Toronto's Gold Wars, Harold Gerstel vs Jack Berkovitz may be over

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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How Toronto's Arena Gardens hosted the first hockey radio broadcast of all time in 1923

Arena Gardens was the staging ground for the first radio hockey broadcast, and the original home of the Maple Leafs. (Alexandra Studios, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s an image as Canadian as maple syrup: The whole family gathering around the TV or radio to follow along with Hockey Night in Canada.

Hockey broadcasting holds a unique place in the national imagination, and has for generations. Over the years, it’s evolved to the point where you can consume games from any major market on any day of the week.

But before you could watch on a variety of channels and devices…

And before Hockey Night in Canada was even broadcast on the radio…

Heck, before there were pro hockey broadcasts of any kind…

There was a Toronto Star reporter taking to the airwaves to call the third period of a random game in 1923.

The first hockey broadcast ever

The first hockey radio broadcast took place at Arena Gardens, a now-long-gone arena on Mutual St. near Dundas St. E., on Feb. 8, 1923.

The arena was the original home of the Toronto Hockey Club — the team that would become the Maple Leafs — and the site of Toronto’s first Stanley Cup. (Which doesn’t technically belong to the Maple Leafs. Long story.)

But no Leafs- or NHL-affiliated team was involved in the first hockey broadcast. Instead, it was North Toronto vs. Midland in the Ontario Hockey Association playoffs.

Who called it?

Though Foster Hewitt is often credited with originating the hockey broadcast, the legendary play-by-play announcer was not in fact the first person to call a game via the airwaves.

That honour goes to Norman Albert, a reporter for the Toronto Star.

The Star owned and operated Toronto’s first radio station, CFCA, and had begun broadcasting in April 1922. So it was natural that they would be at the forefront of calling hockey games for the masses.

On the night of the game in question, Albert set up in a small booth near the ice, and described the events of the third period for CFCA listeners.

Here’s how the Star described it in the paper the following day:

“The announcer who described the play was right by the side of the rink and as he spoke, his voice was shot into space…. The vivid description of Norman Albert gave listeners the chance to mentally see the fast action.”

Albert called three more games that same month — including the first NHL radio broadcast on Feb. 14, between the Toronto St. Patricks and Ottawa Senators — before eventually getting replaced by the aforementioned Hewitt, another Star employee at the time.

While no archival audio exists from this era, we do have some home recordings Hewitt made years later. Here’s one from Feb. 12, 1949:

Foster Hewitt home recording Feb 12, 1949

But, wait, what happened in the Feb. 8 game?

North Toronto won 16–4. So Albert’s third-period call came in what would unofficially be known as “garbage time” by today’s standards.

Though the game wasn’t hotly contested by teams we still know and love today, there was still some Canadian sports royalty on the ice that night. Lionel Conacher scored six goals for North Toronto in the Feb. 8 tilt.

Among his many accomplishments, Conacher was named Canada’s top athlete of the first half of the 20th century, and is a member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame, and the Hockey Hall of Fame. (He also played baseball professionally for the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team.) (He also won boxing and wrestling championships.)

Conacher’s brother Charlie would win the Stanley Cup with the Maple Leafs in 1932. Both Charlie and another Conacher brother, Roy, are also in the Hockey Hall of Fame.

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Vision Zero Toronto’s photo radar program has generated a lot of money, but isn’t slowing traffic like it used to.

Smile, Toronto drivers. You’re on camera.

Toronto’s automated speed enforcement program — otherwise known as photo radar — will celebrate its third birthday this year. Since the city started installing their non-descript grey automated speeding ticket machines near schools in July 2020, the program has nabbed more than a half-million speeding cars, issuing 593,193 tickets, according to data released by the city and last updated through November 2022.

According to the city, the average fine amount is $107.32, so the program has generated estimated potential revenues of about $63.7 million to date.

Key numbers

Dates active	Jul 2020 - Present
Camera count	50 (growing to 75)
Tickets (thru Nov 22)	593,193
Average fine	$107.31
Revenue	$63.7 million (est.)

The city initially ordered 50 of the camera machines. They’ve recently started to roll out an additional 25. Because Toronto has more locations with speeding cars than Toronto currently has speed cameras, the machines’ locations are generally rotated every few months.

Top cash cows

Some of these camera locations have proven to be massive cash cows.

1.

Sheppard Ave. E. and Don Mills Rd.

$2.3 million

 The photo radar camera on Sheppard Avenue East when it was deployed. It's the small grey box on the right. Image from Google Street View.

A camera at Sheppard Ave. E. and Don Mills Rd., for example, issued 21,288 tickets over five months of service between Dec. 2020 and May 2021, generating approximately $2.3 million in potential tickets alone. It’s the reigning champ for most charges.

2.

Parkside Dr. south of Algonquin Ave.

$1.9 million

Other snap-happy photo radar spots include the camera installed on Parkside Dr., just south of Algonquin Ave. It generated 17,596 charges totalling an estimated $1.9 million since its installation in April 2022.

The Parkside-Algonquin camera’s numbers were so strong the city opted to leave it in place beyond the typical four- or five-month period before rotation. It’s currently in the silver-medal position for most charges issued, but given that it’s still active today, it still has time to take the all-time crown.

3.

McCowan Rd., just north of Kenhatch Blvd.

$1.5 million

Third place goes to the camera on McCowan Rd., just north of Kenhatch Blvd., in Scarborough, which brought in 13,908 charges generating an estimated $1.5 million in fines between Dec. 2020 and May 2021.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. The machines will lead to traffic tickets — fines only, no demerit points — for owners whose vehicles are snapped doing up to 49 km/h above the posted speed limit. If a car or truck is clocked going faster than that, the vehicle owner will instead receive a summons ordering them to go before a judge and explain why their vehicle was going so darn fast.

The city had clocked 247 mega-speedsters in 2022 as of the end of September. The fastest car among this group was clocked doing 146 km/h in a 50 km/h zone on Martin Grove Rd. in Etobicoke.

"Four cameras were the victim of a heist — vanishing from their podiums even though each camera weighs more than 800 pounds!"

Unpopular, but effective — to a point

Toronto’s photo radar program isn’t likely to win any awards for popularity. As soon as the machines began to appear, angry residents started expressing their frustration. Machines were tagged with spray paint in attempts to block camera lenses. Some were beaten and battered in acts of vandalism. At least one was set on fire. And another four were the victim of a heist — vanishing from their podiums even though each camera weighs more than 800 pounds. (And probably isn’t really valuable on the resale market — would there be any takers on Craigslist?)

The program was never designed to be popular with drivers, though. Instead, the goal was to reduce speeds in a city with too many deaths and serious injuries happening on its streets.

From that perspective, the program is working, though there are signs that the effectiveness may be starting to wane.

The average photo radar camera installation that began in 2020 saw about a 17 per cent reduction in the number of tickets issued on a monthly basis, comparing the first month of operation with data from four months in. The numbers seemed to indicate that drivers would realize the cameras were operational, and slow down. At least in the area around the cameras.

That changed in 2021, with the average decline shrinking to 9 per cent. And in 2022, it fell to just 4 per cent, even as the average number of monthly charges grew to an all-time high.

Comparing data from the first three years of the program, the average number of tickets issued per month has grown from 14,189 in 2020 to 20,914 in 2021 to 23,372 in 2022 (through November).

The estimated average monthly fine revenue has grown accordingly.

Year	Est. avg. monthly fine revenue
2020*	$1,500,000
2021	$2,240,000
2022**	$2,510,000

*Program launched July 2020; **Through Nov.

A win for road safety, but for how long?

These trends may be cause for concern for road safety advocates, even if they have no sympathy for the car owners receiving tickets in the mail. That’s because an earlier attempt at using photo radar on provincial highways in the 1990s was scuttled after public backlash. People saw it as a cash grab more than an effort to enhance safety.

The 20-years-later resurrection of photo radar started on more solid footing, opting to focus on roads in designated “community safety zones” near schools with lots of pedestrian and cyclist traffic, instead of highways. Still, Mayor John Tory was clear when the program launched that he didn’t want it to become a major revenue generator.

“I always said that my objective would be to have these photo radar automated speed enforcement machines issuing no tickets because that would mean people weren’t speeding,” Tory told CP24 in a January 2021 interview.

Almost three years later, the objective of having cameras that issue zero tickets has not been achieved — though there was one machine installed near Vaughan Rd. and Bansley Ave. that issued a grand total of only three speeding tickets between June 2021 and October 2021. In aggregate, the city seems to be moving further away from Tory’s goal.

One explanation may be that City Hall is slow to respond to speeding hotspots identified by the cameras. Along Parkside Dr., for example, the community has long decried the design of the road for encouraging high-speed traffic. The camera installed there backed up the community observation, racking up thousands of charges.

But the process for making physical changes to the road that could result in slower speeds — things like narrowing the roadway, creating some curves, or installing more traffic lights — has been mired in a slow, bureaucratic process, with two rounds of public consultation surveys and a design process. From beginning to end, real infrastructure improvements to the street will take at least three years to go from idea to action.

Multiply that slow process across dozens of streets that could use safety interventions and the time adds up. For City Hall, the challenge remains matching the pace of change to the speed of traffic. Until then, engines keep revving, the cameras keep snapping, and the money keeps rolling in.

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John Tory's surprise resignation sparks questions about what's next for Toronto

Questions remain about what lies ahead for Toronto following the abrupt resignation of mayor John Tory on Friday night.

The two-term mayor, who had just been re-elected to a third stint in office in October, stepped down over what he described as an inappropriate relationship with a former member of his office staff.

Tory offered few details about the affair during a hastily called Friday night news conference, only saying it had developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and ended by mutual consent earlier this year.

The unnamed employee is now working at another job.

Tory says he’s working with senior city staff and Deputy Mayor Jennifer McKelvie to ensure a smooth transition, but has not formally named his interim successor.

Provincial legislation states a byelection will need to take place within 60 days of the mayor’s office officially becoming vacant to name a permanent replacement.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford thanked Tory, whom he called a friend, for his years of public service including his time in the city’s top job.

“John will be remembered as a dedicated and hard-working mayor who served as a steady leader during the most difficult days of the pandemic,” Ford said in a statement Saturday morning.

“He united Toronto behind an optimistic vision for the future and I will miss working with him to see it come to life. I wish nothing but the best for my friend in the days, weeks and months ahead.”

Tory told reporters late Friday he notified the Office of the Integrity Commissioner of the relationship and asked him to review it, saying he believes it is important to avoid tarnishing the mayoral office or putting City Hall through a prolonged period of controversy over what he describes as an error in judgment on his part.

Tory served two scandal-free terms as mayor of Toronto and had just been re-elected for a third in October.

He thanked the people of Toronto for trusting him as mayor, a position he called “the job of a lifetime.”

“I believe I did some good for the city I truly love, particularly during the pandemic,” he said.

He said the relationship with the employee developed while he was spending long periods of time away from his wife Barbara, to whom he has been married for over 40 years.

“I recognize that permitting this relationship to develop was a serious error in judgment on my part,” Tory said at city hall, where he apologized “unreservedly to the people of Toronto and to all those hurt by my actions including my staff, my colleagues and the public service.”

He said he was stepping down as mayor in order to reflect on his mistakes and focus on rebuilding trust with his family.

He asked for privacy for all affected by his actions, including his wife, family and himself.

Tory, 68, was first elected mayor in 2014, partially on a promise to restore respectability to the office following the scandal-plagued tenure of his predecessor Rob Ford.

He secured a second mandate in 2018 and cruised to a third term in October after a campaign that saw him tout his years of experience as head of Canada’s most populous city.

He secured about 62% of the vote compared to 18% for progressive urbanist Gil Penalosa, who came second. Tory beat out 30 mostly unknown candidates after many criticized his record on transit and housing — two issues he had highlighted as priorities.

In a tweet late Friday night, Penalosa said “now Torontonians have a chance to elect better.”

Tory’s most recent election win came as he faced criticism about the state of Toronto under his leadership. His opponents noted the high cost of housing, aging infrastructure, overflowing garbage bins and shuttered parks.

His leadership saw increased scrutiny in recent weeks over his announcement of a proposed $48.3-million increase to the city’s police budget, which would bring police funding to just over $1.1 billion for 2023 — a figure Tory’s critics said was grossly inflated compared to other line items and underfunded social services.

Tory also saw criticism for his handling of the city’s housing crisis, as thousands of people are experiencing homelessness and Toronto’s shelter capacity is stretched to its limits.

Just this week, Toronto city council scrapped a recommendation to keep its warming centres open around the clock until mid-April after a bout of extreme cold, as well as to declare a public health crisis over lack of shelter space. With support from Tory, council voted instead to call for more federal support and have staff study the idea further.

Kristyn Wong-Tam, a former Toronto city councillor who often disagreed with Tory’s positions and current member of the Ontario legislature, issued a tweet calling Tory’s affair with a staffer “not a simple, one-time lapse of judgment,” but “an abuse of power.”

Toronto city council is set to debate Tory’s proposed budget at a Wednesday meeting. It will be the first under new so-called strong mayor powers granted to Toronto by the province, which Tory had said he would use in a limited and responsible way.

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