Drug dealer convicted of killing rival
‘Get out now before you meet the same fate,’ judge warns others in crack trade
A witness said the drug game has only two endings: You either end up in prison or you end up dead.
Michael Belleus, just 25, could have done anything with his life but he chose to pick up a gun with an eye to so-called easy money in the city’s deadly crack trade.
And on Wednesday, just as most folks were having supper, it cost him his freedom, after a jury found him guilty in the 2012 drive-by killing of rival crack dealer Levy Kasende, 22.
Moments before condemning the killer to life in prison, Ontario Superior Court Justice Kevin Phillips told court that, of all the testimony across seven weeks, no truer words were spoken than when a witness said the drug game has only two endings: You either end up in prison or you end up dead.
The judge noted their positions in the violent drug trade have likely already been filled by other young men, and he had a sharp warning for them: “To those young men — get out, get out now, before you meet the same fate.”
The jury found Belleus guilty of first-degree murder after hearing a strong, yet circumstantial case presented by assistant Crown attorneys Fara Rupert and Matthew Guigan-Miller.
Nobody got a look at the shooter who fired from the lowered window of a Mazda minivan that pulled up outside a townhouse in Blackburn Hamlet. There was just the flash from a gun. Kasende was shot in the right thigh, and in the back, that bullet piercing his heart. Though it was a straight identification case, it was stacked with a pile of evidence that all led back to Belleus, right down to the fact that he had borrowed the minivan, the one found abandoned and engulfed in flames on a country road minutes after the killing.
The defence, led by Anne London-Weinstein and Neil Weinstein, said the shooting was anything but planned and it was more likely that a Belleus associate squeezed the trigger then claimed that Kasende was the one who was plotting to kill their client.
But the jury didn’t buy it and instead found that the murder was planned and deliberate and that Belleus opened fire in a revenge killing.
Belleus was bent on revenge because Kasende had shot him in the arm on Canada Day in 2010 over a drug-turf feud. After Belleus was shot, police tried to interview him as a victim but he refused to co-operate, saying only that he’d deal with it himself.
Belleus was so hungry for revenge, he offered $2,000 on the street for anyone who could tell him where he could find Kasende.
And on the night he died, Kasende wouldn’t have been hard to find.
His girlfriend, and the mother of child, had just moved into Belleus’s “crack territory,” out on Innes Road, and just a few doors down from one of Belleus’s associates.
In haunting words recalled in court, Kasende himself told friends: “This neighbourhood is going to be the death of me.”
Kasende knew the east-end streets well and knew Belleus was after him. In fact, when he went to visit his girlfriend and child on the night of Aug. 24, he brought a sawed-off shotgun, the one he tucked under the bed just in case.
Levy Kasende had finally embraced his future as a young father but the crack dealer couldn’t escape his past, and it cost him his life. In a victim-impact statement read in court by a prosecutor, the grieving mother of his young child told court that Kasende never got to hear his child’s first word — Dadda — or see the first steps.
Belleus did not take the stand in his own defence and when asked if he wanted to finally say something, he said: “I’m an innocent man.”
He will be eligible for parole in 25 years.
The successful police investigation was led by Det. Chris Benson and Sgt. Darren Vinet and the trial had heavy police security in its final days.