Police probe corruption as union boss steps
down
By CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
Monday, April 19, 2004 - Page A1
The president of the Toronto Police Association has temporarily stepped down from office after being implicated in an alleged police-protection racket under investigation by the force's internal affairs unit.
Rick McIntosh, a former association director who won the top job only six months ago, is the second Toronto officer in four days to be affected by a widespread corruption probe the details of which are rife with shocking allegations.
He convened a special board meeting yesterday, The Globe and Mail has learned, and, citing concern for the association's 7,000 members, volunteered to step aside pending the results of the investigation.
Early last evening, the board "reluctantly" agreed that he should, sources say.
Mr. McIntosh said in a telephone interview earlier yesterday that he knew of "an ongoing investigation," but said, "It's news to me," that he was part of it.
Last Thursday, William McCormack Jr., the son of former police chief William McCormack, was suspended from his duties as a plainclothes officer in the downtown 52 Division.
In addition, that same evening, the division's plainclothes squad itself, where Det. Constable McCormack has worked for many years, was quietly disbanded, with a total of 12 officers from two platoons and their supervisors all immediately reassigned.
That move, sources say, was a pre-emptive strike personally ordered by Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino out of concern that the other officers and particularly their supervisors either ought to have known about, or may have turned a blind eye to, what was allegedly going on.
The internal affairs probe, The Globe and Mail has learned, is itself but an offshoot of a much larger organized-crime investigation.
As part of that broader continuing investigation, a Globe source said, Det. Constable McCormack came to official attention, and was subsequently put under surveillance by the Toronto internal affairs unit.
Before his suspension last week, The Globe has learned, Det. Constable McCormack was formally informed of the extensive internal probe and that many phone calls he made during the course of the investigation had been taped.
It was the McCormack probe that drew Mr. McIntosh into the ambit of the investigation and sparked a spinoff investigation of him.
Of this, Mr. McIntosh, in a second phone interview yesterday, said that, "I speak to a lot of people on the phone. I don't know what the allegations are on my end, and apart from that, I can't comment."
Neither Mr. McIntosh nor Det. Constable McCormack have been charged.
Det. Constable McCormack is implicated in what is alleged to have been a long-standing "shakedown" arrangement with bars in the downtown entertainment district -- which falls within the 52 Division boundaries -- whereby in exchange for advance tips about police enforcement activities or help with liquor licences and the like, he allegedly received payoffs.
The revelations have left senior command officers and Mr. McIntosh's fellow directors on the police union board reeling.
Before his election first as director of uniform services, Mr. McIntosh worked in 52 Division, and on its plainclothes squad.
In fact, it was while on duty in the entertainment district that the 28-year veteran badly broke his leg five years ago while making an arrest.
Mr. McIntosh easily won the association's top job last October with 3,788 votes; his only opponent, Constable Gino Costabile, picked up just 516 votes.
It isn't the first time that a police union boss has been tarnished by allegations of wrongdoing.
Mr. McIntosh's predecessor, Craig Bromell, was in fact propelled into office shortly after he and eight other officers from 51 Division were accused of beating up a homeless alcoholic man, Thomas Kerr.
That lengthy internal investigation failed to result in criminal charges -- at least in part because of Mr. Kerr's potential unreliability as a witness.
But in January last year, in the midst of a civil trial and with many of the officers, including Mr. Bromell, still slated to testify, the police association agreed to settle the suit for an undisclosed sum.
Mr. Bromell and the other officers have always denied there was an attack, and justified the lawsuit settlement as a business decision, not as any admission of liability.
The latest scandal comes as a severe body blow to the force, which earlier this year saw six officers, all veterans of the now long-disbanded central drug squad, criminally charged with a raft of serious criminal charges that range from conspiracy to obstruct justice, perjury, theft over $5,000, assault causing bodily harm and extortion. Four other officers were named as unindicted co-conspirators.
The charges resulted after an extraordinarily long and expensive investigation ordered by Chief Fantino, who brought in a senior RCMP officer, Chief Superintendent John Neily, to run it.
It was in reference to those charges and that probe that Mr. McIntosh, then just a few months into his new job, told The Globe while it is true police "are not quick to judge each other," it's often because they know, from firsthand experience, what can happen when "people open their mouths without knowing the whole story, when they see only a slice of something."
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