The situation was out of hand. Later in the year, the Chretien government repealed the tax in hopes of curbing the rampant and increasingly dangerous smuggling epidemic and to get back the tax revenue they were losing. By their own estimates, the federal government admitted that 70 percent of all cigarettes sold in Quebec and 35 percent in Ontario had been smuggled in from the United States.
What was remarkable about that debacle was how quickly ordinary Canadians were willing to break the law when their idea of how expensive a cigarette should be was challenged. And it wasn't just the smugglers, but also the consumers who knew what they were doing was illegal.
A similar analogy can be observed in the advent of Apple's iTunes Store. Before the iTunes Store, people downloaded songs illegally because they believed that it was not worth paying a record company $20 for a CD when all they wanted was one song. There were risks associated from malware and other nasty things from the Internet (and a more vague threat from law enforcement), but millions started doing it, claiming that they were only getting back at a recording industry that had been stealing from them for years. So when the iTunes Store came out in 2003 offering individual, legal song downloads for 99 cents, most of those same people adopted it very quickly. It did not end illegal downloads (nor did Chretien's admission of defeat stop cigarette smuggling), but it moved the mainstream user to legal downloads by providing a safe, reputable service.
The situation in British Columbia was very much like Ontario and Quebec in 1994 or the music business before 2003. There was an abundance of marijuana in the province. Everybody wanted it, and the Americans were willing to pay top dollar. The risks from law enforcement were slight (at least, north of the border).
It was a dynamic, booming industry that attracted thousands. Some, like James Coulter, came from predictably disadvantaged circumstances, but many were simply attracted to the idea of fast, easy money.
Chapter 4
Bumps in the Road: 2001–2004
As rough as the UN's James Coulter's youth had been, that of Red Scorpions associate Anton Brad Kornelius Hooites-Meursing may have been worse. Born to a Canadian father and Australian mother in Calgary in 1971, Hooites-Meursing was the second of three boys. As he later testified on a number of occasions, their home life was anything but idyllic. His mother, he said, was schizophrenic, prone to violent outbursts that his father would often respond to with brutality. Anton said the police visited frequently, but did little other than to tell the family to settle down.
The Hooites-Meursing family moved to Australia when Anton was still very young, then relocated to Los Angeles when he was 8. His dad set up a very successful construction business there, and the family lived on the edges of Beverly Hills. But his parents split up, and Anton lived with his mother until he was 11, when she left him a note saying that she was no longer able to take care of him and his brothers. He and his younger brother went to live in a foster home, then with some friends of the family, before moving in with his father and his new wife.
But it wasn't a happy home there, either. The father forbade the boys from talking about or communicating with their mother and made it clear he resented their presence in his new life. According to Anton, the family's fortunes took a nosedive when the IRS found that Anton's dad had not been honest on his tax returns. The ensuing garnishments and penalties drove the family into relative poverty, moving them from their enviable address to a small house on the border between Long Beach and the notorious Compton.
It was a poor, violent neighborhood, and Hooites-Meursing claims, as one of a very few white kids in the area, he was a frequent target for abuse. He quit school in the ninth grade and, with some friends, started stealing from cars before stealing the cars themselves. Like many other youth in the area, he sought the protection and camaraderie of a gang. But the dearth of white gangs in the area—they do exist in Los Angeles, but not in South-Central—led him to a Hispanic one. “I had no love or anything close at home, but rather was hated by my family and dad especially,” he said. “So it was, as I look back, a natural seeking out acceptance and love which was mine to be had joining ... a Mexican gang.”
The following decade did not go well. At 17, he moved in with his best friend only to return from work one day to find a shot-up apartment and his friend murdered. He moved back in with his father, who by then had managed to restore his finances enough to buy a small house in Compton. But that modicum of stability did little to help young Hooites-Meursing, who spent the next few years in and out of trouble. Looking back, he called it a “decade of gladiator school in the Los Angeles County jail system, which for anybody that is white is a total nightmare.”
By the time he was 29, the United States had had enough of his law-breaking ways and on December 7, 2001, deported him to Canada—a country he barely remembered. He ended up in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
But he was determined to start a better life in his new country. Within weeks, he managed to get two jobs—one as a data entry clerk for the British Columbia Automobile Association and another as a floor attendant for Home Depot. He used the proceeds from them to rent a small apartment in New Westminster and to enroll in a night school course that taught him to sell cars. He eventually landed a salesman job at Jim Pattison Auto Group, the largest car dealer in B.C., and claimed to be very successful at it.
Despite his deportation order, Hooites-Meursing would occasionally drive back to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend. She was the reason, he said, that he went straight. But when she broke up with him, he was shocked, which led to depression and suicidal thoughts. In an effort to quell those feelings, Hooites-Meursing started taking ecstasy and going clubbing every opportunity he could. To afford that lifestyle—and also put his feelings for his now-ex-girlfriend behind him—he dove back into the gangster lifestyle.
It was a pretty easy transition. He knew people in Los Angeles who had money and wanted drugs, and he knew people in the Lower Mainland who had drugs and wanted more money than they could get for them in Canada. The product was high-quality BC Bud, which was like gold in the United States. At first, he did not actually export or even handle the drugs, but served as a broker, introducing interested parties to one another. He also helped friends build hydroponic marijuana grow ops.
But as is commonplace, Hooites-Meursing was attracted to the definitive life of a drug dealer—the cars, the flashy clothes, the tattoos and the guns—and he started trafficking large amounts. On regular driving trips, he would bring marijuana from Vancouver to Los Angeles in modified propane tanks and cocaine from Mexico through a Los Angeles supplier he had met in jail back the same way. When he had an excess of cocaine, he would send it to connections in Australia—who paid a much higher price—in custom-made compartments in briefcases.
He also started taking his own products. In exchange for the BC Bud he could get, his friends in Los Angeles would supply him not just with cocaine and guns, but also with steroids and more exotic drugs like Percocet and Oxycontin. It did not take long for Hooites-Meursing to become huge with muscle, and as so often is the case with steroid users, he became unpredictable and violent, earning a reputation for assaulting rivals in public and bright daylight. He specialized, he said, in disarming opponents with his bare hands, keeping their guns—three or four a month, he recalled—and, if he liked them, their watches.
Though not actually a gang member early in his career, Hooites-Meursing worked with a number of organizations and was particularly close to the then-fledgling Red Scorpions. Early in 2001, a Red Scorpions member whom Hooites-Meursing will not name asked him to kill street-level dealer Randy McLeod. Still depressed, profoundly affected by steroids and now addicted to Oxycontin, Hooites-Meursing agreed, noting to himself that it might be a good opportunity to grab some of McLeod's drugs and cash.
The conspirators agreed to meet McLeod in the parking lot of a Surrey Canadian Tire. As soon as they saw him, Hooites-Meursing grabbed the 22-year-old McLeod in a headlock and threw him i
nto the back of a cargo van. Hooites-Meursing then held McLeod down by driving his knee into McLeod's spine and bound his hands and feet with nylon straps. They then drove to McLeod's townhouse on 66th Avenue, broke in and ransacked the place. Inside, Hooites-Meursing discovered some cocaine and heroin, and about $10,000 in cash. But it wasn't enough. Enraged, Hooites-Meursing went back to the van and began punching the helpless McLeod in the face repeatedly.
They then drove their captive to 0 Avenue—which serves as the ridiculously porous border between Canada and the United States—where Hooites-Meursing argued with the driver over the need to kill McLeod. Hooites-Meursing lost the argument and strangled the bound man, removing some of the victim's clothes that he decided could potentially be used as evidence. Once he was sure McLeod was dead, Hooites-Meursing instructed the driver to take him a few blocks north, to a wooded area away from the busier border, and disposed of the body there. It was found 11 days later, a black inch-wide nylon strap still around its neck.
Some months later, Hooites-Meursing was asked by his friend, Edward “Skeeter” Russell, a Red Scorpions member, to keep a mutual friend safe. On the night of December 22, 2002, Hooites-Meursing took the man and another friend to the Luxor nightclub. Once inside, the man Hooites-Meursing was expected to protect got into a fight with James Thiphavong, a United Nations associate. The fight expanded to include a couple of Thiphavong's brothers and their friends. The Red Scorpion whom Hooites-Meursing was protecting was hit in the forehead with a bottle and began to bleed. As the fight spilled into the parking lot, Hooites-Meursing pulled out a knife and stabbed BonLeuth Thiphavong and his brother Souskavath Thiphavong repeatedly. BonLeuth later died from his injuries.
A month after that, Anton's friend Russell was killed. The Red Scorpions believed his murder was in retaliation for the death of Thiphavong. When an audiotape of a United Nations associate named Gupreet “Bobby” Rehal talking and laughing about the planning of Russell's murder emerged, the Red Scorpions decided he must have been involved and decided to kill him. Hooites-Meursing was at the meeting and was chosen to be part of the mission.
On March 13, 2002, the conspirators stole a nondescript Honda Civic, drove to Rehal's house on Saturnia Crescent in Abbotsford and knocked on the door. Hooites-Meursing was waiting in another stolen car two blocks away. When 19-year-old Rehal answered the door, the Red Scorpions shot him in the face, then ran away to where Hooites-Meursing was parked. Rehal lingered in Royal Columbian Hospital for a few hours and died the following morning.
A close associate of Hooites-Meursing—one might even say a friend—was 24-year-old John Lahn (which was an alias for Laurent Jean-Guy Rahal). Lahn was a drug dealer operating out of the notorious Bonanza Motel, but his specialty was as the head of a home invasion squad frequently employed by the Red Scorpions. Hooites-Meursing worked for him as supplier, dealer and hired muscle.
But things were going bad for Hooites-Meursing at this point. According to Marlin “Marlo” Aburto, one of Lahn's alleged lieutenants, Lahn had intended to fire him because of his unpredictable, often violent, behavior. The last straw came at a 2003 birthday party in Victoria for another alleged Lahn lieutenant, Robert “PDog” Padley. One of the guests made a joke at Hooites-Meursing's expense. While the rest of the party was laughing, Hooites-Meursing punched the man, knocking him to the floor, then pulled out a gun, cocked it and stuck it in the man's mouth. The rest of the party convinced him to put the gun away, and Hooites-Meursing, now twice admonished, left.
Later, Lahn told Aburto and others that he was upset over the incident and that he planned to fire Hooites-Meursing. Aburto later testified that Lahn had no intention of beating up, let alone killing, Hooites-Meursing and that it was commonplace for employees and contractors of Lahn's organization to be fired without violence or further incident. Lahn set up a meeting with Hooites-Meursing in front of the Orkideh Beauty Salon, in a strip mall at the corner of 10th Avenue and 6th Street in Burnaby, where they both got their hair cut.
In the parking lot in front of the Starbucks, the two had words, which quickly escalated into a scuffle. In the struggle, Lahn was shot and died. Hooites-Meursing was arrested and charged with murder, though he claimed self-defense.
Just as the loss of the crude effectiveness of Hooites-Meursing affected the Red Scorpions' ability to do business, the United Nations had their own problems. One of their most prominent members, Jing Bon Chan, heard that his girlfriend of the last two years, Christina Hyun Oh Yoon, was stepping out on him. On August 2, 2003, he received a call informing him that a guy had just been seen entering Yoon's downtown Richmond apartment. Enraged, Chan sped to 6331 Buswell Street and ran up the stairs to Yoon's third-floor place. Inside, he found her in bed with a guy named Winston Thieu Anh Bui. Chan pulled a knife and stabbed Bui several times. Nude and bleeding, Bui ran to the balcony. In an attempt to jump his way to freedom, he lost his footing, fell and hit the pavement with his head. He was taken to a nearby hospital and placed in a medically induced coma. Chan was charged with attempted murder, possessing a prohibited firearm with ammunition and carrying a concealed weapon.
And the Hells Angels were feeling their own bumps in the road. Robert Molsberry was a big man, big enough to hold down a bouncer's job at Number 5 Orange, a notorious Downtown Eastside strip joint that has seen Italian porn star–turned–politician Ilona Staller (La Cicciolina), Hugh Hefner's wife Kimberly Conrad and singer Courtney Love perform on stage and played host to luminaries like Sylvester Stallone, Bill Murray, Charles Barkley and Wayne Gretzky. And it was popular with bikers.
Molsberry not only befriended the Hells Angels, but went into business with them. He ran an after-hours club they frequented and used as a drug-retailing store. And he started and tended a marijuana grow operation supplying the Hells Angels with product. It was a pretty lucrative deal until someone raided Molsberry's grow op, stealing all of his plants. He told his contact with the Hells Angels that he would not be able to make his ordinary shipment because of the theft. In response, the Hells Angels fined him $10,000. Without any product, he was unable to pay that—and the $1,500 he owed them for an ounce of cocaine he had been fronted earlier—on time, so they took him behind Number 5 Orange and beat him up.
That was it for Molsberry. He went to the police and offered to tell them everything he knew. “Fuck these guys,” he told them. “I made them so much money over the years, and they do this to me. Well, fuck them.” He agreed to become a paid informant in exchange for immunity. The investigation, called Project Breakpoint, yielded no arrests, but evidence from it led to another operation called Project Nova. In it, Molsberry made deals for cocaine with several members of the Hells Angels, and surveillance recordings determined that Hells Angels and members of the Regulators—a Burnaby-based puppet gang that had originally been a boxing club—were dealing in a variety of illegal drugs including GHB, the so-called “date-rape drug.”
Just weeks after Hells Angels spokesman Rick Ciarnello appeared on a radio show and dared the police to prove they were a criminal organization, they did. A total of 76 people were arrested, many of them members and associates of the Hells Angels and the Regulators. Among the arrested were full-patch Hells Angels Francisco “Chico” Pires, Ronaldo “Ronnie” Lising and Vincenzo “Vinnie” Brienza. Also arrested was Brienza's brother, Romano, who had been president of the Regulators. He was charged with possession of a kilo of cocaine, 30 pounds of marijuana and an illegal handgun. One Hells Angels hang-around, Rob Alvarez, was arrested after police overheard him being told to remove anything potentially incriminating from Lising's house. Police also seized more than $12 million worth of drugs, cash, property and weapons.
In July 2003, police spotted full-patch Hells Angel Glen “Kingpin” Hehn and his close associate Ewan Lilford loading boxes from a Public Storage unit he had rented at 5555 192nd Street in the Cloverdale section of Surrey into a truck. They arrested the two men and found $1.5 million worth of cocaine in boxes both in the truck and the sto
rage unit. As is often the case with Hells Angels, brotherhood broke down quickly, and both men blamed the other. Hehn said that Lilford had a key to the unit and had let himself in and that Hehn rarely used the locker himself. He had happened to come by, he said, and saw Lilford loading the boxes and decided to help him without asking what was inside them. For his part, Lilford made basically the same claim, transposing the names, and pointed out that he did not have a key on him. The police charged them both with trafficking, but they stuck to their stories at the subsequent trial.
The other major crime organization in the Lower Mainland, the Independent Soldiers, was also still gaining in prominence. Their top guys would hang out in a Gastown nightclub called Loft Six. The club had something of a past. It had been owned by Hells Angel Donald Roming, who made a name for himself in the 1990s as an enforcer when the club was taking over all the strip joints and stripper agencies in the Lower Mainland. Although he was never arrested because witnesses were always reluctant to talk, it was well known that he had brutally beaten several holdouts in the industry, including one 67-year-old man who had to be hospitalized. Roming, however, was murdered on March 9, 2001, when two men began to argue with him just before closing time at a Yaletown nightclub called Bar None, shooting him after the dispute had spilled over into the parking lot.
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