Crime Seen (4 page)

During the day stories emerged through the throngs of media flocking to the scene: emergency responders, area residents and curious onlookers had narrowly escaped serious injury from exploding derailed cars leaking flammable liquids and vapours. There were reports that flames from the initial explosions were visible a hundred kilometres away.

Within minutes of the derailment, OPP and other neighbouring police agencies sent officers to respond to the scene. Overnight they assisted Peel Regional Police with the traffic chaos created by evacuated families trying to leave the area, as well as onlookers and media trying to get in. They also helped to cordon off the perimeter of the derailment scene and expanding evacuated areas.

With the confirmation that chlorine gas was now drifting south of the derailment scene, my day shift was dispatched to assist with further evacuations. I was assigned a grid of residences north of the detachment. I had no legal authority to force people to leave their homes but tried my best to persuade them to do the right thing and get their families out of potential danger. (Even today, under the current Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, there is no authority to force someone to evacuate. The only legal power is under common law and only if there is imminent danger, such as a fire in a residence.)

As I went from door to door, the wind started to pick up and the smoke and chemical smell started to get stronger. I certainly could have used a gas mask but they hadn’t been distributed to us. When people answered my knock at their door I’m sure I must have looked like I was crying with my watering, stinging eyes and running nose. Some residents were just getting up and had no idea what had happened. Others were already making plans to leave their homes. I told them what little I knew: that there were dangerous gases on a derailed train and that they needed to leave their homes for their own safety. I had no information as to how long they would be gone. Some needed a little persuasion. Others refused. I asked those that were going to evacuate to leave their front lights on to show they had left.

Evacuation announcements continued in stages throughout the day to mitigate some of the traffic chaos and avoid overwhelming evacuation centres that had been set up. Once my area evacuation job was complete, I was assigned to a roadblock just north of the derailment at the perimeter of the evacuation zone. A crisis can often bring out the best in people and I saw that throughout the rest of the day. Volunteer services, like the Red Cross, St. John Ambulance, Salvation Army and others, were on site quickly. They were able to assist the evacuees to register their whereabouts for inquiring family and friends, as well as provide food, shelter and medical assistance if needed. Stores and restaurants in unaffected areas opened their doors and gave free meals to people in need, as well as to emergency and support personnel. Concession trucks full of food, drinks, candy and even cigarettes stopped at roadblock locations and opened up their doors. Even people in their private vehicles passing by would stop and hand you out something to eat or drink.

Occasionally people would come by looking for their friends or relatives in the evacuated zones and were worried that they may still be inside. It was actually lucky that evacuation efforts took place at night and then over the course of a Sunday. Most parents were in the company of their children and other family members and were evacuated together. If this incident had occurred during a weekday when parents were at work and children were at school or with caregivers, the evacuations would have been much more chaotic.

Such evacuations can run the risk of stay-behind looters. Later in the afternoon I chased down three teenagers in my evacuated zone and escorted them to the perimeter with a “don’t come back or else” warning.

At midnight, another OPP officer arrived to relieve me. As I headed south on Highway 10 back to the detachment, it was eerie driving through the deserted main street of what had become a ghost town. After being on my feet for most of the last eighteen hours, I was beat and ready to head to my thankfully non-evacuation-zone home. It had been an exhausting yet exhilarating day on the job playing a very small part in emptying a city of 116 square kilometres.

With just a few hours of sleep, I was back up for Monday’s day shift. Recently elected Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion had officially declared the evacuated areas of her city closed for business until further notice. As I made my way to the office, I was soon part of the traffic chaos created by the QEW closing overnight. Toronto’s regional commuter rail transit system in the west end was closed as well. Traffic was gridlock. It would have been much worse if it were not that many commuters were off work for Remembrance Day. That day I was assigned to the north end of our detachment area covering Highway 401, the only other major artery into Toronto that was open to traffic. In the afternoon I was reassigned to another roadblock location. A number of evacuees were making their way back to the cordoned-off areas in which they lived, in the hope that we could assist them in returning to their homes. Most of my day was spent trying to calm down the people who had not yet been given authorization to return to their homes. The only ones who I allowed back in were those that had approval from the emergency operations centre to retrieve necessary medications. Many could not make alternative arrangements because their medical practitioners’ offices had also been evacuated.

By Tuesday, chemical experts on site determined that the hole and leak in the chlorine tank was likely caused when it blew open. It seemed the resulting pillar of fire and heat sucked most of the chlorine to such a high altitude that it dispersed over a wide area. Allowed to return home that day were 144,000 evacuees. The rest of the 73,000 evacuees gradually returned home through to Friday as more and more areas were determined to be safe. Thankfully, the QEW was reopened in time for Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. The city of Mississauga was officially reopened at 7:45 p.m., nearly six days after the derailment occurred. Mayor McCallion said, “If this had happened a half-mile farther down the track—either east or west—we would have seen thousands of people wiped out. It’s a miracle it happened here [in an industrial area].”
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Many agreed with the mayor that it was a miracle that there was no loss of life and few injuries resulting from an accident of such a large scale. Only one arrest was made during the incident, of a man trying to run a roadblock. At the time, it ended up being the largest peacetime evacuation in North America with over 220,000 people from Mississauga and nearby Oakville leaving their homes. (That record stood until 2005 when close to one million residents evacuated their homes in New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina.)

Short-term assignments like assisting with the evacuation provided a welcome break during my four years of doing traffic patrol. I had arrested nearly two hundred impaired drivers and was getting great feedback from my bosses, but the routine was starting to get to me and I had the urge to try something different. Vacant constable positions, usually in small and remote northern Ontario towns, were regularly displayed on the office bulletin board, but I was twenty-five, single and enjoyed the social opportunities I had living in the Toronto area. One day a new position was posted to work in the Toronto office of Special Services Division. They were looking specifically for an unmarried female constable who would have the ability to travel throughout Ontario for two years. I applied and got a job that would never make me feel like I’d had “just another day at the office.”

OUT OF THE BLUE

“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”

—T.S. Eliot

THE NIAGARA FALLS RESTAURANT
was a dive just as I expected. When my potential new boss called me on the telephone the day before, he told me he had received my application in the mail. He also said that he could tell by the sound of my voice that I’d likely be good for the job—whereas his voice sounded like he’d just awakened from a three-day whiskey bender. We agreed to meet the next day at two o’clock.

What to wear to a job interview is always a crucial consideration. For this one I went with a low-cut tank top, jean jacket, tight skirt that barely covered my butt, black stockings and black high-heeled boots. I teased my blond hair and piled on the makeup, going heavy on the black eyeliner, red lipstick and nail polish.

I saw a booth in the back of the restaurant and walked past a table with two guys eating lunch. One looked up and smiled as I walked past, but no one else seemed to give me a second look. I sat down facing the wall. Like all cops, I didn’t like not being able to see what was going on in a room but today I wanted this guy to come looking for me.

He found me easily enough and looked pretty much as I expected. Short, fat, unkempt. He got down to business right away.

“You Katie?”

“Yep.”

“So, why do you want to do this job?”

“I need the money.”

“Ninety percent of my customers want to go all the way.”

“I got no problem with that.”

He asked me if I had a car and told me how he’d assign me my calls, which he said would take me an hour to an hour and a half. It was a cash-only operation, and I’d be busiest between four and eight o’clock. “Weird stuff”—men who were into cross-dressing, for instance—would be twenty-five dollars more. I’d split whatever I made with him. We also covered the price for orgies and how I’d get his money to him. He said if he wasn’t at home, to give it to his wife.

The whole conversation lasted ten minutes. He told me he might even have a call for me that night. I slid out of my seat and left, surprised the interview was so short, and relieved there was no request to complete any kind of practical skills exercise as part of his applicant selection process.

I drove for several blocks, making a few turns along the way to ensure the pimp wasn’t following me. I turned into the back parking lot of an office complex where I met with my cover team, the two guys who had been in the restaurant. I pulled off my wire from underneath my jean jacket and handed over the evidence they needed. They told me the conversation I’d had sounded good and that I’d gotten them everything they needed. We said goodbye with my promise that I would have my Crown brief statement to them in a few days.

It had been two years since I transferred to the OPP’s Toronto Drug Enforcement Section to work as their first female UC (undercover) officer back in 1981. I was sent on courses, conferences and seminars, but it was the guys in the office, who collectively had worked hundreds of UC projects, that taught me how to play the role and how best to protect myself from getting hurt. Part of their practical training was dropping me on a downtown street corner one day and telling me to panhandle to get used to being on the street. I was alone for about three or four hours and collected fifty dollars in small bills and change. I declined one guy’s offer to go down a nearby alley with him and get more than pocket change in return. Although they never said so, I had the feeling my big brothers were nearby keeping an eye on me.

It was a world away from the type of work I did in Port Credit where wearing a uniform was usually enough influence to get people to do what you wanted them to do. As a UC, I couldn’t carry a police revolver or a billy stick. I had to rely on my personality and all those good persuasion skills I’d learned as a kid to get people to say and do things they would never do if they knew I was a cop. And if problems arose, I’d have to talk my way out of them. I was initially assigned to do a number of “arm piece” roles where I’d accompany a male UC to add to his credibility in an assignment. I would also act as his cover officer, backing him up in case of trouble. Like most UCs in this line of work, I hated doing cover, and loved being the UC.

Most of my assignments required my once-professional image to be downgraded to low class and trashy, with a mouth to match. My beloved designer clothes were pushed to the back of my closet and up front were mostly jeans, T-shirts, tank tops and boots. No brand names or logos allowed. You also needed a good cover story when you were a stranger arriving in a new place. I usually stuck with being an out-of-work waitress or having just been beat up and kicked out by my old man in some other town. I made it a habit of bumming drinks, cigarettes, food and even drugs. If I paid for anything I would always try to negotiate the price down as best I could. Undercover drug purchases were no exception. Since most of my work was in bars, I knew I would be asked in court how much I had been drinking at the time of a UC buy. My drink of choice was Molson Canadian beer in a dark brown bottle. You could nurse it for a long time without people really noticing how much you were drinking.

I was one of the few policewomen in Ontario working undercover at the time. The targets were so gullible that some days it was like taking candy from babies. I never led any of them into thinking that they were going to get something from me other than my cash in return. If they thought any different, too bad for them. One unfortunate cad apparently misunderstood. Months later, when he was being escorted into the courtroom, he told the court officer, “When I gave her the shit, I thought I was going to get screwed. Boy did I get screwed.” He gave me a big smile when he saw me in the courtroom gallery and pleaded guilty.

Getting “narc’ed,” that is, challenged by someone who thought you might be a cop, was part of the job. I remember a bad guy once telling me that he had never sold drugs to a narc because if you ask them if they’re a cop, they have to tell you the truth. I told him I had never heard that before and thanked him for his great advice.

The following was pretty standard for how I dealt with those situations—always with the same opener.

“I heard you got some shit?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“This ain’t the same shit that I got off your buddy the other night is it?”