Why is there so much crime and violence in the GTA's towing industry?

The tow truck wars in the GTA appear to be heating back up with a lot of recent violence and Monday night Toronto Fire responded to a tow truck on fire on Parma Court near Victoria Park in O'Connor. And this is just one incident of violence related to tow truck businesses in recent weeks. Last weekend, police reported there were shots fired at multiple tow trucks. And last month, a man connected to the business was murdered. And to understand why this is happening now, CBC investigative journalist Zach Divinsky joins us now. And Zach, why are we seeing this now? Well, the tow truck industry is an incredibly lucrative 1, not necessarily because of the towing and the storage of damaged vehicles, although that does make money. But there's all these side businesses that spill out from that. So every time a vehicle is towed, it's taken to a Body Shop. There's repairs that need to be done, there's insurance claims that are put in. And then the people who are in the accident, they also have to put in for claims for physiotherapy, rehab, that kind of thing. And there's a lot of money and all of that. And sometimes there's kickbacks that are being paid to the towing companies. Sometimes the people that own the towing companies own the rehab clinics and they own the body shops. So they stand to make a lot of work, and they have there even in cases of them submitting fraudulent claims to insurance, inflating their claims to insurance, even faking accidents, all because there's so much money to be made, to be made. And that's what leads to a lot of the violence. And you mentioned why there is so much violence. Can you get into more about why so much violence and crime is in the GTA towing industry? Yeah. So if we go back historically, the police first started to notice that some pretty violent people were involved in towing people who they think might even be associated with organized crime as far back as 2014. There's some names that come up in a police investigation back then. Then in 2018 and 2019, police are monitoring a couple folks as a as a part of a guns and gangs investigation in Scarborough. And what they noticed is that a lot of people there were either affiliated with the towing industry. If you look through police records, you actually see a bunch of people's names are listed as being tow truck operators or towing company owners, you know, or they were somehow associated with that, but they they weren't from those alleged gangs either. Then there's another operation of police operation in 2020 called Project Platinum where they went after specifically tow companies, criminal tow companies. A lot of charges were filed, but ultimately a lot of those charges were dropped. And that had to do with some issues where the prosecutors thought that if they provided disclosure to the defense lawyers that it might reveal who some of the confidential police informants were. So as a result of that, a lot of those people had their charges dropped. They just went right back to doing what they were doing before, which is operating tow truck companies in a really violent way, shooting at each other, setting each other's trucks on fire. And we're still seeing that happen today, you know, like 4-4 years later Now. So much of this problem is being driven by organized crime. Yeah, it certainly seems like it if you speak to investigators that's that's certainly their view. It comes down to, I guess, what is your definition of of organized crime. But if you look at a lot of the charges out of that 2020 project, Project Platinum, certainly a lot of criminal charges laid had to do with organized crime. They were, you know, organized crime offenses that were alleged. But it's not that kind of traditional organized crime that we might think of in terms of, you know, the Mafia, for example, in some of the differences are, for example, you don't have the same levels and and duration of loyalty that you might have in traditional organized crime. So people turn on each other very easily. You see former employees of towing companies who might go after their former boss. You might see bosses who go after their former employees and even take out hits on them. You also see that it's not just limited to particular ethnic groups or families. There's a lot of these towing companies, a lot of the the ones that are alleged to have criminal elements, they stretch across all kinds of cultural and ethnic lines. So there, you know, there's people from Italian and Turkish and Russian and European and South Asian backgrounds all associating together in in some of these teams and some of these companies. And new provincial regulations were rolled out earlier this year to kind of provide better oversight of the industry. How well do these regulations address these turf wars and protect consumers? I spoke to a few people about this. I spoke to a company that is part of the provincial towing association. So they're a licensed official company. And their position, and I think this is the official industry position, is that some of those regulations have helped, but only in very particular areas. So one of the new things that happened just this year is that there's some official towing zones on the provincial highways around Toronto. And those zones are basically the four O 1 from I think Morningside over to Burlington, four O 9, the 427 and the four O 3 and the QEW. So in in those zones of those highways, there's only two or three designated companies that the provincial government has vetted and chosen who are allowed to tow in those areas. And as a result of that, what the industry says is you don't have this phenomenon of different companies chasing each other to be the first ones to get there to tow cars. And so there's far less violence because they're not trying to muscle each other out of the way. But the problem is that now that there's no competition for towing in those spaces, there's actually a lot more competition for towing everywhere else because there's a lot less business for every other towing company. So if you talk to people who aren't among the licensed companies, they'll tell you that things have actually gotten more intense on some of the other roads. And that would be everything from the DVP to the gardener to side streets and main streets in Toronto. Thanks so much for this, Zach. Zach Dubinsky is a journalist with CBC's Investigative Unit.