Toronto’s nasty cash-for-gold wars on Bathurst St. has seen an alleged murder plot, an unsolved firebombing, two magazine profiles, including in the New Yorker, customer-poaching sandwich boarders and a slew of suits and countersuits that go back more than a decade.
Could it finally be nearing an end?
Calling it an incredulous “blood feud” between Orthodox Jews Harold “The Jewellery Buyer” Gerstel and Jack “Omni Jewelcrafter” Berkovits — not to mention Gerstel employee Maria Konstan, now 82, being wrongly accused of hiring a hit man — an Ontario judge didn’t have much sympathy for any of the players in his recent ruling.
“I cannot find any of the parties to be credible or reliable,” wrote an exasperated Superior Court Justice James F. Diamond.
“What in fact unfolded was a full-blown turf war. Unfortunately, the casualties of this war were honesty, decency, reasonableness, respect and dignity.”
According to his synopsis of their tangled history, the feud began in 2009 when Berkovits’s jewelry store at the corner of Bathurst St. and Glencairn Ave. entered the cash-for-gold business that Gerstel had long monopolized nearby with the help of his shlocky TV ads.
Gerstel responded by going on the offensive, the judge said, by hiring aggressive sandwich boarders to direct customers from Omni to his store. The court noted there was evidence that a number of the sandwich boarders were homeless or battling drug addiction.
Matters intensified in 2010 after Gerstel’s store burned down and he moved into the same plaza where Berkovits had opened a second Omni location. The sandwich boarders were vying for customers and Gerstel and his employees were blocking parking spots reserved for his competitor, Diamond said.
Then the feud took a decidedly sinister turn.
On July 16, 2010, Berkovits exchanged insults on Bathurst with Konstan, a Gerstel employee then in her 70s. A few days later, another Gerstel staffer, ex-MMA fighter Saeed Hosseini, approached Berkovits to warn him that he’d been hired by Konstan to kill him.
During cross-examination at the civil trial, the now octogenarian admitted she’d joked that “somebody should break that guy’s legs” but she wasn’t serious about harming Berkovits. The judge found there was no murder plot and Hosseini was an “unsavoury character” with zero credibility who “was playing all sides off the middle.”
“It is patently obvious that Hosseini’s story morphed at his whim, and he would simply change the facts (indeed, even under oath) to fit whatever narrative Jack needed, presumably to ensure that Jack would pay Hosseini some money for helping him out.”
Berkovits went to police and a shocked Konstan was arrested. His sights, though, were on a bigger target, the judge wrote.
“He clearly wanted the police to tie the alleged ‘murder for hire’ plot back to Harold.”
Not only was his nemesis never arrested but the Crown told Berkovits in June 2011 that they were withdrawing the charges against Konstan. Even so, the jeweler still reported her for allegedly breaching her bail by walking by his store.
The day after the distraught senior turned herself in again to 13 Division, she tried to kill herself by taking more than 20 lorazepam pills.
“The allegations against her will exist online in perpetuity, and Jack compounded Maria’s damages by insisting upon having her charged criminally a second time when he knew that the basis for those charges was purely tactical, and that Maria was likely suffering from emotional trauma,” Diamond wrote.
The judge awarded her $175,000 in damages and almost $50,000 for her legal costs against Berkovits and Hosseini.
“I’m not sure that any amount of money would address what she went through,” said her lawyer Mark Ross. “This is the greatest vindication she could get … having a forum and an opportunity to definitively clear her name and find that she in no way, shape or form was involved in a plot to hire a hit man and murder someone.”
Berkovits also scored some wins: The judge awarded him $200,000 against Gerstel in economic damages after finding “Harold the Jewellery Buyer” sandwich boarders interfered with Omni’s business and his employees “harassed, disparaged and intimidated” Omni staff. Berkovits was also awarded $50,000 for a defamatory interview Gerstel gave in the Town Crier.
“This is a guy who clearly felt himself under siege for many years by Mr. Gerstel,” said Berkovits’s lawyer Daniel Naymark, “and having won his claim for business interference and also the defamation claim that he brought and all of Harold’s claims against him being dismissed, that feels quite vindicating.”
Gerstel’s lawyer didn’t return a request for comment.
The Bathurst St. enemies have another week to decide if they’ll appeal the ruling.
The lawyer for the woman caught in the middle is hoping this is the final chapter in the gold wars.
“I wish them the best,” Ross said with a little chuckle, “and I hope everyone can really close the book on this and move on with their lives.”
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