After one day of deliberations, a jury has found Alessandro Giammichele guilty of murdering Marko Bakir.
The 12 jurors delivered the verdict to a Hamilton Superior courtroom on Tuesday morning where Bakir’s family members sat along with a slew of homicide detectives.
Giammichele, who goes by Gino, sat in the prisoner’s box. The 31-year-old from Hamilton is tall with a dark beard. He appeared to have no outward reaction about the verdict.
Bakir’s family members gasped and cried when the verdict was read, and hugged the Crown attorneys afterwards.
Giammichele was charged with first-degree murder in 2022 for orchestrating the shooting death of Bakir in 2018. He had pleaded not guilty.
Another man Abdelaziz Ibrahim was also charged with first-degree murder of Bakir but died before the charges were resolved. He was accused of pulling the trigger on Giammichele’s behalf.
Justice Toni Skarica had finished instructing the 12-person jury on Monday at 10:30 a.m. He’d told them they could find Giammichele not guilty, guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of second-degree murder, or guilty of manslaughter.
“I totally agree with that verdict,” Skarica told the jury Tuesday morning.
In the trial, the Crown and defence agreed that in September 2018, Bakir lent Giammichele, a drug dealer, $100,000 as an investment in what the jury heard was likely a drug-related business. The pair, who had become close, signed a contract with a payment plan, but Giammichele stopped following it after two partial payments.
On November 22, 2018 around 8:15 p.m., Ibrahim shot Bakir, 31, to death in front of his home in Hamilton’s west Mountain area, the Crown and defence agreed.
The Crown said that it was Giammichele who hired Ibrahim through an alleged drug dealer.
Giammichele did so, at least in part, because Bakir threatened to expose his criminal lifestyle to Giammichele’s father and take him to court, the Crown said.
“Marko lent Gino $100,000 and Gino had 100,000 reasons to want him dead,” assistant Crown attorney Elise Quinn said in her closing argument on May 31.
Giammichele turned off his phone and drove Ibrahim to the scene of the shooting, and communicated with Ibrahim before and after Ibrahim shot Bakir five times, Quinn said.
“This is not a string of bad luck for Gino,” Quinn said. “The cumulative effect of these events makes it absolutely improbable that these are just a series of unfortunate coincidences, especially when you consider all the other evidence in this case.”
For example, the Crown interviewed one witness during the trial who told police Giammichele had confessed to him.
The defence argued that the witness lied and only told police that because they kept coming to question him.
The Crown also presented evidence that when he was in the Dominican Republic in 2019, Giammichele used Google to translate phrases about him being a hitman and involved in violent crimes. The defence had countered that Giammichele was boasting to impress women and other people in the drug trade.
During the trial, defence lawyer Kendra Stanyon had argued the evidence against her client was inconclusive and did not establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
”Suspicion is not enough. ‘Maybe,’ is not enough. ‘Likely,’ is not enough. Even ‘probably,’ is not enough,” she said in her closing statement.
Stanyon also said the Crown’s narrative was illogical. For example, she said Giammichele already had a plan to meet Bakir in a private location to pay him back, so he had no need to kill him — especially in a neighbourhood full of potential witnesses.
What’s more, Stanyon added, Giammichele did nothing to hide potential evidence against him on his phone, which she said he unlocked for the police.
But ultimately the jury accepted the Crown’s version of events when they found Giammichele responsible for Bakir’s death.
The accused shooter, Ibrahim, was 25 years old when he died in August 2022 in the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont. A 2024 coroner’s inquest found the Hamilton man died accidentally of acute toxicity of fentanyl.
