Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  When Smith finished the sauna, he had planned to take his wife on vacation in Niagara Falls, less than an hour’s drive from Hamilton. But Paul said he’d pay their way to a fancy resort in Jamaica — and pay him a little extra — if he’d just do him a little favor. He also told him: “If you get caught, just plead guilty; we have lawyers who’ll take care of you.”

  He did get caught. After a week in Ocho Rios, a tanned Smith and his wife were arrested in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport on February 11, 1997 with $500,000 worth of hash oil hidden in their double-locked Samsonite hard-sided bags. Smith called Paul. The gangster laughed and told him not to worry, he’d get him a lawyer, they’d plead guilty and get 18 months, probably serve less than a year.

  But Smith wasn’t interested in playing the good soldier. He got his own attorney. Out of the Yellow Pages, he hired Gilbank. She did her research. She found that the Gravelles had been arrested many times, but had spent little time behind bars through fancy legal work and by offloading the blame to inferiors. She was outraged. She told everyone who would listen about what monsters the Gravelles were, how she was sure they were capable of murder. Smith was surprised that a defense attorney would be so interested in prosecuting bad guys, but admitted she had “a real hard-on for these people; and she definitely was gonna step on some toes.”

  Police stepped up their investigations of the Gravelles’ activities. One of the brothers, 37-year-old Danny, was stopped on the 401 while driving his truck from Halifax back to his home in Burlington. The police found 314 kilograms of hash ($12 million worth) hidden in the tubing of the boat trailer he was pulling. He received 15 months of house arrest after pleading guilty. Denis was caught with $20,000 worth of hash oil on his way to Manitoulin Island.

  Smith was leaving the Hamilton courthouse when he was approached by a man later identified in court as Denis’s lawyer. Smith told Gilbank the man said to him: “You’re the one that ratted out Denis.” She put him in the witness protection program that day.

  The arrests didn’t stop. Danny and André were implicated in a scheme to import $12.5 million worth of hash oil in May 1998, and Paul’s son Christian was caught with $160,000 worth of marijuana and hash oil on him in October.

  Realizing things were heating up, Gilbank told her daughter, Kristen, who worked in her law office, to be careful.

  Fred and Lynn Gilbank

  Somewhere between 5:15 and 5:30 on the chilly morning of November 16, 1998, the residents of Ancaster’s exclusive Postans Path neighborhood heard loud blasts and then the sound of a car’s doors slamming and of it peeling rubber to get away in a hurry.

  Someone had broken into the Gilbanks’ home and killed Lynn and her husband, software consultant Fred, with close-range volleys from a large-barrelled shotgun.

  What followed was one of the longest and costliest murder investigations in Canadian history. In 2004, police offered absolute immunity to anyone who would talk. Nobody came forward. Finally, on January 6, 2005, Johnny K-9 was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the killing of the Gilbanks. At the end of March, André Gravelle was also charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and Johnny’s friend Jack Howard was charged with being an accessory after the fact. The police admitted they didn’t believe either André or Johnny actually pulled the triggers on the gun or guns that killed the Gilbanks, just that they ordered the hit in an attempt to stop her from continuing to investigate and prosecute the Gravelles.

  When the charges were made public, the media tracked down Paul Gravelle, who had retired to a luxurious home on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. He was asked if he was, as the prosecution alleged, the kingpin of the Gravelle brothers crime family. “There’s 12 in our family and only the boys have a criminal record. And not all of them. That’s just pure fabrication,” he said, smiling. “I’ve just gone out of it altogether now. I’ve retired. It’s no secret, yes, I was a drug importer. Mostly hash oil and marijuana.” Then the reporter asked if he gave the order to have Lynn and Fred Gilbank killed. “No. That’s not true,” he said. “Our family is not killers ... That’s beyond us to do a thing like that. That’s a despicable act. That’s a cowardly act.”

  It was an ugly trial. Even the lead investigator, Steve Hrab, admitted much of the evidence was circumstantial. Despite six years’ worth of evidence, including thousands of wiretaps, the Crown didn’t have much against the pair. And they lost a great deal of their ammo when the testimony of a lip-reader (who had been paid more than $20,000 to tell them what Johnny was saying in a videotape of a meeting in a restaurant) was thrown out because she had been found guilty of perjury in a trial in England and because, when tested for her ability, she was only able to decipher 55 percent of the words spoken by people right in front of her.

  At the summary of the original bail hearing — André was released on $2 million bail — Justice Donald Gordon told the Crown that their case was “less than strong” and that “I am satisfied the issue of an alternate suspect is very real.” On June 12, 2006, the Crown dropped all charges against André, Johnny and Howard and announced they were re-opening the case.

  The Gilbanks’ children — both adults — went on CTV’s W5 newsmagazine and blamed the collapse of the case on corruption within the Hamilton police and the Ontario justice system. They claimed that someone was leaking evidence to the Gravelles from the police force. Hamilton police chief Brian Mullan went on the show and denied their claims and pointed out that the OPP had already spent months investigating the Gilbanks’ claims and found no evidence to move forward. Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant — now more famous for his fatal run-in with a drunken bicyclist than anything he ever did in office — called the claims “false, baseless, scurrilous and potentially libelous and defamatory.”

  Johnny was asked to be on the show, but declined. Instead, he sent the following message via e-mail: I am suing for what happened to me so I cannot provide an interview for your program. I do want to say that what happened to me was wrong. I did not have anything to do with the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Gilbank and do not know who did. It is wrong that after six years of investigation — they watched everything I did and wiretapped all my calls — after six years of investigating me, the police did not find any evidence I committed this crime — everything showed that I’m innocent, but they charged me with two murders I did not commit — I sat in jail for months when there was no case, no evidence that I was guilty. What happened to me was not right, it should not happen to anyone.

  André filed a $25 million lawsuit against 20 officers (including Chief Mullan), Bryant and the lip-reader. “I was wrongfully charged for the murders of the Gilbanks,” he said. “I want the truth to come out and for the record to be set straight for myself and my family.” Johnny — who, unlike André, logged some serious jail time because he didn’t make bail — launched a similar suit for $15 million.

  And the case brought down the career of Inspector Rick Wills, Hamilton’s top drug cop. Wills had arrested André Gravelle a few times, and had alleged that he’d heard that André had hired Johnny to kill him, but that after talking with André, things cooled down. Wills — who once dined and chatted with Prince Charles as a representative of the Hamilton police — retired abruptly. The investigation of him that began with his part in the handling of the Gilbanks netted even more charges of corruption, including the alleged theft of $57,000 from the police evidence locker.

  André went back to business and was arrested a couple more times, but received only probation.

  Johnny — the failed minor-league hockey player, failed wrestler, failed biker and allegedly successful hitman — left Hamilton for the west coast. He reunited with his common-law wife and their two sons (then aged five and eight) and told a wrestling fan magazine that he was having the time of his life in Vancouver. “It’s beautiful out here, oh my God; the ocean, the mountains,” he said. “Hamilton makes me puke now when I think about it; all those years wasted sitting there in that garbage, you know
what I mean?”

  And he had a new job. Johnny had done plenty of work as a bouncer in the Hammer, but in Vancouver he rented himself out as a celebrity bodyguard, counting Jack Nicholson and Cyndi Lauper among his clients. “I love it!” he said of his new profession. “I dress up nice, eat the best food, just hang around and make sure nobody screws with these people.”

  And like so many Canadian bikers, he said he planned to write a book about his experiences. “This will be a bestseller,” he predicted. “I’ve been on every extreme in the world — the bikers, I was a wrestler, Major Junior A hockey player for the Kitchener Rangers — I’ve done a lot of things people can only dream about.” He forgot to mention that he also had a part in the low-budget comedy-action movie Oklahoma Smugglers as “Wrestler No. 1.”

  Things looked good for Johnny, but once again he picked his friends poorly.

  Chapter 16

  Dead, in Prison or On the Run

  It’s ironic that the United Nations gang, like so many others, was founded specifically to be in opposition to Hells Angels. It started with two young men, James Coulter and Clayton Roueche from Abbotsford, B.C., who hung out and went to raves together in the late ’90s.

  “It started slowly. I started using E — ecstasy — just to stay awake and stay balanced because when you take ecstasy and you drink, it sort of counterbalances, you don’t get high from ecstasy and you don’t get drunk from drinking. But as soon as the ecstasy wears off, you are super, super drunk,” Coulter said. “Then I just started using crack, just for an extra high. Maybe it was just to take stress away, I don’t know.” Like many young men who like to take drugs, they started selling them in order to pay for more.

  Clayton Roueche

  The two of them had many Asian friends who, since many of them were physically quite small, were often bullied by white kids. This offended Coulter and Roueche and they began to look out for their friends. For mutual protection, their crew started going out to bars in increasingly greater numbers. That confidence led more than a few of their guys to start picking fights.

  One night in 2000, the group ran into some Hells Angels associates at a since-closed Abbotsford nightclub called Animals. It was pretty obvious who they were because they were wearing “Support 81” T-shirts, which Hells Angels supporters wear because they are not allowed to wear the Hells Angels name. The Hells Angels associates, as usual, started pushing other guys around, especially the Asians.

  But much to the would-be bikers’ surprise, they fought back. “I remember back in the day, everyone and their dog used to be afraid of anyone who had a Hells Angels [support] shirt,” said Coulter years later, “and you would tread lightly, you would tiptoe around those people and we were just a bunch of kids and thought, you don’t have to be afraid of people. Right? You don’t want to be bullied around. Numbers rule. We had a lot of numbers.”

  As the cops were breaking it all up, the Hells Angels supporters threatened Coulter and his friends. They told them they were “dead” and that they were coming back next weekend.

  The crew started calling themselves the “United Nations” to reflect their ethnically diverse membership and as a subtle jab at the Hells Angels’ whites-only membership rule. They went back to Animals, about 70 of them. The Hells Angels supporters showed as well, maybe two dozen. They saw the United Nations crowd and called for reinforcements, boosting their number to about 40 guys.

  Coulter later recalled that evening: “I’ll never forget. There was the big fight inside. It lasted maybe five minutes. Then everyone started running outside. I remember I came out the front doors and there were probably about five or six different fights happening out on the street and I seen an Abbotsford police officer pull up and he gets out of his car and he’s on his walkietalkie and he’s like, ‘There’s H.A.! There are fights everywhere!’ It was like he had never seen anything like this before. Nor had I. That was one of the bigger fights I had ever been in.”

  It put the United Nations on the map, and more and more young men wanted to join up. Roueche emerged as the club’s president and established its structure. Members were expected to learn and practice martial arts and get the words “honor, loyalty, respect” tattooed on their bodies, often in Chinese characters rather than Western text. Members usually wore hoodies with metallic embellishments, often depicting dragons.

  They started to make a lot of money. Expanding from their base of selling ecstasy, crack and meth to ravers, they began to export the super powerful BC Bud to the U.S. — often using helicopters — for incredibly large profits.

  And they made enemies. In the clubs, the white and East Asian United Nations started stepping on the feet of the more established mainly Indian and Pakistani members of Independent Soldiers. As the United Nations matured as a gang, a number of crimes committed against members of the gang and the Independent Soldiers occurred and went unsolved. In 2008, there were more than 100 gang-related shootings in Vancouver, with 20 fatalities. It was a gang war not unlike Quebec’s in that young men were shooting at each other to maintain and expand drug-selling territory, but instead of the combatants being two easily identifiable groups, it was a number of small, unfamiliar factions. None of the victims or accused belonged to Hells Angels.

  As the United Nations grew more ambitious, they decided there was only one place to go in order to raise themselves above the mass of small gangs vying for space in the Vancouver area — and this is where the irony kicks in — so they formed a working relationship with Hells Angels. They weren’t a puppet gang in the traditional sense, but allied independent contractors.

  It had been going on for years, but only came to police attention when they were investigating Hells Angels and a United Nations member named Omid Bayani kept showing up in taped conversations. Bayani’s an interesting guy. He was born in Iran and raised in the Baha’i faith — a religion whose adherents have sworn off violence, even in cases of self-defense. His father was murdered just before his family moved to Canada, and his family (when Omid was 16) moved to Turkey, then later to the desolate streets of Red Deer, Alberta.

  Bored and out of both work and school, Bayani started robbing convenience stores for cash and cigarettes. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend ratted on him and he found himself in court. His lawyer called him “really just some sort of young puppy out on the lot.” The judge disagreed, and sentenced him to five years.

  At the Bowden Institution, a medium-security prison just outside Red Deer, Bayani’s personality came out. He found his calling in life. Almost as soon as he arrived, he got in trouble for beating a fellow prisoner with a homemade club that had the words “goof beater” carved into it. While he served his sentence, Bayani had 21 new charges leveled against him, including threats and assaults against guards. His official report said: “The subject has a history of being sullen and defiant of officers.”

  He was transferred to the Kent Institution, a maximum security prison in Agassiz, B.C., about an hour away from Abbotsford. The reports on him did not improve: While incarcerated he has on a number of occasions tried to provoke staff members into fights with him. It was noted that Bayani’s actions during one of the offences caused a female victim to suffer serious psychological trauma. It appears that Bayani does not have a full understanding of this.

  His case was brought to the attention of the people at immigration, and an order signed by the federal immigration minister called for Bayani’s deportation because his presence “constitutes a danger to the public of Canada.”

  But they never got around to getting rid of him. The official story is that the people at immigration just lost track of him.

  They should have asked the police where he was. The cops saw him in a car in Abbotsford and stopped it. A search yielded a loaded .38-caliber handgun, a machete, a hunting knife, a piece of a wooden chair that police thought would be used as a club, some marijuana and cocaine. And he was arrested — along with his partner, full-patch Hells Angel Vincenzo Sansalone from the Haney Chapte
r — on April 4, 2007 for trafficking 600 liters of GHB, better known as “roofies” or the “date-rape drug.”

  After his arrest, his connections with Hells Angels became clear. “Mr. Bayani, although he is a UN gang member, was known to work and associate criminally with other gangs,” RCMP biker specialist Inspector Gary Shinkaruk said. “The fact that he is charged jointly with a member of the Hells Angels is not a surprise to us and it is really indicative of the networking and the relationships that now exist in the Lower Mainland and throughout Canada where these criminal organizations are working cooperatively with each other.”

  And it’s not like Bayani was a maverick member of the United Nations who dealt with the Hells Angels against club wishes. The cops realized that when they watched the May 15, 2008 funeral of Duane “D.W.” Meyer, who was shot on the front porch of his friends’ house in Abbotsford by some men in a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV. Meyer had been a prominent member of the United Nations. His funeral was attended not just by all the important members of the United Nations, but also all the local Hells Angels, including full-patches. Clearly, the United Nations — which had actually been incorporated in opposition to Hells Angels — were now working for them.

  But the United Nations ran into a far bigger opponent than Hells Angels. American authorities caught Roueche on a stopover in Texas while he was flying to Mexico. He was arrested for conspiring to possess cocaine, conspiring to export cocaine, conspiring to import marijuana and conspiring to launder money. The prosecution wanted Roueche to get 220 years in prison. They didn’t get it, but they weren’t exactly disappointed. He was sentenced to 30 years and fined $8 million.