Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Duty by Julian Fantino

Rate this book
As Torontoâ€s chief of police from 2000 to 2005, Julian Fantino faced a seemingly endless array of issues of ethnic sensitivity, rising crime rates, endless budget battles, corruption and vendettas, political spats, a hostile media, and finally, his controversial and contentious dismissal. This brutally frank, hard-hitting memoir describes both his humble beginnings in Italy and his rise through the police ranks, recounting with humor, passion, and honesty the details of a life devoted to public service.

Paperback

First published December 1, 2007

2 people are currently reading
17 people want to read

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
2 (6%)
4 stars
6 (20%)
3 stars
14 (48%)
2 stars
5 (17%)
1 star
2 (6%)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for R.J. Gilmour.
Author 2 books26 followers
July 31, 2024
To understand Fantino's view all you have to do is read the paragraph below. It waxes romantic about Italy as seen through the nostalgic eyes of a child.

What I learned above all in Vendoglio was the importance of family. I also learned about the importance of community. There was a deep sense of discipline and respect in Vendoglio and that included respect for your elders. Honesty and a work ethic were important, too. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I ever saw a police officer in town even though there was a police detachment nearby. There just wasn’t any crime. So while we may have been poor, there was a lot of love. And discipline and accountability. The reality was basically, family, community, and church. 16

…but the first three times I applied I was turned down. That’s right, I was rejected. Later, I did a lot of correspondence courses and got my high-school equivalency, but I didn’t have that when I first applied. 36

I joined the police in 1969 and married Livy in 1970. By that time, we had a house and a mortgage. In those days, Toronto was much more peaceful and civilized than it is now. People didn’t even lock their doors then. We also had the Vagrancy Act, which allowed us to deal with vagrants on the street. If they had no visible means of support, we could pick them up. Some people thought this practise was inhumane, but it was the most humane thing to do because we took them to shelters or to special court where the judge would send them off to detox or to be fed or to get medical attention. 38

Canada’s traditional Mafia centres are Hamilton, Toronto, and Montreal, but the Mob-which is police vernacular for organized crime-has also been well entrenched in many other places, too. This includes such Ontario cities as London and Guelph and other cities like Winnipeg and Vancouver…87-88

The Hells Angels first came to Canada in 1977, and over the next twenty years established chapters coast to coast. In the beginning, they had trouble penetrating into Ontario, which was the domain of another gang, the Outlaws…100

One year later, London was the scene of killings attributed to the biker wars. The slain bikers were Jeffrey Labra’s and Jody Hart, who were both members of the London Outlaws, a large chapter that had been around since the 1960s. At that time, the Outlaws were all over southwestern Ontario with chapters in London, Windsor, St.Catherines, Toronto, Ottawa, and Sault Ste. Marie. As is the case with most bikers, Labrah and Hart were no strangers to police. Five years earlier both of them had been front and centre in a seven-month police probe called Project Bandido. After raiding the homes of some known bikers and their clubhouses, we seized $ 52,000 in cash along with amounts $ 200,000 worth of cocaine and marijuana, not to mention sawed-off shotguns and tear gas. The kind of thing law-abiding citizens keep in their homes, right? At the funeral for Labash and Hart, hundreds of bikers showed up from Ontario, Quebec, and the U.S. And three years before that, in 1989, which was just before I became chief of police in London, a million-dollar cocaine cartel had been smashed by police. There were raids on biker homes and clubhouses in Montreal and in eight Ontario cities, London being one of them.
More recently, in April 2006, the biggest mass murder in Ontario history took place when eight bikers from the Bandidos were shot to death. They had been slaughtered in a farmer’s field in southwestern Ontario. The Bandidos moved into Canada in 2000, when they took over the Rock Machine. In fact, what many people don’t realize is that the Rock Machine was actually created by the Mafia so it could compete with the Hell’s Angels. Well, the Hells Angels won that war and then tried to crush the Bandidos in Ontario. This led to a civil war among the Bandidos, after the Hells Angels recruited a prominent Rock Machine leader to join them. 101

Dave Boothby…Later, in 1995, when I was chief in London, Dave became chief of the Toronto Police Service, and after he retired I succeeded him as Toronto’s chief. 109

In 1991, I left the Toronto police and became chief in London, Ontario. A quiet prosperous city of 350,000 people, London was known as a university town and a haven for old money. One reason I took the job was that, after spending over twenty years as a police officer in a big city, I thought this would be a chance to gain new insights into policing a smaller jurisdiction. London had a fraction of Toronto’s population and a much slower pace of life. After all my experience with organized crime, drugs, and murder, I figured it would be a welcome change. The downside was that I lived just north of Toronto, so taking the London job meant getting an apartment in town and commuting home on the weekend, and that’s what I did. It meant very long days. 119

Not until the mid-1980s did Canada’s Criminal Code include any offences involving child abuse, and in the early ‘90s there was still no law prohibiting the possession of child pornography, even though other countries had such laws. I had been pushing for this after becoming chief in London. I once attended a conference where one of the presenters was an official with the United States Postal Service. He talked about all the seizures they were making of cassette tapes and magazines depicting child pornography. Child pornography was a huge problem all over the world…
Before you knew it, out came Bill C-27. It was supposed to be the ‘fixer’ that would prosecute any Canadian who went abroad to sexually abuse children….
I wanted to devote more attention to this area and joined an Interpol committee called the Standing Working Party on Offences Against Children. I was the only Canadian police chief on that committee and made many contacts with law enforcement people in the FBI and around the world….119-120

Finally, on August 1, 1993, Canada passed Bill C-128. It made the possession of child pornography a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail.
According to Canada’s Criminal Code, the age of consent is eighteen where the sexual activity involved exploitative activity such as prostitution or pornography, or where there is a relationship of trust, authority, or dependency. For other sexual activity, the age of consent is fourteen. Canada’s age of consent has been unchanged since 1890, when it was raised from twelve years to fourteen, but in 2006, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced a bill to raise it to sixteen. This would mean that most adults who have sex with boys or girls aged fourteen or fifteen could face criminal charges. The bill still has not passed.
Still, by making the possession of child pornography a criminal offence, Bill C-128 was a major change in Canada. A month after it became law, two residents in London, Ontario, who possessed homemade chronography decided to destroy their collection. They had a friend dumped their incriminating videotapes in a bag in the Ausable River, just north of the city. A boy fishing in the river found the bag of tapes, took them home, and dried them up. His mother put one of the tapes in the VCR and then called the police. There were tapes of children being sexually abused. Three officers from our vice unit viewed them, and when they told me what they saw, I said we had to identify these children, find out where the tapes were made, and go after these guys. The investigation was called Project Scoop it started off as a child pornography case. We eventually seized ninety-three videotapes from the river.
Are officers made still photographs from the tapes and showed them to both current and retired police officers, social workers with the local Children's Aid Society, and staff from area group homes. One of those people was able to identify a young person from a photo. That person was approached by our police and interviewed, and pretty soon we were on to other youths and suspects and the whole network started to unravel. 121

The first two suspects in London were arrested in November 1993, and over the next few months we arrested many more. As our investigators started digging around, one kid talked about another kid who talked about another kid and the thing just snowballed. Our investigation soon became obvious this was about more than pornography. One point that must be clarified right here is that any situation involving child pornography also involves child abuse. These videos were of kids having sex with adults. So we formed task force and I asked the government of Ontario to fund a joint-forces project that would involve the London police, Ontario provincial police, and also the Toronto police, and that's what happened. The London police became the lead agency and the investigation was renamed Project Guardian. It began in May 1994. 122

Project Guardian eventually involve sixty-two complaints and sixty-one sex suspects. If that's not a ‘ring,’ I don't know what is. The ages of the complaint range from seven to seventeen years with fifty percent of them being thirteen years of age or younger, well the average age of the suspects was forty. When it was all done, 535 criminal charges were laid against sixty-one suspects…
The conviction rate for Project Guardian was 86 per cent. This is an astounding figure, which is almost unheard of in the criminal justice system. Compare that to Canada’s national conviction rate of just under 21 per cent. That’s all it is. So this was more than four times that. As things turned out, 71 per cent of all matters were resolved guilty plea 29 per cent went to trial…123-124

Buryl Wilson, a high school English teacher in Toronto, wrote vicious letters about police and about me personally and then sent them to people and government. He wrote to everybody. He is the man who wrote to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and who got a very nice response from the Prime Minister's Office. Wilson later became a convicted paedophile. Activists in London's gay community said I was a homophobic police chief and we had to go out and again to explain ourselves. Frankly, it made no sense to me. I figured everyone in the community should embrace any initiative to protect children, and the great majority people in London were solidly behind the police and what we were doing, there were some with an agenda who created mischief, made a lot of noise, and got lots of ink.
Then came the morning of March 11, 1995.
We were working on a joint forces project with the Toronto police and Ontario provincial police in pursuit of gangsters called the Balaclava Bandits. These guys had killed the owner of a gun store in Oshawa, Ontario, and had also killed an innocent man for his car… The next day, Saturday, we held a news conference in the boardroom at London police headquarters… at the end of it a reporter asked me about the article in the morning edition of the Globe and Mail. I didn't know what he was talking about, but I assume found out. The article was a vile, vicious attack on Project Guardian and me. It was called an ‘Analysis’ and the headline was ‘The kiddie-porn ring that wasn’t.’… 125-126

London mayor Tom Gosnell, who was also a member of the London Police Services Board, wrote to the newspaper complaining about the peace. Gosnell said that Hannon’s article was unfair and that it had an obvious bias against the police. Newspapers like the Toronto star, which is the biggest in Canada, made hay out of all this and published stories with such headlines as ‘London porn inquiry angers gay activists.’ That ran on June 4, 1995. Voices in the gay press and in Toronto alternative weeklies such as NOW magazine went on the offensive. So that initial article by Hannon led to a wave of interest, with other media jumping on the bandwagon. It included radio talk shows and panel discussions.
Even the New York Times got into the act. On May 29, 1995, the New York Times published a story called ‘Sex Tapes of Children Stir Anxiety’ and picked up on some of the earlier meteor coverage by calling Project Guardian 'the largest child pornography investigation in Canadian history.’ It also quoted Hannon, who said that London was ‘in the grip of a police constructed moral panic.’ 128

Without a doubt, Project Guardian what's the case that made child abuse such a big issue with me. My officers were attacked every day and we took a lot of heat. But I was the one who faced and I was faced critics. I didn’t send anybody to deal with these people. I did it myself. I am also the one who took the issue forward to the provincial government at the outset. We wanted funding so we could do a comprehensive investigation, which we did, we were under constant attack. I never realized there could be such a pushback and such influence. I was shocked that the CBC could be co-opted into this kind of nonsense, knowing well that we were dealing with a very serious problem, the sexual exploitation of children. Looking back, I think of the entire campaign as the most vile, unfair, unethical treatment of police that I have ever seen in my career and law enforcement…129

I am not anti-gay or homophobic and never have been. Frankly, I don't care what someone sexual orientation is as long as they don't break the law. It would be impossible for someone who is homophobic to be chief in a city like Toronto, which has one of the largest, most flourishing gay populations in North America. You just wouldn't get the job. You wouldn't even be considered for the job. However, I am very much against anyone who abuses kids or young people, and as long as I'm in law enforcement, I will go after these characters with everything I've got. You can bet on it. 130

The long-standing child pornography section of the Ontario Provincial Police is called Project P. Before the internet took off-in the early to mid ‘90s-that unit investigated perhaps two cases of child pornography each year. In 2000, it had 200 investigations on its plate and the year after that, 410. However, because of all the time and legwork required, those 410 investigations resulted in only thirty-seven arrests. 133

Toronto’s Sex Crimes Unit grew to become the largest such unit in North America and one of the most recognized in the world. It all started back in December 2000, when a US investigation called Project Avalanche identify a couple in Dallas who were generating more than U.S. $ 1 million a month by selling subscriptions to child pornography websites. This was a huge international operation involving 35,000 people, and 2,300 of them were in the Toronto area. Of these 2,300 people, 241 used a credit card to subscribe. Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie was quickly put in charge of the Child Exploitation Section of the Sex Crimes unit for the Toronto police. In 2002, the Ontario government gave that unit a grant of $ 2 and the unit to 20 full-time people. That group was dedicated to this kind of worked and achieved international recognition as it managed to identify and rescue child victims of computer facilitated, sexual abuse… 134
1 review1 follower
Currently Reading
February 16, 2009
I'm reading this to learn a bit more about our current Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner as I intend to pursue a career in law enforcement with this organization. Fantino isn't afraid to expose what he feels are the flaws in the Canadian legal system.
Profile Image for Teena in Toronto.
2,492 reviews81 followers
July 5, 2012
I enjoyed the writing style. It was interesting to read the stories from his perspective as an insider. Obviously I know who he is but I didn't realize how involved and well-respected he is internationally.
Profile Image for Rich.
13 reviews
January 2, 2014
Good book, a little slow at times but Julian Fantino seems like he was a very dedicated LE officer and was caring and responsive Chief. Reading his account of the murder of Officer Sweet you can tell it has greatly affected Mr. Fantino and still weighs heavily on his mind.
11 reviews
June 30, 2014
I didn't enjoy this book as well as I thought I would; however, it wasn't bad by any means. Some of the stories were informative and interesting but others not so much.

Arliss Crowe
Profile Image for Alex Gregory.
124 reviews8 followers
April 11, 2017
A lot better than I was expecting. Clear language, a lot of interesting anecdotes about the judicial system, and you really get the sense that Fantino has an incredibly thorough (but empathic) understanding of the forces that cause people to commit crimes.

I wasn't planning to enjoy this book as much as I did, but I'm glad I picked it up. Well worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews