“You live by the gun and knife, and die by the gun and knife.”— Joseph Valachi, The Valachi Papers
The old Genovese crime family soldier would not recognize today’s outrageous criminal milieu.
But like the Mafia of old, trying to understand gangland requires a deep dive to see where the threads all go.
Driftwood Ave. in the violent Jane and Finch corridor is one of the most deadly locales under the Canadian flag and has been for generations.
Gunfire erupted there again this week leaving two men dead and cops hunting for the killer.
A quick look at the names involved in the opera of bullets and bloodshed and what emerges is a labyrinth with murder appearing to run in at least one of the families involved.
Pour yourself a coffee – or a stiff belt if it’s that time of the day.
One of the victims killed at 9 Driftwood Ave. was Ibrahim Handule, 26. Police sources told the Toronto Sun that his brother, Farah Hersi Handule, 23, had been wanted for a 2017 murder in Ottawa when he was gunned down in Calgary on Dec. 26, 2019.
Their brother, Abdulkadir Handule was 27 when he was convicted of forcible confinement for a 2019 kidnapping in Burnaby, B.C., in June 2023.
At the time, he was already serving a life sentence after being convicted on two counts of first-degree murder for the 2018 shootings of Jahvante Smart, 21, aka Smoke Dawg, and Ernest Modekwe, 28, aka Koba Prime, in Toronto’s Entertainment District.
At least two of the Handule brothers were aspiring rappers – Abdulkadir Handule went by the stage name 21 Neat and Farah Hersi Handule was known as 22 Filthy.
“This is the world we live in now,” one investigator told the Sun.
Deshawn Walters, 27, also had his ticket punched: Morgue on Driftwood Ave. He was an alleged member of the street gang the Young Buck Killas when he was charged in the kidnapping and torture of two teenage boys in April 2016.
Gangbangers blamed the boys for allegedly tipping off rivals about a party at a condo near the Rogers Centre. The two 17-year-olds “feared for their lives” as they were tied to chairs, beaten, and forced to play Russian roulette with a loaded gun, Toronto cops claimed at the time.
In addition, the teen boys were allegedly forced to perform sex acts while they were held captive for several days at various homes in the city until their families paid a ransom and they were released.
While it’s unclear what the result of those charges were, Walters was also nabbed in a big firearms trafficking bust in Sept. 2016. Bizarrely, a slew of gun-related charges were dropped and he went down on two breaches.
One of Walters’ co-accused in the 2016 kidnapping was yet another aspiring rapper, Quinton Gardiner (stage name Pressa), who at the time was a protege of Drake. Hell, our sugary-sweet legal system let him go to Europe with the superstar while out on bail.
Pressa’s charges were withdrawn in 2017.
Another kidnapping co-accused was a man named Akil Whyte.
On April 21, 2017, father and Hamilton DJ Leonard Pinnock, 33, was targeted for death while he waited in his car near Dufferin St. and Eglinton Ave. W. in Toronto.
Two triggerman clad in black walked up to the vehicle and opened fire.
Six slugs through the driver’s window from point blank range.
Whyte fled the country and was arrested by the U.S. Marshals two years later in Atlanta, GA. No motive for the senseless murder of Pinnock has ever emerged.
Whyte was convicted of first-degree murder in the judge-alone trial and sentenced to life in prison in 2022.
Deshawn Walters narrowly missed another brush with death when he was clipped by bullets in 2020. He survived – for a few years, anyway.
But by this week there were only a few remaining grains of sand in the hourglass that held the lives of Walters and his co-dead, Ibrahim Handule.