On a winter day in 2015, Erin Maranan logged on to her computer at a police detachment in Toronto’s northwest corner, a trove of confidential information at her fingertips.
A temporary civilian employee, Maranan had access to information classified by police as “highly restricted.” The job represented a sharp turn on her vocational path, which had included stints as a model, a personal trainer and a yoga instructor.
The petite woman with long, black hair keyed in the name “Victor Oliveira.” Up came a summary of a recent Highway Traffic Act ticket, which provided personal information including the licence plate number and description of his vehicle.
Seven months later, Oliveira was fatally shot as he sat in his white Range Rover outside a restaurant near Pearson Airport.
Maranan’s query was just one of dozens of illegal police database searches conducted under the nose of her employer during a 16-month spree between 2014 and 2015. All were done for the benefit of organized crime
The Crown theory was that some of Maranan’s searches were conducted to collect information on rival members of criminal organizations, while others were so-called “heat checks” — queries done on a gang’s own members to find out what police had on them.
Three of the people Maranan searched were later killed, including Thanh Tien Ngo, who died outside a North York bowling alley in a March shooting that also killed an innocent bystander. Two other victims survived after they were shot inside a ritzy Toronto steak house in September 2015.
Kelly sentenced Maranan to a year in jail followed by three years of probation after the 30-year-old mother pleaded guilty to breach of trust. As Maranan was taken into custody last week, her mother sat in the front row of the courtroom, quietly weeping.
In his lengthy sentencing decision, Kelly said Maranan had been “wilfully blind” to the fact that the information she had gathered was being provided to criminal organizations, which included Toronto’s Chin Pac gang and Vancouver’s United Nations gang.
In a voluntary statement given to Toronto police this year, Maranan admitted conducting unauthorized searches on “many occasions” concerning “many individuals,” according to an agreed statement of facts filed in court, which names 20 people as the subjects of her searches.
Some of the searches were done at the behest of one man, who has ties to criminal organizations. The Star is not publishing his name at the request of the judge to protect Maranan’s child.
No one has been charged for counselling Maranan to commit breach of trust.
Maranan admitted to having been paid a total of between $3,000 and $4,000 for the information she gleaned. But the sum did not appear to explain why Maranan engaged in such risky criminal behaviour, Kelly said.