A shopper leaves Jungle Fruit, a Kensington Market produce stall in Toronto, on Oct. 10.Sarah Dea for The Globe and Mail
Anthony Bennett is back in jail, once again accused of stealing plants from a Chinese merchant in Toronto's downtown.
Police locked him up on Friday, just three days after he testified in a high-profile trial. In that case, merchant David Chen and two co-accused face charges that they assaulted and forcibly confined Mr. Bennett after catching him stealing plants in 2009. Mr. Bennett is the Crown's star witness in the case.
The latest allegations date back to the spring. Authorities said they could have charged Mr. Bennett months earlier with the thefts, but "each time, the suspect was not on the scene, so police were not able to make an arrest at that time," Toronto Police Detective Henry Dyck told The Globe and Mail Sunday.
He added that "sometimes minor investigations sit for a while."
Mr. Bennett, who has amassed 43 prior convictions, is spending the long weekend in the Don Jail. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to appear in Old City Hall court to face five charges of theft under $5,000. Specifically, he stands accused of stealing plants on several occasions at the Jungle Fruit mart - a Kensington Market stall just half a kilometre away from Mr. Chen's Lucky Moose Mart on Dundas Street West.
"Okay, I stole from [Mr. Chen] I took the plant," Mr. Bennett, a 52-year-old drug addict, testified last week. Then he argued that he had been targeted "because I'm black" and that it was wrong to "frigging tie me up and put me in the back of a frigging van."
Market merchants in the Spadina Avenue area complain that Mr. Bennett and others steal plants and other wares with near impunity.
Vendors tend to look at Mr. Chen as a hero who made a necessary citizen's arrest.
Mr. Bennett is "a well known thief," Jeff Ng, the owner of the Jungle Fruit Mart told The Globe and Mail Sunday from his store. He said he and his security cameras have frequently caught the man stealing.
Between May and July, he phoned these crimes into police and even presented authorities with video evidence.
The delay in the charges, is "a paperwork issue," according to Det. Dyck, who went to Jungle Fruit Mart on Sunday to retrieve some additional surveillance-camera footage.
He explained he was only recently assigned to the work of collating complaints about Mr. Bennett. The detective insisted his investigation is completely distinct from the Lucky Moose trial - and no one had asked him to hold off charging Mr. Bennett until after he gave testimony.
Det. Dyck said that various theft reports had landed scattershot on different officers' desks and inside a "centralized police reporting service" until he was assigned to the case. Then, "it was just a matter of putting all these reports together and speaking to the complainant," he said.
About an hour before Det. Dyck picked up the tapes at Jungle Fruit Mart Sunday, the owner of a food store across Kensington Avenue was dialling police himself.
Frank Lu, owner of Essence of Life, got into a shouting match with a young man in a hoodie whom he accused of theft. "You stay there, I'm calling police," he said, dialling Toronto Police's 14 Division. "Yeah, buddy, don't worry, I'm right here," the young man replied, not budging.
"We have them [thefts]every day, there is not one day that goes by that somebody doesn't steal something from our store," Wan Lu, Mr. Lu's daughter, said after the incident.
Police, she said, "don't do anything, actually."
With a report from Christie Blatchford
Colin Freeze