ALPF sent this very good feature from Macleans. It begins:
John Butcher had fallen on hard times. His wife of 33 years had died after a lengthy battle with multiple sclerosis. He'd lost his job in the financial services industry, he'd run out of money and, in his late 50s, the expat Englishman had been forced to move in with his daughter. With only an entry-level job at a golf course and moonlight gigs as frontman of a blues band to earn his keep, he felt like a burden. So when a close friend approached him with a shady sounding proposition -- $500 per trip to squire envelopes stuffed with U.S. cash into Canada from Detroit -- he swallowed hard and accepted. "I was told that at my age, I would never be involved with anything that would result in a jail sentence," he says. Glancing at his surroundings -- a drafty interview room at the Toronto East Detention Centre -- he now snorts at this thought with hollow laughter.And concludes:
The idea of playing big-house mascot to a group of outlaws is not something Butcher finds terribly amusing. But prison has given him time to think, to read, to examine his conscience. He has learned his lesson, he says; he knows where danger lies and -- like anyone betrayed by a long-time friend -- he's determined not to be duped again. With the death toll from gang shootings rising on Canadian streets, and nothing on the horizon to stem the flow of American guns, can the same be said for the rest of us?Very good stuff in the middle, found here.
3 comments:
We're seeing a similar problem in Calgary (not as widely known because we're not the centre of the universe). Our problem is Asian gangs. They seem to get a kick out of combining street racing and gunfights (I suppose there is a certain adrenaline rush). We've had something like twenty gang shootings so far this year and a half dozen deaths. Small potatoes by US standards to be sure, especially for a city of one million, but a significant increase here.
I think these things come in spurts.
The was a big rash of gang related violence in Montreal a few years ago, but it calmed down.
Montreal is still sort of the gangland of Canada though.
Yeah, I lived there during the height of the biker wars. They didn't seem as reckless as the Asian gangs out here though. Most people weren't too bothered over bikers killing each other, so not much was done until a young boy was killed by a car bomb intended for a Hell's Angels guy. That's when the Montreal police got serious.
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