‘Hamilton, you have a problem’
The darker, dirty side of our city’s policing was exposed this week in a Toronto courtroom
We witnessed this week the best of policing.
An officer who held his nerve and held his ground against a suspect who seemed hell-bent on suicide-by-cop. The dramatic Toronto confrontation ended with Alek Minassian — subsequently charged with 10 counts of murder and 14 counts of attempted murder in Monday’s van rampage down Yonge St. — on his knees and Const. Ken Lam snapping on the handcuffs.
But also this week, over the past five weeks, a different shade of policing — darker, dirty — was exposed in a Toronto courtroom.
Not a Toronto cop but a veteran of the Hamilton Police Service, formerly a member of the guns and gangs unit.
A world where Det. Const. Craig Ruthowsky moved with apparent cunning and greed, simultaneously ringing up bad guys and profiting off them, aligning with them.
On Wednesday, late into their third day of deliberation, a jury returned guilty verdicts on charges of bribery, obstruction of justice, breach of trust and cocaine trafficking.
When drug dealers with eyepopping criminal histories have more credibility than a cop with 17 years on the force — Hamilton, you have a problem.
Jurors believed the testimony of some unsavoury individuals — including, crucially, Mr. X, a seedy drug merchant and the Crown’s star witness — rather than the elaborate justifications, obfuscations and gerrymandered accounts of the accused.
“His evidence was a joke,” defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine told the jury in his closing address. “Total, absolute perjury.”
But their verdict puts the lie to the lie. If there was anyone perjuring under oath, by its rendering the jury concluded it was Ruthowsky.
Over the course of the lengthy trial in which Ruthowsky took the stand in his own defence, court heard duelling versions of the defendant’s conduct and his reasons for it — that he had groomed Mr. X as an informant, a snitch, which the witness adamantly denied. That he, Ruthowsky, was a maniacally devoted cop who adopted unorthodox methods to get the job done in a city awash in crime. Or that he benefited from an environment where cops and hoods were scarcely distinguishable.
The grenade of an allegation was that Ruthowsky had accepted $20,000 in bribes a month from Mr. X and a crew of likewise oily crooks, the payoff for information that helped protect them from raids and arrests, essentially allowing the drug brigade to move their product with impunity.
Other way around, Ruthowsky countered — he was the one collecting vital intel that contributed to the takedown of dangerous suspects, including a murderer.
Ruthowsky had more than 60 “sources” in his policing tool kit. Yet Mr. X (his name protected by a publication ban) was never registered as a confidential informant, as per Hamilton police policy. Ruthowsky claimed he kept that detail in a separate private notebook, part of a trove of files he took home — as directed by a commanding officer — after he was suspended in June 2012. Court heard that 130 case files, potentially including sensitive information about police investigations, have been sitting in Ruthowsky’s basement for the past six years. This, despite a police search of the home in the summer of 2015, when Ruthowsky was arrested.
No explanation has been offered for how those files were overlooked.
That was but a trifle from the damning material that surfaced at trial. There was the cocaine cutting agent that Ruthowsky personally had tested at a lab for chemical analysis, this after a dealer was looking to identify the element as a cost-curtailing adjustment by eliminating the middleman associate. Ruthowsky claimed his gambit was aimed at catching a bigger narcotics fish. There was the bizarre inclusion of Mr. X on a raid at a massive Hamilton grow-up, where the dealer was permitted into the building to eyeball the goods. There was the intervention by Ruthowsky on behalf of drug operators who’d been arrested, promising charges would disappear in exchange for inside intel dope. There was the cocaine press, a piece of equipment seized in an operation which another dealer testified he later purchased at auction from Ruthowsky. There was the $130,000 in unexplained income between 2011 and 2015, uncovered by a financial audit prepared for the prosecution — money Ruthowsky asserted came from his sideline businesses installing pools and building decks. Sloppy bookkeeping, he conceded.
It was an avalanche of incriminating evidence, all of which Ruthowsky tried to explain away, often addressing the jury directly in an overly familiar we’re-all-pals-here fashion, for which he was repeatedly admonished by the judge.
The jury came to its verdict without knowing what had been excluded in earlier rulings by a different judge — critically, details about two other Hamilton officers who were either directly or indirectly part of the trial cast.
One was Ian Matthews, advocated as a likewise unconventional cop — who nonetheless closed the deal on important investigations — corralled into the procedure through the defence in cross-examination. Jurors heard only that Matthews had “passed away.” In fact, the 25-year veteran shot himself inside Hamilton police headquarters in 2013. At the time, he was under investigation for an inappropriate sexual relationship with a female source. A subsequent investigation by concluded the relationship included “drugs, sex and money.”
That was the guy the defence held up as a paragon of hardnosed policing.
The second was Robert Hansen, a disgraced ex-Hamilton cop and Ruthowsky’s ex-partner in the guns and gangs unit, sentenced to five years behind bars after being convicted in a case that involved planting a gun at a suspected drug dealer’s house.
At this trial, the jury watched a two-hour video made in 2016 wherein Hansen was interviewed by an OPP officer about the Ruthowsky case. He appears in street clothes and was continually referenced as an officer although he’s no such thing anymore. A “good cop,” said Ruthowsky of Hansen.
Another character who drifted through the trial was Samir Abdelgadir, one of the bad apples Ruthowsky was allegedly trying to take off the board. Ruthowsky claimed Mr. X provided a tip that assisted in a 2011 investigation of Abdelgadir, who had homes in Hamilton and Mississauga at the time. A joint operation between Hamilton and Peel Regional police led to a search of Abdelgadir’s Hamilton home, followed by a raid on some storage lockers in the man’s Mississauga condo building where police found eight handguns, ammunition, marijuana and cocaine. Abdelgadir was hit with 23 weapons-related charges.
But, as The Spectator’s Steve Buist reported this week, that condo raid took place on June 9, 2011 — two months before Mr. X allegedly began providing Ruthowsky with information.
Buist itemizes what happened in the Abdelgadir case:
On Nov. 3, 2015, Justice John Sproat ruled that Ruthowsky had deliberately fabricated a date for a search warrant and deliberately fabricated information that Abdelgadir kept 4.5 pounds of marijuana at his Hamilton address. Sproat further ruled that Ruthowsky had lied when he gave testimony related to the search warrant, saying he was troubled by “the ends justifies the means’ attitude” on display.
The warrant was retroactively quashed, the guns and drugs seized ruled inadmissible and the case ultimately collapsed — Abdelgadir found not guilty on the all the charges on the same day of Sproat’s ruling.
And we haven’t even dipped into all the allegations made at this trial about poor practices and procedures at Hamilton Police, from feuding between the guns and gangs unit and the drug squad, to improperly catalogued and stored evidence.
Can’t tell the cops from the criminals, sometimes.
One dirty cop, at least, has had his reckoning, though Lafontaine has said he intends to bring an abuse-of-process motion and will ask that the charges be stayed, with arguments on May 10.
Ruthowsky was found not guilty of a conspiracy to commit an indictable offence — trafficking marijuana.
But he still faces 16 more charges laid last August, including bribery, two counts of breach of trust, two counts of obstructive justice, public mischief, two counts of weapons trafficking, fraud under $5,000, trafficking marijuana, perjury, two counts of conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, robbery and two counts of trafficking cocaine. Good cop: Ken Lam.
Bad cop: Craig Ruthowsky.