How ‘Mr. Big’ sting caught double killer

Case offers rare view of undercover tactics

Travelling east on Highway 401 toward what he thought was a new career path, Trestan Brown opened up about his attempt to find the motivation to lead a better life by forgiving himself — even for the murder of an innocent person.

Brown was going to use their death to tell himself, “I can’t do that ever again and I want to make things right in my life,” he explained to an undercover Toronto police officer on Oct. 24, 2017.

He added: “You have to use that energy in a positive way.”

By nightfall, in a Kingston hotel room, Brown was surreptitiously recorded admitting to another undercover officer — in extreme detail — that he had, in fact, participated in two 2016 killings within a month of each other, in Toronto and Brampton.

Those wiretapped confessions were what the police were looking for.

They were the culmination of an elaborate nine-month scheme to win the trust and confidence of a suspected double murderer. Brown was arrested hours later.

For the first time, an exceptionally detailed 70-page court ruling has offered a rare window into the “Mr. Big” operation that led to Brown’s arrest and conviction. The details of the undercover investigation, as described by Superior Court Justice Michael Code, are no longer subject to a publication ban after Brown pleaded guilty earlier this month to the 2016 murder of bystander Abdullah Farah outside a Danforth hookah lounge. (Last October, Brown pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the second killing, the shooting death of Kadeem Bascombe in Brampton.)

The Mr. Big technique is controversial. The complex operations involve recruiting a suspect into a fictitious criminal organization with offers of financial rewards, then gradually building their trust in order to elicit a confession.

But some prior confessions obtained this way have failed to hold up in court amid allegations of investigative recklessness. In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada set out the strict lawful parameters for what it described as a “Canadian invention” that had been used by police more than 350 times in cases involving serious unsolved crimes.

Typically, the “Mr. Big” is a male crime boss, with the confession a condition of the suspect’s membership in the invented group.

In Brown’s case, Mr. Big was a diminutive undercover Toronto cop who used the pseudonym “Stephanie” to pose as a fitness trainer, entrepreneur and madam. While trying to exhibit a “classy” appearance, wearing high heels and her hair pulled back, Stephanie also swore and used street slang as she lured Brown into her trust over several months with their shared interest in food, diet, health and the good life.

Their rapport grew because they both agreed on the importance of love, respect, trust and family, the judge wrote, describing her methods.

“It’s good that I met you,” Brown told her while the two discussed a plan to develop healthy vegan products.

“We were meant to be, you know, work together like this,” she replied. (According to the ruling, Stephanie explicitly told Brown she was in a same-sex relationship to thwart any romantic notions he might develop.)

“Operation Smokescreen” included a supporting cast of at least a dozen undercover operatives playing the parts of sex workers, clients, drivers and other associates. The judge’s ruling summarized most of their 27 meetings with Brown in gyms, restaurants and other locations around Ontario — all audiorecorded.

As well, Code’s ruling reproduces extensive transcripts of Brown’s own words, detailing background events and his own state of mind, while capturing the psychology the cops used to reel him in.

In sum, the tactics Toronto police used in this Mr. Big operation led to reliable evidence and an admissible confession, Code ruled.

When Brown was first introduced to Stephanie, he was a mid-20s drug dealer and bricklayer with outstanding criminal charges. But, Brown told her, he aspired to greater things — to be a boss and leave his gritty, violent past behind. “I want to be in control of my life … actually start becoming a real human being, instead of this person who I was programmed to be,” he said in one meeting.

After a few more, Stephanie wooed Brown with a plan to build a gym with a restaurant and escort service. It would be called the “Syn Gym.” His job would involve scheduling escorts’ appointments — something police knew would appeal to the former pimp.

“We’re looking to build a team,” she told him.

In court in the fall of 2019, Code heard a total of 14 days of evidence detailing the investigation, including many hours of wiretaps and testimony from the primary undercover officer — Stephanie. (Her identity cannot be revealed; she gave her evidence from behind a screen.)

Brown had been set to go to trial for first-degree murder in 20-yearold Farah’s drive-by killing this fall. Brown instead pleaded guilty to second-degree murder earlier this month, lifting the publication ban on Code’s ruling on his confession.

Farah was killed in front of Cloud Nine, a hookah lounge on the Danforth near Coxwell Avenue, on April 17, 2016. According to the agreed facts of the case, Brown had been aiming at an unnamed target from a rival neighbourhood. Farah was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brown’s guilty plea came nearly five years after his final encounter with Stephanie in that Kingston hotel room. Convinced he was on his way to becoming her “righthand man” but feeling pressure that Toronto police investigators were too close to solving the Farah murder, Brown laid bare his past.

He shared an exhaustive account of both the Farah and Bascombe killings, coaxed along by Stephanie’s offer to help “take care of things” by — improbably — bringing in a man from Haiti “to take the hit.”

Brown volunteered how he and his accomplices had “scoped” the hookah lounge, driving past three times trying to determine if his unnamed target was there. Brown covered up his licence plate before pointing his Ruger pistol outside the window of his vehicle and firing several shots, one of which killed Farah.

“There’s a motive behind it,” Brown told Stephanie, “but … it wasn’t the right person … we got a drop on some people but when we went there, people are telling me that ‘these are the people,’ but then when everything happened … totally opposite … innocent person.”

Brown added: “I don’t talk about it, I just let it be. You gotta learn how to forgive yourself … what I do now is I use this person to make me a better person.”

About the second killing, Brown admitted to Stephanie that he shot Bascombe, 24, outside the All Stars bar in Brampton in the belief that one of Bascombe’s friends “intended to kill him and so he fired first,” Code wrote.

In his ruling, Code noted that the financial incentives given to Brown throughout Operation Smokescreen were modest — just $1,350 in cash, $288 for running shoes and $57 for a gift for his daughter’s birthday, plus $800 for car parts and cocaine and 10 meals paid for by the undercover officers.

“The real inducement was being given a position in a ‘high end’ organization with an unspecified future remuneration,” the judge wrote. “That position held out the prospect of a new and better career for Brown, within a loving and supportive organization, far away from the troubled and dangerous background in which he had grown up.”

Brown’s sentencing hearing is set for Oct. 28.