‘The weapon here was the computer’
Toronto police civilian employee Erin Maranan pleaded guilty to breach of trust after selling information gleaned from illegal searches on people — three of whom were later killed
On a winter day in 2015, Erin Maranan logged on to her computer at a police detachment in Toronto’s northwest corner, a trove of confidential information at her fingertips.
A temporary civilian employee, Maranan had access to information classified by police as “highly restricted.” The job represented a sharp turn on her vocational path, which had included stints as a model, a personal trainer and a yoga instructor.
The petite woman with long, black hair keyed in the name “Victor Oliveira.” Up came a summary of a recent Highway Traffic Act ticket, which provided personal information including the licence plate number and description of his vehicle.
Seven months later, Oliveira was fatally shot as he sat in his white Range Rover outside a restaurant near Pearson airport.
Maranan’s query was just one of dozens of illegal police database searches conducted under the nose of her employer during a 16-month spree between 2014 and 2015. All were done for the benefit of organized crime and constituted an “extremely serious breach of trust,” Ontario Court Justice Edward Kelly said in a recent ruling.
The Crown theory was that some of Maranan’s searches were conducted to collect information on rival members of criminal organizations, while others were so-called “heat checks” — queries done on a gang’s own members to find out what police had on them. Three of the people Maranan searched were later killed.
“This … demonstrated organized crime’s ability to corrupt people in positions of public trust.” RCMP NEWS RELEASE
The victims include Thanh Tien Ngo, who died outside a North York bowling alley in a March shooting that also killed an innocent bystander. Two other victims survived after they were shot inside a ritzy Toronto steak house in 2015.
Kelly sentenced Maranan to a year in jail followed by three years of probation after the 30year-old mother pleaded guilty to breach of trust. As Maranan was taken into custody last week, her mother sat in the front row of the courtroom, quietly weeping.
In his lengthy sentencing decision, Kelly said Maranan had been “wilfully blind” to the fact that the information she had gathered was being provided to criminal organizations, which included Toronto’s Chin Pac gang and Vancouver’s United Nations gang.
Kelly noted the Crown did not establish Maranan knew how the information would be used, and it was not proved that the disclosure of information compromised ongoing investigations or resulted in harm to any particular person.
“Nevertheless, she must have known that the disclosure of the information could have compromised ongoing investigations and or prosecutions, placed police officers and or members of the public at risk, and ultimately erode public confidence in the police service and the administration of justice,” he said.
In a voluntary statement given to Toronto police this year, Maranan admitted conducting unauthorized searches on “many occasions” concerning “many individuals,” according to an agreed statement of facts filed in court, which names 20 people as the subjects of her searches.
Some of the searches were done at the behest of one man, who has ties to criminal organizations. The Star is not publishing his name at the request of the judge to protect Maranan’s child.
No one has been charged for counselling Maranan to commit breach of trust.
Maranan admitted to having been paid a total of between $3,000 and $4,000 for the information she gleaned. But the sum did not explain why Maranan engaged in such risky criminal behaviour, Kelly said.
“What is most notable in this case is that Ms. Maranan has not offered any explanation for her criminal conduct that could be considered as mitigating,” Kelly said. “In fact, she has not offered any explanation at all (of ) what motivated her to commit her crime, apart from financial advantage.”
Gary Clewley, Maranan’s lawyer, declined to comment.
Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said the case was “unique,” and “in no way defines the committed professionalism of the service’s civilian members.”
Once police became aware of Maranan’s activities, Gray said, the service’s professional standards unit conducted a thorough investigation, resulting in the criminal charges.
While not a direct result of Maranan’s case, Gray noted, the service has made changes to civilian and uniform hiring processes to ensure the best possible candidates. That hiring plan stresses the importance of “acting professionally, with integrity and without prejudice, even in the most challenging of circumstances when no one is watching.”
Maranan was hired as a temporary employee with the forensic identification unit. On her first day in September 2013, she took an oath she would not disclose any of the information obtained through her work.
The breadth of information she could retrieve was substantial. According to court documents, her queries gave her access to a catalogue of individuals within the police databases, including photos, physical descriptions, addresses, known associates and more.
On one occasion, she queried the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), a national crime database, to learn that a member of the Chin Pac gang was under surveillance.
Although the details remain unclear, Maranan’s illicit searches were ultimately uncovered during a multi-jurisdictional and years-long investigation into organized crime and the fentanyl trade.
The RCMP-led Project O’Tremens resulted in the arrests of nine alleged GTA organized crime members who were charged with dozens of drugrelated offences, including trafficking.
Announcing those charges last year, the RCMP revealed that Project OTremens had uncovered Maranan’s “transgressions,” with police alleging she made queries on behalf of a criminal organization the probe had targeted.
“This investigation … demonstrated organized crime’s ability to corrupt people in positions of public trust to further their criminal enterprise,” the RCMP said of Maranan in a news release.
In December 2015, the Toronto police professional standards unit took over the probe, dub- bing the investigation Project Madre. The probe included running surveillance on Maranan and accessing her phone records, which showed she had a “personal relationship” with an alleged gang member whose name she queried 17 times.
In their agreed statement of facts, Clewley and Crown prosecutor Stephen Byrne noted that the information Maranan had access to was so highly restricted that even those investigating her did not have immediate clearance to see it.
Neither “the two veteran detectives who investigated her, nor their Detective Sergeant, could access it without special permission from a TPS superintendent,” the document states.
The investigation culminated in Maranan’s arrest in July 2016 on two charges of breach of trust. She faced an avalanche of new breach of trust charges as the investigation continued.
In February, in a voluntary interview with police, Maranan “admitted that she had conducted unauthorized inquiries to access confidential information.” Those inquiries included a February 2015 search of Ly Duy Nguyen, a member of the Chin Pac gang, who was murdered in a Vancouver strip mall seven months later.
Weeks later, she searched Nguyen’s associate, Thanh Tien Ngo. He was the victim in a high-profile shooting outside a North York bowling alley on March 17, 2018, that also killed bystander Ruma Amar.
During her search of Ngo, she accessed a restricted firstdegree murder report containing information about the investigation into the murder of Ngo’s father, Ngoc Ngo, who was killed in a hit in 2014 that police believe was intended for his son. Among the things she found in the report were the notes of an officer involved in that investigation.
Maranan also searched an alleged Asian Assassinz gang member and his girlfriend in late 2014. Nine months later, the couple survived a shooting that took place as they ate at Michael’s restaurant in downtown Toronto.
Yet another search was done on Paul Galati, who according to the agreed statement of fact is an associate of Maranan’s common-law partner, a man serving time for drug-trafficking offences. She spoke or texted with Galati 45 times while under investigation.
Taken together, Maranan’s searches show her behaviour was “deliberate and focused,” Kelly found. But the judge noted that she apologized for her conduct and seemed “genuinely remorseful.”
After Kelly finished reading out his sentencing decision, Byrne requested a weapons prohibition.
The judge pushed back, reminding Byrne that Maranan had not “had anything to do with weapons before.” Then he asked Clewley for his opinion.
Maranan’s lawyer agreed that it wasn’t necessary. “The weapon here was the computer,” he said.