And law enforcement were doing their best to keep a sharp eye on the members, or at least the leadership, of both organizations. When there was a double shooting in downtown Vancouver on February 24, 2007, police were unsurprised to see Roueche and Jing Bon Chan—who many believed shared control of the UN with Roueche—show up just after they did. They were questioned, but had nothing to say to police, who drew their own conclusions. “In this instance, two known associates of the gang were shot—one in the head and one in the leg,” was the official word. “It is believed Roueche and Chan were there to ‘interview the victims' in order to determine the gang's response to the shooting.”
The sudden shifts of alliances in the Lower Mainland's underworld were not limited to those gangs in league with the Hells Angels. The Bacon Brothers, perhaps sensing the impending legal trouble with the UN, switched alliances. Instead of getting product from the Hells Angels, they started getting close to their rivals, the Red Scorpions.
In fact, they became very close. While the Hells Angels/UN ties had been discovered through wiretaps, informants and arrests, the Bacon Brothers' ties with the Red Scorpions were more obvious than that.
Under scrutiny from police and neighbors, the Bacons left Abbotsford on February 21, 2007, and moved into a rented but very luxurious house at 15830 106th Avenue in Surrey. It's interesting to note that while much smaller than Surrey, Abbottsford has a distinct police force, while Surrey is patrolled by an RCMP detachment. The feeling among many youth in the area was that it was easier to get away with crime in Surrey because the RCMP were fewer in number and more transient, caring less about the community than their career options.
Often in either house's driveway when the Bacon family was in residence, one could see a gigantic GMC Suburban. At least, police did. It was owned by Dennis Karbovanec. The same Karbovanec who was not only a convicted killer, but also one of the longest-serving members of the Red Scorpions. But he had been in jail since a December 14, 2006, drug and weapons arrest, a week after his appearance at the suspicious Castle Fun Park meeting.
Knowing the massive SUV belonged to Karbovanec, the RCMP were watching it and even managed to get a judge to agree to allow them to covertly install a tracking chip in it. While Karbovanec was behind bars, police frequently saw it driven around variously by Jamie and Jarrod Bacon. And in the spring of 2007, they found it at the site of a crime not committed by Karbovanec.
Jamie Bacon didn't even see the two guys on the street in front of the Surrey house at about one in the morning on April 13. He was just returning home in his Corvette and was more intent on getting home to his girlfriend, Chalsi Sylvestre, and his parents than anything else. But as he drove into the driveway, the two men sent a cascade of .45-caliber shells at him. Five shells hit the Corvette, seven penetrated the garage door and one of them ended up in one of the Surburban's tires.
Jamie instinctively leapt from the car, which continued to roll until it hit the house. As the two assailants ran away, Jamie pulled out a Glock handgun and fired four shots at them.
His mother, awakened by the noise, called 9-1-1. She later reported that she could hear her son screaming “I've been shot!” over and over again. She then ran to her son, who was bleeding from where a bullet grazed his scalp, and tried to help him. She later reported that Jamie told her, “Tell Dad not to go outside,” before everything “blurred for [him] after that.”
An eyewitness reported that two figures—he could not identify them, but they appeared to be male—came out of the house's front door to see what was going on. According to later testimony, the only two men in the house at the time were David and Jonathan Bacon. The eyewitness then said the two men appeared to be looking for something, returned an object to the Corvette and reentered the house through a different door.
Police arrived after neighbors called 9-1-1, searched the house for potential victims (without a warrant) and took Jamie to the hospital to be checked out.
Susan Bacon was shocked at the way the officers treated her sons. “They didn't treat Jamie like a victim at all or Jonathan,” she said. “When we were leaving the house, I made the boys put them [bulletproof vests] on. I was terrified.”
Actually, thanks to the fact he was wearing level-3 body armor at the time of the attack, Jamie was bruised and had a gash on his head, but was not severely hurt. One of the officers who rode with him in the ambulance, helped remove his bulletproof vest and then later drove him home from the hospital, Constable Byron Donovan, had an informal conversation with Jamie that shed some light on how gangsters operate.
When Donovan asked him about the shooting and how he felt about it, Jamie just shrugged and told him it was “part of the lifestyle.” Donovan then asked him about his bulletproof vest. “Mr. Bacon made a comment that he was lucky to be wearing his level-3 vest that night, otherwise he'd be paralyzed,” Donovan later said. “Mr. Bacon told me that it was a level-3 vest. He learned that these are the best type of vests to have and that he learned that from watching the Military Channel. And from watching that, he got all the specs of these level-3 vests.” He also mentioned, without being asked, that he had purchased ten such vests—at a price of $1,600 apiece—from Dave's Surplus in New Westminster.
And that wasn't all he had coming. Jamie bragged to the young cop that he had ordered a fully armored Ford SUV and also pointed out that he would have been driving it that night, but a CN Rail strike had delayed its arrival from Ontario.
While Jamie was being examined and talking with Donovan and his partner, other cops who had returned with a warrant were investigating the crime scene, the house and even the Bacons' cellphones and computers. They quickly found Jamie's Glock in a hidden gun compartment in the Corvette and determined the gun inside had been fired four times that night. That was backed up by the presence of four matching Smith & Wesson shell casings found near the Corvette. Interestingly, Jarrod Bacon's DNA was later found on the Glock's magazine. He was not present at the house on the night of the shooting.
The following day, a forensic specialist searched the SUV owned by Karbovanec and shared by the Bacons, and found four other loaded semiautomatic handguns inside their own custom-made, hydraulically operated gun compartments. He and others marveled at the sophistication. All of the guns were unregistered and had their serial numbers altered or removed. One of the guns inside, a Sig Sauer .45, was found to have Jamie's fingerprints on the handle, and Jarrod's fingerprints were found on the device that activated the gun compartment.
Jamie was arrested the night of the attack, and Jarrod was also arrested after his fingerprints were discovered.
News of the incident spread quickly. Most interpreted it as, if not the opening salvo in a UN war against the Bacon Brothers/Red Scorpions alliance, at least a warning shot to intimidate the Bacon Brothers back into the fold.
Fears of an all-out war on the streets of the Lower Mainland intensified about two weeks after the Bacon shooting.
Vancouver police received an anonymous call at 4:02 a.m. on the night of April 26, 2007, about someone walking into apartment 2101 at 1128 Quebec Street with a gun. Police quickly arrived at the luxurious high-rise and knocked on the door. When they entered, they were literally shocked at the immense amount of weaponry openly on display. They immediately arrested the only person in the unit, a nerdy-looking guy named Jong Ca “John” Lee and applied for a search warrant.
When they searched the apartment, they found a treasure trove of illegality. “When I stepped into the room, it was like immediately—wow, what is going on here. It was actually somewhat awesome,” said Inspector Dean Robinson said. “It didn't matter where you looked, you saw something that was related to firearms, whether it was a firearm itself, ammunition, gun cases—then there was the swastika flag on the wall in the bedroom along with the military ordnance that we were concerned with that was on a desk. So it really quickly shifted from odd to being really disturbing.”
As for weapons, police found fully automatic assault rifl
es, several handguns, an automatic machine pistol, a silencer, prohibited extra-capacity magazines, rifle scopes, a laser scope, telescoping stocks, ammunition, a homemade electric stun gun and weapons instruction manuals. But Lee didn't just sell weapons and their accessories; he also sold drugs. Police also found a vat containing 3.5 kilograms of MDMA in liquid form. Enough, police estimated, to make 41,800 ecstasy pills. In addition, police also discovered five bags of marijuana—one of 466 grams, one of 99 grams, one of 282.8 grams, one of 25.1 grams, and one of 2.65 grams. There was also a highly accurate digital scale, the type often associated with the drug trade.
As if gun running and drug trafficking were not enough, police found even more evidence that Lee was far from an upstanding citizen. The search of the apartment revealed a number of Canadian passports in other people's names, including at least three passports that had been reported stolen after a violent home invasion in Burnaby on February 13, 2007. On his large number of cellphones and digital cameras, they found photographs of handguns, assault rifles and other firearms displayed as though for sale. He also had a commemorative photo album that featured shots of Lee vacationing in Vietnam with three known senior members of the UN and of him posing in a prominent setting with the entire gang at the March 2005 funeral of UN founding member Evan Appell. To top it all off, Lee's tax returns stated he had made between $6,048 and $20,930 in the years he had inhabited the apartment with his unemployed wife, even though the rent was $21,600 per year. Because Lee had no criminal record, his brother—a successful real estate developer named Brett—was allowed to post $50,000 bail for his release.
Tensions flared again shortly thereafter when a Vancouver police officer conducting a routine traffic stop on May 3, 2007, noticed that the front-seat passenger had a handgun stuck in the waistband of his pants. The man, UN member Greg Allen, was arrested for carrying an unregistered Glock handgun and a silencer. The gun was traced back to Lee's arsenal.
It looked to many like war was imminent. There were two distinct sides (and other, smaller players) intent on dominating the drug trade in the Lower Mainland. All parties could count on legions of heavily armed young men who had little regard for their own safety or that of others.
As had happened several times before in the Vancouver area's history, an intense competition to cash in on a natural bounty—it had previously been timber, coal, gold and a pathway to the Pacific, but this time it was the world's best marijuana—had combined with bitter rivalries and hatreds, although slightly less racially tinged this time, to set the fuse for widespread violence.
Chapter 7
Going Public: 2007–2008
While the people involved with the drug trade were growing increasingly tense, many people in the Vancouver area were blissfully unaware of the impending violence in their midst. Of course, the police forces in the area knew who the players were and were keeping a quiet eye on them. In fact, many people remarked—even in the mainstream media—that they were grateful to see an increased police presence in problem areas because it kept the “hookers” and “druggies” away. But what they didn't realize was that hookers and druggies weren't the ones they should really have been worried about.
One local businessman who was observant of the changes in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood was Mohamad Ahmed, who owns Shapla Grocery & Halal Meat. At about four in the morning of August 9, 2007, he had just closed his store and popped into a Mac's convenience store for a few things before heading home. Then he heard a tremendous noise and ran outside to see what was happening. “It sounded like a building collapsing or something,” he told reporters. But it wasn't. The buildings were all standing, but a throng of panicked people—some screaming, some covered in blood—were struggling to get out of the Fortune Happiness Restaurant two doors away from Ahmed's own shop. “A lot of people were coming to the door and were screaming,” he said. “Some were sitting down on the curb, like five or six men and women. The victims were crying.”
Ahmed always thought there was something fishy going on at the Fortune Happiness, although he considered the newest owner to be “friendly.” It had gone through three owners in the five years he'd been keeping track. In that same period, the restaurant had been closed down twice, once for serving alcohol without a license and later for cutting fish on plywood instead of approved cutting boards. It was open every night from 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. and attracted a lot of young nightclubbers. Most of its clientele were under 30, and the bulk of them arrived after midnight. Someone had recently put a cardboard sign in the front window warning would-be troublemakers that the management had installed security cameras. Seedy perhaps, but the Fortune Happiness was hardly an established gang hangout. Police would later say, “it wasn't on our radar.”
On the night of the tragedy, nine men and women were sitting at a table enjoying a family-style meal when two masked men broke in and showered them with bullets. Two men died at the scene—19-year-old Prince Rupert native Zachary Ferland and an unidentified 26-year-old. Both were “known to police” and had a history related to drug trafficking. Of the remaining seven, one was uninjured.
One of those shot was a more notorious gangster, Hung Van “Scarface” (or “Sonny”) Bui, who was shot six times but survived. Well known as a trafficker and enforcer for hire, Bui was a veteran gangster who specialized in robbing rival drug dealers.
All of the victims of the shooting were of Chinese or Vietnamese descent, and all of the men at the table had been linked to the drug trade. Law enforcement called the incident “gang related.” Word on the street was that the Independent Soldiers were reestablishing their dominance in the area. No arrests were ever made.
Vancouver police called the Fortune Happiness massacre “the worst shooting in the city's history.” They'd see worse.
As with most wars, the conflict on the streets of the Lower Mainland simmered slowly before intensifying, with the period after the dramatic Fortune Happiness shoot-up characterized by individual tit-for-tat shootings and assaults as the sides felt each other out.
A couple of such early incidents were shocking, not just because of the targets, but also because of the blatant disregard the assailants had for putting innocent bystanders, in this case innocent children, in deadly harm's way.
The first came at a bustling restaurant full of people. Quattro on Fourth in Kitsilano is posh and always busy. It was particularly crowded the night of September 8, 2007, as 26 people were at one table celebrating a birthday party. At a little after eleven, two men wearing dark clothes and masks walked up to the plate glass window and fired through the glass at two people inside.
“What we can tell you now is that the 29-year-old man, we believe, was a target of the shooting, that he is well-known to police,” said a police spokesman. “It's a very shocking occurrence. Here we have a very popular, busy restaurant in town.” The 29-year-old was Gurmit Singh Dhak. Also injured in the attack was his 21-year-old girlfriend.
Both were badly hurt, though neither suffered life-threatening injuries. Still, Dhak refused to cooperate with police. But they weren't too surprised. Dhak had a long history of gang-related trouble. He'd gone to prison for helping an associate shoot a 19-year-old who was in the front passenger seat of his car in 1999. During that investigation, they found him to be in possession of weapons linked to another gang-related shooting in 1998. More recently, he was stopped by police after his Lexus SUV was shot full of holes in front of a seedy strip joint called the Uranus Lounge a few blocks down East Broadway from the Happiness Fortune restaurant. He didn't cooperate then either, and was even arrested for uttering death threats at an officer who attempted to question him.
And the violence was hardly limited to the city. If you drive down 248th Street in the Otter district of Langley, B.C., you'll see typical wooden semi-rural houses, some better than the others, but mostly nothing special. Until you get to 3153. Hidden from public view by a high, thick hedge and protected by a huge gate on its private laneway, the $2.6-million-d
ollar property has a large in-ground pool and a massive stable. It's called Laughing Stock Ranch, and it operates as a site for kids' parties with pony rides and bouncy castles. The owners, Leonard and Cynthia Pelletier, also hire out their ponies and dogs for film, television and advertising. Leonard also likes to restore old muscle cars.
But police knew him as a close associate of several full-patch Hells Angels. In fact, he was first cousins—and what appeared to best friends—with Nomad full-patch Bob Green. Some media reports claimed Pelletier himself was a full-patch. There's no proof of that, but there are several published photos of him in familiar poses with Hells Angels, including a set of him arm in arm with Green, while they both pose with UFC star Chuck Liddell. Cynthia laughed at the idea her husband was a gangster when confronted by reporters. “We're farmers,” she said. “Everybody loves Lenny.” Still, between 1997 and 2006, he was arrested several times on charges related to trafficking, possessing stolen goods and dangerous driving.
They also had two teenaged sons at the time. In early September 2007, the older one, 16, was involved in a confrontation between a group he was part of and a rival group of boys the same age. Len put an end to the standoff by severely beating the other group's leader. As these things always seem to end, the losing side skulked away shouting threats.
A few days later, on September 11, 2007, Len Pelletier was driving his younger, 14-year-old son to D.W. Poppy Secondary School in his massive Hummer SUV when he felt like he was being followed by another car. As he drove closer to the school, he slowed down, and the car that he thought had been following him pulled up alongside. When he saw who was inside the car (and perhaps that they were armed), he stomped on the accelerator. Later, he would claim it was to ensure the safety of throngs of innocent high school kids around him.
The Notorious Bacon Brothers Page 13