Wrestling with who killed lawyer, husband
The prime suspect was Satan’s Choice biker who once fought Hulk Hogan
Hopes of solving a double murder dimmed when former outlaw biker and one-time pro wrestler Ion William Croitoru (a.k.a. Johnny K-9, Bedlam Bruiser, The Terrible Turk and Ion Kroitoru) died quietly in February 2017 in the Keele Community Correctional Centre, a Toronto halfway house for particularly hardcore offenders.
Croitoru was 53 when he drew his last breath.
He had been in the news bigtime two decades earlier, after he was charged by Hamilton Police with two counts of firstdegree murder in the Nov. 16, 1998, shotgun slayings of Lynn Gilbank, a criminal defence lawyer, and her husband Fred, a computer consultant, both 52, in their home in the upscale Ancaster district.
By the time of his death, Croitoru was well past his heyday, when he did wildly violent things for money, legally and illegally.
“He just became a nobody,” said another outlaw biker who also spent time at the Keele Centre. “Lost all of his fame. Lost all of his clout.”
The high point in Croitoru’s public life was when he was tossed about in a WWF bout by Hulk Hogan.
He made the news on the criminal front when he tried to blow up the Sudbury police station while a member of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. The bombing was retaliation — he and biker friends were kicked out of a local strip club in 1996 for wearing gang colours.
He was Hamilton Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club president in the 1990s, when the club occupied a fortified grey building in the city’s east end.
The pool table there was donated by Hamilton mobster Pasquale (Pat) Musitano, whose murder last summer remains unsolved.
The donated pool table didn’t mean things were rosy between Croitoru and Musitano.
Musitano hit man Kenneth James Murdock, who’s now in a witness protection program, later told police that he was given a contract to kill Croitoru because the former grappler was working for the rival Luppino crime group.
Police also considered Croitoru to be muscle for another area crime group deeply involved in cannabis smuggling.
That brings us to how police thought they connected Croitoru to the execution-style slayings of the Gilbanks early in the morning of Nov. 16, 1998.
Fred Gilbank was found lying face down on the second-floor landing, shot twice. Lynn was still in bed, shot three times. Robbery and sexual assault were quickly ruled out. Police found two white gloves and five spent shells on the property.
At first, it seemed like the case would be quickly solved.
In late December 2000, Hamilton police announced they were “one witness away” from cracking the case.
By then, police had what they considered a solid theory: Lynn Gilbank was the killer’s prime target because she helped a drug courier disappear into a witness protection program after working with police against a drug-smuggling family.
Lynn Gilbank was considered something of a softie in legal circles, a nurturing person who went out of her way to help people. Before she began her law practice, she worked as a teacher, crisis counsellor and cancer society fundraiser. Her office was open to everyone, including drug dealers and killers. In her eye, her clients weren’t bad people, just lost souls.
The case appeared to be solved in 2005, when Croitoru and André Joseph Gravelle of Ancaster were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder. As police saw things, Gravelle ordered the hit and then Croitoru carried it out.
Those charges were dropped but Croitoru remained a suspect until his death.
Gravelle is the quieter, younger brother of Paul Gravelle, who has convictions for drug smuggling and bank robbery. (Paul Gravelle didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this article.)
Paul Gravelle joked to Hamilton Spectator reporter Bill Dunphy back in 2005 that when he moved to Hamilton from northern Ontario he only knew three words of English: “Stick ’em up.”
The Gravelle brothers went on to serve prison time in the U.S. in the 1990s for smuggling hash oil by boat from Jamaica to Florida.
The year 1998 was another rough one for the Gravelles. That’s when Lynn Gilbank was helping one of her clients, a drug mule, who was arrested at Pearson airport with a shipment of hash oil. The client cooperated with police and then vanished into witness protection.
In his interview with Dunphy, Paul Gravelle ridiculed the theory that the Gilbanks were killed because of Lynn’s work with the drug mule and the loss of a multimillion dollar seized hash oil shipment.
“It was a couple of suitcases of (hash) oil,” he told Dunphy.
That said, he also told Dunphy: “You do me wrong and I’m coming after you. Period.”
On the other hand, he stressed, he was never violent toward women. “I cherish women too much to ever harm a hair on (a woman’s) head. Look at my record, there’s nothing like that, there’s not a woman in this city can say I’ve ever raised my voice to them, never.”
Lawyers were safe from him too, Paul Gravelle said.
“A lot of people fear me, I don’t know why. I would never have went after a lawyer, never.”
There have been at least three lawyers murdered since 1978 in the GTA, but none of them were criminal attorneys.
After the murder charges against Croitoru were dropped on June 12, 2006, he moved to B.C. and settled in with the multi-ethnic United Nations gang. Within three years, he was charged with plotting to kill Jonathan, James and Jarrod Bacon of the rival Red Scorpions. Two years after that, he was also charged with first-degree murder in the death of a rival gang member and for an attempt on his girlfriend’s life.
Croitoru pleaded guilty in 2013 to conspiring to commit murder and the first-degree murder charge was dropped.
That’s what led him to the Keele Street halfway house. He wanted to get back into Hamilton but the parole board blocked him, so Toronto was the next best, nearest thing.
By that time, the Gilbank murders were old news — and still unsolved.