Let Me Tell You A Story.

[jimintoronto]

That is the working title for a book that I am working on. Over the course of my working life I have been involved in a number of different criminal cases, ranging from arson, violent radical political activists, biker gangs, and a 1981 Toronto murder case. Plus some interesting roles as an Ambulance Officer, Private Investigator, a repo man, a security dog trainer, and a small town radio show host.

I will be working with a published Canadian author, who has 4 novels in his catalogue.

Each chapter will be a stand alone story, that I experienced and was involved in. These will be true crime events.

A sample. In 1980, I was employed by Metro Toronto Ambulance as an Ambulance Attendant. My partner was Rick Graham. One night we were sent to a "unknown trouble call " at a high rise motel down by the shore of Lake Ontario, which was called The Seaway Towers. Upon arrival at room 312, Rick and I found 3 men in the room, two of whom were dead of gunshot wounds. The third man was also shot in the head, but he was conscious and able to speak.

It turned out the 3 men were Italian mob guys from Montreal, who had come to Toronto to buy a large amount of near pure heroin. They had a suitcase full of cash. The sellers had shot them, and ripped off the money. We checked the 2 men who weren't breathing, and decided to move the third man to a local hospital. As we were leaving, a Toronto Police SGT arrived. We told him there were 2 obviously dead men in the room. We left headed to St Joes emergency, which was 5 minutes away.

At the ER, the wounded man told Police that he knew the shooters , who were also from Montreal, and he described the probable get away car they might be driving , heading back to Montreal. Toronto Police sent a message to the Ontario Provincial Police, who managed to stop the car, at the last exit before entering Quebec.

About a year later Rick and I were called as Crown witnesses, at the trial of the 3 shooters. The wounded man also testified, and they were convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison. In a case of irony, the surviving wounded witness was shot and killed later in a bungled bank robbery in Montreal. He was shot and killed by Montreal Police.

JIMB>

 

[jimintoronto]

Another Toronto Ambulance call...A really hot summer night in August, heavy thunder storms are sweeping across the city and I'm working the night shift with a new female partner. My regular partner Randy is away on vacation.

We get a call to attend at a house on the South Kingsway, a wealthy suburb in the west side of Toronto. Dispatch says it is a "possible hanging " in the basement apartment of a house. It's raining so hard that the wipers are having a hard time clearing the windscreen. Its dark, about 10 pm when we arrive at the address.

My new female partner is a young woman, who I have never worked with before tonight. This is our first shift together. As the senior attendant, I am driving, and she will be doing the patient care duties. The house is a large 2 story brick structure, and the driveway lights are all on, as I park our Ambulance with the rear doors close to the side entrance door.

The home owner opens the side door, and says that they have just returned from a week long stay at the family cottage on Gull Lake. He thinks that the basement tenant is dead in the basement apartment suite. She has not been seen for at least a week. He describes her as being 23 years old, and she has recently lost her job with a real estate company where she worked in the office. Her family lives in another city 3 hours drive away from Toronto.

There is a set of stairs that lead from the side door to the basement suite. My partner and I walk down the stairs, looking for the light switch to turn the lights on. I have a flash light which I use to search for the light switch. I can't find it. My female partner is close behind me on the stairs as I get to the bottom .

I use my flashlight to illuminate the kitchen which is the first room in the suite. I see a body hanging from a chain which is attached to the ceiling. Its a slender young woman, who is obviously dead, given the lividity on her skin, and the strong smell of decomposition in the enclosed space of the basement. As I am about to say something to my young partner, she starts to laugh.

She says to me..."This is a set up, right ? A way to break me in, right "? She thinks this is all an elaborate joke, on her as a newbie. I said nothing. I took her by the hand and walked her over to where the corpse was hanging, and pressed her hand on the leg of the dead girl. She screamed out loud, as she felt the cold skin. She ran up the stairs and out into the pouring rain storm.

I asked the home owner if I could use their phone to call my dispatcher, to request that the Police and a Coroner attend this address. My dispatch told me that due to a large number of traffic accident calls in the rain storm, the Police response would likely be delayed. He asked if we would stay in place, to maintain the scene, until Police could arrive.

Knowing that we were on a non recorded phone line I said....We aren't doing anything important, so we will "just hang around here ". Dave the dispatcher said... " I never heard you say that Jim ".

Eventually, about 3 hours later, 2 Metro Police detectives from the Hold Up Squad arrived to take over the scene. They were somewhat pissed, because being body sitters was not their usual type of thing. My female partner had locked herself in the Ambulance, and she quit the job later that week. JIMB>

 

[CallMeKate]

Oh, I'm so glad to hear you're doing that book, Jim! I think we had talked about having a book in you a couple of times. I enjoyed these stories and I know you have a ton of them that need to be told. Best of luck with this exciting endeavor!

 

[jimintoronto]

Oh, I'm so glad to hear you're doing that book, Jim! I think we had talked about having a book in you a couple of times. I enjoyed these stories and I know you have a ton of them that need to be told. Best of luck with this exciting endeavor!

Thank you. My self and my co author are just in the very early stages of this project. His previous novels are all about growing up in Toronto, when he was a teenager in the 1970's. They have sold well. My stuff will be more wide spread in terms of the time periods, the characters, and what type of role I was involved in, at the time. All true, with a few name changes to avoid legal entanglements. In the 1981 Toronto homicide case, the killer is still alive, and still in prison, so he will be known by an alias in the book. JIMB>

 

[jimintoronto]

Summer day in 1979, hot and muggy in the city. My partner Ranndy and I are filling up our Ambulance at number 11 Toronto Police station, near our station.

" 3292 respond code four to the westbound lanes of the Humber bridge on Dundas Street".

We shut off the gas pump, collect the receipt and head west towards the location. The bridge in this case runs across the Humber River, one of the 5 main rivers that flow south through the city of Toronto into Lake Ontario. The bridge is 3 lanes wide in each direction.

As we arrive on the bridge , we see a Metro Toronto Police officer on the sidewalk, waving at us. We pull over and the officer tells us that....

"A guy has jumped off the bridge, and he is impaled by a small tree on one of the silt islands below the bridge". We drive to the west end of the bridge and turn left going down the park service road, to get to the west bank of the Humber river. Once down there, we meet up with a Toronto Fire Department truck and 4 crew members. The TFD Captain tells us that they brought a 14 foot fishing boat with a 15 horsepower outboard motor, so they can get across the water to the small island where the victim is located.

The TFD boat is only big enough for 3 people to be in it. The fire guys have a small gasoline powered chain saw to use to cut the tree branch that the jumper has sticking through his lower abdomen. Randy can't swim, so I get to ride over to the victim. He is in agony, with a branch the thickness of a man's arm protruding about 4 feet out of him.

Remember that this is 1979, and we have no drugs to give to this patient. The best I can do is give him a bite stick, and tell him to grip it tightly between his teeth, as we use the chain saw to first cut the lower end of the branch, and then the upper end. Once that is done I apply a number of pressure dressings to the remaining piece of the tree branch, and we attempt to place him in the little aluminum fishing boat to get across to the west bank of the river. He is screaming in pain.

We get our patient to the west bank where Randy has our stretcher ready. We place the patient on his side, and gently place him in our vehicle. Randy is driving today, so I am in the back of our vehicle, trying to place an oxygen mask on the patient as we head for St Joes emergency department which is about 15 minutes away. Randy calls ahead on the radio to get our dispatcher to notify St Joes ER about this patient. WE arrive and within a few minutes the patient is being prepped for surgery.

Now for the rest of the story.

At the east end of that Dundas Street bridge, there was The Lambton Tavern, and old run down beer joint. The man who we later rescued from the river had been drinking in the men's beverage room at the Lambton. A Toronto Police officer had entered the bar to use the pay phone. The man( who had a number of arrest warrants out for him ) jumped up and ran out the back door onto Dundas Street, and started running west towards the bridge. The copper ran after him. The chase continued west along the bridge. As luck would have it, another Police patrol vehicle was driving east along the bridge. The wanted man jumped over the edge of the bridge, falling an estimated 60 feet to the silt island below.

The man survived the surgery, spent months in hospital, and was then tried and convicted on a number of charges, including a burglary he had committed that morning in the houses to the east of the bridge. Just another day in the city. JIMB>

 

[CallMeKate]

Did he know (if you know) there was a sediment island down there?! Or did he think he was jumping into water? Good thing it was Randy with you and not the partner you wrote about yesterday... she'd have totally freaked out.

 

[hollydolly]

I am reading these stories, not unaware of the type, because my ex was a firefighter so he had very similar stories..

He and his 'watch'' had regular debriefing sessions, because as you know, they see some horrible things, not just fires as people imagine.. but they're often called to many different horrendous scenes, and are often the first responders...

I just wondered did the ambulance service have the same debriefing available for you... ?

 

[gruntlabor]

Wishing you good luck on this project, jimintoronto

​

 

[jimintoronto]

Did he know (if you know) there was a sediment island down there?! Or did he think he was jumping into water? Good thing it was Randy with you and not the partner you wrote about yesterday... she'd have totally freaked out.

Morning Kate. I don't know for sure what the guy knew. He was in a panic mode, saw cops coming from both directions on the bridge.....And jumped over the waist high barrier. My partner Randy was born in Newfoundland, in a small town called Badger, which is smack in the middle of the island. NO swimming pools in Badger, so he never learned to swim. I have a strong aversion to heights, so....If it was a "wet call " I was going in the water, but if it was a call that involved heights, Randy was doing the climbing. That was our personal agreement. JIMB>

 

[OldOld]

let's just say everybody has a life story to tell.

 

[jimintoronto]

Wishing you good luck on this project, jimintoronto

​

Thanks. I have been thinking about this idea for a long time. Now I have a co-author who has published 4 successful fiction novels to work with me.

The pages I am writing here are condensed versions of what I hope will be chapters in my book.

 

[jimintoronto]

A repo story, around 1995 in Toronto. I was a licensed Private Investigator in Ontario for about ten years. My boss was Glenn Woods, who had been a Detective with Peel Regional Police for about 15 years. He was shot and badly wounded during a bungled bank robbery at the Square One shopping mall in Mississauga. He took a medical retirement from PRP, and started up Antrium Investigations. I was his first employee.

Glenn had a lot of good connections with some leading Canadian corporations, like Ford of Canada, who owned Budget Rent A Car, Lever Brothers who made soap products, and General Motors of Canada. We provided back ground checks for those companies, and we also did worker's compensation fraud investigations of workers who were falsely claiming benefits.

One day Glenn gave me a file that was somewhat different. We had to find a man named Jacob Rothstein, who was a building contractor. Mister Rothstein had received a sum of $250,000 as a down payment to build a 15 unit strip mall in one of the Toronto suburbs. He used the money to pay off some of his own debts, instead. My task was to find him and serve him with court documents informing him of a civil suit being brought against him by the company that he had taken the money from.

In the file, I saw that Mister Rothstein owned a number of houses in the northern suburbs of Toronto. When I say a number, he had seven houses that he or his Wife owned or had mortgages on. All of them needed to be checked physically by me. I did that the next day, with negative results. Going back into the files I saw that Mister Rothstein had 5 leased vehicles, 3 work vans, a Cadillac Coupe De Ville , and a Buick station wagon. All of those 5 vehicles were leased from a major G.M. dealership in north Toronto.

I called the dealership by phone, and asked to speak to the leasing manager. His name was Brian Bone. I explained who I was looking for, and he immediately said...."That SOB ". Rothstein was far behind on his lease payments, to the tune of about $22,000 in arrears. Brian Bone agreed that I could come up and read the files on Rothstein, to see if any new information could be found. The next day I went to the dealership and read all of the files on Rothstein. I didn't find any new addresses. I did learn a new bit of information from the chief clerk in the leasing department.

Mister Rothstein had a set of 15 year old twin boys. Now I had something solid to work with. Despite the fact that Rothstein moved around every few months, his kids might attend one high school in the district. The clerk told me that the station wagon was driven by a housekeeper that lived with the Rothstein family.

I put together a list of all the high schools in a 15 mile radius, and started watching the school parking lots at the end of each school day. I was watching for the Buick wagon which was maroon. I also went to the central library for that part of Toronto, to have a look at the previous year's high school year books, looking for the twins. BINGO. I found them in the year book for York Memorial Secondary School.

Next day at 3.30 pm I was set up at York Memorial in the parking lot. Buick wagon shows up, two boys get in and the female driver heads home, to an address that I had not known about previously. I called Brian Bone at the GM dealership and told him I had found Rothstein and all of the leased vehicles. He was happy. I told him to have 5 tow trucks at the house at 6 am the next morning.

I served Rothstein with the court documents, as all 5 vehicles were being towed away back to the dealership, which was just FOUR blocks away from where the Rothstein couple had been living. Brian Bone called me the next day and told me that there was a "thank you check " waiting for me in his office. The dealership paid me $2,000 for helping to recover vehicles that were worth about $80 k. Brian asked me if I was interested in working some more leasing files, ones they were having trouble finding. I said I would have to talk to my boss Glenn about that.

I eventually left Antrium Investigations and started up Jim Bunting Enterprises, doing repos for Brian Bone at the G.M. dealership. I did that for about 4 years. In Canada doing vehicle repos is not like in the USA. I never had anyone pull a gun on me. If I was doing the job properly, they didn't know the vehicle was gone, until I called the person and said...It's not stolen it has been returned to the legal owner, the leasing company. Call them to make arrangements to get your personal belongings back, at the storage yard. JIMB>