Joseph Brean, National Post Published: Friday, August 15, 2008
Simon Hayter for National Post
A grey-haired man, known on the streets as the General, stood in front of a liquor store with a stack of newspapers and a crumpled Tim Horton's cup, watching the passing customers through an artsy pair of glasses.
Most passed without eye contact. Some looked sheepish, even scared, or they shrugged to say they had no spare change. A few read the headline: "Beachers' White Racist Hate Attacks Expanding!!" And like every day at countless streetcorners across Toronto, the General sold three issues in a midafternoon hour, making six dollars, nearly minimum wage, and sparing himself the indignity of begging.
Since the passage ten years ago of the Safe Streets Act with its strict controls on panhandling, the Toronto Street News has become a popular alternative, selling 4,000 copies every two weeks across the city. Homeless people pay a nominal fee at various collection points, then sell it for $2 an issue.
But under this guise of charity, it has become the city's most prominent vehicle for hate propaganda, outrageous conspiracy theories, blatant plagiarism and libellous personal attacks, though virtually nothing about the homeless, all published at the whim of a man who lives a two-hour drive away in Ontario's farm-belt.
In the past year, the paper has claimed that Liberal MP Bob Rae's name was changed from Levine to hide his Jewishness and that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's secret true birthday is the same as Adolf Hitler's, which "looks good on a resume" for "New World Order types." It has claimed that a police officer covered up racist attacks on a shopkeeper, and even the editor admits one article was an illegal incitement to genocide against Jews. Ads are rare to non-existent, and often unpaid.
"It's a little left wing," the General said. "Real out there."
Barbara Hall, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, calls it an "unpleasant rant," full of anti-Semitism and senseless paranoia that is contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of human rights law.
"I don't like it. It's offensive," she said. "I suspect that a large number of people who open it would very quickly do what I did, which is say, ‘This is scurrilous stuff' and throw it away... This is just using a group of vulnerable people to put out an offensive message, which is making them even more vulnerable."
"It strikes me that it's better than begging," said Mel Sufrin, executive secretary of the Ontario Press Council. At the same time, he said it fails almost every conceivable test for membership in his council.
The Canadian Jewish Congress has a longstanding file on the Street News, and in the last year has brought a hate speech complaint to the police, since settled without charges, and a human rights complaint against a columnist, now referred to a tribunal.
But even though the editor and publisher of the Street News apologized for a story that urged the killing of all "jew bankers," he remains unrepentant.
"For a homeless paper, I can get away with it, and have done that for ten years," said Victor Fletcher, 63, who calls himself a "one-man charity," though not a registered one, and a "hands-on reporter."
"I have the rare luxury of sounding off any way I want. I'm just amazed that people go out there and buy it. If they didn't want to buy the paper, they can give the homeless guy two bucks. But they don't, they want the paper, so there is an audience out there. It's amazing to me."
That audience, he said, is "upscale communities and a lot of women."
The story of the Toronto Street News is one of great compassion poorly focused. It involves a family feud, a massive fraud, a price war, a terminal illness, and a decade's worth of paranoid delusions.
But at its heart, it is the story of Mr. Fletcher, a watchmaker's apprentice who came to work in high-tech weapons assembly, and had a crisis of conscience when he realized that the world is controlled by a cabal of Masons and Zionists. As penance, he turned to the radical underground press, and eventually, thanks to the charity of Toronto's pedestrians and the salesmanship of its homeless, plus a lot of his own money, became the city's most prolific and persistent propagandist.
And now it is coming to an end. Mr. Fletcher expects that neither he nor the paper will be around to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Street News next summer. He says they will die for different reasons, but the one cannot live without the other. He calls the Street News an "act of frustration."
"I've been trying to stop it for years. It's something I feel I have to do, for some stupid reason," he said. "I keep being told a lot of people depend on it."
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Richie van den Kerkhof sat on a stool, barefoot under his baggy pants, with an ashtray balanced on his knee. He produced a rolled up Ziploc baggie, the kind that bulk Indian cigarettes come in. He took the last one that was fully intact and squeezed a bit of tobacco back into the bag among the half dozen busted ones, then twisted the tip into a point. He held the smoke in his hand rather than his lips to light it, rotating the sealed end in the flame of a miniature Bic.
He said he grew in homes arranged by children's aid, and by the time he was a teenager around the millennium, he was in a world of trouble, vulnerable to drugs, prostitution and violence.
"A lot of other people went that way," he said.
But he met Angel Femia-Richmond, one of the Street News' main writers and distributors. She saved him.
A bohemian woman with colourful braids in her hair, Angel runs an outreach program called LoveCry from a cozy house behind a Jamaican restaurant, kitty corner to a strip club. She has written poetry and essays for all three of Toronto's street papers: the original Outrider, the upstart Outreach Connection, and now the Street News. She says it serves as both a creative outlet and as a stabilizing force in their lives.
"Artwork heals, period. Writing heals. I give them journals the minute they walk in the door," she said. Selling the paper "takes them out of sympathy. They become addicts because of sympathy. You want them out of sympathy... The input of positive energy is really good for these people. Panhandling just gives them negative energy."
Richie seems to think Victor has some exquisite sense for how far he can push things, that he takes his writing right up to the line, but not over. He says the proof is that he has never been sued.
"Some of the articles are very controversial, but it's the truth. He pushes back," Richie said. "He pushes whatever he can push, whatever people aren't paying attention to. He gets real upset sometimes."
******
Charity papers in Toronto were not always in the sorry state they are today.
Rod Goodman, 81, a long-time newspaperman who worked at the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star before becoming editor of the Outrider, said the goal was to create something good to read on the streetcar ride to work.
There was a sports column written pseudonymously by a Queen's Park bureau chief, sections on politics, culture and food, interviews with stars like Mike Myers, even two of the biggest bylines in Canadian letters, Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood.
"We figured if we put enough different stuff in here, with something for everybody, it enables the seller to say, ‘Look, here's something you can't get in other papers," he said. "We got a lot of professional respect."
That respect, ironically, was the beginning of the end for Toronto's homeless papers.
When it launched in 1993, mainstream media praised the new Outrider, comparing it to similar projects in New York and London. That coverage caught the attention of David Mackin, who recognized the publisher as his estranged father, Jim Mackin.
Briefly reunited, father and son soon fell into a dispute over money. David would later tell a reporter that he started the the Outreach Connection "out of total anger as well as helping the poor. I just wanted to go after him and stab him in the guts."
A price war followed, creating an environment in which Patrick Harold White - who introduced himself to David as a Prairie farm boy, but was really a fraudster and child rapist wanted by police from Regina to Halifax to Mississippi - was able to grab the financial reins of the Outreach Connection. By the spring of 1994, when David and his staff clued in that their new business manager was a crook, White had left with the money and the office furniture. The Outreach Connection continues to exist, but its presence is greatly diminished. Efforts to contact David Mackin were unsuccessful.
Mr. Fletcher said he started the Street News because, "I don't like people being ripped off, especially at the bottom end of society."
But Mr. Goodman, a former ombudsman of the Toronto Star, does not buy it, literally or figuratively.
"There's got to be a better product than this. I'd say, ‘Here's a dollar. Keep the paper,'" he said. "That's not news. That's not street news. That's a message."
******
The current message at the Street News is that the Beaches area of Toronto, near where the paper used to have offices, is awash in the blood of minorities, spilled by "roving gangs" of "white agents."
A recent issue reported on a variety store owner, Kishore Muthreja, who closed his shop after a series of robberies, which he and the police say were done by teenage thugs, but which the Street News described as a racist campaign, supported by "white power" locals.
"It's just propaganda," said Paul Francis, a landlord who last month bought the building.
As a "Grenadian by birth and a Canadian by choice," he said he was offended by the loose accusations of racism in the Street News, and feels bad for the police officer held up as the scapegoat. "They just threw that guy under the bus," he said.
Constable Rob McDonald - "is he protected by secret society?" sic - said the criticism comes with the territory.
"If it was a legitimate news outlet, I would have great concern, and would be very quick to defend our actions, or what the truth really is, but then I don't think a responsible journalist would portray anything like that," he said. "I just wish they'd spell my name right."
******
Like the fraudster Patrick White, Victor Fletcher describes himself as a "Canadian farm boy," whose homestead is a beef cattle farm in Fergus, Ontario, a bucolic village near the university town of Guelph.
He learned watchmaking in the 1960s and worked in antique shops before being hired to make tiny weights for gyroscopes at Litton Systems, a U.S. defence contractor whose Toronto-area offices were famously bombed years later, in 1982. With his clearance, he also got work at Canadian Arsenals making weapons components.
"I just felt I was killing people," he said in an interview. He went to work for the Guerilla, an anti-war paper in the early 70s, and eventually set up a typesetting business, doing pamphlets and annual reports. He is divorced with no children.
"I take shots at everybody," he said. "Telling the truth is radical, you might say, these days, and that's what I feel I do... I project what I see and the conclusions I've come to."
So, who are the Zionists that control the media?
"Zionists are people who victimize Jews."
Are they in cooperation with the Masons who control Bay Street?
"At times, yeah. I can't walk down the street without the Masonic thing all over me, you know? They control 680 News."
How does he know Stephen Harper actually has Hitler's birthday?
"I'm satisfied I didn't make it up, okay," he said. "The New World Order types, they love to have somebody who would emulate that birthday and be chosen."
Why did he plagiarize an article about AIDS from the British Guardian newspaper, put his byline on it, and the false headline: Man-Made AIDS Virus Targets Blacks?
"I consider them a supporter of the paper."
Does he feel he is doing good for Toronto's homeless?
"The homeless come and go like flies. They either die, right? And I'm the last person who sees them sometimes, the last commercial relationship they had to the world is me. Or they finally get a room, get on welfare, and if the drugs don't kill them, they survive."
******
About a year ago, Mr. Fletcher's journalism finally got him into serious trouble.
He had printed, without permission, a piece from Hal Turner, a prominent American racist and anti-Semite, about a North American common currency. It read, in part: "Are you starting to grasp why so many things are going wrong lately? Does a lot of it start to make sense when put in the context of wiping out currencies in the name of globalization? It's the jew bankers, folks.
"Another jew banking scam designed to enrich the few at the utter devastation of the rest!...This is EVIL treachery on such a massive scale that the only proper response may be to simply KILL everyone involved."
"You can always tell you're dealing with a real intellectual by the number of capital letters they use," said Len Rudner, Ontario director of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Faced with the CJC's police complaint, even Mr. Fletcher agreed this was hate speech, apologized in print, and promised to stop running columns by another anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist, Henry Makow, although he has recently started again.
Mr. Rudner said the CJC made a human rights complaint against Mr. Makow for describing Jews as a cancer, and it has been referred for a tribunal hearing.
"To ignore them is a form of encouragement," Mr. Rudner said.
He quoted Stephen Bronner, a philosopher at Rutgers University, as saying that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, like other grand conspiracy theories, is "an idiot's answer to a very important question"
"The important question is why do things happen in the world... The idiot's answer is there is a conspiracy out there and they are controlling everything that happens in this world, and the net result is not only do you then have an answer that says, ‘Aha, it's happening because of them.' But also, you are released from any responsibility or obligation for your own predicament."
******
Victor Fletcher is dying of cancer. He has only a matter of months to live.
"I'm just going to let it develop. I'm just tired of living. I'm so depressed," he said. "I wish I didn't know what I know... I'm disgusted with the world, you know? I don't want to go through operations and stuff. I've done my thing in this life. That's it. Goodbye. Goodbye, Charlie."
He said he has read about cancer of the bowel on the Internet, and his symptoms seem to match it. He has not been to a doctor for a diagnosis. He does not trust them.
"When I'm gone, it's gone," he said of the Toronto Street News. "It shouldn't exist. It's an anomaly. There'll never be another one like it."
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