.

Gillis wants Page to give her a form ordering her to court for
communicating to an undercover cop, and then walk away.

But the police computer spits out two arrest warrants. She denies the
warrants are for her. She doesn't have ID and Page can't challenge her claim.

But the machine knows everything. It says she has a "FTW" tattoo on
her right wrist.

She was spotted by an undercover officer walking on Lansdowne Ave.
and picked up as part of the ongoing Project Zero Tolerance, a
campaign to take back the streets.

The contents of her purse, her meagre possessions, are spread on the
trunk of the cruiser: A tube of toothpaste and a brush, shampoo,
underarm deodorant, makeup, a brush, a broken music box and a drug
kit consisting of a needle, a swab and a rubber tourniquet.

"Have you used heroin at all today?" Page asks.

"No," Gillis says, claiming she's started showing up at a methadone
clinic. Page figures she's just saying what he wants to hear.

"Shirley, we got warrants for you, there's nothing we can do," he says.

In between the sobs, Gillis mentions her 16-year-old daughter who
lives with grandparents.

"She's dying," she says. "She has a heart and lung condition and they
put her on this new medication and it's going to make her liver and
everything fail. Crazy."

She says she relapsed "about a month or so ago. I can't deal with the
fact my daughter is going to die."

From her back pocket, there's more trouble for Gillis as a cop pulls
out a flick knife, a prohibited weapon. Gillis says it's to make a
peanut butter sandwich.

Within a week she's back on the street after pleading out to her charges.

"The thing is it still gets to me, some of these stories," says Page,
a veteran of the west-end streets.

"I'm not calling her a bullsh--ter. I believe her," he says. "She
probably does have a daughter that's dying. Sometimes, when you do
this long enough, you can tell crocodile tears from real ones. That
was genuine.

"Somehow, I'm not buying the story she was spreading peanut butter
with that," he says.

"I feel for her," he says. "That's our job, to not have her pull the
wool over our eyes, but she does have that addiction," Page says.
"That's what drives them to be out in the streets.

"There's no girl that comes out of Parkdale, Bloor and Lansdowne or
anywhere in Toronto and decides one day 'I'm going to have sex with
men in cars in parking lots for $30.'"

"I mean, something in their lives has done this," he says.

Page heads the 14 Division major crime unit vice squad, which targets
street drug dealers, complementing the work of the Toronto drug
squad, which aims for mid-level or higher level dealers.

Page's unit is joined by others from 14 Division for Project Zero
Tolerance, which was devised to reclaim neighbourhoods from dealers
and users, prostitutes, thugs and speakeasies.

While the focus is Bathurst and Queen Sts., where the Entertainment
District sprawl has spread, the whole division is the hunting ground.

It's an ethnically diverse area bounded by the lake to the south, the
CP line by Dupont St. to the north, Spadina Ave. to the east and
Landsdowne Ave. to the west

Within a nine-week period, the project has caught 93 crack dealers
and filed 342 charges.

The area also has more than 700 licensed establishments, probably the
highest concentration of booze dealers in the country.

"Here's one of our crack buyers," Page says as he pulls his unmarked
cruiser from St. Clarens St. on to Bloor St.

"What he'll do is walk back and forth, back and forth until he finds
himself a deal," he says. "He's a pretty violent guy."

The man makes a deal with a street trafficker in a flash of four
hands that within seconds has cash exchanged for rock with no one
seeming the wiser.

Residents have been complaining about drug trafficking and it's
related demons: The thefts, the muggings, and the prostitution in
parks that should be reserved for kids.

"This is a nice community in and around here," Page says as he drives
north on Lansdowne towards Dupont. "What's happened, this one corner
right up here where the crosswalk is, this is Lappin (Ave.), it is
one of our number one problem corners for prostitutes."

The sex workers take their clients into backyards, parks, including a
portable toilet in a park next to a playground.

"There's needles, condoms in the same place where kids are playing
soccer," Page says.

Undercover narc Izzy Bernardo is trying to get Tony to assume the
position against a Bloor St. building.

Tony says he can't spread his legs any wider, something Bernardo
doesn't believe, having seen the man use his feet adroitly in street
fights in the past.

Page presses Tony to surrender any drugs he has.

Bernardo had moments earlier watched Tony make three transactions
from a park bench near Dufferin St.

Page cringes as he holds out a hand and a small rock of crack
dribbles out of Tony's mouth. But the officers feel there's more that
isn't being coughed up.

It's Bernardo's turn to cringe as Tony pulls his pants down and
spreads his buttocks.

Nothing there, Tony insists, including dignity and truth. Giving in
to the search, he spreads his legs wider allowing police to dislodge
a baggy containing a stash of "ball crack": An ounce of crack, some
powder cocaine and nine Ecstasy pills stuffed in a plastic baggy in
his underwear tucked neatly by his testicles.

DEAD MAN WALKING

While waiting to be processed at 14 Division, Tony sits handcuffed,
but the cops' attention is on another man sitting at the table,
handcuffed and waiting to be booked.

He's known as Stoppa on the streets, but among cops he's Dead Man Walking.

He was shot in the neck June 25 in the College St.-Spadina Ave. area.

On Aug. 20 in Parkdale a gunman opened fire on him with some of the
bullets going into a passing van carrying a family. It could have
easily been another Jane Creba type shooting, Page says. "They'll
kill each other for a $50 debt."

Someone is gunning for him and police fear that one day a bullet will
catch up to Dead Man Walking.

But on this night, he's safe. He's in police custody.

"I live for today," he told a cop after the second incident, just
like his hero Scarface.

He's keeping warm with an embroidered leather jacket, stitched on the
back with Al Pacino in the Scarface role.

"Every drug dealer, any search warrant we do that has something to do
with drugs, there's always something to do with Scarface," Bernardo
says. "There's always a monument to Pacino. It's hilarious."

Chuck Thomson flashes a disarming smile that reveals perfect teeth,
showing he once lived the middle-class dream.

Now, the streets are his home.

Thomson, 31, is a study in downward mobility.

"Many of these people, they don't have any idea why a lot of us are
where we are. They think that we were like this our whole lives,"
Thomson says. "This is all new to me.

"They look at me like a piece of sh--," Thomson says. "I used to be
where you are a year ago. I'm having a rough time. It won't be like
this forever.

"I was doing really well," the St. Catharines native says, having
moved his family, including his 8-year-old daughter, to Alberta. "I
had two jobs, (including) a supervisor at a grocery store. I was
making four grand a month."

But then one day, sometime after his marriage fell apart, he walked
into a bathroom at a house party and saw a woman smoking.

Crack, she told him, offering a hit.

"I was drunk," Thomson says, but that drag sealed his fate.

"Somebody offered it to me, and I tried it, and once you try it once,
that's it," says the former roofer. "I would never give anybody their
first one because that's the worst you can wish on anybody.

"People that give 15-, 16-year-old girls their first ones, I think
they're the lowest form of scum there is," he says. "It's harder for
a girl to get off of it because, no offence, but she has a 24-hour
bank account between her legs and she uses it. She can have it
anytime she wants."

Thomson wants his middle-class dream back, but he knows he can't
strive for it yet.

"Eventually, I'm going to say, 'I've had enough,' and I'll be ready
and I'll do it," he says. "I'll go back to work, good job, good girl
and everything will fall into place.

"It's hard to roof when you're sleeping outside, when you're not
eating, when drugs are taking all the calcium and vitamins out of
your body. You don't want to work."

The addiction makes its demand on Thomson's body "every hour, hour and a half.

"I don't steal. That's why I panhandle. I never have to do anything I
don't want to do because panhandling gives me enough," he says.

"People in Toronto are unbelievably great. They treat us the best
they can. I understand they look down at us, obviously. But I feel
guilty most of all, I feel we're taking advantage of the poor people.

"They're paying for our drug habit, and I think they know it," Thomson says.

"But a lot of them tell me they'd rather give it to us than have us steal.

"Would you mention me, because my mom is probably worried sick," Thomson says.

"I just want my mom to know I'm okay. She's in Alberta. Red Deer."