THE 'SCANDAL' IN TORONTO'S POLICE

Is The Toronto Drug Squad Rife With Corruption, Framing Scores Of Poor
Innocents And Pilfering From The Fink Fund? Or Is This Seeming Scandal A
Classic Example Of Using An Elephant Gun To Shoot The Proverbial Flea?
Could It Be That A Group Of Police Officers Just Broke Some Rules To Make A
Broken System Work? The National Post's Christie Blatchford Investigates.

When The Toronto Star breathlessly reported last month that the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police had been called in to head an ongoing probe into
alleged misconduct at the Toronto Police, it appeared the force must be
embroiled in its worst scandal in modern history.

The story led the CBC national news that night, and the next day was picked
up by newspapers across the country, receiving front-page play in Montreal
and Edmonton and prominent space elsewhere.

All the significant buzz words were duly invoked: The probe is "huge" and
"ever-widening" and shrouded in secrecy; it involves former members of the
"troubled" central field command drug squad; federal prosecutors have
abruptly stayed or withdrawn criminal charges in 115 cases involving about
200 accused drug dealers, and at least one unidentified man has been sprung
from prison on a mysterious "fresh evidence" application, his conviction
described as "a miscarriage of justice."

A public increasingly inured to tales of police wrongdoing could be
forgiven for leaping to the conclusion that the Toronto force is rife with
corruption, that there may be scores of innocents set up or framed by the
police antics, and that, what with the Mounties -- actually, one Mountie,
Chief Superintendent John Neil -- now on the scene and two of the accused
officers under investigation for perjury, the worst is yet to come.

It may be so: Off the record, high-ranking command officers interviewed by
the National Post for this story all warned ominously that "there's more"
and cautioned me not to "give these guys the Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval."

But there is an argument to be made the other way -- that this is a classic
example of using an elephant gun to shoot the proverbial flea and that, at
most, the evidence may prove only that a handful of officers bent internal
force rules and procedures to make a broken system work, and furthermore,
that virtually everyone in authority knew they were doing it.

There are 13 officers facing a total of more than 260 criminal charges,
most of them theft- and fraud-related. In addition, the 13 are charged with
a truckload of related Police Act charges.

But what the casual observer may not realize is that the charges cover a
five-year period and involve a total of only $12,690 of allegedly stolen or
misused money, all of it dispensed -- or not, as the allegations have it --
in dribs and drabs of as little as $30 and $50 to a total of 11
"confidential informants," or finks, virtually all of whom hail from the
underclass and are arguably among the most dubious of witnesses -- the drug
addict, or recovered addict, with a habit and concomitant unreliable
memory, a criminal record and substantial self-interest.

What almost no one knows is that during the period in question, the accused
officers were handling upward of $60,000 a year in "fink fund" money, which
makes them either the most curious or stupid thieves in the world: Why,
with about $300,000 slipping through their collective fingers, would they
steal only $12,000?

Now, the original accusations cited much bigger sums -- hundreds of
thousands of dollars purportedly stolen from drug dealers during police
raids -- but a lengthy internal affairs probe that had detectives conduct
searches on the suspected officers' personal bank accounts and even review
videotape from the Niagara Casino in nearby Niagara Falls looking for signs
of untoward high-living and which revealed instead some of the officers
withdrawing normally small amounts from bank machines in order to continue
playing the slots -- uncovered "insufficient grounds for charges," as
internal affairs boss, Superintendent Bob Strathdee, said last week.

"We got knots on our heads trying to seek evidence to support these
allegations," he bluntly told the Post.

The original complaint, Supt. Strathdee said, came in a phone call he
received in the spring of 1999 from Edward Sapiano, a Toronto defence
lawyer whose client claimed officers from the central drug squad had stolen
cash from him during a raid. Mr. Sapiano told Supt. Strathdee he knew of
other lawyers whose clients had similar complaints. The superintendent
invited Mr. Sapiano to write him a letter, laying out his allegations, and
then Supt. Strathdee wrote the other lawyers, inviting them to do the same.
Eventually, 10 defence lawyers complained their clients had been robbed.

(At least one such case, involving large sums purportedly stolen by former
drug squad members, is still live and before the courts, the Post has
learned. The allegation here is that two officers, neither of whom is
facing charges, executed a search warrant upon a suspected drug dealer's
safety deposit box and turned in only part of the haul they found there,
allegedly pocketing approximately $250,000. There is a publication ban on
the details of this case.)

Mr. Sapiano was frank then, and is frank now, about the inherent problems
of any case built around claims from drug dealers.

"I told IA in writing that the prosecution cannot be based on real or
alleged drug dealers," Mr. Sapiano said in an interview last week. "I
recommended a sting operation. These guys [the police] were getting so
reckless it would be like shooting fish in a barrel."

He said he suspects the original investigation, conducted by Detective
Sergeants Randy Franks and Marie Greer, uncovered evidence which wasn't
court-credible because it came from convicted or admitted drug dealers but
which nonetheless "convinced the brass these cops were dirty."

This first probe having gone nowhere, the official line from police
headquarters on what happened next is that, coincidentally, the commander
of the force's elite Repeat Offender and Parole Enforcement (ROPE) squad
discovered irregularities in records relating to fink-fund payments during
a routine audit.

It was two members of this ROPE squad -- Detective Rod Lawrence and
Detective Constable Gary Corbett -- and three from divisional drug squads
- -- Constables Gordon Ramsay, Wayne Frye and Rick Franklin -- who were
charged first in April last year. Though most allegations involve their
work on the drug squad, they began, in a sad wordplay on the famous little
robot from Star Wars, referring to themselves as "R2-D3", the ROPE two and
drug squad three.

All are middle-aged veterans of the force; Const. Franklin, at 40 with 18
years of service, has the least experience, and Det.-Const. Corbett is
widely known as one of the city's best plainclothes officers, a hard-nosed
and canny officer who has served three separate stints on the drug squad.

The investigation continued, officially because IA detectives kept
uncovering new irregularities, and in November last year, eight more former
central drug squad officers were charged.

These eight, too, are veteran officers, the most senior among them Staff
Sergeant John Schertzer, who at the time of his arrest had been with the
Toronto force a quarter-century.

As Staff-Sgt. Schertzer and six other of these eight officers were named by
Mr. Sapiano in his letter of April, 1999, it seems likely that, at least
unofficially, what was always figuring large in the background were the
unproven suspicions raised by the original probe.

But for all the time, manpower and money devoted to investigating the
former drug squad cops -- the probe is now in its third calendar year,
numbers about 20 officers working under RCMP Chief Supt. Neil and is in the
process of finding a new office outside Toronto Police headquarters for
which the task force will likely sign a year-long lease -- the case against
the 13 is arguably as weak now as it was in the beginning.

Mr. Sapiano told the Post last week if the case "is inescapably linked to
these informants, I'll be really shocked and disappointed."

Yet it appears that this is precisely the situation.

Crown disclosure to defence lawyers representing the accused officers
indicates the evidence relies heavily, if not exclusively, on claims from
the 11 informants, what Gary Clewley, the Toronto Police Association lawyer
who represents six of the officers, describes as "evidence you wouldn't
punish your dog on."

It was only in November of 1993 that the Toronto force first began
requiring confidential informants to sign for monies it received for giving
information to police.

The form used then and now is a "property receipt tag;" the snitch, though
allowed to be known only by number everywhere else in police records, is
supposed to sign his or her real name upon payment, and the transaction is
to be witnessed by a second officer.

Indeed, the charges against at least three of the accused officers allege
only that they fraudulently claimed to have been in an unmarked car when a
snitch signed a tag.

In theory, it is supposed to work like this: The officer gets information
from a snitch; he arbitrarily decides what it's worth (to a maximum of
$1,000, beyond which a deputy chief must sign off); he obtains the OK from
his immediate supervisor; then he goes to the cashier's office on the
fourth floor of headquarters and gets the money; then he pays the
informant, who obligingly comes out of the shadows long enough to sign on
the dotted line.

But in the real world of drug enforcement, police may pay an informant out
of pocket; the tips and information as often as not come in when the
cashier's office, which is open only during normal business hours, is
closed; and the snitch may not want, or may refuse, to sign his real name.

And informants, while reliable enough within the narrow confines of their
world (as drug users, they may reasonably know who is selling), make for
ripe pickings in the witness box.

Often, they offer information to police when they need money for a fix or
when they hope for "consideration," that is, a break, on charges they
themselves are facing. Most of them by definition have criminal records.
Their ability to recall dates and times may be clouded by years, even
decades, of drug use. And as addicts or recovering addicts, they are
notorious liars.

In other words, it could be argued that they are the street equivalent of
the "jailhouse informants" against whom, in the wake of the wrongful
conviction of Guy Paul Morin, police and Crown attorneys are warned not to
rely because their testimony is motivated by self-interest and is as a rule
suspect and unreliable.

"Why is that principle abandoned when it comes to these people [the
officers]?" Mr. Clewley thundered in an interview last week.

The Post has learned that at least one of the accused officers will, if the
case gets to trial, happily admit to improperly crediting payments to one
fink because the real informant wouldn't sign the property receipt; or to
knowing that another's signature was bogus; or that the monies that on
paper were paid to snitch A on one day were in fact paid to him, or even to
snitch B, on another.

Where it gets troublesome for the accused officers is that they would have
sworn to the veracity of this information, knowing it to be false, before a
justice of the peace in order to obtain a search warrant.

Such breaches, the officers will claim, are but "technical" ones and the
result of the practical realities of drug work; the finks' information,
they will say, was usually backed up by their own independent surveillance;
none of this impinged in any way whatsoever upon the accused drug dealers'
guilt.

Ironically, this is almost word for word what Mr. Sapiano said last week.

It is precisely this unacknowledged duplicity within the justice system
that so offends him and other defence lawyers and that makes the
prosecution of police so difficult.

"It's too easy to catch a few bad cops and say, 'bad police.' Nothing
happens in a vacuum." Here he quoted Alan Dershowitz, the famous U.S.
lawyer who was part of O.J. Simpson's dream team, about the so-called
"noble cause" that may drive improper police actions, and the game that
goes on in court. Mr. Sapiano describes that game this way: "The police
officer is lying. The trial judge pretends to believe the police officer.
The court of appeal pretends to believe the trial judge.

"There have been decades of the bench turning a blind eye, of accepting
ludicrous testimony from police officers," Mr. Sapiano said.

"I know the road to hell is paved with good intentions," he said.

"I know the public would absolutely support the police and I can see it; if
my neighbourhood cop bends the rules to get the job done, I can even see my
way clear to forgiving that.

"The problem is that [the practice] will mushroom, it will grow.

"And the police are no longer pursuing the noble cause when bending rules
becomes the norm, when the rules go out the window." He said he often has
"white, middle-class families in my office who say the police officer
didn't read me my rights, and then they get to court and he says he did,
and they're astonished." Even in the Morin case, Mr. Sapiano said, the
police and prosecution "knew" they had the right guy. In other words, they
didn't want to see an innocent man convicted; they genuinely believed Mr.
Morin was guilty.

But if police should not justify their actions this way, why is it all
right for internal affairs to do the same thing with cops they are sure
must be dirty? This, said Mr. Clewley, is just what is going on now, with
the accused 13. In the absence of evidence, he said, neither internal
affairs nor prosecutors are "entitled to act on their gut instinct," he
snapped.

Certainly, the evidence against the police appears problematic, and not
only because of the general reliability, or lack of it, of informant witnesses.

The Post has learned that the key witness in the case against the five ROPE
squad officers has recanted what he originally told internal affairs in a
cautioned videotaped statement.

He is informant No. 186, and in March of last year, he was questioned by
Det. Sergeants Mike Hamel and Stephen Pipe of internal affairs. The gist of
his complaints, as with most of the allegations, was that he either didn't
sign the property receipts that purported to bear his signature or that he
didn't get all of the money he was supposedly given.

But just three months later, on June 7, apparently at his request, No.
186's family doctor wrote a letter to Det.-Sgt. Hamel in which he said that
the man had severe memory problems due to a head injury he suffered years
earlier and to several medications he was taking. This letter reads in
part, "The statement he made to Officer Hamel is not true ... because of
the alteration of his mind" caused by his prescription drugs.

Det.-Sgt. Hamel subsequently interviewed the physician, who confirmed he
had written the letter at his patient's request.

But the existence of the letter was not disclosed to police defence lawyers
by prosecutors until late this spring, almost a year later, and only after
the Ontario Provincial Police had been quietly called in to authenticate
the doctor's handwriting (which he had already authenticated as his) and
investigate whether any of the five accused officers had leaned on No. 186
to recant, or had cooked up the document.

There is less to even the most serious-sounding aspects of the case than
may appear.

It was a drug trafficker who can be identified only as Mr. X. who was
suddenly released from prison in July of this year amid much secrecy.

The man, whose name is protected by a publication ban, was in the midst of
serving a 48-month term at a federal jail when, in an affidavit now sealed
by the Ontario Court of Appeal, Det.-Sgt. Franks swore to fresh evidence
that purported to show the man had been wrongly convicted.

The two accused officers who are now being investigated for perjury were
involved in this case.

The logical inference might appear to be that the two had planted evidence.

But the Post has learned that in fact there is virtually no question about
Mr. X's guilt.

He was arrested and charged by the drug squad officers after they saw him
emerge from his house with a bag which later proved to contain heroin.

In his statement to police, Mr. X told them there was more heroin back at
his house, and even provided for the officers the alarm code to enter his
residence. They used it, and found the additional heroin.

Mr. X was ably represented by a veteran defence counsel, and after a
preliminary hearing, traditionally the place where the Crown shows its hand
to the defence, pleaded guilty to possession of drugs for the purpose of
trafficking.

But when Internal Affairs was renewing the probe of misconduct, they
recalled Det.-Sgt. Franks to re-interview the informants he had already
questioned.

One of them, a 55-year-old long-time heroin addict, had been interviewed
twice as part of the original probe.

But in a third interview, the informant described how he had bought heroin
from Mr. X, and how, when he had returned to his handler, the officer had
stuck a finger in the stash and proclaimed it "good smack."

If true, that would have turned the informant into a police agent -- the
distinction is tricky, but centres around whether police just get
information from a snitch or actually use him to make a buy -- and that, in
turn, would have rendered the snitch disclosable to Mr. X's lawyer and
potentially compellable at trial.

The "agent" was not disclosed, because, the police say, the incident he
described never happened, and because he was only ever an informant, and
informants are legally protected, can't be identified in court and cannot
be compelled to testify.

But when the federal prosecutors who handle drug charges learned of the
allegation, they took it to the Court of Appeal, and Mr. X was freed. The
perjury probe around Staff Sgt. Schertzer and Det. Const. Steve Correia
centres not on anything they testified about, but rather on their alleged
failure to make mention of the informant-agent in their testimony at Mr.
X's trial.

Similarly quickly -- some would say prematurely -- have the federal Crowns
moved to drop charges in, at last count, 115 other cases in which one or
another of the accused officers was involved. With only drug users or
reformed drug users as witnesses, with the 13 officers not yet convicted of
a single solitary offence, criminal or Police Act, prosecutors have stopped
proceedings against as many as 200 accused drug dealers.

As Police Association boss Craig Bromell said with trademark bluntness last
week: "There are a lot of people walking the streets who should be behind
bars. Where's the priority?"

A spokesman for the federal justice department last week declined to say if
there are others, like Mr. X, who were released from prison as a result of
the drug-squad probe, or why lawyers dropped the cases touched by the 13
officers like hot potatoes, or how many more charges may yet be affected.

Dorette Huggins would say only that prosecutors each time weighed "the
public interest and the rights of the accused" and that the lawyers are
taking it "a case at a time."

And what is the public interest?

Is it, as Mr. Sapiano said last week, that police should play by the rules
and the law? Or is it, that in the name of getting drugs and those who sell
them off the streets, they ought to be forgiven if they play a little
loosy-goosy with the rules or, as the allegations have it, the laws?

Among the more interesting statistics the Post uncovered is this: Last
year, the Toronto Police spent about $100,000 in payments to confidential
informants, up from the usual $60,000 a year.

To the end of June this year, only $16,000 has been paid out, far below the
norm.

Supporters of the accused officers would argue that what this means is that
drug dealers are not being rousted, that informants are not being pressed
for tips on the various unsolved homicides in the city and that drug squad
officers have either grown timid or have become paper-pushers who stick to
the letter of the law, with predictable results.

As for what motivates the force's clear dogged desire to press on with the
case -- the probe began under the tenure of former chief David Boothby but
it was at the behest of Chief Julian Fantino that Chief Supt. Neil was
brought in -- Mr. Clewley believes it is a function of three factors: the
Chief's "exaggerated notion of what is required to maintain the high road;
his unwillingness to presume innocence in the face of evidence you wouldn't
punish your dog on, and the pressure of the defence bar."

Chief Fantino told the Post last week this "is a heart-wrenching thing for
me. I happen to know some of these [accused] people and yes, I feel pain
for them." But the police, he said, must be held to a higher standard. "It
isn't just $50, if that's what it is," he said. "We have a duty of care. We
are not like every other citizen. We can deprive people of their liberty,
use deadly force ... When the public trust is compromised, it's not trivial.

"Bending rules and inappropriate practices," he said, "don't count any
more, other than to bring you into trouble." It sounded remarkably like a
shot over the bow.

The protracted probe, he noted, "may very well go to proving people innocent."

If so, that day will come too late for at least some of the accused men.

One of the accused officers has seen his 25-year marriage collapse under
the strain; another has retired from the force; a third, slated to take
over the board of the local hospital where he has volunteered for years,
refused to accept the presidency and stepped down; another man believes he
and his wife lost the child they were on the verge of adopting because of
the publicity.

This is also, of course, the normal sort of price paid by civilians charged
in a whirl of media attention and found not guilty months or years later to
little notice -- even if, as the police might say, they "got off on a
technicality."

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and bitter medicine for all.