The Notorious Bacon Brothers

by Jerry Langton

  While Jonathan Bacon may have abandoned the helicopter plan, he did not stop trafficking. The Abbotsford police—like pretty well everyone else—knew very well that Jonathan was a major source of drugs in the area. Though still keeping very close ties, he had moved out of his parents' house and rented another one on Winfield Drive ten minutes to the south to live with his girlfriend, the blonde and apparently surgically enhanced Rayleene Burton. Neighbors have told me that there were “expensive-looking” cars and trucks coming to and from the house at all hours and that “tough-looking guys” always seemed to be hanging around.

  But his neighbors weren't the only people whose attention Jonathan had aroused. The police broke up a home invasion at a grow op and arrested him under suspicion of breaking and entering, and robbery. They were shocked to find that not only was he wearing a bulletproof vest, but it had been stolen from the RCMP.

  A lack of cooperation from the victims of the break-in led to the Crown's case falling apart, and Jonathan was convicted simply of possession of stolen goods.

  But the evidence gathered in that case allowed police to put Jonathan under surveillance, and in the spring and summer of 2005, officers watching the house saw as many as 15 transactions in which Jonathan exchanged a package with various other men. They never actually saw drugs or cash change hands, just packages. Eager to put him out of business, the Abbotsford police requested a search warrant for the house. It was denied. The local Judicial Justice of the Peace who reviewed the application declared that the reasons the police gave for the warrant fell “short of supporting reasonable grounds to believe that the items to be searched for [would] be at the requested location.”

  Constable John Forster, who was leading the investigation, was actually in the process of revising his search warrant application when he received a telephone call on August 4 from one of his officers watching the house. He was informed that Bacon was meeting with a friend named Godwin Cheng.

  Forster knew that Cheng was no choirboy. He had been arrested in February 1996 along with Jaswant “Billy” Rai and Rabinder Ahuja for a massive gang beating in which they had uttered death threats. All three were also suspected of being drug traffickers and UN members. He also happened to be out on bail after an April 19, 2005, arrest in which police found marijuana, cocaine and a loaded handgun at his Hawksview Place townhouse, less than a mile from the Bacons' house.

  He and Jonathan were in Cheng's car, the officers on the scene told Forster, and it looked like they were making a deal. Forster told them to make an arrest.

  The cops stormed the car, and the two men inside surrendered without incident. Inside the car, police found eight ounces of marijuana, 92 hits of meth, 15 ecstasy pills, 4 small packages of cocaine, $2,600 in cash and a number of cellphones.

  Upon seeing the bust go down, Burton fled from the house and sped away in an SUV. She was stopped two blocks away. After she was arrested, a brief search of the vehicle yielded $88,000 in cash.

  On the strength of the arrests, a warrant to search the house was issued. Inside, the police found a lot of what they expected from a drug dealer. There were 24 pounds of pre-packaged marijuana, score sheets, cellphones and four illegal handguns, two automatic and the other two semiautomatic, with matching ammunition. But the police were more disturbed by the fact that Jonathan also had a police scanner, a bulletproof vest and, most damning of all, a complete police uniform.

  The three were granted bail, and were released to await trial.

  While Jonathan was bedeviled by helicopter crashes and police raids, the Lower Mainland underworld continued to play out like a violent soap opera. While Hells Angels' influence had effectively taken the Indian leadership away from the major Indian Canadian gangs like the Independent Soldiers, others had emerged to take their place.

  One of them involved three brothers who had formerly run with Bindy Johal and his Indo-Canadian Mafia. Balraj, Sandip and Paul Singh Duhre were alleged to have run an Indian Canadian gang that involved itself in drug trafficking and other illegal activities. Balraj was the oldest and supplied the muscle. He'd been arrested a few times before, including once for escaping police custody and another for assault. All three brothers—along with Johal—were arrested in 1997 for obstruction of justice.

  No matter what they did for a living, the Duhre brothers led dangerous lives. In 2003, Balraj was walking down a Surrey street when someone shot at him from a moving car. One bullet grazed his face, but it was not a life-threatening injury. No arrests were made. On May 13, 2005, Sandip decided to stop at a Mac's convenience store on Scott Road in Surrey with his friend, Egyptian-born Dean Elshamy. As they prepared to exit Sandip's car, they were met with a hail of shots from inside an SUV. Elshamy died in the driver's seat, but Sandip was not hit. That summer, Balraj leased an armor-plated BMW from a friend in the car business. It was a worthwhile investment. On July 7, Balraj was stopped at an East Vancouver stoplight when an unknown assailant opened fire just inches away from his face. The car's special windows proved their worth as the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the glass. At the time, many in the Lower Mainland thought the shots were supposed to be for Sandip, who was considered the leader of the Duhre Brothers gang.

  After two attempts on his life in less than two years, Balraj left town to lay low for a little while. His father, Baldev—who works as a court interpreter—said that Balraj was taking some time to put his life back together and leave the gangster world altogether. Sandip chose to accept an offer of police protection. “They are at a stage where they want to change, but managing to do it is very hard,” Baldev said of his sons. “They are at a stage where they want to walk away.”

  But in the fall of 2006, Balraj returned to the area and started living with his cousin, Ravi Sahota. On October 25, the pair went to lunch at Ph 66 on East Hastings. Even though it was in the Sunrise neighborhood where both grew up, it was an odd choice, as the men rarely ate Vietnamese food. At approximately 1:15 or 1:20 p.m., an East Asian man who had been sitting in the restaurant opened fire, hitting both Balraj and his cousin. The assailant then fled out of the restaurant and hopped into a silver four-door sedan driven by what witnesses called a “dark-skinned man.”

  Both men were badly hurt, but neither died.

  “The people that were shot are known to us as gang members,” said Vancouver Police spokesman Constable Tim Fanning. “It looks like a targeted attack that had no relationship to the neighborhood or the restaurant.” Police also indicated they believe that the two men were lured to the restaurant specifically to be shot as part of an ongoing conflict. But they did not want the incident to cause anyone to panic, denying there was any kind of war on the streets.

  But while Canadian law enforcement was busy on the streets trying to keep the violence down, it was the Americans who started taking strategic initiatives. Made aware of the details of the magnitude of drugs coming over the border and by which methods, ICE and other American law enforcement increased their efforts in the region. It was revealed later that one of their primary goals was to prevent the flood of Canadian marijuana from being exchanged for Colombian or Mexican cocaine, drawing potentially dangerous cartel members to American soil.

  After a number of arrests—including successful projects like Operation Frozen Timber, a multi-force project aimed primarily at combating helicopter-borne smugglers—the Americans learned through turned informants and other means that the vast majority of the weed being moved over the border could be linked directly back to the United Nations. Roueche's name came up particularly often.

  The Americans used sophisticated methods, including motion-activated video cameras in the woods, shooting the trails they knew smugglers used, but the majority of their information came from informants. Many of them were scared Canadian kids who were anything but career criminals, and having heard horror stories about American cops and sentences, they were quick to turn.

  In March 2005, the Americans learned of a pair of Canadian drug smugglers who were
making repeated trips across the border. Finding the pickup truck they used in Washington State, ICE agents covertly equipped it with a GPS transmitter and an ignition kill switch. The cops tracked them going over the border frequently and then in June activated the kill switch on the Washington side of the border. Cops swarmed in and arrested Trevor Schoutens and Brian Fews, and charged them with trafficking. Later, the same informant who led ICE to the pickup truck—Ken Davis, the UN's top guy in the United States—received a call from Roueche himself asking him to help Schoutens and Fews get out of jail.

  The next big one to go down was Roueche's personal friend, Alexander Swanson, who was caught pulling bags of weed out of a pickup truck in Blaine, Washington, on August 12, 2005.

  About a month later, ICE received a tip from an informant that a deal was going down in Puyallup, Washington. As instructed, a multi-force team followed a Toyota Tundra with Colorado plates and a GMC Spartan with Washington plates to a house in Puyallup. When they saw the men carrying large black hockey bags into the house, they arrested them. A drug-sniffing dog confirmed their belief that the men had massive quantities of marijuana. In fact, it was 1,000 pounds in 23 bags. Two of the men—Zachary and Braydon Miraback—were UN members from Calgary. Zachary thought he'd play tough with the officers, refusing to give his identity and saying he had no identification with him. The ICE agents added a charge of crossing the border without proper identification.

  They were followed on December 1, 2005, by Greg Fielding, a B.C. resident with UN ties who was observed collecting 325 pounds of marijuana from a white floatplane that landed on Soap Lake, a health resort high in the mountains. Fielding was arrested; the pilot escaped.

  And it wasn't just federal and Washington State forces that got involved. Federal agents alerted local police forces about a white floatplane that had been seen dropping off large quantities of weed. They said it would be easy to spot because the identification numbers had been covered by duct tape.

  The following day, March 14, 2006, they received a call from the Colville Indian Reservation tribal police. They had intercepted the plane, with 314 pounds of marijuana and 24,000 ecstasy pills on board, when it landed on tiny Omak Lake in their jurisdiction. They arrested Courtney, B.C., resident Kevin Haughton when they saw him walk away from the aircraft. He initially denied knowledge of the plane, but relented under questioning. He was, he admitted, ferrying the drugs over the border for Duane Meyer, a notorious trafficker and UN member. When he was presented to Okanogan County Sheriff Frank T. Rogers, the sheriff actually complained about how many suspects the new efforts were bringing in. “We're running ourselves ragged,” he said. “It's like an epidemic up here. We're running from call to call.”

  He'd get no rest. On March 23, two Canadian women were seen picking up hockey bags full of weed near the shores of Soap Lake and throwing them into their SUV. ICE agents knew about the bags and had been watching and videotaping them the whole time. They arrested Sharmila Kumar and Shailen Varma, both of Vancouver, and brought them to Rogers. “It's almost like this is nothing to us. It's happening so much, it's ridiculous,” he said with obvious exasperation. “They come any way they can. It's well-orchestrated, and they plan this well in advance. It's a daily event.”

  But they were small fry. People like Kumar and Varma were just transporters—“mules” in the parlance of the business—and were more valuable for information than anything else. The feds were after the big guys. And a few months later, on September 25, they got a couple. Acting on a tip, ICE watched the single strip at Tieton State Airport just outside of Rimrock, Washington, when the plane they were looking for landed.

  Unfortunately for them, the items they unloaded were obscured by some nearby bushes and trees, but they did manage to apprehend two men—UN associates Joshua Hildebrandt and Nicholas “Nick” Kocoski—and arrest them for entering the United States illegally. Kocoski happened to be carrying a handheld GPS device that indicated the flight had begun in Chilliwack. Its history also showed that he had made many such flights and that Rimrock was just a stop on the way to other destinations, particularly Montana. A few days later, Kocoski's older brother Alexander (also an alleged UN associate) and Roueche's friend and real estate agent Mike Gordon drove over the border. They told customs and immigration officers they were going to bail out Nick and Hildebrandt.

  As if to prove traffic also went the other way, B.C. native and UN associate Daniel Leclerc was stopped at Yreka Rohrer Field airport just outside Montague in northern California on September 27. Inside the plane was 315 pounds of cocaine, and his itinerary indicated he was headed for Chilliwack.

  The informant Davis then visited Roueche in Abbotsford. Roueche outlined a plan in which Davis would regularly organize the transport of up to $500,000 to some friends in California and bring back 25 kilograms of cocaine. He also asked for his help in finding street-level dealers for San Jose, California, and drivers who'd get BC Bud and ecstasy to some new clients he had in Texas.

  He also told him, on tape, that since the feds were already onto the helicopters, he'd planned “something a little different, a little cool” that was “flatter” and would go deeper over the border and that negotiations were “brewing up.”

  At the start of 2006, Davis started transporting UN cash from Seattle down to Los Angeles to a Roueche contact there known as “Pitbull,” who had also turned informant. He turned over two payments—one $109,555, the other $118,980—to ICE agents.

  But Roueche was not happy with how long the payments were taking to get to Pitbull and told Davis that if they didn't speed up, he'd send someone down to beat up the guy who'd been driving them down for him. Davis also claimed he was told that if Roueche was on one of his many trips out of the country, his contact would be Dan Russell, Roueche's right-hand man.

  The Americans knew exactly who they wanted. It was just a matter of how and when they'd get him.

  But it's not as though Canadian law enforcement were sitting on their hands. While the Americans were intent on tearing down the UN because they trafficked marijuana into their country and attracted more dangerous elements from the south, the Canadians had their own agenda.

  Sure that the drugs and violence could all be linked back to the Hells Angels and their allies, the police in Canada put particularly heavy pressure on them. After Plante's testimony led to the arrest of Lising and 17 others, the police used evidence gathered from that investigation to fuel new ones.

  One of the major players who had not been arrested in Operation E-Pandora was Kerry Renaud, the meth cook and street-level dealer who worked with both Lising and Punko. Based on what they had learned in E-Pandora, police were given permission to wiretap his residence.

  It was not exactly his first run-in with the law. A few years earlier, a man who lived on the ninth floor of a 20-floor Surrey high-rise noticed a strange “chemically” smoke coming from the apartment below and called 9-1-1. When the police, who responded first, entered the eighth-floor apartment, they found Renaud on the balcony cooking methamphetamine on a cheap, two-burner hotplate using kitchen utensils. They also found more than 13 pounds of high-quality meth—with a retail value of about $500,000—and the ingredients to make much more. Renaud tried to flee but was apprehended. Since it was a first offense, he was given a particularly light sentence.

  Since then, he had become more sophisticated and more cocky. He looked like a meth cook. He had tattoos, a shaved head and that tilted-head stance guys who think they're tough always take. Police heard him talk about how he outwitted them when they raided the Abbotsford barn he used as a lab by moving all his product—nine buckets of high-grade meth—elsewhere just hours earlier. They also heard him instruct the people who worked for him how to cook. “I'm the one running the show,” he boasted. “This is how it's going to work. This is how we are going to make our money.”

  After he was arrested, the judge in his trial ordered a publication ban. It was made clear that he was cooking meth for a particular Hell
s Angel. The judge attempted to protect the identity of the biker in question, but since Plante had already testified that Renaud cooked for Lising and Punko, and Lising was already behind bars, it didn't take a brain surgeon to make an educated guess.

  Unable to infiltrate their ranks because of strict new entry requirements, the police knew it was necessary to turn another informant. And they found one in the Prince George puppet gang the Renegades. This as-yet-unnamed source bought more than nine kilos of cocaine on several trips to the Langley house of East End full-patch Cedric Smith's house. He also managed to get Smith on tape telling him that the coke had come from East End president Norman Krogstad. Both Smith and Krogstad were arrested, the first time a chapter president had gone down in B.C. Both were sentenced to four years. In the raid that brought them down, police also seized 14 kilos of cocaine, 11 kilos of BC Bud, four handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, a civilian version of an AK-47 assault rifle modified for automatic fire, some $100,000 in U.S. currency and three lawn tractors recently reported stolen from a nearby golf course.

  But while both were released after one-third of their sentences, they were only allowed to walk under the condition they not associate with people involved in the drug trade. That, of course, made the Hells Angels clubhouse and all of their haunts absolutely off-limits. The concept—arrest as many as you can and release them under the condition they essentially leave the club—was not new. Police in Ontario had used the same plan to take the teeth out of the once-powerful Outlaws, reducing them both in number and effectiveness.

  To those other than perhaps his Hells Angels brothers, Robert Thomas was considered an egregious individual. Ugly, pig-nosed and flabby, Thomas was originally from Sarnia, Ontario—a dead-end chemical-industry town with particularly high crime rates. When he was bumming around southwestern Ontario, he was arrested several times for petty crimes, mostly B&Es, in Sarnia, Guelph and Windsor.