A turf war has fueled a 50% rise in Toronto shootings, mostly with guns smuggled from the U.S.
TORONTO—Towing cars has become a deadly business in Canada’s largest city.
Rival gangs control parts of the tow-truck industry here, using the heavy-duty vehicles to transport drugs, extort car-crash victims with high fees, and fake automobile accidents to defraud insurance. They once resolved their territorial differences with their fists, but now a wave of gun smuggling from the U.S. has turned their fights into a lethal blood sport.
This year through late August, Toronto shootings are up 50% compared with the same period last year and homicides are up 20%—a surge caused in part by “the tow-truck violence,” said Inspector Paul Krawczyk of the Toronto Police Service’s guns-and-gangs unit. In all, about one in seven of Toronto’s shootings and dischargings of firearms this year have been related to the towing industry, police said.
“It’s pretty brazen,” Krawczyk said.
