51 Division Getting Deadlier As More and More Criminals Arm
Themselves, Street Cops Say

It's a wickedly cold day when a team of 51 Division Community Response
officers ride their bikes into north Regent Park to follow up on a
home invasion.

A man with a blue bandana by an entrance eating takeout wings and
chips doesn't flinch as a stream of yellow jackets, led by Sgt. Dan
McDermott, walk past him.

The victim of the invasion, McDermott says, was attacked by gunmen who
broke through the window, knocked the air conditioner out of the way,
and demanded drugs.

But the victim claimed he no longer "flips" from his main-floor
apartment because North Side Regent gangsters, who didn't like the
competition, had ordered him to stop selling drugs.

The bandits took the DVD player and that's the god's honest
truth.

The walls around the man's apartment are marked with the sign of a
North Side gang which claims ownership of the projects, which are
slated for redevelopment.

Inside. Outside. Virtually every wall has been branded with North Side
logo, an - imposed on an S. And, to add flavour, a Bloodz tag here, a
Bloodz tag there.

The victim isn't home -- or decides not to answer the door -- when
McDermott knocks on this particular morning.

But he stops to check Maxwell Firatti, still eating his
food.

"I got nothing to say, you know?" Firatti says when asked about the
gang graffiti. "I'm just waiting for my cousin. I don't know about
that stuff, you know? It just says North Side, you know what I'm
saying? It don't mean nothing. It's North Side, that's where you are
right now."

Crack Violence

McDermott says the cause of the recent spike in gunfire in 51 comes
down to one thing: "Drug dealing."

Crack was behind an Oct. 24 shootout at Sherbourne and Bloor Sts. On
Nov. 24, a man was wounded while sitting in a car at Ontario and
Dundas Sts. Three days earlier a man dodged a volley of shots in a
Sackville St. parking lot. The most recent was a Dec. 1 shootout at
Dundas and Sackville.

"Now that there's been so many shootings, a lot of the drug guys say,
'Now, I've got to protect myself.' Now all these drug dealers are
carrying guns.

"These guys get hit with 10 bullets and they're still alive," he said.
"An innocent person is hit with a stray and he's dead. That's the
problem. These guys are shooting at each other and they don't care
where the bullets are going.

"Any time you go to a call you have to be very careful because you're
dealing with those kind of people who are going to have weapons,"
McDermott says.

How many crack houses in 51? "There are lots," he says. "We can't keep
up. You do one, and another one pops up."

The demand is unrelenting. Crack whores sell oral sex for $40, while
men either live off the girls, rob people or steal property. The cycle
is only interrupted when users or dealers are hampered by a short stay
in jail.

Addicts will crack, at times, for days and then pass out from
exhaustion when stopped by police.

"This is a rough area, people are living day by day," he
says.

There's a set of pay phones on Dundas at Jarvis where deals are
arranged, and suppliers roll in on their bikes to consummate the deal.

So CRU officers are targeting cyclists who don't equip the two-wheeler
properly or flout traffic laws.

Major crime Det. Mike Forestell says his team picked up a .40-calibre
Desert Eagle pistol off the street, one of 17 stolen from a Parliament
St. lawyer's office on Oct. 2.

The burglars left behind a cache of long-barrelled weapons, all part
of a personal collection, probably because it would have been too
difficult to conceal as they fled.

The gunman told detectives he paid about $2,200 for the pistol. The
other 16, Forestell believes, remain in Regent.

Heartless Thug

Forestell is also hunting a heartless thug who viciously attacked a
feisty 84-year-old Cabbagetown woman. She was the latest victim of a
man who cleans up lawns without permission and then demands cash.

He says the man may have struck again since the Nov. 30 attack on the
woman. But Forestell cautions there's a few of these shysters working
the division and isn't sure if it's same man.

Emily pulled up the sleeve of her shirt to show the fading purple
bruises on her arm left by the thug. She was punched in the face and
bounced off a wall of the home she's lived in for 74 years.

She says she paid him $40 previously for work done earlier but he
returned demanding another $40 claiming his sister was "very ill in
the hospital."

Emily says there was another man hanging around and suspects he was
her attacker's drug dealer.

"I said, 'I haven't got any more money,' and he said, 'Yes, you have,'
and he pulled me into the house.

"He got me and pulled me into the kitchen." The man then rifled
through her wallets, but they were empty.

He demanded to know when she would have money.

"So he grabbed me by the (wrist) and he threw me against the wall and
he pounded my head," Emily says. "And he said, 'You better get me some
money soon.'

"I thought, 'If he starts to punch me, I'm going to kick him, or I'm
going to do something,' because I wasn't going to let him bounce me
around. He punched me around enough," she says. "Where do think I
would kick him? Where it counts."

The man threatened to return and fled with her VCR and a handheld
phone.

She says her way of life has been permanently altered.

"I could go out of here and never lock the door," she says, "I'm
shaky. I keep the front door locked because I'm afraid to look. It
unnerved me."

Judges Feel Danger

"Do you know where I can get some winter gloves, do ya?" asks James
MacInnis outside the Seaton House on George St. on a bone-chilling
day.

This is the same George St. where the judges at Juvenile Court on 311
Jarvis St. have asked the cops for a meeting to see if things could be
done to make it safer for them when they arrive and leave their house
of justice.

"Of course, if they put some of them away, it would help us," quips
one cop.

Given a Black Eye

MacInnis, 42, but looking like he's going on 60, says he was rolled
for $180 by a man he thought was a friend. The footprint left by the
friend remains on his forehead, along with the black eye and fat lip.

"I go to a guy's house for a beer and he put something in my drink,"
he says. "I passed out. He jumped on my knees because I couldn't do
nothing, then jumped all over my head.

"What for? To rob me," says MacInnis, who claims kinship to hockey
player Al MacInnis.

In the twisted street logic about turning to the cops for help after
the attack, MacInnis says he reported his attacker only because he
could have been killed.

"I'm not a rat. I grew up the hard way," he said.

MacInnis has been on the street, he says, for about 25 years: "I had a
hard life, buddy."

His mother died at 32 of cancer, his then-alcoholic father beat him,
and he's lost his marriage.

"I had it all. I can't deal with it," he says. "I have too many
problems. It's hard, buddy.

"You know, I could write a book, but I can't read or write," he says
laughing.

As Christmas looms, MacInnis doesn't know what he'll be doing or where
he'll be staying. It's too far down the road.

"I don't know, buddy," he says. "Probably nothing. Probably here. I'd
stay in the penalty box if that helps me." Next story: 'It's very
hard, too hard'