HUNTER: No replies to admission of guilt in murder of gangster pal Grant Norton

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Grant Norton ran out of time this summer of 2020.

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The 59-year-old leather-faced mafia operative with a store-bought smile was caught between the whirlwind of a bloody mafia settling accounts in southern Ontario and his own nefarious plans.

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Norton, an associate of the small potato mafia, has been linked by police to myriad schemes, including the infamous Havana Group scam involving his friend and benefactor Pasquale “Fat Pat” Musitano.

Of course, the plump gangster landed with a splash on the sidewalk on July 10, 2020. He was previously the longtime boss of the Musitano crime family in Hamilton, a business bequeathed to him by his dear old gangster father, Dominik.

The last three years hadn’t been particularly good for Pat. His brother Angelo and a bunch of cronies were beaten up. Poor Pat was like a leper with parts of his body falling to the ground.

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Even boys the portly criminal had been associated with as children were beaten up. Pat had become a box office poison and his hubris eventually caught up with him.

Which brings us to the unfortunate Grant Norton of Ingersoll.

Norton was last seen on July 6, 2020 and was reported missing to police in the Waterloo area six days later. For Posterity: Four days later, Musitano was beaten up in the parking lot of a Burlington mall after decades of greed and malicious dealings.

On July 19, 2020, Norton’s remains were discovered in a white plastic barrel in an idyllic canyon on the River Thames in London, Ontario.

Immediately, all eyes turned to the bloody underworld machinations emanating from the GTA. Wait, cops said, it has nothing to do with the Big Pat attack or any of the other dozen or so riots between 2017 and 2020.

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A year later, using surveillance footage showing some of the cast members getting something out of Norton’s sporty Audi, investigators finally arrested those suspected of being responsible for the entrepreneur’s death.

Ashley Bourget, 39, charged with first-degree murder; Wesley Peters, 31, is charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit a criminal offense; Zaida Collin, 26, is charged with manslaughter and conspiracy to commit a criminal offense; and Adam Wade, 39, faces manslaughter charges.

Like my colleague Jane Sims from the Reports from the London Free PressOn Wednesday, Joseph Hodgkin, 52, was subsequently convicted of being an accomplice. Police observed him on CCTV pushing the barrel containing Norton’s body.

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But some pieces of the puzzle were missing in London, Ontario. courtroom. The how and why of the murder was kept secret and details kept for the trial of the others.

Crown and defense agreed that Hodgkin had nothing to do with the murder.

He is helping his young mother in an “emergency situation,” said his attorney James Zegers.

The attorney dryly noted, “He got there and discovered the emergency was a body in a barrel and he helped dispose of that body.”

Hodgkin will be sentenced on July 5 – a day before the third anniversary of Norton’s assassination, Sims noted.

In the past, police officers sometimes arrested all-rounders and brought charges against them.

The crook would whine, ‘But I didn’t do it.’ I’m innocent.’

The police replied: “Maybe not, but you are guilty of something.”

That seems to be the case with Grant Norton.

He might not have been murdered on the campaign trail, but someone somewhere decided he was guilty of something.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun