The apartment towers on Martha Eaton Way loom over an urban creek in north Toronto, a working-class part of the city where ethnic stores dominate the strip malls.
Violent episodes have cast a long shadow over the neighborhood, known as “Creek” to the young people for whom the address can confer clout. Some remember that an 8-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet through his bedroom window last summer, and that a teenager was fatally shot at the pizza shop next door a year before that.
Others are too young to know that an adjacent street is named after a Toronto police officer killed there decades ago, or that a gang from this neighborhood played a defining role in the city’s bloody “summer of the gun” in 2005.
Crime is broadly low in Toronto, with homicides and car theft rates dropping over the last year. But a recent spate of shootings has put many on edge, including synagogues and Jewish schools and storefronts that have been targeted by gunfire.
Then, in March, two gunmen fired at the U.S. Consulate in the heart of Toronto’s downtown; a stark, low-rise structure on a busy avenue dotted with court offices, university buildings and hospitals.
Security cameras showed the gunmen taking turns to fire the same weapon at the building. Hunting for them, investigators zeroed in on the three apartment towers on Martha Eaton Way. Their investigation took a tragic turn in June, when a police officer trying to carry out a search warrant inside one of the buildings was shot dead.
The violence depicts an emerging trend, the police say, of criminals using encrypted apps to anonymously recruit teenagers into what investigators call a guns-for-hire network, treating young people as gig workers in the underworld economy.
Then, in late July, the U.S. Consulate was fired on again. The suspects, arrested in early August, were two other teenagers who the police believe were involved with the network.
‘In Canada We Have Our Guys’
Explosive bangs and shouting jolted Mario Kramo awake in his fourth-floor apartment in one of the Martha Eaton Way towers just before sunrise on June 11. In the hallway, police officers tried to resuscitate a wounded officer.
“I realized that they definitely came for a raid,” Mr. Kramo said. “And it went badly.”
Next door, his neighbor, Nicholas Bennett, 19, fired a single gunshot, the police say, that killed Constable Marc Pinizzotto, 43. Constable Pinizzotto, a veteran of an elite task force, was part of a high-risk takedown unit dispatched to arrest Mr. Bennett that morning.
Mr. Bennett was accused of participating in a few of the roughly two dozen shootings at homes and businesses across the city linked to the guns-for-hire network, according to police and court documents.
Two other teenagers who lived in the building, both wanted in the U.S. Consulate shooting, tried to flee.
The police apprehended the first, Sheldon Tracey-Stewart, 18, in the neighborhood carrying, they said, a loaded Glock 17 handgun. The other, Zara Jabbi, 19, fled and a week later was arrested at Toronto’s main airport.
No Payment Without Video
Criminals typically avoid filming themselves in the act to avoid creating evidence. But in the guns-for-hire network, video recordings are a condition of payment for picking up a “contract,” said Chief Superintendent Joe Matthews, who is leading the investigation.
But the promised payment — in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the job — sometimes doesn’t materialize.
“They’re now facing potential jail time for something they didn’t even get paid for,” said Superintendent Matthews, who grew up near Martha Eaton Way.
The guns-for-hire network is spread across Toronto and the surrounding areas, and involves a few dozen young people, the police said.
Earlier this month, the police announced the arrest of Xen-Ul-Abdeen Syed, 19, of Brampton, Ontario, and a 15-year-old who cannot be named because of a youth publication ban, who were allegedly involved in the network.
Europol, the European police agency, has said it is investigating a similar trend of youth hired on social media to commit violent acts, including homicides, in a “violence-as-a-service” scheme that is “accessible, scalable and driven by online ecosystems” across borders. One of the most prolific contractors of violence in Europe is a criminal network with links to Iran, according to an investigation by the BBC.
In Canada, questions about the network’s possible financiers have emerged following a criminal complaint filed in New York in May. According to the complaint, the F.B.I. says a 32-year-old man was heard in a secretly recorded call taking responsibility for the consulate attack and one at a synagogue, in the name of a militant group that serves as a proxy for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Britain designated that group, Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya, a terrorist organization in July. Canada’s public safety ministry did not respond to questions about whether it plans to do the same.
Three other arrests have been made in connection with synagogue shootings in Toronto, but the police are still investigating links to the guns-for-hire network.
“In Canada we have our guys,” said the man heard on the wiretap, Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, according to the complaint. Neither Canadian authorities nor the F.B.I. have disclosed who dispatched the young shooters, who the police do not believe were ideologically motivated.
Monte MacGregor, a defense lawyer representing one of the teenagers accused in the consulate shooting, said it was telling that the police did not file terrorism charges.
His client was asserting his innocence, Mr. MacGregor said, adding that for whoever was involved: “It speaks to the level of sophistication and understanding of the actual people pulling the trigger. It’s probably fairly low.”
The recruitment over social media has set the network apart from past cases, said Andrew Hammond, president of the Organization for National Gang Information and Awareness, a Canadian nonprofit.
Previously, older gang members groomed young recruits through lower-stakes crimes, like petty theft or stashing firearms, to build trust and loyalty. Social media has upended that model, and gives higher-ranking gang members more anonymity, said Sergeant Hammond, a Toronto detective who is not involved in this case.
The trend has grown more pronounced in the last two years, he said, and other Canadian cities, including Montreal, have seen versions of it, what experts there call the “disposable army.”
A Hardened Neighborhood
On the afternoon of Constable Pinizzotto’s death, a neighborhood youth group gathered for its weekly activities, sports and snacks. The news jarred the older teenagers.
“For some young people, it’s another day on the block,” said Destin Bujang, executive director of the Black Creek Youth Initiative. One of the alleged consulate shooters had long dropped in on the program, which is often paid for out of Mr. Bujang’s own pocket, he said, amid unreliable public funding and cutbacks in city programming, which hit underprivileged neighborhoods the hardest.
Some of the group’s participants would say they want to provide for their family, “whatever it takes,” Mr. Bujang said.
Toronto gangs are also exploiting that pressure to recruit boys to travel across the country, as far north as Nunavut, to sell drugs, the police and social services workers say.
When they see alerts about missing boys in the neighborhood, Josiah Sappleton-Stout and Grace Garawai, both 17, say their first guess is the boy has “gone O.T.”, or out-of-town, to sell drugs.
“Because we’re from the hood, not everyone here is rich,” said Ms. Garawai, a high-school athlete on a local basketball court. “I feel like if you get into that situation, it’s unintentional. It kind of just happens.”
The lure of money — young people posting stacks of $20 bills on social media — can be hard to escape, said Mr. Sappleton-Stout, who is enrolled in a trades apprenticeship program. Gesturing at the court, he said, “Adding little things like this makes a big contribution to the community. It keeps kids out of trouble.”
Not every young person on Martha Eaton Way has been so lucky.
Just before the first day of school in September 2024, Mario Giddings, 15, was shot outside the pizza shop next to the building where the raids in June took place. His killers have not been caught.
“It’s still there, fresh, in my blood, in my eyes, seeing him just walk out that door and never return,” said Fortunata Giddings, Mario’s aunt and primary caregiver in Canada. Ms. Giddings, an airport cleaner, said her nephew would inexplicably come home with expensive clothes. He died, she said, in $400 sneakers.
