The Violent Life of a Tow Truck Driver
The towing industry has been hijacked by criminals and kingpins who fleece customers, beat up dissenters and shoot their enemies. How an unremarkable profession turned Toronto into a war zone
Lisa Carr was not the kind of person who chased adrenalin. A former farm girl, she graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2004, worked for a stint on Bay Street, then quit in 2011 to start her own shop in Vaughan, closer to her rural roots. At first, the firm was just her, an associate and an assistant, and over the years, they took on all kinds of cases: divorce, real estate, corporate disputes. When auto-insurance companies came to Carr with fraud cases against local tow truck drivers, she eagerly accepted that work too.
As it turned out, she’d stumbled on a lucrative niche, and a trickle of files became a cascade. Soon, she was getting between 15 and 20 new cases a day, and her staff ballooned to 13 full-time employees. By 2018, her insurance-fraud department had 1,400 active cases. Her clients were accusing tow truck companies of shady practices like charging inflated rates for towing and storage or billing for repairs that were never done.
Back in the 2010s, pretty much anybody in Ontario could work as a tow trucker. All you needed was a driver’s licence and a flatbed vehicle with a boom and a hook. The main barrier to entry: a high tolerance for risk. In some Ontario cities, like Sarnia or Woodstock, the police were in charge of doling out towing gigs. When an accident happened, they would award the towing contract to one of a small number of pre-approved companies. But, in the GTA, the tow went to whoever arrived at the scene first. And so the highways of Toronto became a battleground, with operators racing to get to an accident and even beating each other up at the site. The free-for-all had one major upside, which was that it kept things brisk. If you crashed your car anywhere in the GTA, there was probably a tow trucker cruising the streets nearby, listening to traffic reports or updates from police scanners, his foot poised on the gas pedal. In most cases, you wouldn’t wait long before he showed up.
Tow truck drivers are eager to be first on the scene—some are even willing to risk death or injury—because a single vehicle can yield a massive payout. If you’re an unscrupulous driver, the tow fee is only the beginning. Somebody has to fix the battered vehicle, after all. Maybe you refer that job to one of your buddies with an auto-body shop. Maybe, in return, he gives you a cut of the profits. In some cases, you and your friend might even exaggerate the extent of the damage or deliberately wreck the vehicle further.
As for the passengers of the damaged car, they’re going to need a taxi ride home, a rental car for the next few days, maybe even some physiotherapy. You can award these contracts to your cronies in exchange for a piece of the action. Before and after repairs, the car itself has to go somewhere. Perhaps you send it to a lot far outside of town, a trip with a hefty price tag. For every day it sits there, the car racks up storage fees.
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That’s exactly how things work in the GTA. When a tow trucker arrives at an accident site, they impose themselves onto the bewildered survivors, and a whole business ecosystem springs to life around the damaged vehicle. And while none of the shady activity—the kickbacks, the phony repairs, the extortionate storage fees—is remotely legal, vehicle owners are unlikely to complain since they don’t actually pick up the tab. A single tow can generate $10,000 in business, but the bill goes to insurance companies, and ultimately to everyone with auto insurance, since we subsidize this racket with our inflated premiums.
In Carr, exasperated insurance companies had found a lawyer eager to fight for them. Insurers were so desperate to push back against the towing industry that they were willing to lose money to stop them—the fees they paid Carr often greatly exceeded the fraudulent bills they were challenging.
Carr didn’t fully understand, at first, the nature of the enemies she was making. That changed in late 2018, when a man broke into her office in the dead of night. He shattered a window and set fire to a plant near the entrance, then left it to burn to ash. Two months later, an intruder smashed the glass door of the office, doused the lobby in gas and set it ablaze. Carr knew that tow trucking could be a shady hustle, but she hadn’t expected things to escalate so dramatically. Still, she refused to back down.
He pointed a gun at her and told her not to look at him. He asked if she had kids
Then, on August 29, 2019, a lawyer at Carr’s firm named Alycia Rose was sitting in her car outside the office when a man approached her. Rose bears a vague resemblance to Carr—they both wear glasses and have light hair—and the man likely mistook her for her boss. Just outside Rose’s open car window, the man drew a gun, pointed it at Rose and told her not to look at him. He asked if she had kids. When she said no, he replied, “Do you want to have kids? Do you want to grow old? Then stop suing my friend.” He demanded her wallet and uttered one last threat: “This is your only warning.”
He was true to his word. A week later, the man returned in broad daylight and parked his Volvo outside the office. While children were climbing into their parents’ cars just metres away, the man fired seven rounds through the firm’s front window, straight into the lobby. Afterward, Carr found her receptionist on her hands and knees, terrified and surrounded by broken glass but, miraculously, uninjured. The entire staff went into panic mode. Some disappeared from social media; one moved out of their home.
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Carr maintained her cool—until, a few days later, York Regional Police contacted her with an urgent message. They had arrested a 38-year-old man named Thomas Sliwinski for possession of a stolen vehicle, and they’d found an alarming video on his phone. In it, Sliwinski is at the wheel of a car that pulls up beside Carr’s Toyota RAV4. Sliwinski then points a gun at Carr and pulls the trigger—but the gun misfires. “Oh fuck,” Sliwinski exclaims, “it doesn’t work.”
The cops told Carr that, from what they could tell, she’d narrowly escaped assassination. Next time, she may not be so lucky. Immediately, Carr and her husband started packing their belongings. An hour later, the cops arrived at Carr’s house to escort the couple on the first leg of their journey out of the country. When Carr returned to Canada five months later, the police told her that they still couldn’t protect her—at least if she continued in her line of work. She could have her safety, they explained, or she could have her business, but she probably couldn’t have both. Ultimately, Carr closed her firm for good. Law and order had lost. The tow truck industry had won.
It’s hardly surprising that the towing industry has become a magnet for lawbreakers. Wherever you find transportation infrastructure, you often find criminality. Airports, shipping ports, truck depots—these are the liminal spaces where the above-board economy collides with the criminal underworld. The business of organized crime, after all, is mostly about shipping and logistics. The goal is to move contraband into and out of territory you control.
A tow truck fits neatly into this enterprise. In 1969, General Motors began installing anti-theft locks on all of its new models. These devices—which freeze the steering wheel and gear shift once the driver removes the key—soon became an industry standard. Without the ability to hotwire an engine, organized crime rings started using tow trucks, which could whisk a car away to an auto-body shop where the locks could be changed or the frame stripped for parts. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, opening up the eastern European black market, criminals in North America had even more incentive to run this particular hustle. They started shipping cars en masse across the Atlantic Ocean into Baltic ports.
The best—or, really, worst—thing about tow trucks is that they give criminals the one thing they need most: deniability. Regardless of what’s stashed away in the vehicle you’re towing—drugs, guns, stolen jewellery—you’ll look, from the outside, like a regular person doing a regular job. And if you do get searched, you can always plead ignorance. A tow trucker isn’t expected to know anything about the contents of a car they’re towing.
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Tow trucks are more than Trojan horses for contraband—the whole enterprise has become a profitable criminal opportunity in its own right. Having acquired tow trucks for car theft or drug smuggling, criminals discovered that they could make a whole lot of dirty money through the more conventional business of towing, impounding and performing trumped-up repairs on vehicles, then defrauding insurers for cash. And they’ve proven to be fierce competition for the majority of tow truck drivers, who are law-abiding citizens trying to make a living. As the business became more lucrative, it naturally became more cut-throat, with nefarious tow truckers laying claim to large swaths of urban territory.
The inevitable result: turf wars. In Sydney, Australia, in 2005, competition in the towing industry escalated into a literal firebombing campaign. In 2019, a tow truck war in Durban, South Africa, erupted into a spate of drive-by shootings, with civilians caught in the crossfire. In the early 2010s, crime syndicates like the Mafia and the Hells Angels managed to monopolize the municipal towing in Montreal and all but eliminate their competition.
In Toronto, by the 1990s, organized crime syndicates were moving aggressively into tow trucking, leading to sporadic outbursts of gun violence and a massive spike in the size of insurance bills. In 2012, an insurance-fraud tax force commissioned by the Ontario government found that billings had increased by an astonishing $2.4 billion over four years despite a decrease in accident-related injuries. But, because the inflated costs largely affected insurers, the issue didn’t draw much attention from the public.
By 2018, a man named Alexander Vinogradsky had established himself at the centre of the maelstrom. A bearded, heavyset guy in his 30s, he had alleged connections to a slew of businesses in North York, including car rental agencies, auto repair shops and physiotherapy clinics. Police believe that he owned a company in Vaughan called Paramount Towing, which he used to funnel business to the other entities he controlled. Vinogradsky was known for fiercely protecting his turf. His business empire was a kind of fiefdom, with its own rules and enforcement tactics. He had a cadre of drivers, some of whom referred to one another as family and travelled in threes in case they were attacked. Guys who left the organization or crossed it were intimidated or assaulted. In February of 2018, an employee caught a thief in an impound lot that Vinogradsky is believed to have owned. Instead of calling the police, the employee alerted Vinogradsky, who allegedly demanded that his associates drop what they were doing and hurry to the lot to deliver a gang beating.
Many of the people involved in tow trucking crimes are motivated by desperation or greed. Thomas Sliwinski, the man in the cellphone video who had pointed a gun at Lisa Carr, suffered from PTSD, anxiety and bipolar disorder and had been using drugs since he was 17. By 2018, he’d fallen deep into drug debt. To settle it, Sliwinski had agreed to murder Carr. (He later told police that he’d deliberately botched the hit in an attempt to fulfill his obligation to his debtors without harming anyone.)
One of Vinogradsky’s conspirators was Vera Kasotty, a 60-year-old mother of three and former English teacher from Russia. She may have been introduced to Vinogradsky by her husband, Igor, a long-haul truck driver. Vinogradsky sized up Vera and took her for an easy mark—an unsophisticated striver who could be talked into breaking the law for a quick payout. So, on March 5, 2020, Vera, working with Vinogradsky, staged a fake collision with her Lexus in North York. The car was wrecked at the scene, likely by Vinogradsky’s men. While Vera reported the collision to the police, Igor coordinated to have the car dropped off at an impound lot that was connected to Vinogradsky. The ultimate payout from the insurer was just under $40,000, which Vera pocketed in full.
Three weeks later, Vera and Vinogradsky conspired to torch one of Igor’s trucks. The blaze consumed two other nearby trucks, a Mercedes and a trailer. The York Regional Fire Department needed six fire trucks, two command units and a support unit to put the fire out, at a cost of $8,000. The payout from Igor’s insurance was just under $60,000. For six decades, Vera had lived a crime-free life in Canada, but now, on the cusp of old age, her proximity to Vinogradsky’s sprawling empire had turned her into an arsonist and a fraudster.
Vinogradsky seemed untouchable—until, in 2018, he took on Sergei Manukian, a Toronto-area landlord in his late 20s who also owned a clinic that specialized in physical rehabilitation. The business was legit, but Manukian had dangerous people in his orbit. He was friends with a man named Soheil “Cadi” Rafipour, a manager for hip hop artists who was connected to street gangs: the Chester Le, whose members had pulled off a string of jewellery heists across Toronto, and the Deep Water gang, which allegedly supplied the Chester Le boys with guns.
According to a tip received by police, Manukian and Rafipour were planning a joint venture in the tow trucking business. Their goal was allegedly to drum up business for Manukian’s rehab clinic: whenever the tow truck company picked up a battered car, they would dole out a physiotherapy referral. The bill for their treatments would, of course, go to the driver’s insurer. There was just one problem—the business would be treading on Vinogradsky’s turf, a move that was tantamount to a declaration of war. It wasn’t long before the attempts on Manukian’s and Rafipour’s lives began. On October 1, 2018, someone tried to shoot them both while they were in Manukian’s BMW on Finch Avenue. The shooter missed, but two days later, men with guns showed up at Manukian’s clinic and sent a volley of bullets through the front window. Again, no one was hit. Manukian was proving difficult to eliminate.
On Halloween, Manukian was sitting in his Jeep outside his clinic, having a smoke with a friend named Jonathan Salazar-Blanco. When a Nissan Infiniti—its window rolled down despite the fall weather—entered the parking lot and began creeping toward the Jeep, Manukian likely realized what was happening. As the driver and the passenger in the Infiniti started firing, Manukian bent down as low as he could behind the steering wheel of the Jeep. Twenty-one bullets pierced the hood and shattered the windshield. Salazar-Blanco pulled out his own gun and started firing back at the men, who then fled in the Infiniti. At this point, Manukian raised his head, put his foot on the gas and drove out in hot pursuit of his would-be killers.
The Infiniti had barely cleared two blocks when the driver lost control on a turn and collided with a dumpster. Manukian’s Jeep was right behind him. As the driver tried to reverse away from the crash, Manukian rammed the Infiniti hard from behind, sending it spinning. The two men inside got out and ran in opposite directions, the shooter dropping his gun. Manukian got out of his car and took off after the driver on foot, eventually catching up to him. The two fought until Manukian forced the driver to the ground. He continued kicking the driver while he called 911. By the time police arrived, the driver’s face was bloodied, his nose was broken and he had a small internal bleed in his neck, near his spinal cord. The cops arrested the driver, who ultimately survived the ordeal. The second gunman, meanwhile, had gotten away. So, too, had Salazar-Blanco.
An arm reached out of the car window and coolly delivered four shots to Rafipour’s crumpled body
In the aftermath, Salazar-Blanco got roped into a revenge plot. Acquaintances of his and Manukian’s had heard that Vinogradsky was en route to Costa Rica, and they proposed that Salazar-Blanco track him down and kill him in retaliation. Within days, Salazar-Blanco was posted up there, sending updates about staking out the airport. “I’m not moving from the port,” he wrote. “I’ll do it with my bare hands if I have to.” He also said that he’d phoned all the luxury hotels in the country to see if Vinogradsky was registered as a guest, and he’d hired a team of men to comb the beaches. But, on November 3, Salazar-Blanco heard from his guys back in Toronto that his intel had been faulty: Vinogradsky was in fact in Miami, where he was planning his next move.
On December 24, a man stalked Rafipour’s car for hours as it moved through the GTA, from a McDonald’s, where Rafipour stopped to get coffee, to a Christmas Eve party in Richmond Hill. After that, two hitmen showed up in a Volkswagen Touareg to stake out the address. Rafipour left the party at 9:30 p.m. and was getting into his Corvette when the Touareg pulled up beside him and a man shot him in the chest. Badly wounded and bleeding, Rafipour stumbled down the street before collapsing onto the sidewalk. A woman in a nearby house hurried out to where he’d fallen. She arrived just in time to see the Touareg pull up, again, beside the injured man. Then an arm extended out of the window and coolly delivered four more shots into Rafipour’s crumpled body. He died in hospital that night.
The battle Vinogradsky was waging was just one in a larger towing-industry turf war that had started sometime in 2018. At the centre of the violence were four consortiums—including Vinogradsky’s—each with its own gang affiliations and all feuding over contested territory.
Over two years, roughly 50 vehicles were torched at impound lots and body shops. After Rafipour’s murder, the killings kept mounting, and they didn’t always happen on the road. In January of 2019, a 36-year-old tow truck company employee was shot and killed in his apartment near Kennedy Road and Highway 401. Three months later, a 28-year-old driver was killed in an execution-style shooting outside his house while his mother watched from an upstairs window.
Turf wars are, by their nature, chaotic. The victims and aggressors are often one and the same, since the man who gets shot at one day will be out avenging the shooting the next. This dynamic puts police in the awkward position of having to protect the same people they’re investigating. In late 2018, the cops warned Vinogradsky that rivals were out to kill him. Vinogradsky and his family went into hiding, but he stopped by his house on April 4, 2019, only to find that someone was staking out the property. When he parked outside the residence, a car drove past and the man in the passenger seat began firing shots his way. Vinogradsky fled, dialling 911 while the other car pursued, its passenger managing to clip Vinogradsky, non-lethally, in the side.
Later that day, Vinogradsky told police that he was “a dead man with money on my head.” Yet, when the cops asked who might be behind the attack, he refused to say. “I have to think about my street cred,” he explained. If he looked fearful or ratted on his rivals, his underlings might defect. As the months wore on, Vinogradsky became suspicious and twitchy. In one instance, he called 911 because he believed someone was following him. It turned out Vinogradsky’s criminal enemies weren’t the only ones closing in on him. The man tailing him was an undercover cop running surveillance.
In 2020, York Regional Police—in collaboration with the Ontario Provincial Police, the Toronto Police and the Canada Revenue Agency—launched Project Platinum, an investigation into Paramount Towing, the company Vinogradsky was believed to own, and its rivals. In May, cops raided homes and businesses across the GTA. They seized a machine gun, handguns, shotguns, rifles and brass knuckles as well as five kilograms of fentanyl and more than a kilogram each of cocaine, cannabis and crystal meth. Ultimately, 38 people were arrested. Vera Kasotty (the woman who had staged the phony collision) and Thomas Sliwinski (the man who had botched the hit on Carr) were among them. But one of the operation’s biggest gets was Vinogradsky, who was apprehended and charged with several crimes including fraud, conspiracy to commit arson and participating in a criminal organization.
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation to come out of Project Platinum was that several cops appeared to have been in on the hustle. Five GTA officers were accused of colluding with criminal tow truck drivers; they were suspended with pay. Another investigation alleged that a Toronto constable named Ronald Joseph had been working with tow truck drivers to stage collisions or report false collisions as part of a scheme to defraud insurers. He was also accused of stealing a police radio so that his towing contacts could get to accidents faster.
In the months and years that followed the raids, prosecutors notched a few wins. Joseph pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted fraud and one count of public mischief. Kasotty was convicted of fraud and arson. Sliwinski and two other men were convicted for the campaign of intimidation against Carr and five people were found guilty for Rafipour’s murder. But other cases fizzled. Salazar-Blanco was acquitted in the Costa Rica plot. Police knew he’d gone to Costa Rica and texted his associates back home that he was going to find and kill Vinogradsky. However, the Crown couldn’t prove that he’d actually done the things he’d described over text—maybe he was just bluffing to keep the Toronto guys happy. Manukian was tried for assaulting the driver who had attempted to kill him in the Halloween attack, and he was convicted of assault causing bodily harm. But, on appeal, he was given an absolute discharge—that is, a conviction without penalty—for the lesser crime of common assault. The judge found that, for the majority of the altercation, Manukian had acted in self-defence.
In 2022, the Crown dropped its charges against Vinogradsky and four other accused because it couldn’t litigate the case without revealing the identity of a confidential informant. A free man, Vinogradsky returned to the tow trucking business, but his reprieve was short lived. On March 28, 2024, a gunman shot him multiple times outside a plaza near Finch and Dufferin before escaping. Vinogradsky died on the scene, a few blocks from the physio clinic where, five years prior, Manukian had fended off an attempt on his life.
Project Platinum and the death of Vinogradsky put an end to the tow truck wars, at least for a time. And legislators used that reprieve to introduce new regulations to the industry. In 2021, to cut down on collision-chasing, the province launched a pilot project that carved some GTA highways up into “tow zones,” with each area awarded to specific companies. Those zones may soon be expanded, although chasing remains the norm on most GTA streets. Three years later, a new suite of provincial regulations kicked in, requiring tow truckers to get a special licence, submit to criminal background checks, post information publicly about their maximum fees and take a customer’s vehicle to an accessible destination using the best available route.
The regulations were both overdue and insufficient. People who get in car accidents are still susceptible to abuse at the hands of their towers. Insurance payouts are still easily gamed by scammers. And tow truckers are still financially motivated to violently defend their territory. Even after Project Platinum, it was only a matter of time before the industry’s criminal elements regrouped.
Police became aware of the Union, a consortium of GTA towing businesses, in 2023. The Union had started up a classic protection racket, collecting dues of up to thousands of dollars per year in exchange for theoretical safety. If you operated on Union territory and refused to pay, the Union would get you.
Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from Project Platinum was that several cops appeared to have been in on the hustle
By 2024, the city was embroiled in another full-on tow truck war. At night, Union thugs would sneak onto the lots of non-Union tow companies and set fire to their trucks, or they would visit non-members’ homes and riddle their windows with bullets. In Toronto in 2024, 63 firearm discharges—roughly 13 per cent of the total for that year—were related to the tow truck industry. The Union singled out turncoats or deserters for particularly brutal treatment. Neveeth Raguthas and his brother were both tow truck drivers. When one of them left his job at Joshua Roadside, a Union-affiliated lot, to move to a non-Union business, the response was unrelenting. Assailants shot up Raguthas’s house three times in 2024. Then, last March, two men broke into Raguthas’s home and shot him, his younger sister and their dog. Raguthas was the only one who survived.
That same evening, a new bar, the Piper Arms Scarborough—part of the Piper Arms restaurant chain—was celebrating its opening night in an old heritage home near Scarborough Town Centre. The franchise was owned by the uncle of a dispatcher at Joshua Roadside. Just past 10:30 p.m., four patrons were gathered in the lobby. Suddenly, bullets began flying, spitting up clouds of dust and sending the patrons running for cover. Three guys in masks and hoodies then rushed in from the entrance. The one in front fired an assault rifle into the dining room, the one behind fired a handgun into another room and the third guarded the door. Some customers dashed for the basement; others ducked beneath tables or lay down on banquettes.
After 10 seconds of indiscriminate shooting, the attackers rushed out just as quickly as they had arrived. The incident was brief yet terrifying. Nine people were hit—shot in the arms, elbows, knees and legs—and another three were injured by falling debris. The floor was a mess of blood and broken glass. Somehow, nobody was killed, which Toronto police chief Myron Demkiw called “a miracle.”
The police launched an investigation that resulted in 10 arrests. The most shocking detail of the case was the relative youth of the suspects, who ranged in age from 15 to 22. They weren’t tow truckers—just kids getting paid for part-time work.
A few weeks later, Demkiw announced the results of a much larger operation. This one was focused on high-level Union members. All told, 20 people were arrested on 111 charges, including 52 counts of conspiracy to commit murder. When raiding the homes of suspects, police found three armour-plated Cadillacs—rare, expensive vehicles that only sophisticated criminals would have the means and motives to buy. The list of suspects contained one familiar name: Sergei Manukian, somehow still alive and at large, who has been charged with two counts of assault. At the press conference announcing the arrests, Demkiw acknowledged the most disturbing development: that the world of criminal tow truckers was increasingly colliding with the world the rest of us inhabit.
Today, some law-abiding tow truckers argue that the sector needs a complete overhaul—carve the entire province into dedicated zones, they say; assign one trusted, carefully vetted towing company to each zone; and fine or arrest anyone caught working outside of their legal territory. If the provincial and municipal governments took this bold move, criminality would surely decline. But perhaps efficiency would decline too, as chasers disappear from the landscape.
At the moment, the towing industry has quieted down. Whether it stays quiet will depend on how far our governments are willing to go. And if lawmakers decide that the fly-by-night industry we currently have is, for all its flaws, at least speedier—and therefore preferable—to a more regulated system? Then it’s only a matter of time before the wars start up again, with new players and new allegiances but the same old mixture of extortion, arson, murder and terror.
This story appears in the February 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.
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Simon Lewsen is a feature writer and a regular contributor to Toronto Life, Maclean’s, the Walrus, Report on Business, and the Toronto Star. He writes the monthly City Beat column on art and architecture for Designlines, and he teaches writing at the University of Toronto.