The Notorious Bacon Brothers

by Jerry Langton

  He did. But shortly after the plane he was on was in American airspace, the pilot made an announcement: the plane was being rerouted to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. He did not give a reason why. “Once on the plane and in his seat,” said U.S. prosecutors, “Roueche quickly began sending BlackBerry messages, indicating he was concerned about flying through the United States, saying that perhaps he was being paranoid but he was worried about being arrested. He also BlackBerried information about bank accounts and access codes before he had to turn off the device.” Once on the tarmac, the plane was entered by U.S. Customs agents, who arrested Roueche.

  Roueche was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine and marijuana into the United States and money laundering. Emily Langlie, spokesman for the federal attorney's office, told media that Roueche was wearing a significant amount of UN-related jewelry at the time of his arrest.

  At a federal lockup in Oklahoma, Roueche immediately started making calls, while the feds listened in. When they determined he had been speaking in code (he had actually left a codebook in his holding cell), his phone privileges were lifted.

  Langlie also said that he would be flown to Seattle to stand trial. He requested bail, but prosecutors pointed out that the last UN member they granted bail to, Joe Curry, had fled. To emphasize that point, they showed the judge a photo of Roueche and Curry arm in arm at Duane Meyer's funeral. Bail was not granted.

  The founder and brightest star of the UN was behind bars. It wasn't a hugely crippling blow, as most members of the gang had their own connections and suppliers, or could easily get in touch with Roueche's. But it was a terrible hit to the gang's morale. The big guy, the founder, the face of the UN, grinning from behind designer sunglasses while cruising around in his Maserati, was off the streets.

  But it wasn't just the UN who was being forcibly reordered. Cedric Michael Smith was one of the founding B.C. Hells Angels and generally considered a heavy player. He was arrested for trafficking a number of times, but the most recent was a big one. In January 2005, nine Hells Angels and Renegades were arrested, including Smith and Norman Krogstad, who had been selling one-kilogram bags of coke—many delivered to a Wendy's fast food location—to an informant who was building a case. The pair were charged, tried, and sentenced and served time, and both were granted parole in March 2007.

  Many other Hells Angels blamed Smith for the 2005 arrests, including his own, because he had introduced them to the informant. Of course, he didn't know the man was an informant, but it was still considered a huge faux pas in the industry. So huge, in fact, that there was a price to pay. Smith's old partner from the Renegades, William “Billy” Moore, had been killed shortly after the arrests, and his house had been set on fire in a similar situation.

  So when Smith missed a June 17, 2008, meeting with his parole officer, the RCMP sent a pair of officers to his house in Langley. He wasn't there and has not been seen since. There are lots of rumors that explain his absence and fate, but nothing concrete has emerged.

  And gang members did not have to be in the Lower Mainland to be in danger. Ahmet “Lou” Kaawach looked like a gangster. A 26-year-old, he shaved his head, had a pencil-thin beard and moustache, had prominent tattoos on his pumped-up biceps and always wore a big gold chain. He also liked to show off his wealth with his vehicle—a red Cadillac EXT pickup truck tricked out with six TV screens and doors modified to open vertically.

  That kind of truck and lifestyle do not come cheaply. But money was no problem for Kaawach. He owned a car customization business and law enforcement agencies also say he was the UN's chief contact with the Mexican drug cartels, arranging for shipments of cocaine to be traded for BC Bud. Roueche himself described Kaawach as a wannabe “ladies' man” and spoke about his earnest, if not entirely productive, efforts to rap about his gangster lifestyle.

  Things were working out well for him until he was deported after a weapons conviction. Unlike Omid Bayani, who was ordered deported but just never left, Kaawach did actually leave Canada for his native Lebanon. Roueche is known to have visited him there. He also had a residence in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he continued to work as a go-between, between the Sinaloa Cartel and the UN.

  His contact in Canada, according to police in both countries, was his good friend Elliott “Taco” Castañeda, a Guatemala-born Canadian citizen who worked as a realtor but seemed to have a lifestyle and set of possessions—like three houses with a value of $1.1 million and a top-of-the-line BMW—that far outstripped his sales commissions. When a joint law enforcement/Canada Revenue Agency operation looked into his earnings and those of other UN members, and then a revenue agent and 10 cops paid a late-night visit to his house, Castañeda quit HomeLife Glenayre Realty and relinquished his license.

  Castañeda went to visit Kaawach in Mexico, probably to iron out their new situation and to meet some people. On a sunny July 12, 2008, the pair went for a bite to eat at the open-air Tacos de Barbacoa El Cuellos restaurant on Calle Pedro Buzeta in the Santa Teresita neighborhood of Guadalajara. They were both mid-taco when a group of heavily armed men burst from a minivan and showered the restaurant with automatic weapons fire. Both died on the scene.

  Perhaps, like many Canadian tough guys who go to Mexico, they were in way over their heads. Any of the cartels or sub-cartels could easily have known who they were and killed them in an increasingly commonplace way of doing business in Mexico. Or UN members, afraid Castañeda was going to spill information about them now that he was under severe legal pressure, had him eliminated. Although there was a wake for him at the Rain Bar and Grill in Abbotsford (police seized two handguns from the crowd), it's unlikely too many in the UN would miss Castañeda.

  Jonathan Bacon, his girlfriend Rayleene Burton and his business associate Godwin Cheng had been in and out of court, fighting against the charges that arose after the police found them with drugs, weapons and cash in 2005. Their defense team based their argument on the thesis that since the police did not have an active search warrant, the decision to arrest Bacon and Cheng was illegal. Since the police only saw them exchange bags for cash, they did not have reasonable evidence to believe that what was inside the bags were drugs or that there were weapons in the car.

  Despite the fact that Bacon and Cheng were caught red-handed, the judge agreed that the police had no right to arrest or search them or the car. And, of course, since Burton was only stopped on the basis of the earlier arrest, her arrest was unlawful, as well.

  On July 16, 2008, Bacon, Burton and Cheng walked out of court free. It was just another in a growing list of law-enforcement attempts to stop the Bacon Brothers that had failed. Caught with drugs and weapons? No problem for the Bacons, just a matter of showing up in court a few times. They were beginning to appear untouchable, even invincible.

  But it wasn't just the Bacons. In Prince George, tensions were rising as competition in the lucrative drug market had caused friction between the existing gangs. Few in these hastily put-together organizations had the feelings of “brotherhood” that bikers claim is the reason their clubs exist. Instead, individuals within the gangs began to undercut one another in an attempt to get increased market share. Traditionally, the penalty for such a crime in Hells Angels–controlled gangs has been execution.

  Police were dealing with a series of shootings and beatings in which neither victims nor independent witnesses would cooperate with them. But on August 6, 2008, they caught something of a break. They received 9-1-1 calls about a red SUV being driven erratically with a gun protruding from a window. A few minutes later, while police were searching for the truck, a series of calls came in reporting shots fired on Upland Street.

  Police rushed to the scene, a known crack shack, and found a 19-year-old man severely injured with several gunshot wounds. The victim had been in the backseat of a Lincoln Navigator parked in front of the house when it was sprayed with gunfire. The two people in the front seats—Garrett McComb and his girlfriend Brittany Giese—were unharmed. The victim w
as sent to a nearby hospital and survived. Of the several people in the house at the time, police managed to convince one of them, an admitted crack addict and alcoholic, to cooperate with them. His eyewitness account led them to arrest three members of the Independent Soldiers—Fabian Charlie, Jesse Bird and Eric West—and charge them with attempted murder, causing bodily harm with a firearm, aggravated assault and a number of firearms charges. Police also found a red Ford Explorer with a license plate that matched the original 9-1-1 calls outside the house. Its engine was still warm. A search of the house revealed a shotgun wrapped in a T-shirt and three shotgun shells.

  Actually, they arrested three other Independent Soldiers but did not press charges against them. It did not go unnoticed in the community that while the three men who had charges laid against them were of aboriginal origin, the three released were all white.

  But things did not go well for the police. The victim, known as W.B., refused to testify. After police were alerted by an anonymous tip, McComb and Giese, who'd been in the car with W.B., were found murdered in their home, shot multiple times, on October 7, 2008. Their Lincoln Navigator SUV, still bearing bullet holes from the night W.B. was shot, was parked outside. Nobody was arrested for their murders.

  When the case against Charlie, Bird and West finally came to trial in October 2009, Justice Karen Walker determined that the sole witness who came forward was not credible enough, and the trio walked.

  In Prince George, as in the Lower Mainland, it appeared not only that gangs could sell drugs with impunity from the law, but they could also settle their scores with gunfire with little or nothing to fear from the courts.

  The UN's reorganization continued in the Lower Mainland. Mike Gordon was a 33-year-old realtor who lived in Chilliwack with his wife and 4-year-old son. He was very good at what he did, making some big, high-commission deals, mostly in the Fraser Valley. At least a few of them were for his close friend, Clayton Roueche. In fact, Rupert Roueche, Clayton's dad, let Gordon put up a billboard at his scrapyard.

  At 8:30 p.m. on August 20, 2008, there were a number of 9-1-1 calls reporting gunfire on Promontory Road in Chilliwack. When responders arrived, they found Gordon dead, slumped behind the wheel of his BMW in the parking lot of the Teskey Market grocery store.

  It's been widely reported that Gordon was killed because he had been “hanging out with” one of Roueche's enemies, but with Roueche behind bars awaiting trial in the U.S., he had bigger fish to fry than to order the killing of an old friend over a personal matter. Besides, ordering such a hit while in custody when he knew the authorities were listening to everything he said (and most of what his friends and associates said) would put him at a ridiculous level of risk. It's also been postulated that Gordon was part of the Canadian Revenue Agency/RCMP investigation and was a risk to incriminate others. No matter what the absolute truth is, it's clear that somebody—almost certainly associated with the UN—wanted Gordon dead.

  And the violence kept going. James O'Toole was born in Dublin, Ireland, and was raised in Vancouver. Music was his passion. While most of his peers and friends were performing rap and hip hop, O'Toole preferred schmaltzy slow rock. After living in Australia for a while, touring with a band called Napoleon, he returned to Vancouver and performed under the name Jed Cruz.

  His music career was still fledgling, but O'Toole appeared to live very well, with all the affectations of youthful success of the time and place. Police say he was involved with several Asian-dominated crime organizations and may well have been a trafficker himself. His sole conviction, though, came from a 2001 incident in which he pulled a handgun and threatened some kids who were throwing vegetables and eggs at him and some friends as they exited the Luv-A-Fair nightclub one evening.

  He'd been arrested for assault in 2008 after a fight in a Whistler nightclub but would never go before a judge. At 1:00 a.m. on August 30, 2008, O'Toole was leaving yet another Vancouver nightclub. The yellow Toyota Prius taxi he was in stopped at a red light. Then suddenly, the silver Mazda MPV minivan that had been behind him went into the oncoming lane beside the Prius. Once in position, the men inside slid open the van's door and opened fire on the Prius.

  The driver was seriously shaken, but unhurt. O'Toole was dead.

  Jack Woodruff was a bad dude. And he looked like it. He had a fleshy face with a thick, protruding eyebrow ridge, and the look in his eyes, even in happy times, was threatening. And he has admitted to killing three people. But he wasn't really a gangster, just a bad dude.

  But somehow, he found a woman who loved him. Karen Batke came from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. After moving from Canada's poorest region to its richest, she became involved with Woodruff and eventually moved into his basement apartment in Surrey.

  It wasn't blissful. I've been told that he was very abusive. In fact, his abuse may have led to her death. Years after she went missing, Woodruff would admit that he'd killed her. He claimed that she came at him with a baseball bat, but “fell” into a plate-glass table that managed to open an artery in her leg so that she began losing a remarkable amount of blood. In his story, the bleeding-out woman who was less than half his weight charged at him again. He was so afraid for his own life that he somehow managed to put his two meaty paws around her neck and squeezed until she went limp and, when he released his grip, fell to the ground dead. Woodruff then said he took her body to an undisclosed waste management facility where he threw it among the trash. Her body has never been recovered, and Woodruff was acquitted of her murder.

  He'd not only managed to get away with killing Batke, but he'd put it behind him. And perhaps put it on his resume. Whether it was known that he'd already killed and gotten away with it, he was hired (he won't say by whom) to carry out an assassination.

  Lisa Dudley had a lot of experience running marijuana grow ops, and she had one in the large and secluded house she shared with her boyfriend, Guthrie McKay, in a wooded section of Mission.

  Woodruff had been instructed to kill Dudley and, “if necessary,” McKay. He didn't ask why; he just assumed it was a drug debt. And his plan was not complicated. He arrived in their backyard at 10:41 p.m. on September 22, 2008, and stood on the deck. He could see them inside, sitting on a couch and watching television. He fired six shots. The first shattered the glass door, the other five hit McKay in the face, back and chest, and Dudley in the face and neck. He then fled.

  A neighbor called 9-1-1, and the Mission RCMP sent out a car with Constable Mike White and Auxilliary Constable Danielle Girard, a volunteer with limited training, to investigate. When they arrived, White drove around the area and talked with the person who called 9-1-1, but did not inspect Dudley's house specifically. In fact, neither officer got out of the car.

  Four days later, a curious neighbor dropped by Dudley's house. When nobody answered, he went around back. Seeing the shattered back door, he went up on the deck to take a look. Spotting both Dudley and McKay on the ground, he called 9-1-1.

  Responders were shocked to see that Dudley was alive, though paralyzed from the neck down. Somehow, she had survived for four days, without food or water, or the ability to move away from her boyfriend's dead body. They quickly got her into an ambulance, in which she finally expired on the way to a hospital.

  It took years, but Woodruff eventually confessed to the murders in March 2012. At the time, he said it was his conscience, but others have claimed he was presented with the Crown's evidence and realized he could not win a court battle. In any case, he never said on whose behalf he killed Dudley and McKay. And while he did cop to killing Batke and throwing her body in the trash, he still maintained it was self-defense and did not tell her grieving children where they could find her body—if it still existed.

  But Woodruff was the exception. After four years, he finally broke down—and nobody would have called him a pillar of intellect or resolve—and admitted far more than the cops ended up charging him for.

  But at the time he killed Dudley and McKay, nobody knew th
at the perpetrator would get caught or go to prison, and to tell the truth, few even had the optimism to hope for it. Law enforcement had failed to catch people so many times, and those few they did catch seemed to get a free ride from the court system. And after the ridiculously bad job the police had done with the Robert Pickton case—he had once confessed to 49 murders and a myriad of other crimes, but was found guilty only of six counts of second-degree murder—there was simply no faith in the authorities' ability to stop or even slow violent crime.

  There seemed to be nothing that could stop gangs from meting out their own justice, however they felt like it. It was all about money. If a grower, importer or dealer didn't want to work with the gang exactly the way the gang wanted, there would be big trouble, even a death penalty. But what made it worse for the Lower Mainland was that there wasn't just one gang. Growers, importers and dealers who worked with the UN were immediately enemies of the Red Scorpions and vice versa. In the ever-changing shady underworld of alliances, alienations and pettiness, people involved in the drug trade were exposed to danger all the time and from just about anyone. And, as the senseless murders of Jonathan Barber, Chris Mohan and Ed Schellenberg proved, you didn't even have to be part of the drug trade. You just had to live close by.

  Part III

  Breaking the Bacons

  I've written a number of true-crime books, and they are generally well-received by critics and readers alike. But I have had some complaints. Some people—including notable motorcycle gang members like Donnie Peterson and Mario Parente—have complained that I don't speak to enough bikers or others who are alleged to be in the drug trade. They have told me that I only get the opinions of “cops, snitches and lawyers.”