The points cards were popping for members of Toronto’s criminal fraternity this week.
Me? I couldn’t begin to pick the player of the week, but there were two standouts whose dedication to craft is noteworthy. But … we hasten to add, none of the charges have been tested in court.
THE horrific case of Vincent Chan, the north London nursery worker who this week admitted sexually abusing toddlers and hoarding 25,000 indecent images, has rightly shaken the country.
Chan was not a rogue babysitter or an unregulated childminder. He worked at a respected £2,000-a-month nursery. He passed his enhanced vetting. He was subject to all the ‘industry-leading’ safeguarding checks we trust to keep children safe. And yet for years he abused children in a setting parents had every reason to believe was secure.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released never-before-seen images of Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous island.
The photographs and video appear to show several bedrooms in the US Virgin Islands home, as well as a room with masks on a wall and a phone with names written on speed-dial buttons.
In a statement, the committee’s Democratic leader, Robert Garcia, said they collectively form a “disturbing look” into Epstein’s world and are being released to “ensure public transparency”.
More youth under 18 in Canada were charged with homicide in 2024 than the previous year, according to new figures from Statistics Canada — an unexpected rise that comes even as national homicide rates edged downward.
The 2024 homicide report shows 72 youths were charged with homicide last year, up from 65 in 2023. That pushes the youth accused of murder to 0.94 per 100,000 youths.
Among those cases, police recorded 13 incidents involving multiple youth accused, including five homicides with three or more youth charged.
OTTAWA — In less than half a year, a Canadian criminal intelligence report shows, police and partner agencies across the country seized 386 kilograms of fentanyl and analogues in a coordinated national enforcement blitz — with Ontario and British Columbia together accounting for more than 90 per cent of the total.
Border officials stressed they believe the vast majority of the fentanyl seizures were for domestic consumption and not for export to other nations.
The Ontario Provincial Police sergeant who led the investigation into Becky Hamber and Brandy Cooney testified at their first-degree murder trial Monday, outlining evidence collected by police in the case against the couple.
Sgt. Julie Powers told the Milton, Ont., courtroom that she spent weeks reviewing photos, videos, audio recordings, messages and call logs on electronic devices police took from Cooney and Hamber when they were charged in 2023 in relation to two boys they were trying to adopt.
The mass shooting in California that killed four people, including three kids, erupted just as a toddler was cutting cake at her 2nd birthday party, according to her mom — who said the shooters “deserve to go to hell.”
The birthday girl’s mother, Patrice Williams, said partygoers dropped to the floor as soon as the gunshots rang out inside the packed banquet hall in Stockton on Saturday.
… Authorities haven’t identified any suspects but have indicated the shooting was gang-related.
Gang related? That is cartel level violence.
Pretty tough lingo for some pretty bad actors.
“I’ve got a little tip for lowlife criminals out there. If you don’t want to get shot, don’t break into someone’s house. It’s really that simple.
“Isn’t it? It really is.”
Now that’s laying down the law.
There’s an old joke that in the 1970s and 1980s, James Q. Wilson waged a one-man battle against a thousand sociologists, criminologists, and other academics. The punchline: “A thousand to one against Wilson—that’s almost a fair fight.” The quip captures both Wilson’s towering intellect—recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, author of dozens of books, and arguably the most important conservative social scientist of the late twentieth century—and the impact of one major strand of his work, launched in high-profile magazine articles and expressed most powerfully in 1975’s Thinking About Crime.
The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has shattered an alleged criminal conspiracy that moved millions of dollars in cocaine and methamphetamine over the border.
According to the CBSA, Operation Meridian was a targeted 60-day operation in Southern Ontario. Officials said the goal was to disrupt the import and export of illicit narcotics through commercial channels at ports of entry across Southern Ontario.
No arrest would be complete without Singhs.
Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities.
Corrupt military officers and drug gangs smuggle shipments by light aircraft, fishing boats, semi-submersible vessels and freighters heading east, international law-enforcement officials have said publicly. The cocaine flows to West Africa, where an informal network of jihadist-linked smugglers and their allies then move the drug north to feed high and rising demand in Europe.
“Cocaine in the 1980s is not the same as the one we see today,” said Jesus Romero, a retired U.S. military intelligence officer. “There are direct linkages to terrorist organizations to support their cause.”
A child and family therapist tried to help two moms deal with two difficult Indigenous foster children who’d survived years of early trauma – but her advice never included dressing them in onesie pyjamas and zip-tying them shut.
It was like a ghost sighting. And the FBI agents had to be sure they weren’t mistaken.
The investigators, conducting surveillance near a Starbucks in Mexico City on Jan. 22, 2024, had just seen two men walk in.
One of them, a hulking six-foot-three-inch figure, may just have been the ghost they’d been hunting.
BRITISH COLUMBIA — Vancouver police say they have seized a grenade launcher, four guns, and nearly 500 grams of fentanyl and other hard drugs from a fortified Downtown Eastside rooming house that was allegedly feeding a synthetic opioid supply line through the city’s most drug-ravaged blocks.
“Task Force Barrage has come to an end, but our work to curb violence and disrupt organized crime in the Downtown Eastside continues,” Sergeant Steve Addison said, adding “the proliferation of violence and weapons in some residential buildings continues to put the neighbourhood at risk.”
That neighborhood is permanently at risk. I used to live there a lifetime ago.
VANCOUVER — In an extraordinary civil forfeiture action, the B.C. government is seeking to permanently seize a late-model Mercedes from a prominent Vancouver real estate agent, alleging the luxury sedan was used as an instrument in a predatory sex crime — including luring and assaulting a vulnerable 15-year-old girl living in a provincial care home — according to court filings.
