Crime in Toronto - Organized Crime

Organized Crime

Large criminal organizations have been operating in the Toronto region since at least the mid-19th century, beginning with the homegrown, yet short-lived Markham Gang. Since that time large-scale organized crime in Toronto has mostly been the domain of international or foreign-based crime syndicates.

By the early 1900s the infamous Black Hand had followed Italian immigrants to Toronto as it had in most major North American cities of the time. Italian organized crime remains prevalent to this day with the Sicilian Mafia, Campanian Camorra, and Calabrian 'Ndrangheta all active at various times and to various degrees within the city. During prohibition Toronto became a major centre for bootlegging operations into the United States which also saw an increased presence of Italian-American organized crime — specifically the Buffalo crime family.

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, or cocaine and South American cartels in the 1980s. These criminal groups, however, occasionally have a political bent as well, as with the Tamil organized crime groups and gangs such as the VVT and rival AK Kannan gangs which warred with each other in the city's streets during the 1990s and early 2000s over the brown heroin trade. In recent decades Toronto has also seen an infiltration of major American street gangs such as the Bloods, Crips, and Mara Salvatrucha which have become so large and powerful over the years that they are now generally considered to be organized crime outfits themselves.

Critics have argued that organized crime has been allowed to flourish in Canadian cities such as Toronto due to weak laws and law enforcement, culminating in the Office of the United States Trade Representative placing Canada on a watch list for failing to provide adequate protection or enforcement of intellectual property rights. Today Toronto has become a centre for a wide array of organized and transnational criminal activities, including the counterfeiting of currency, bank cards, digital entertainment products, telemarketing fraud, and the production of marijuana and synthetic drugs. Toronto also has a comparable rate of car theft to various U.S. cities, although this is lower than in some other Canadian cities. Much of this has been attributed to organized crime, with stolen vehicles ending up being shipped overseas for sale.