What Killed Jane Creba. Anita Arvast
As he would tell the court during the preliminary hearing, “In 2005, you (couldn’t) be in between. There is no neutral ground.” Rivalries were clearly heating up between the two groups of music makers.
On October 28, 2005, Marz was going to go to a movie with his girlfriend. As they crossed the street to get in a cab, two guys in masks on bikes fired shots on Marz as he scrambled to safety. He was pretty sure it was members of another rap group affiliated with Point Blank, who at the time went by the name TnT (based on their names Turk and Tyke).[2] TnT — who later became TnT Sick Thugz — were later attached to another shooting at the Toronto Eaton Centre in 2012. They sang about violence and Marz reported that they actually perpetrated it targeting individuals in the south part of Regent Park. When Point Blank stopped rapping in about 2013, TnT/Sick Thugz had replaced them in the media and on police radar as the “Sic Thugs Gang.”[3]
As for Marz, no gang affiliation. He just wanted out of the neighbourhood. His girlfriend wanted him out. But sometimes you just don’t have a choice about where you live.
Just three days after the shooting by Marz’s cab, on Hallowe’en night, a gunfight erupted behind Marz’s building with at least thirty guys involved. It’s a miracle nobody died. Another shootout happened in Regent Park in mid-November. Marz reported that this was the work of the rival TnT and Silent Souljahs.
Creedy was apparently one of their main targets. They didn’t get him in the mid-November shootout in Regent Park, or on the day when a car he was sitting in got riveted with bullets. After those incidents, he went into what Marz called “hyper-paranoid mode” — changing his cellphone every few days, never staying in the same location for more than a few days, and certainly keeping on the down low in public.
No way Creedy would be out on Boxing Day. Marz was right. Too much popping off in the “park where we don’t play.”
But it wasn’t as easy as just those rivalries between Silent Souljahs, Point Blank, and TnT. It was more about personal rivalries and allegiance to friends; issues less threatening to the public than gangs and far too nuanced to explain.
There are bad boys in every neighbourhood, it’s just that some neighbourhoods have conditions that tend to produce more. Short was one on the bad boys. He had a lengthy criminal record for drugs, assaults, break-and-enters, and drug trafficking. He wasn’t a gang member. He was an entrepreneur, who ran up against some other entrepreneurs in the drug trade.
He had a lot of enemies, especially from Black Creek, and at one point even told police that word on the street was that there was fifty thousand dollars up for grabs for his head. It’s nice to feel important.
Boy had enemies from both Black Creek and Jane-Finch. Same place Short had enemies.
A lot of dealers in the suburbs don’t have enough customers in their own area, so they sometimes migrate downtown to deal. And that was crossing territories. Whether you’re a record store owner, a mom-and-pop restaurant, or a drug dealer, nobody wants competition coming into their turf.
Boy and Short also had enemies called the Po Boys (or Project Originals), who named themselves this because the Atkinson Housing Co-op where they resided (with boundaries Dundas West to the north, Queen to the south, and Bathurst and Spadina on either side) was the first (i.e., original) public housing conversion in Canada. They started off just promoting community pride, but eventually those ideals fell to the wayside and the Po Boys, like many of the young men, turned to the drug trade. The Po Boys claimed strong allegiance to the Bloods. Their rivals included people from Regent Park and the Jane-Finch corridor, even though the Regent boys also referred to themselves as “Bloods through and through.” Go figure.
It seems that the L.A. gang culture didn’t really transplant so well to Toronto. Too many boys confused about what it meant and where the intersections spelled a territory. Some of them still wore the colours — red for Bloods, blue for Crips. But honestly, very few were actually associated with either L.A. gang.
Some reports claimed the reason for the Boxing Day shootout was because of a rivalry between a kid named JoJay (a Point Blank affiliate because his uncle was a member of the group) and Boy (a Silent Souljahs affiliate). Not so easy. Not so true. Another of the reported rivalries was between Short and a guy in Black Creek named Big Guy. That wasn’t quite true either.
Big Guy wasn’t a part of any gang. The police and media used these guys’ nicknames to imply they were all gang members, but the truth was much more simple than that. Fact is, all of them got their handles when they were children. It’s a standard part of Jamaican culture. Big Guy wasn’t called Big Guy because he was a significant menace; he got that name for his stocky physique as a boy.
Did Big Guy have friends? Yes, he did. But they weren’t gang members either. The usual concept of a gang is a group of individuals who commit crimes together. The truth is that most “gangs” have much more considerably fluid membership. So-and-so is friends with this other guy, so they hang out. Sometimes friendships go awry and those bonds break. Street gangs don’t have initiation rights or oaths or even anything remotely resembling a commitment. They’re often just groups of teenagers who come together — usually to protect each other from bullying or threats of violence. Bullying and threats are all too common in difficult neighbourhoods. Why wouldn’t a person want to ensure they had the protection of friends?
Still, Big Guy had a reputation with the police as a previous associate of the Weston Road and Lawrence Avenue 5 Point Generalz (or 5PGz), who were based out of an area just west of Black Creek. He had an extensive rap sheet for guns, drugs, resisting arrest, and assaults (including on officers). The truth is that he spent most of his time in the Black Creek area working part-time at a community centre, helping young children. His police files don’t mention the community work, or his coaching of baseball teams in his neighbourhood, or his regular church attendance.
Despite what was in his police file, he wasn’t actually associated with the 5PGz. Yes, he knew them. But it wasn’t friendly. There was apparently another Black Creek gang called the Gatorz who weren’t too friendly with the Five Point Generalz. Big Guy wasn’t a part of that gang either.
It seems the police files had a lot of wrong information about Big Guy.
While Big Guy lived with his parents, he also paid a bit of rent to another guy in the Black Creek area — a guy named Kory Benoit Jones. Kory’s crib was a basement apartment in a house. His mom didn’t care for his lifestyle and kicked Kory out at a young age. When he had money for the bus, he sometimes made it to school. But mostly he just sat around his apartment smoking dope. School is hard when you’re virtually illiterate. Welfare carried him some of the time, but to keep up with his pot habit he would do break-and-enters and deal in crack and pot.
It was tough to make his rent, so he tried getting a couple of roommates. That’s how Big Guy ended up there in the fall of 2005. Kory would smoke pot every day all day, and Big Guy just used the place once in a while to bang a girl or hang. Kory didn’t have much use for Big Guy. And at the end of the day, Big Guy had zero use for Kory. Kory was just a little guy in his mind.
Big Guy saw Kory as something of a wimp. Kory didn’t much care because he was stoned most of the time and had become completely complacent about anything going on in his apartment.
Those tensions aside, Kory’s apartment was pretty useful for anyone who was trying to stash arms or anything else remotely illegal. He had a “smoking room” — really just a dingy room not much bigger than a closet — where he and anyone hanging at his crib could go smoke. The ceiling in the room wasn’t finished, just beams and fibreglass insulation. It was a perfect spot for guys to hide any guns they were carrying or trying to sell, and Kory would always play the stupid, stoned guy who knew nothing about this.
Big Guy stashed his 9-millimetre there.
Big Guy was also friends with a young offender named Jorell Simpson Rowe, whom he met at school. He went by the nickname of JoJay because it just rolled off the tongue a lot easier. JoJay had a difficult past. When JoJay was young, his father was deported, leaving the boy to be raised by an often violently abusive, alcoholic