Ontario’s Tow Truck War
The tow truck war is usually written about in the past tense — a burst of arsons and shootings between 2019 and 2021, answered by a new provincial law. That account is wrong. Toronto police logged 63 firearm discharges linked to the towing industry in 2024 alone, a higher annual figure than anything published for the original peak, and no evaluation anywhere shows the law reduced the violence.
It Did Not End
The standard telling has the war running from roughly 2018 to 2021, cresting with a wave of police operations, and closing with Ontario’s Towing and Storage Safety and Enforcement Act. Every part of that is true. The conclusion drawn from it is not.
Toronto police recorded 63 firearm discharges linked to the towing industry in 2024 — roughly thirteen per cent of every shooting in the city that year. That is a larger annual figure than any published for the earlier peak. Operator certification had taken effect in January of that year.
The conflict did not end. It reconfigured, and the second phase has been covered far less than the first.
Why Towing
The recurring puzzle for readers is why anyone would firebomb a competitor over a tow. The answer is that the tow is not the product. It is the acquisition event.
- First-to-arrive. The GTA ran on a system with no dispatch control, so whoever reached a collision first owned the job. That made a corner or a stretch of highway a cash-generating asset — and something worth fighting over.
- Staged collisions. Crashes deliberately caused with low-value vehicles, or drivers swapped after a genuine collision so accomplices can claim medical expenses.
- Vertical integration. The same network owns or is paid by the body shop, the rental company, the storage yard, the paralegal and the rehabilitation clinic. As Bryan Gast of Équité Association put it: “It can involve the tow companies, the medical facilities, the paralegals, the body shops, the car rental companies, all working together.”
- Inflated billing. Overstated damage assessments, deliberate additional damage inflicted on vehicles, and storage fees accruing at remote yards.
Toronto Life, reporting on the industry, put the arithmetic simply: a single tow can generate $10,000 in business once the downstream billing is counted. That is the economics that makes a stretch of highway worth shooting over.
On the national cost of insurance fraud, the figures in circulation deserve a caveat: Équité Association estimates $3 to $5 billion annually and the Insurance Bureau of Canada has said “well over $1 billion,” but these are national numbers. This publication could find no Ontario-specific figure published by either body or by the province.
The Trigger Was a Lawyer
The escalation of 2018 and 2019 did not begin with a killing. It began with civil litigation.
Vaughan litigator Lisa Carr ran an insurance-fraud recovery practice that by 2018 was handling roughly 1,400 active files involving inflated towing and storage charges and fraudulent repair billing.
November 2018 and January 2019 — the Carr Law building is set on fire, twice.
August 2019 — Qalid Abderezak robs a woman he has mistaken for Carr, telling her to stop the lawsuits.
Late August 2019 — a handgun attack is made on Carr’s vehicle. A different man, Thomas Sliwinski, was charged in connection with it; this publication could not verify the outcome.
Early September 2019 — Abderezak fires seven bullets through the front window of the firm.
Sources differ on the precise dates within this sequence — CTV places the robbery in August and the shooting on 6 September; other accounts give 29 August and 5 September. The order is consistent across all of them: the robbery came first.
She closed the practice.
Abderezak was convicted and sentenced by Justice Fuerst to twelve years, less roughly five years’ credit for pre-trial custody. His appeal was dismissed at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
The Carr campaign is the clearest illustration of what the conflict was actually about. The violence was not competition between tow operators for road space. It was an industry defending a fraud pipeline against the person unwinding it in court.
Project Platinum — and Its Partial Collapse
York Regional Police announced Project Platinum in May 2020, a joint operation with the OPP, Toronto police and the Canada Revenue Agency. Warrants were executed between 30 April and 20 May; twenty people were charged, on hundreds of counts.
Over the roughly three-year investigative window, YRP attributed to the towing conflict four homicides, at least thirty arsons and more than 150 related incidents. Those remain the only police figures for the first phase, and no service has ever published a cumulative total spanning 2018 to the present.
In 2022, the Crown stayed all remaining charges against six of the accused — more than seventy charges in total, including conspiracy to commit murder — rather than disclose wiretap material that would have identified an informant.
It is the same failure mode that ended Project Sindacato against the ‘Ndrangheta a year earlier: a Canadian organized-crime case built on intercepts, abandoned at the disclosure stage rather than litigated.
Alexander Vinogradsky, owner-operator of Paramount Towing in Vaughan, was among the accused whose charges were stayed. He was never convicted of anything arising from Platinum. He was murdered in March 2024, and no charges have been reported in his killing.
The Second Wave
By 2025 the enforcement picture had restarted, under different names and against a partly different cast.
In the Selvasingam killing, the Crown told the court that adults connected to the towing industry had recruited the 16-year-old and offered him a sum of money.
The violence is being outsourced to minors, who face a maximum of ten years under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, six of them in custody. That is the incentive structure the industry is now operating inside.
Convictions, Against the Charge Volume
Hundreds of charges have been laid across six years. The convictions are comparatively few, and it is worth naming them precisely.
Mohamad El-Zahawi and Cory Chung | First-degree murder of Soheil Rafipour, 24 December 2018. Convicted 11 December 2023. Life, no parole for 25 years.
Qalid Abderezak | Robbery with a restricted firearm, reckless discharge, and firearms possession offences, arising from the Carr Law campaign. Twelve years less credit. Appeal dismissed.
Vera Kasotty | Fraud over $5,000 and arson, on a guilty plea in a staged-collision case. Two-year conditional sentence and $25,000 restitution.
A 16-year-old (name protected under the YCJA) | First-degree murder, on a guilty plea, June 2026.
The great majority of the Project Platinum accused fall into this category, and their outcomes are not in the accessible public record. Several are known to have had charges stayed in 2022.
Among police officers: Const. Ronald Joseph of the Toronto Police Service was acquitted on five fraud counts on 13 December 2023. That did not close his file — two charges remained outstanding in the Ontario Court of Justice and a separate Superior Court prosecution was still pending.
Const. Simon Bridle of the OPP was acquitted. The secret-commissions charges against him were withdrawn on 14 November 2023, and after a four-day trial that same month Justice Loww acquitted him of the remaining breach-of-trust charge, finding that the Crown’s suspicions were not supported by facts.
The outcomes for the two other OPP constables charged in January 2021, Mohammed Ali Hussain and Bindo Showan, could not be verified by this publication.
There is no operation called “Project Tow Truck,” despite the name appearing in aggregated accounts of the conflict.
The towing link in Project South is reported but not official. CBC reported in February 2026, attributing the account to sources, that seven Toronto police officers faced charges related to tow-truck violence. That is real reporting, not a headline. But the connection does not appear in any police release this publication could locate, and no charge document confirms it. We report the reporting; we do not assert the link.
The Law That Arrived
Ontario’s legislative response was real and its chronology is precise.
2021 | The Towing and Storage Safety and Enforcement Act is passed.
13 December 2021 | The tow zone pilot begins on 400-series highways, replacing first-to-arrive with assigned operators in designated stretches.
1 January 2024 | Operator and storage certificates become mandatory.
1 July 2024 | Driver certificates become mandatory.
1 April 2025 | Tow zones are expanded.
Has it worked? Nobody knows, because nobody has measured the thing that matters.
The only published outcome evaluation covers the tow zone programme and measures traffic clearance: more than 31,000 incidents handled, targets met over 85 per cent of the time, complaints under one per cent. Those are real results for a highway-management programme.
No evaluation exists showing the regime reduced violence or fraud. The 63 tow-linked shootings in Toronto in 2024 came after operator certification took effect. That is suggestive, not causal — a single city’s count against a provincial measure, with no controlled comparison. But the absence of any assessment at all, five years into a law passed specifically in response to gunfire, is itself the finding.
Conflict Status | Active. Second phase, 2024–2026, larger by Toronto’s shooting count than the first
First-Phase Toll | 4 homicides, 30+ arsons, 150+ incidents (YRP figures, ~2017–2020)
Enforcement | Project Platinum partly collapsed on disclosure; Dodger, Yankee and Outsource ongoing
Convictions | Four sets on the public record against hundreds of charges laid
Corruption Track | Two officers acquitted (Joseph on five counts, with other matters outstanding; Bridle in full); two OPP constables with outcomes unverified
Regulation | Fully in force since July 2024. No published evaluation of its effect on violence or fraud
Trajectory | Violence outsourced to minors; principals insulated behind them
- York Regional Police — Project Platinum charge list and announcement (May 2020)
- Toronto Police Service — Project Dodger and Project Yankee announcements (2025)
- Peel Regional Police — Project Outsource (June 2025)
- Global News — Tow truck violence figures for Toronto (13 January 2025; 18 June 2025) and the youth guilty plea (June 2026)
- OCCRP — “Trouble in Toronto: Tow Trucking Turf War” (28 May 2020)
- Toronto Life (Simon Lewsen) — “The violent life of a tow truck driver” (5 February 2026)
- Toronto Sun — Michele Mandel’s reporting on the Carr Law intimidation campaign and the Abderezak conviction
- NewmarketToday — Life sentences in the Rafipour murder (December 2023 / January 2024)
- CTV News — Const. Ronald Joseph acquittal (13 December 2023)
- Canadian Underwriter — R. v. Kasotty and judicial comment on insurance fraud
- Government of Ontario — Towing and Storage Safety and Enforcement Act and tow zone programme materials