Longtime Hells Angel biker killed on Danforth

Member killed in execution-style shooting

A longtime Ontario Hells Angel was shot to death execution-style in the parking garage of an apartment building on Danforth Avenue on Tuesday night.

Harry Lainas, 47, was a full member of the Hells Angels’ Simcoe South charter and formerly with the Keswick Hells Angels.

Police said they were called to 2301 Danforth Ave., near Oak Park Avenue, around 10:24 p.m. Tuesday night, where Lainas was found dead with multiple gunshot wounds in the parking garage.

Lainas was unconscious when paramedics arrived and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Shell casings were found near the body and police asked anyone with security video to call investigators.

Lainas narrowly escaped an attempt on his life roughly two years ago while collecting illegal gambling revenue in the same area where he was slain, a source who knew him said.

Lainas had brushes with the law that went back decades.

Lainas was named by police as being part of an organized crime ring that impersonated police while committing a string of GTA armed robberies in 2008.

That nine-month operation, called Project Betrayal, began after witnesses called 911 to report the September 2007 robbery of cash from two Montreal drug dealers at a Richmond Hill hotel.

Project Betrayal ended with 198 criminal charges laid against 25 people after a crime spree across the regions of York, Peel, Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe.

Project Betrayal investigators said they intercepted 50,000 phone conversations and seized body armour marked “Police,” police-style stun guns, handcuffs, illegal handguns, including one with a silencer, $140,000 in stolen lawn mowers, $1.6 million in stolen power tools, 300 marijuana plants, police-style radios, a money-counting machine, $108,000 in cash, plus 15 stolen luxury vehicles.

Some of the police paraphernalia was found hidden inside a false wall of a Richmond Hill home, police said.

At the time, former York Regional Police Chief Armand La Barge called the group “very organized” and “very dangerous.”

“I think we disrupted a very sophisticated criminal enterprise here,” La Barge said after the arrests.

That operation centred around a career criminal named Dobroslav (Bobby) Manchev, who often held court in a restaurant on the Danforth — which police said he called “the office.”

Manchev was shot to death near the Eglinton Town Centre last May.

Police said that Manchev was savvy to police procedures, such as how surveillance is conducted.

Manchev was sentenced to six years in prison in 2001 for being part of a crime ring in which members pretended to be police officers on drug raids, and then robbed and threatened various drug dealers in an attempt to raise money to import ecstasy from Europe.

Also charged in Project Betrayal was former Toronto police constable Darin Cooper, who was sentenced to 9 1/2 years in prison for breach of trust and three counts of armed robbery.

In 1996, before he became a Hells Angel, police said Lainas was a member of a group called “the Danforth Village Posse” gang, who brought baseball bats and steel pipes to a brawl with bouncers at an Adelaide Street night club, injuring seven employees.

Lainas is Toronto’s ninth homicide victim of 2021 and the eighth killed in a shooting.