It was a telling strategic move. Law enforcement now realized that the Independent Soldiers were no longer controlled by the gang's old Indian Canadian founders, but were actually just another club taking orders from the Hells Angels. And they had no problem recruiting in a city where fewer than half the provincial average attend higher education, despite the fact that its few visible minorities are almost entirely Native Canadians with almost no South Asians in the area. “Some of these guys think, ‘What the hell. I'm going to give it all I got because I don't think I'll live past 30,’” said one RCMP officer in Prince George. “In one check stop that we made on Highway 16 West, we stopped an 18-year-old kid who had $8,000 cash in his pocket. He just looked at me and said, ‘If you think I'm going to work for minimum wage when I can make this kind of money, you're crazy.’”
But while the Hells Angels and their underlings were gaining ground in their desire to monopolize the drug market, there were, as always, internal tensions. When the RCMP let Renegades president William “Billy” Moore know how much evidence they had collected against him, he elected to turn paid informant rather than face trial.
It was a bad career choice. On March 25, 2005, responders to a raging fire at his home found him just outside the flaming house. His corpse, full of bullet holes, was sitting in the front seat of his car. The Hells Angels who attended his funeral—under the watchful eye of media and law enforcement—praised him as “a nice man.” His replacement, Romano Brienza, who had just beaten trafficking charges, died of natural causes a month later.
And there were other leaks. Michael Plante was a bodybuilder who occasionally worked as a bouncer to pay his way through college. He'd never been in any real trouble before—he was charged once for assault when an argument at a gym got out of hand, but it never went to trial—but the first bar he worked at, in the North Burnaby Inn, was owned by Hells Angel Bob Green. Alarmed by the amount of crime he saw, Plante moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta, for a year but came back when he saw it was no different when it came to how bouncers had to work for criminals. Back in B.C., he took a job loading trucks for Costco to get away from shady dealings but eventually found himself working as a bouncer again.
He worked at a series of bars, often connected to the Hells Angels. At one location, the Dell Hotel in Surrey, he was sometimes asked to watch over a room the Hells Angels used to stash cocaine. He worked the door at a couple of strip joints, the Marble Arch and the Cecil Hotel, both of which were owned by Hells Angels associates. It was at the strip joints where he met and became friends with a number of gang members who frequented the spots. He was surprised, in fact, at how many different gangs would socialize at the Cecil Hotel, an indication of how many allies the Hells Angels had on the streets.
Eventually, Plante started ferrying drugs and cash for Randy Potts, who owned the Cecil Hotel, ran a stripper/escort agency and had just been elevated to prospect status as a Hells Angel. As a hang-around, the level below prospect, he was given a leather vest that indicated his status on the front. The vests are a Hells Angels prized possession and hang-arounds are instructed upon receiving one never to allow a non-member to even touch it. Potts was wearing his vest proudly in 2003 when he was set upon by an old rival named Audey Hanson. Not only did Hanson beat him up and black his eye, but he stole Potts's vest.
Embarrassed, Potts went to see his sponsor, full-patch Hells Angel Lonnie Robinson, to let him know what happened. For moral support, he brought along Plante, a mutual friend. It didn't do much good. Robinson knocked Potts to the floor with an open-handed slap to the face and instructed him to get the vest back at any cost.
Potts recruited Plante to help him stake out Hanson's house. After two months of watching, Potts determined that Hanson would be alone, and he and Plante paid him a visit. But Plante quickly found out that Potts had more on his mind than simply beating Hanson up and taking the vest back. He handed him an Uzi, .38 handgun and a balaclava and told him to shoot Hanson. Plante did shoot, but intentionally missed him with the .38 and claimed the Uzi had jammed. Potts was angry, and gave the job to another friend who managed to shoot but not kill Hanson.
Plante, who was initially reluctant to get involved with the gang, was upset that they'd expect him to kill over a leather vest and appealed to the police to become a paid informant. But it was not just his desire to be a good citizen that motivated him. After it got rolling, Plante's deal paid him $14,000 a month, along with a 1997 Mustang, the lease of a Harley-Davidson, dinners out with bills of up to $2,000 and vacations to Mexico.
But Plante—later known as the million-dollar rat in the media—was the only way the police had to get inside any of the drug trafficking organizations. And because the Hells Angels had since become linked with the Independent Soldiers and the United Nations, the potential was there to disrupt a lot of trafficking.
Over the next several years, Plante acted as an informant for the RCMP under a project known as Operation E-Pandora. He learned and relayed who the players were and how they operated. For example, a gesture simulating turning a car's ignition key indicated a “key” or kilogram of drugs in conversation. His account of working in the underworld all came out in testimony against his former associates.
One of his primary suppliers was a Hells Angels associate named Kerry Ryan Renaud, who cooked and sold methamphetamine for full-patch Hells Angels Ron Lising and the unfortunately named Johnny Punko. Since both believed they were working with Plante and Renaud exclusively, Plante had yet another secret to keep.
The cops hit the mother lode on September 6, 2004, when Plante received a phone call instructing him to meet Lising and his friend Nima Ghavami at 8 Rinks sports center in Burnaby. It was, he said, going to be a big deal. The cops tailed Plante, who was driving the black Mustang they bought him. At the meeting, Lising told Plante to drop off a pound of meth on the counter of a deli in Vancouver's Champlain Mall. Despite the obvious danger, the police okayed the plan.
They followed along and filmed him making the drop off. Later that day, Plante received text messages from Lising asking to visit so he could tell him where he could pick up the cash for the meth. He was then instructed to go to a restaurant in Hope, sit at a table, read a newspaper and wait for a man from Kelowna to give him $10,000. He also handed Plante a note that he was instructed to hand over to the bag man. Apparently Lising was upset that the guy from Kelowna was using a phone Lising had given him for personal calls when it was intended just for drug transactions. “I don't care if you are calling taxis or pizzas, don't use that fucking phone,” Lising threatened.
Plante went to the restaurant and met the money man. He handed Plante $5,000 in cash hidden in a rolled-up newspaper. Plante texted Lising with the news. Lising answered with a message to the guy from Kelowna: “Hey fuck face, that's not what you promised.” The guy didn't have any more money, so Plante left with the $5,000 and let the other two work out how the rest would be paid.
But it didn't matter in the larger sense. Plante had done the job the RCMP had paid him in excess of $1 million to do. He gave them enough evidence to storm in and arrest 18 men, six of them full-patch Hells Angels and the rest associates. Their defense pointed out that, while an undercover informant, Plante sold drugs and committed several assaults. But that didn't matter, either. Plante's defense was that since he was posing as someone auditioning for the club, he had to act the part, and committing crimes on a regular basis was part of that. The Hells Angels were guilty and Plante, as bad as he was and as many tax dollars as he took with him, had brought at least a few of them down.
“It was like Grand Central Station up there,” Jeremy Enright told me when asked to describe life around 2005 and 2006. “All you had to do was wait a few minutes and another airplane or helicopter would go by. It's a wonder none of them ever crashed into one another.” Enright, who lives in Bellingham, Washington, likes to hike and camp in the North Cascades, near the Canadian border.
But for a while, he could get no peace in his bel
oved mountains because of the huge amount of air traffic. “It was especially bad at night,” he said. “I go up there for peace and quiet, and I might as well have camped out by the airport.” Interestingly, Enright was certain that the government was behind all the action in the skies. “To tell you the truth,” he said. “I thought it was the DEA looking for weed.” In fact, what was flying above his head was weed.
It was a crazy time. Sure, there was money to be made in dial-a-dope. But it wasn't the big time. The abundance of weed had driven the price way down. Operating a dial-a-dope operation could easily net you the lease of a nice Acura SUV, but if you wanted to pay down a fully loaded, customized, armor-plated Cadillac Escalade with hydraulic gun racks and an innards-shaking stereo system—and many, many young men did—you needed to branch out from the Lower Mainland.
There was an absolute surfeit of weed. A tradition of locals growing pot for themselves and their friends had morphed into a huge and sophisticated industry as organized crime pushed growers for more profits. Using methods like hydroponics, aeroponics, grow lights and artificial daytimes, British Columbia farmers had found the way to get not only the highest yield of marijuana, but also the most potent. In fact, the best of the local strains—known collectively as “B.C. Bud,” set the smoking world alight. It was so prized, so valued, that in some places, it was actually bartered kilo-for-kilo with cocaine, a feat unimaginable with any other strain of marijuana.
The provincial government estimated there were 22,000 marijuana grow operations in B.C., and in 2005, Forbes magazine estimated these harvested $7 billion in product. That was just too much weed for the province, and prices reflected that. Weed was cheap, competition was fierce and profit margins began to get thin.
But people were willing to pay a premium for weed elsewhere, especially the now world-famous BC Bud. Most of the sophisticated Lower Mainland and Okanagan traffickers already had systems in place to export drugs to Australia and Japan—in fact, the United Nations (the New York City–based multinational organization, not the Abbotsford-based street gang) has determined that one of the leading suppliers of cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy to both countries is Canada.
But while trafficking easily concealable drugs like cocaine, meth and ecstasy is one thing, moving marijuana is quite another. While very small quantities of stimulant drugs can yield a high profit, there's no way to make money hiding weed in the fake bottoms of frying pans. No matter what the selling price, to make money moving weed, you have to have significant volume. Even when dried and vacuum-packed, weed is bulky and cumbersome.
But across the border, they would pay through the nose for BC Bud. And if you could get the stuff as far away as Los Angeles or Chicago, you could get very rich very quickly. And that's what traffickers did. Like French wine merchants who serve the locals their worst and save the best for export, many drug traffickers in the Lower Mainland collected their best weed for the United States—where the real money was.
Getting it over the border wasn't hard. At first, they drove it over, but after 9/11, the Americans worked much harder to secure their borders. Driving over frequently opened the traffickers to increased scrutiny and the potential for arrests and the stiff sentences given out by U.S. courts.
But while the official crossings presented something of a challenge, the security along most of the border was a joke. For the most part in the Lower Mainland, the border itself is little more than a two-lane road, called (depending on which town it's in) 0 Avenue, Townline Road or Boundary Road. On the Canadian side, there are farms and scattered suburban housing tracts, while the American side is mostly wooded, with a few raspberry fields. Getting over is simple. Look both ways, cross the road and you're in the other country.
Naturally, traffickers took—and continue to take—advantage of this. The primary method for cross-border trafficking was to hire some teenager or twenty-something, give him (or her) a backpack full of weed and send him over the border.
But there are a few problems with that. The most weed a backpacker can usually take over the border is just a few pounds. The road is patrolled by police, and backpackers crossing the border—especially if they are in large groups—are liable to be apprehended. And they can talk. After arrest, backpackers can save themselves by turning in their contacts, and some have even been known to implicate their bosses by bragging in front of the wrong people about what they do and who they know.
There are other methods, of course. Canoes and kayaks are popular on the coast, but they are prone to federal scrutiny on both sides of the border. Some people use dirt bikes or ATVs, but the noise they make tends to invite unwanted attention. A few people have tried giant slingshots and makeshift catapults with limited success. Tunneling is an expensive, time-consuming and dangerous option, but it has been taken. A pair of Canadians built a tunnel from a Quonset hut in Langley that opened up in a friend's living room in Lynden, Washington, but they were arrested before they could complete a single shipment. The men, who were given nine-year prison sentences by a U.S. court, said they expected to move at least 300 pounds a day through the tunnel.
In order to move large amounts of product over the border quickly and safely, more and more trafficking organizations took to the air. Even the smallest Cessna can carry as much as 300 pounds of weed and can fly literally under the radar, spend a couple of undetected seconds on the other side of the border, land briefly or even just drop a package, and return.
As more people realized how safe and efficient the method was, the airways over the British Columbia–Washington border became very busy, especially at night. Drugs were being ferried over the border constantly. Law enforcement knew it was happening but could do little about it. It was such a commonplace activity that in 2006, when Jane Gerth was driving on Highway 17, 15 minutes away from the Canadian border, and saw a black-and-gold backpack in a ditch beside the road, she slammed on the brakes. The wife of a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent, she knew what was in the bag. When she unzipped it, it almost burst as the $20 and $10 bills packed tightly inside started pouring out of it. After a night of excited counting, Gerth had found $507,270 in U.S. currency. Since it was used as evidence in a raid that netted the arrests of three men who grabbed a replacement bag set out by police, Gerth was allowed to keep her prize, plus the interest that accumulated as the trial went along.
It was so easy to get mass quantities of weed over the border this way that it became very popular, and private pilots were in huge demand. Helicopters, which did not require airports and their complications, were extremely prized, and their pilots were worth their weight in gold.
One of them was Dustin “Princess” Haugen. Though only 24, the doughy, weary-looking Haugen was an experienced helicopter pilot and drug trafficker. He had never been caught red-handed, but had spent a few days in jail as a suspect in a helicopter-based trafficking ring and was released when a case against him failed to coalesce. A reporter for Playboy magazine rode along with some helicopter traffickers—many people I spoke with believe that Haugen was one of them—and quoted them as boasting they were more efficient than FedEx.
Haugen met Jonathan Bacon, and the two quickly became friends. At the time, Bacon was just another small-time dial-a-doper, but he was one with big plans. In fact, Bacon was so sold on the idea of helicopter trafficking, he started to take flying lessons in Langley. To get things started, Bacon rented a serviceable helipad in Abbotsford, near the border, from which Haugen flew a leased Bell JetRanger frequently. Despite the fact that the JetRanger could carry four passengers or up to 1,300 pounds of cargo, Haugen's flights never listed any cargo and rarely any passengers.
In March 2005, Haugen took his girlfriend—aspiring hairstylist Christina Alexander—on one of his flights. But he landed poorly, wrecking the helicopter and killing Alexander. Police investigated, but could find no drugs, large amounts of cash or witnesses willing to deny Haugen's story that he had been taking Alexander on a sightseeing trip (in the dark), so no charge
s were laid.
But the incident had an effect on Bacon. He stopped taking flying lessons and more or less fired Haugen, letting his lease on the helipad expire without financing any more trips.
Haugen, though, was less affected and went right back to work for other clients. On May 9, 2006, as part of Operation Frozen Timber, police on both sides of the border watched and photographed as Haugen and an associate named Daryl Desjardins took off in Canada and landed in the woods just over the border.
Desjardins had a long history as a drug trafficker and was a close associate of the United Nations. He had actually once run afoul of the group back in 2003, when Roueche found out that he had been overstating his status in the gang, claiming he was one of the big bosses when he wasn't. After a “talk” with gang enforcer James Coulter, Desjardins continued to traffic in association with the UN and presumably snapped Haugen up as soon as he heard that Bacon had let him go.
Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also photographed Haugen and Desjardins land and hand over five hockey bags to three young men with a large blue GMC pickup truck. They allowed him to take off and arrested the men in the pickup. Inside the hockey bags, ICE agents discovered almost 300 pounds of BC Bud shrink-wrapped into one-kilo packages. Desjardins and Haugen were arrested when they returned to the helipad near Desjardins' home after a brief stop near Chilliwack.
After Haugen served time in Canadian prison, he was extradited to the United States for trial there. Traditionally, that meant a much longer sentence, so when the Washington judge sentenced him to time served, rumors that he had made a deal, probably ratting on someone higher up, abounded.
The Notorious Bacon Brothers Page 10