Ignazio Drago, who had links to organized crime, was killed in 1992. His case has never been solved.
Almost three decades on, GTA cold case as much a mystery now as then
Ignazio Drago knew something had gone horribly wrong when the man in the blue nylon jacket showed up at his North York home around midnight and said, “I’m a police officer. Come with me.”
The man introduced himself as “Sergeant Harold” and flashed some sort of badge at the side door of Drago’s twostorey, red brick, semi-detached house on Husband Drive in the Steeles and Islington Avenue area.
“Sergeant Harold’s” blue jacket had with “52 Division” on the front, for the Toronto police division that patrols downtown, and “POLICE” on the back.
Drago, 53, didn’t recognize the man and doubted he was really a cop.
“Sergeant Harold” had come by an hour earlier and knocked on the door, but Drago wasn’t home then.
Drago asked his wife and 18year-old daughter to write down the licence plate of the stranger’s four-door blue 1980 Chevrolet Malibu, licence plate 974 NND, before they drove off into the night.
It was Jan. 20, 1992, and “Sergeant Harold” took Drago for a two-kilometre ride.
They likely drove to Islington Avenue, north a few blocks to Steeles Avenue, then east past some industrial plazas, a gas station and a discount shoe store.
They stopped at a dimly lit parking lot behind the industrial office complex by a forklift, lumber piles and cement.
Fifteen minutes after he got into “Sergeant Harold’s” car, a woman who worked at the nearby Pine Valley Racquet Club saw a body lying motionless in the snow.
She let out a scream and a couple of racquet-club employees grabbed some towels and ran toward the body.
“I saw the body, it was on its back,” a worker told the Star at the time. “We weren’t sure if he was dead.” There was no pulse, but a racquet club worker tried CPR anyway.
The body was identified as Drago’s, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at York-Finch General Hospital.
A neighbour later said he thought Drago was brave to get into the Malibu, when he didn’t know or trust the supposed police officer.
Drago clearly didn’t want his wife and daughter to see him killed, the neighbour said.
“What would you do?” the neighbour asked a reporter.
Police quickly said the killing was a professional job.
An underworld contract had been taken out on Drago’s life several years earlier but, apparently, it had been called off.
Drago ran a paving company, but he was known to police for his enthusiastic gambling and connections to the heroin trade along the College Street and St. Clair Avenue West strips.
His brother, Vincenzo (Vince), was a menacing figure there, with an ugly scar on his face from when he came second place in a knife fight.
“He wasn’t a guy that you crossed without giving it a lot of thought,” retired RCMP StaffSgt. Larry Tronstad, a longtime member of the anti-organized crime Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, said in an interview.
Ignazio Drago benefited from Vince’s reputation for toughness to stay safe.
“Ignazio, he just leant on Vince,” Tronstad said.
Drago lost that protection when his brother was sentenced to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to trafficking heroin out of a small tailor shop on St. Clair in an operation that was investigated by police in Canada, Italy and the United States.
Vince was nabbed after he tried to sell 20 kilos of 94 per cent pure heroin to a DEA agent in Illinois.
Ignazio, who was born on Feb. 14, 1938, in Catania, Sicily, moved to Canada in the mid-1950s. Before setting up his paving company, he was involved in real estate.
He was convicted of a gambling charge in 1982 in Toronto.
Just hours before his murder, he had appeared in Newmarket court on another gambling charge after he was arrested with 66 others in raids on seven social clubs in Vaughan and Richmond Hill.
His arrest was at the Café Paradise, close to where his life ended. “If you look out the window (of Café Paradise) you can easily see the building where he ended up dying,” Sgt. Norn Miles of York Regional Police noted.
On the final day of his life, Drago was remanded until June for trial in Newmarket court.
Drago didn’t appear too rattled with the gambling charges in court that day. In fact, he fell asleep in the courtroom, a friend said.
After his murder, neighbours recalled strange sights near his house.
“Sergeant Harold” was seen pacing in Drago’s driveway before he knocked on the door for the second time.
A woman who lived across the street from Drago recalled a man in a light-coloured van who parked in her driveway a week before the murder. The man backed into the driveway, with a clear view of Drago’s house and car.
After about 10 minutes, he drove away. Another neighbour spoke of seeing a man in a truck who parked by Drago’s house two days before “Sergeant Harold” took Drago away.
It was around 1:30 a.m. and the man kept the engine idling.
When the neighbour came out and stared at him, the truck drove away.
Tracking dogs sniffed for any further clues and officers questioned neighbours.
The blue Malibu was discovered the day after the murder, a few kilometres from where Drago’s body was found, parked behind a Steeles Avenue West strip mall at Weston Road. It had been stolen, as were the plates on it.
Blood was spattered on the inside rear right window. Shell casings from a 9-mm handgun lay on the front seat and there were bullet holes in the front and back windshields.
“It’s obvious there was a violent struggle inside and he was shot in the vehicle,” Miles told the Star.
On the back seat: A blue jacket with “52 Division” across the back.
Laser fingerprinting testing was done on the Malibu as well as testing for fibres, hairs and blood samples.
An autopsy of Drago found he was shot five times, in the head, chest and leg.
A police artist pulled together a composite drawing of “Sergeant Harold,” who was described as about 38 years old, about five-foot-10, 200 pounds with a medium build and brown hair combed back. He had a V-shaped face, goatee and dark eyebrows.
No one notable from the underworld showed up for the funeral at St. Philip Nieri Church, on Jane Street near Wilson Avenue.
Investigators recalled how Drago had been under siege in criminal circles.
His associate, heroin dealer Tony Carnovale, was shot to death when he was hit with two shotgun blasts in west-end Toronto in January 1980. Carnovale’s murder was never solved.
Now retired Metro police inspector Ron Sandelli speculated at the time that Drago was probably killed for either gambling or drug debts.
“It was money owed. That’s my gut feeling,” Sandelli said.
There was crude symbolism to the fact that Drago was taken from his home by someone disguised as a police officer.
The clear message was that Drago was also suspected of being a police informer.
“In the drug world, there was always a rat, always,” Tronstad said.
The police garb left in the Malibu had a double message, since the man believed to be the hit man was himself a former police officer. Police circulated their sketch of “Sergeant Harold,” with no results.
No charges were ever laid in the killing.
“In the drug world, there was always a rat, always.”
LARRY TRONSTAD
RETIRED RCMP STAFF-SGT.