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Really, they should be locked up on grounds of bad taste alone.

Among the weapons, drugs and cash seized this week in a Toronto police-led series of raids was some preposterously garish bling — one giant diamond necklace that is allegedly worth $100,000-plus and a little number that could be a broach or cufflink that reads “Pay Up”; a gold and diamond-encrusted grid for the front teeth and, the jewel, a giant painting featuring the CN Tower in the Toronto skyline, $100 bills floating down in the night sky, the big-eared ocelots that apparently are the street thug’s pet of choice, naked cartoonish babes with giant (albeit nipple-less) breasts and splendid rears and, at the centre, the alleged leader of the Heart of a King (HOK) street gang, Jahmal Richardson, bare-chested and sporting both a crown and a death’s head mask.

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(To borrow from Kipling, “It’s ugly, but is it Art?”)

That, it appears, is the nature of the HOK gang: its members and associates indulge in caricature, and if it stopped at bad paintings it might cause the culturati some sleepless nights but that would be the end of it.