The 42-year-old is also a recovering addict — he took opiates — who has been clean for eight years.
As the leader of the Looney Toons/Tiny Toons — a subset of the infamous Bloods gang — he was shot a couple of times and was jailed for short periods.
Wilson began the long process of turning his life around about a decade ago after meeting a woman, falling “deeply in love” and realizing he wasn’t living the way he should be.
He now operates a company called the One By One Movement, which works to reduce the “extreme acts of violence” in Toronto and curb “negative lifestyles” using a team of former neo-Nazis, mob hit men, al-Qaida and gang members.
During our fascinating interview on Friday, he was busy taking calls from the Jane-Finch community where the innocent 12-year-old boy was caught in a hail of gunfire a week ago. The young man subsequently succumbed to his injuries on Remembrance Day.
He said the community reached out for help with the gang situation in their neighbourhood — to try to turn down the temperature so little kids don’t get shot.
Wilson said he’s done work with residents of certain Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) properties, even though officials have gotten upset with them for coming in to help, so much so that they’ve had to call in media to get their message out.
He grew up in poverty living in government housing — in Swansea Mews, in the city’s west end — in an unstable home with an absentee father. He was homeless by the age of 13.
At that point, Wilson said he committed himself to the street where he connected with other kids in a similar situation.
He said he eventually left the street level and as a gang leader became involved in activities in Latin America — drug trafficking mainly but they dabbled in everything.
When his team was subsequently wiped out after a lengthy investigation and he was “hobbled,” he thought it a perfect opportunity to back out of the lifestyle.
The woman is “unfortunately” no longer in his life but she was a catalyst to many changes, leading to the One by One concept.
“I felt this is how I can redeem myself … because I feel personally responsible for what’s happening now (on the streets),” he said, referring to the residual effect of what groups started in his era 20 some years ago.
He said prior to his generation, Toronto wasn’t really known for gun violence — that his generation really started the “whole murder culture.”
He says they brought in all these weapons but didn’t pass down to the next generation the “street code.”
Wilson said during his time on the streets, there were “rules” that deemed shooting innocent kids in a park or on the streets “strict no-nos.”
If a gang member did this back in his day, they were disciplined internally.
He feels social media is playing a “huge role” in the transformation — noting people can be killed these days over a remark made on a YouTube video or an Instagram Live post.
Opiates are also playing a huge role in luring young people to gangs — drugs that were frowned upon in his day.
Drug dealers are taking the drugs too, he said, explaining in his time one of the 10 crack commandments was not to “get high on your own supply.”
He’s convinced the shootings these days are so brazen because the drugs numb the feelings of those who take them — leaving them with no remorse about shooting an innocent child.
“Now it’s very accepted to take all these exotic drugs and obviously it’s affecting their psyche,” he said. “It’s not real life to them (the gang members) … it’s like a video game.”
He adds that the addiction culture is really feeding into “organized crime, gang activity and murder.”
Curtis Priest, chairman of the public safety and security committee of the Garment District Neighbourhood Association, said he found it important to hear Wilson say at a recent meeting that huge drug operations are “feeding off the addictions” of many people living on Toronto’s streets, which in turn is causing spikes in crime in a variety of communities.
Priest said politicians don’t seem to understand this and are only implementing “Band-Aid type solutions” for housing and ignoring the core problems.
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