The Notorious Bacon Brothers (14 page)

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.