As the weather grew warmer, there were a number of violent deaths that could well have been related to the gang war. Cory Konkin was not known to police and appeared to have had no gang-related activities, so it was a big surprise when his body was taken from an overturned SUV in a rural Maple Ridge ditch on February 26, 2009. He had been shot in the head. It could well have also been a case of mistaken identity.
At 6:40 p.m. on March 2, 2009, police in Delta, a community just west of Surrey, answered a couple of 9-1-1 calls reporting what they later called “suspicious activity” at the entrance to the Watershed Park and Delta Golf Course on Highway 10. When they arrived, they found a man—Sukhwinder “DB” Dhaliwal of Abbotsford—dead with several gunshot wounds, including at least one in his head. His body was beside his gray Cadillac.
Dhalilwal was, like most victims, well known to police. He had been arrested the previous May in a raid and faced seven charges, including possession for the purpose of trafficking, possession of a prohibited firearm with ammunition and careless use of a gun. Seized at the time were 7.5 ounces of crack, 36 grams of heroin and two loaded handguns. He was out on bail awaiting trial when he was shot. He had a previous conviction for an incident in which he threatened a man's life and for which he paid a $500 fine. Friends and coworkers described him as a great guy and expressed surprise at the concept that he was a drug dealer. No arrests were made in his murder.
The next day saw even more violence. Xing Li operated a brothel in a 25th-floor luxury apartment on Madison Avenue in Burnaby. What appeared to be a client entered the apartment at about eight in the evening, walked right past Xing Li and entered the next room. He reemerged with Ping Li, a prostitute who was also pursuing her MBA. The assailant, 17 at the time, had a gun up to her temple. He told Xing Li (no relation to Ping Li) to buzz in his associate, who was waiting in the lobby. Xing Li refused to do so, explaining that any robbery wouldn't be worth their while because he had almost no cash in the apartment.
Angered, the assailant (who was also of East Asian descent) pointed the gun at Xing Li and asked him if thought the gun was fake. Without waiting for an answer, the young man fired two shots. One missed, while the other went through Xing Li's arm and embedded itself in his abdomen. Xing Li immediately went down, losing blood and unable to see what was going on, but he could hear Ping Li begging for her life. She offered the young assailant money to spare her. Then Xing Li heard two shots, and Ping Li's voice stopped. Barely conscious, he managed to dial 9-1-1.
Xing Li's wife, who was in another room, came running to the scene, just as the young man was escaping. Xing Li survived. Ping Li, who showed no vital signs when first responders arrived, was rushed to Vancouver General Hospital but could not be revived. Police said the botched robbery had the signs of a gang operation.
A couple of hours after the brothel invasion, police in East Vancouver answered a 9-1-1 call at the corner of East 3rd Avenue and Kalso Street. They found a man, Abbotsford's Sunil Mall, slumped over the wheel of his car, dead. Mall was well known to police, with a record dating back to 2001. He was said to have been close friends with Clayton Roueche, but had switched allegiances to the Bacon Brothers after Roueche was arrested.
As other people were murdered—like small-time dealer Laura Lynn Lamoureux, prostitute Kimberley Hallgarth and real estate developer Marc Bontkes—the media and public openly wondered if the authorities could do anything to stop gangsters from murdering with impunity.
In response to the incredible amount of violence, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson called for the formation of a metropolitan police force, to remove the communication and logistical barriers that separated the current police forces in the Lower Mainland. Warning that there was an unacceptable level of violence—other shootings that week, including at a crack shack and a gas station, were less well known because there were no fatalities—and that the 2010 Winter Olympics were on their way, he pleaded for the public to come forward and help fight crime. He said they were “losing the battle” and needed something to “turn the tide.”
Speaking on behalf of the RCMP and the multi-force homicide team IHIT, Corporal Peter Thiessen was noncommittal on whether or not he thought that would help and pointed out that he thought the number of police was not the problem; the lack of public involvement was. “I wouldn't say the area is under-policed, but certainly we could use additional resources,” he said. “We're trying to engage the public because we cannot do this ourselves. This is not about more police on the street necessarily, this is also about the public becoming engaged in a problem that they need to help us solve.”
And, like many other commentators at the time, he pointed out that parents had to be more observant and take responsibility for their children if they wanted them to make it home. “When you have a young 20-something living under your roof that doesn't get up in the morning, but is driving a $100,000 car and wearing a $1,000 suit and has a pocketful of cash, you have to question where that money is coming from,” he said.
So after Thiessen pointed out that the cops were essentially powerless without community involvement—and we had seen how effective public outrage was in catching the killer of Nicole Alemy—many in the Lower Mainland were surprised when arrests related to the Willock-Sutherland shooting and other offenses were announced early in March. The suspects in the Willock-Sutherland shooting were familiar names to anyone who was following the news of the gangs in the Lower Mainland. The best known was the notorious Barzan Tilli-Choli, who many believed had taken over the leadership of the UN when Clayton Roueche landed behind bars in the United States. Also in the SUV from which the shots were fired were UN member Aram Ali, Tilli-Choli's associate Nicola Cotrell and Sarah Trebble, who had been the girlfriend of Hells Angel Larry Amero (they still shared the lease of a Cadillac Escalade) and had been a character witness for Sasan Ansari, who was convicted of the 2008 murder and mutilation of Joshua Goos.
Tilli-Choli, Ali and Cotrell were charged with first-degree murder, and Trebble was charged with being in a car in which she knew there was an illegal firearm. All were released on bail, even though Tilli-Choli had already been ordered deported.
Although he had escaped from the targeted assassination attempt (and the alleged perpetrators had been caught), Willock was not out of the woods. While the UN had made it abundantly clear they would like to see him dead, they were not the only thing he had to fear. Willock had a habit of running his mouth, and it had occasionally got him into trouble. He had the particularly bad taste to joke about the death of LeClair, laughing while saying that now that LeClair was dead, he could keep the $40,000 he owed him. Few found it funny, and one Red Scorpion—Albert Jackman, who was so close to LeClair that he had a tattoo of his face—found it worthy of punishment.
On the night of May 8, 2009, Jackman and his 20-year-old associate Wesley Kelemen arranged to meet Willock at his house in Langley. When they arrived, Jackman told Willock they had private business to discuss, so they went into Willock's bedroom, leaving Kelemen and the roommate in the living room.
Once the door was closed, Jackman ordered Willock to the ground. He then secured his hands and feet with plastic cable ties and put strips of duct tape over his mouth and eyes. And that's when he took the sledgehammer out of the hockey bag. He pounded Willock so badly that he put dents in the cement floor. The floor, walls, furniture and even the ceiling were spattered with blood. But Jackman was careful. None of the twenty hits threatened Willock's life. He hadn't meant to kill him, just to make him hurt. And that he did, smashing joints and damaging various organs.
When he was satisfied that Willock had paid sufficiently for his little joke, Jackman then put his hammer back in the bag and walked in the living room. He collected Kelemen and left, telling Willock's roommate to call 9-1-1.
Jackman was not shy about the assault afterward. He was heard discussing it on an unrelated wiretap in which he said, “I wish the fuck I had beat him until he was dead.” And he later told an undercover offic
er that he would “clip every member of his family if he squealed.” Willock did not cooperate with police.
On the evening of May 28, 2009, Kyle Barber and his girlfriend, Hayley Lloyd, were relaxing in bed watching TV in their home at 24421 Fraser Highway in Langley when she heard a truck park in their driveway. Lloyd recognized the truck as belonging to her neighbors but did not know the two men who got out of it. When the two men approached the door, Lloyd asked what they wanted with the door still shut. They told her that they lived next door and that their barn had been broken into. Lloyd had seen a ladder up against the building leading to an open window the day before, but didn't know what had happened there. Still, she wanted to help so she opened the door a few inches to talk with them. When she said she couldn't help them, the two visitors pushed past her and stormed into the house. The shorter of the two, Albert Jackman, started shouting questions, asked them what they knew about the $50,000 stolen from the grow op next door. When Barber told him he didn't know anything, Jackman tried to intimidate him by telling him he was in the Red Scorpions, showing tattoos (including one on his neck) to back up his claim. “You took my shit, my $50,000 worth of shit,” he bellowed. Barber said he didn't know what they were talking about but offered them a half pound of weed, some LSD and magic mushrooms, and the few thousand dollars they had. Jackman said it wasn't enough, so Barber told him they had more downstairs. Indeed they did. In fact, as revealed at trial, Barber and Lloyd had a grow op with about 200 plants in the basement.
Once downstairs, the taller, younger intruder—Gregory Barrett—held onto Lloyd, immobilizing her. Jackman forced Barber to kneel, grabbed a pair of scissors and started punching him with the blade between his fingers. He took a moment to wash the blood from his hands, then forced them to go back upstairs. Jackman ordered Barber to lie on the floor. Instead, Barber threw a small space heater at him. Jackman grabbed a knife off the top of a dresser and chased Barber, stabbing or slashing him whenever he got close enough. In a final bid for freedom, Barber crashed through a window.
The invaders left, taking a shotgun Lloyd had under the bed, but not the drugs or cash. Lloyd then called 9-1-1, and used an old T-shirt to try to stop the blood that was pumping out of Barber's throat. She later identified Jackman and Barret from photographs the police had of known gang members.
It's likely that among the pictures she saw both Sean “Smurf” Murphy and Ryan “Whitey” Richards. Old friends and small-time drug dealers, Murphy and Richards were both heavily involved with the Red Scorpions. That association proved fatal. Early in the morning of March 31, 2009, police came across a car stopped beside Bateman Park in Abbotsford. Its driver's-side window was missing, its front bumper had been torn off and its owner, Murphy, was found dead slumped over the wheel. A few hours later, passersby found Richards's body behind the Yellow Barn Country Produce vegetable market in Abbotsford, a few feet from the Chilliwack line. “We don't believe these homicides were random and there is a strong possibility that the victims' own criminal lifestyles led to their deaths,” said police spokesman Casey Vinet. “It's unknown at this time if the two cases are in any way connected, but it is something investigators are carefully considering.”
In spite of a few high-profile arrests, including that of Tilli-Choli, it appeared as though the gangsters still ruled the streets of the Lower Mainland. Bodies were piling up at a horrendous rate, and the few people actually getting arrested seemed to be literally getting away with murder.
That belief changed for many people on April 3, 2009, when police arrested Dennis Karbovanec and charged him with three counts of murder for the killings of Christopher Mohan, Ryan Bartolomeo and Michael Lal. Even more shocking was the fact that he had agreed to confess to all three charges, despite knowing that would guarantee him the most severe punishment Canada has to offer—life in prison with no chance at parole for 25 years.
The next day's news was even more shocking. Police arrested a veritable who's who of the Red Scorpions gang: Cody Ray Haevischer, Matthew James Johnson and the previously untouchable Jamie Bacon. All three were charged with first-degree murder, and Haevischer and Johnson were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy.
A neighbor who saw Bacon's arrest told me that it was a huge spectacle. “It was like a movie, a war movie,” he said. “The cops looked like soldiers, all dressed in black with body armor and heavy weapons.” Bacon was led from the house—in a hoodie, track pants and handcuffs—and taken away.
Later, Red Scorpions founder Michael Le and someone identified by police as “Person X” were also arrested.
About a year and a half after the Surrey Six murders, Jamie Bacon and two of his Red Scorpions buddies were going down for it. Although nobody thought it would make a dent in the drug trade, many wanted to believe that if one of the previously untouchable Bacon Brothers could be held accountable, maybe there was hope the violence would at least slow down.
But not everybody believed it would. History had shown that high-profile arrests tended to make places more violent as opportunists fought for the business arrested individuals left behind. “What they do is they disturb the balance in the industry, and that creates opportunities for new and less-disciplined groups to come in,” said Rob Gordon, director of criminology at Simon Fraser University. “The same kind of thing happened when they had sessions with the Hells Angels a little while ago. There is a colossal drug industry operating behind these kinds of individuals who, to my mind, are actually fairly low down on the pecking order.”
Chapter 10
The Year of the Rat: 2009–2010
It's easy to think that Jamie Bacon and his pals could have gotten away with the Surrey Six murders. With no definitive eyewitness statements and no real physical evidence to connect them to the incident, it's very unlikely police could have built a strong enough case to bring them to trial, and even if they had, charges would likely have been stayed due to a lack of significant evidence.
Not that they didn't know who did it or why. Sources close to police have told me that they knew that Michael Lal and his allies had long been involved with the Red Scorpions, but there had been a bitter dispute over how much “tax” they were kicking upstairs to the Red Scorpions' brass (which probably included the Bacons). The Lals and their friends then decided to break out on their own, which, of course, the Red Scorpions could not tolerate. In the Lower Mainland's drug trafficking circles, breaking such rules meant capital punishment.
But, as with many cases in which the cops knew who did it, there was very little the authorities could do about it—until one of the killers had a remarkable change of heart. Ever since police put out a warning about Dennis Karbovanec and the Bacon Brothers, they had been tailing them, watching their every move. Of course, the gangsters and police officers spoke with one another as they got more familiar. And it was on April 1, 2009, that Karbovanec told one of them he wanted to “come clean.”
It wasn't an April Fool's Day prank. Karbovanec told the cop he wanted to confess, to admit the whole thing. The cop told him to get a lawyer and then turn himself in. He did.
It may be easy to think that the anti-crime rallies and other activist actions did little but preach to the converted, that the real criminals ignored them or even laughed at them. But in this case, they actually worked. After he confessed, Karbovanec granted an interview to Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan. She had been covering the Lower Mainland's underworld for years and probably knew more about organized crime than law enforcement or most of its participants. He told her that it was Eileen Mohan that made him do it. While many gangsters lack the basic empathy—or at least pretend they do—to be moved by the suffering of others, Karbovanec clearly was.
And while experts normally say front-page arrests actually increase violence by opening up the market to competition, there was something different about this one. Many Lower Mainland youth idolized the gangsters, especially the Bacon Brothers. Until the Surrey Six arrest, they appeared untouchable. Until that
point, they were like the mythical gangsters of movies and popular music. They lived above the law, drove fancy cars, wore the latest styles and had the prettiest girls. They made millions selling drugs, and they got away with murder.
But if a Bacon Brother was sent away for a long time, it could well take the luster off their image. Kids would be a lot less likely to idolize them.
But the drug- and gang-related violence did not stop, or even slow down, right away. In Kamloops, Damien Marks's dad, Robert, had qualms about his son's new best friend and roommate, Ken Yaretz. Yaretz, just 24 years old, seemed like he could be trouble. Marks wanted to press the issue with his son; he kept meaning to, but never really got around to it. He should have.
Indeed, Yaretz had been in trouble. He'd been sentenced to nine months for trafficking and, in August 2008, had been in a car that was stopped by police that also contained Jayme Russell, president of the Kamloops chapter of the Independent Soldiers.
Marks and Yaretz were moving to a bigger basement apartment, also in Kamloops, on April 17, 2009, when both men went missing. They were, Marks's dad said, heading up to nearby Knouff Lake to pick up some of Yaretz's stuff.
Up in Knouff Lake there was an associate of theirs who was deeply involved in trafficking. In fact, Roy Fraser had been arrested with $120,000 worth of marijuana and hashish in his native Saskatchewan in 1999 and had since relocated to a trailer on a remote property. Neighbors told the media that it was “common knowledge” that the property contained a grow op owned by the Hells Angels.
About a month after Marks and Yaretz went missing, police executed a search warrant on Fraser's property during an investigation about some stolen goods. While searching Fraser's property, they came across the bodies of Marks and Yaretz in a shallow grave.
The Notorious Bacon Brothers Page 18