A couple of months later, on July 22, 2007, 11-year-old Ephraim Brown was killed after being shot in the neck by a stray bullet, during a gang shooting in the city's North York district at Jane Street and Sheppard Avenue.
[79] The growth of the police force was due not to an increase in crime per se, but rather due to an increase in laws regulating social behavior as the major concerns of the Toronto police went from being burglary, vagrancy and breaking up fistfights in 1872 to enforcing laws regarding censorship, Sabbath-breaking, dance halls, gambling, alcohol consumption, street traffic, and all forms of "immorality" by 1914.
[81] "The Ward" was mostly inhabited by Italian, Jewish, Finnish, Polish, West Indian and Chinese immigrants that was painted in lurid terms by the newspapers as a center of organized crime add depravity in general that was threatening society.
The most important gangsters in Toronto area in the 1920s was Rocco Perri and his common-law wife Bessie Starkman, who were involved in smuggling alcohol into the United States and heroin into Canada.
[89] Though based in Hamilton, Johnny Papalia was very extensively involved in Toronto, where he engaged in extortion, hijacking, loan-sharking, theft, book-making and the sale of heroin.
[90] The first organized crime case that attracted widespread public attention was the beating of the gambler Maxie Bluestein by the gangster Johnny Papalia at Toronto's Town Tavern on 21 March 1961.
[91] Pierre Berton, a Toronto Star newspaper columnist wrote in his column that the Bluestein beating was a "semi-execution" committed in front of hundreds of people, which showed that Papalia did not fear the law.
[93] It was largely to end the attacks of the Black Diamond Riders that four other biker gangs came together in 1965 to found Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club under the leadership of Bernie Guindon.
[93] Satan's Choice quickly became the most dominant biker gang not only in the Toronto area, but in Ontario, pushing the Black Diamond Riders into irrelevance.
[97] Subsequently, it was established that both Trumbari and Vendemini were involved in organized crime, being engaged in bootlegging (bars and liquor stores closed early in Ontario at the time.
[104] The Toronto-based Commisso 'ndrina clan of the Siderno group were described by the end of the 1970s as running a crime empire that "imported and distributed heroin with the Vancouver mob and the Calabrian Mafia in Italy, fenced stolen goods across North America, printed and distributed counterfeit money throughout Canada and the United States, ran a vast extortion network in Ontario, arranged insurance and land frauds in the Toronto area and engaged in contract killings and contract enforcement work across Canada and the United States– the whole gamut of violent criminal activities one usually associates with the Mafia".
[105] The best known of Kirby's crimes in the employ of the Commisso brothers in Toronto occurred on the morning of 3 May 1977 when he blew up a Chinese restaurant, the Wah Kew Chop Suey House, and killed a cook, Chong Yin Quan.
[110] In 1979, a report from the Immigration department complained that the Kong Lok triad was very active in trying to recruit Chinese-Canadian high school students in Toronto to work as drug dealers.
[117] In the 1980s, Papalia sent out a crew of muscular Mafiosi led by Carmen Barillaro and Enio Mora to raid the illegal gambling houses in Toronto's Greektown in the Pape-Danforth area that refused to pay him extortion money.
[119] In December 1985, Barillaro, Mora and several other Mafiosi were all charged by the Ontario Provincial Police as part of Project Outhouse for their actions in the Greektown raids, but none of the accused were ever brought to trial.
[120] A number of Triads took advantage of the influx to move to Canada, which was popular for them as it offered easier opportunities to smuggle drugs and people into the United States.
[121] Peter Yuen of the Toronto Police Service recalled about the violence between various Asian crime factions in 1990: "You had gun battles, 15 rounds at the corner of Dundas and Spadina on a Saturday afternoon...It was like watching a triad movie.
[124] Brian "Bo" Beaucage, generally considered to be the most violent and vicious member of Satan's Choice, spent the night of 3 March 1991 in a Toronto rooming house devoted to hard drugs, alcohol, and watching pornographic films.
[125] Beaucage's night of bacchanalian excess was cut short when he was beheaded in his bed by Frank Passarelli, a member of the Loners gang, who used a kitchen knife to decapitate him.
[125] The gruesome nature of Beaucage's murder, made worse by the fact that his body was partially devoured by dogs after his death, led to it acquiring a legendary reputation in biker community, being known incorrectly as "the fifty whacks with an ax".
[126] On 25 August 1995, Lenti was badly wounded by a bomb planted in his car, which marked the end of the biker war as his club collapsed as he recovered from his injuries during a prolonged stay in a hospital.
[127] The journalist Jerry Langton wrote the "frequently hysterical Toronto media" vastly exaggerated the amount of biker war violence, which in turn led to Hall's overreaction.
[136] On 3 October 2000, Panepinto was shot dead on Bloor Street in his automobile by gunmen in a mini-van that pulled up next to his vehicle while he was waiting for a red light and pumped six bullets into him.
On 21 April 2014, the Hells Angel Paris Christoforou and the Mafiosi Antonio Borrelli shot up the California Sandwiches restaurant in north Toronto in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Michele Modica that left an innocent by-stander, Louise Russo, paralyzed from the neck down.
[150] Today, the multicultural face of Toronto is well reflected in the city's underworld, which includes everything from Jamaican posses to Eastern European bratvas to American biker gangs.
The genesis of many foreign criminal organizations in Toronto has often been linked to the drug trade, as with the large influx of heroin and various Asian triads during the 1970s,[151] or cocaine and South American cartels in the 1980s.
In the spring of 2012, the Wolfpack was going to bring to Toronto a shipment of 200 kilograms cocaine from Mexico worth $5 million with the profits to be split four ways between Johnny Raposo, Nick Nero, Martino "Lil Guy" Caputo, and Rabih Alkhalil.
[154] In one of Toronto's best known gangland murders, on 18 June 2012, Raposo was shot and killed in the Sicilian Sidewalk Cafe on College Street by a Wolfpack hitman, Dean Michael Wiwchar.
In 2013 the Platinum Sportsbook a sports betting ring, thought have brought in over $100 million in revenue, was a joint venture between Hells Angels, Italian Mafia and Asian organized crime figures.
[166] Efforts to reduce youth gang crime have included police raids,[169] government and social programs,[163] and camera surveillance of public housing projects.