PROBE CHIEF'S A MAN OF THE WORLD

Mountie Has Rich, Varied Experience

Leads City Police Corruption Case

The Mountie in charge of investigating alleged corruption inside the
Toronto Police Service is a veteran undercover operative who made his name
battling international organized crime rings.

Soft-spoken and dapper, RCMP Chief Superintendent Ben Soave exudes quiet
intensity as he chain-smokes through an interview this week, talking
guardedly about the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, the elite
team he has led for eight years.

Soave is circumspect about his team's current probe of police wrongdoing,
which in the past 10 days has seen criminal charges laid against four
Toronto officers and Police Services Act charges against four more.

The investigation is continuing, he confirms.

"If new information comes to the surface, everything will have to be
weighed and if it warrants new charges, then it will be done," Soave says.

"Anything is possible," says the 56-year-old, who directs investigations
from a Toronto area office building.

Soave told the Star that the probe of Toronto police originated with an
investigation by his unit of links between organized crime and gambling.

Soave won't talk about the probe's origin, except to say, "It's a result of
ongoing investigations."

A man of small stature, the Italian-born Soave has a commanding presence
and an impressive list of awards.

The list includes the Officer of the Order of Merit of the Police Forces
from the governor-general and the RCMP's Commissioner's Unit Commendation,
which is the service's highest honour.

Seldom seen without a small cup of espresso, Soave is a workaholic who goes
to sleep at 11, awakes at 4 and spends two hours before work devouring
newspapers, magazines and books.

Soave's team includes officers from the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and
the police services of Toronto, Peel, York and Durham. The unit also
includes agents from CSIS, the Canada Border Services Agency (formerly
customs and immigration) and representatives from the federal Department of
Justice and the provincial attorney-general's office.

Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino says Soave's presentation to the police
board last Monday, followed by a news conference at police headquarters,
was necessary to reassure the public.

It's unusual for Soave to talk about a probe before criminal charges are
laid. "But the circumstances dictated that it was essential," Fantino says,
adding that "it silenced a lot of the critics" who were calling for an
outside agency to head the probe.

Soave's unit works from a special operations centre that looks like spy
central from a James Bond movie, replete with floor-to-ceiling display
screens for video conferencing and communications systems where each of the
12 partner agencies can share information electronically.

The unit started in 1977 with 17 investigators and one support staffer from
each of three agencies: Toronto police, OPP and RCMP. By the end of the
1990s, the unit was home to 70 people and had registered a dozen busts of
organized crime rings.

The most significant of those probes was Project Omerta. The $8.5 million
investigation -- involving police in Canada, the U.S., Italy and Mexico --
smashed an international drug trafficking and money laundering ring in 1998
and charged 14 people.

"When you're doing organized crime investigation, you have to understand
the nature of the beast, the criminal organization, where they came from,
how they think, how they operate," says Soave, who also speaks fluent
Italian, French and Spanish and spent 15 years as a travelling liaison
officer with the RCMP.

He has worked in the Middle East, Italy, South America and southeast Asia.
He says those experiences help him understand the culture and thought
process behind various groups his unit investigates and some they protect
from organized crime.

High on a shelf in his office is a small replica of an escape boat given to
him by a Vietnamese refugee he helped. The model was built from wood the
man took from a beached boat on the island of Bidong, off the southeast
coast of Malaysia.

But the most sentimental of all Soave's memories as liaison officer was his
posting at the Canadian embassy in Rome. It's the same embassy where he and
his family, from the small village of Cese (south of Rome), reported to
immigrate to Canada when he was just 10. It was, he says, the one place he
wanted to return as a Canadian Mountie.

Of all the lessons Soave says he has learned from the many places he
worked, he says the most important is: "Never forget who you are: a police
officer first."

Those words sustained him, he says, for the seven years he spent as an
undercover operative, working his way across Canada while posing as a
long-haired trafficker or dealer in heroin and marijuana. His name was
usually Domenic or Tony, but he assumed different roles in different
situations.

Later, Soave passed on his undercover experience as an instructor for the
RCMP undercover program in Ottawa where he helped train, select and
co-ordinate undercover officers.

"You're taking on a life that is not your own," Soave says of the
undercover operative's job. "This is where training and maturity becomes
very important, along with supervision and accountability."

Soave's team also now includes an anti-terrorism task force, the Integrated
National Security Enforcement Team.

"It's unique," he says, as the only police team in Canada that puts an
organized crime unit and a counter-terrorist unit under the same command.
"After 9/11 we didn't have the capacity, nor the facility to be able to
launch a major response to that crisis. So we wanted to make sure we had
the communication infrastructure, the facility and the critical mass of
investigative expertise to be able to respond to any situation," Soave said.

"We're as ready as we can ever be. ... It's not where and if, it's going to
be when."