Their clubhouses are closed, travel is out and gambling has dried up. How COVID-19 is changing organized crime in the GTA

Their favourite GTA cafes, restaurants and gyms are closed and they're uncomfortable meeting their associates on the streets, to walk and talk the business.

And the severe travel restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic mean they can't jet off to Italy or Mexico - or even just Montreal or New York - make deals.

Social isolation has hit the underworld hard, including in the GTA and Hamilton area, experts say.

"Everyone is cash poor," said one GTA private investigator who often bumps up against local mobsters.

"They're suffering like the rest of us," said Federico Varese, a global organized crime expert and author who teaches criminology at Oxford University.

"A lot of 'wiseguys' and bikers have money in property, so they'll lose like every other landlord," said Paul Manning, a former Hamilton undercover police officer who investigated organized crime. "Debt collection will be an issue," he added.

Some southern Ontario mobsters have interests in construction firms, which are now shut down, and even those who make money stealing construction machinery are hurting, Manning said.

But probably the hardest-hit segment of the underworld involves illegal sports gambling.

The pandemic means there's suddenly no NBA, NHL, international soccer or U.S. college sports to bet on and no prospect of anything to come in the summer, including football and baseball. Even old standbys like horse racing are but a fond memory.

"Sports gambling has been devastated, obviously," said Declan Hill, an author and professor at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut.

Sports gambling was big-business in the GTA. At a 2018 Toronto trial, prosecutors said the site Platinum Sports Book, which was run by the Hells Angels and the old Rizzuto crime family of Montreal, had grossed more than $100 million in five years before it was shut down.

At that trial, the court heard that alternate gambling websites were set up almost immediately after the Platinum sites were disabled, on Super Bowl Sunday in 2013.

Now there are plenty of frustrated gamblers and mobsters and no big-time pro sports, Hill said.

"The sports gambling market has nothing to bet on," he said - not even obscure sports like caber-tossing or jai alai.

During the pandemic, some hardened gamblers have resorted to betting on things like virtual horse racing or extremely minor-league soccer, still being played in remote spots in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe where there haven't yet been such severe crackdowns on public gatherings.

Such low-level competitions where games are too unskilled to be televised are ripe for match-fixing, Hill said.

Elsewhere, GTA mobsters continue to make money from illegal drug sales, but supply and distribution remain uncertain and, as a result, prices for illegal drugs like cocaine have fluctuated wildly, sources say.

In Montreal, Daniel Renaud of La Presse found that cocaine prices shot up after COVID-19 hit. Meanwhile, social isolation also has made it tougher for criminals to distribute their drugs, and home delivery was tried, with mixed results.

What's more, it's become tougher to sell drugs like methamphetamine as raves and festivals have disappeared.

The Mexican drug cartels that supply GTA mobsters have had their shipments of chemicals from China disrupted by the pandemic, said Luis Najera, a GTA investigative journalist who fled Mexico after his life was threatened by drug cartels.

Najera said he anticipates violence between crime groups if the pandemic drags on.

"I think in the long run those groups without a solid chain of supplies will begin to attack others in order to steal products or chemicals to keep their operations running," he said.

Experts say the pandemic may push organized criminals to put more energy into money-lending, a traditional source of income.

Varese notes that during the Great Depression, the New York Mafia moved heavily into loan-sharking.

Anna Sergi, an expert on international organized crime who teaches at the University of Essex, agreed that loan-sharking activity may increase if the pandemic drags on.

"Not immediately, but surely this can happen in the medium-term," Sergi said. "We know that in the past some criminal groups, Mafia-type, have turned to loan-sharking on those businesses they were once extorting. Or they have the opportunity to buy bankrupt or nearly bankrupt businesses now for cash and enter the legal markets unnoticed."

Generally, underworld experts agree that organized crime will soldier on through the pandemic.

"I doubt we'll see the Mafiosos wearing N95s (breathing masks) but I could certainly see the odd shipment being hijacked," said a long-time GTA police officer who specialized in organized crime. "These guys will never quit. The monthly nut is too big."

Peter Edwards is a Toronto-based reporter primarily covering crime. Reach him by email at pedwards@thestar.ca