Hamilton cop interprets wiretapped calls in corruption case
TORONTO — It must be Kafkaesque, a maniacally hard-working cop — so zealous he was mocked by colleagues — to find himself dumped into a trial, facing some of the most serious charges that can be laid against a member of law enforcement.
Bribery, attempting to obstruct justice, trafficking cocaine, criminal breach of trust and conspiring to traffic marijuana.
Or maybe, with its occasional fillips of dry humour, Hitchcockian: The Man Who Faked Too Much.
As suspended Hamilton Det.Const. Craig Ruthowsky has now spent three days on the stand in a Toronto courtroom, under examination in chief, trying to explain. Rebutting here and denying there and untwisting yonder.
Dozens of professional commendations on the resumé, court has heard, one of them actually bestowed after he was suspended (with pay) from the force in 2012. “Nothing like getting a commendation while suspended,” Ruthowsky, who has pleaded not guilty, told the jury on Friday.
I can’t quite put my finger on the correct word to describe Ruthowsky’s demeanour and presentation as a witness. Selfconsciously earnest? Gabby? Conversational, as he aims his answers directly at the jury as if they were all just sitting around talking at a backyard barbecue, with Ruthowsky wearing an apron that says: Kiss the cook? A one-way conversation, obviously, though the jury will provide its response, via verdict, in due time.
The 44-year-old was a dirty cop, the prosecution maintains. Corrupt-o. Paid off $20,000 a month by drug dealers in exchange for protection and useful information about police investigations and a kind of consigliere advice, helping crooks stay out of investigative crosshairs. And a piece of the drug trade action, as asserted by the Crown’s star witness last week, a drug trafficker known as Mr. X, his identity covered by a publication ban.
Mr. X, Ruthowsky has repeatedly insisted, was his informant, a groomed snitch from whom, perish the thought, he’d never taken a penny. Mr. X has countered just as adamantly that he was no such thing and who-you-calling-a-rat?
It is through this prism of insider information induced that all of his actions, all of his chats — including the 2015 wiretapped parley with a dealer that led to Ruthowsky’s being criminally charged — must be viewed, the defendant attests. Just old-fashioned cop initiative, Ruthowsky known and admired for the knack he had of turning crooks into informants; had a slew of them in his heroic quest to clean up Steeltown, take down cocaine kingpins, the “bigger fish,” and get guns off the street, especially during his five years with the guns and gangs unit.
That wiretapped dialogue was played again in court Friday, defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine stopping the tape over and over so that the witness could insert what he really had intended, the ploy that he’d been unspooling. Why, so committed was Ruthowsky to his undertaking that he maintained relationships with the informants even after he was suspended, in part because, well, this was his vocation and in part to prove his superiors wrong, that they’d made a dreadful mistake booting him out of the copshop, sending him home with his case files (which included names of informants he’d never put into his informant book, as dictated by Hamilton Police Service regulations), and his suspended investigations. “I was angry I was on suspension. There was a small vein of anger that propelled me forward.”
The informants kept giving him priceless dope, such as the name of a suspect in the notorious 2012 gang-related Danzig block party shooting in Toronto, a man believed to be lying low in Hamilton, that he passed on to Toronto police, and information about a vicious stabbing murder — the victim’s fingers were chopped off — which helped Hamilton police solve the homicide. All these informants, some of whom he pretended to befriend, some of whom he cut slack on information to obtain warrants — quid pro quo, you understand — filled his boots with insider intelligence. Addressing the warm conversation with a dealer on the audio recording, talking about his recent family vacation, at one point reassuring the other man, who’d been caught with drugs, that the charges against him would probably be dropped: “You make him feel like he’s trusted and the blinders, the blockades, will come down. He’ll open up his heart to you.”
Mr. X was especially attractive as an informant, said Ruthowsky, because someone the alleged snitch knew, a really nbig fish in the narcotics business, was the bust that made his mouth water. So, indeed — as Mr. X testified last week — he did take a cocaine-cutting sample to a lab, paying for the analyzing test out of pocket, to determine what cutting agent was being used. Cutting agents are mixed in with cocaine to increase its volume and maximize profits by the time it gets stepped down to the street.
The dealer was aggrieved because he was being charged a “crazy amount” for the cutting agent; figured if it could be identified, he might be able to buy the stuff in bulk. From Ruthowsky’s perspective, the favour was all about building a case against the bigger fish, who was providing the agent, a chemical called phenacetin. The plan was to bird-dog the dealer when he was buying the cutting agent and then follow them to what he hoped was the man’s safe house. Because, Ruthowsky explained, the dealer had tipped him about a huge cocaine shipment shortly inbound to Ruthowsky’s associate. There was no time, Ruthowsky said, to go through the proper channels for substance testing, which would have to be done by Health Canada. But he never tipped off informants about pending police raids while on suspension. “(I wouldn’t) have the ability to get that information. My suspension, basically, I had no police communication devices.” Couldn’t go into the station, couldn’t access police computers.
On the wiretap, Mr. X asks Ruthowsky whether police could have been behind a rip-off in which two kilos of his cocaine had been stolen from a car parked at Sherway Gardens. Possibly, Ruthowsky responds. But he was “99.9 per cent sure” it was an inside job and the culprit was the driver, a longtime associate of the dealer’s partner.
Always, said Ruthowsky, his objective had been to extrapolate information. “
Were you giving away state secrets?” Lafontaine asked. Never, said Ruthowsky, had he revealed anything about investigative “tradecraft” that they couldn’t have picked up watching TV cop shows. “The intention was to sew confusion about police techniques.”
The trial resumes Monday.