The Notorious Bacon Brothers (3 page)

Although he couldn't smell anything, the building manager immediately thought there had been a gas leak, and that Schellenberg had asphyxiated. Scared the entire building could go up in flames, the building manager raced down the stairs and called 9-1-1.

The fire department arrived and evacuated the building, and as protocol dictated, authorities shut down the SkyTrain and blocked off the nearby highways. The firefighters went up to the 15th floor, and their gas detectors indicated there was no leak. They went into 1505. Inside, they found six corpses. It was no gas leak. All six men were lying in pools of blood, and there were visible holes in their heads. It was clearly not a job for the fire department. They called the police.

Despite its size and high crime rate, Surrey doesn't actually have its own police force. Instead, they have a 640-officer RCMP detachment. Alerted by the firefighters, the RCMP sent out a HAZMAT unit and members of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), a unit formed by a number of police forces and RCMP detachments in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia to investigate all homicides across city and town borders.

RCMP Superintendent Wayne Rideout was in charge of the IHIT, but he had already left for the weekend. And many of the other IHIT officers were investigating an incident earlier that day in which a small private plane, a twin-engined Piper Seneca, had flown into the ninth floor of an apartment building in nearby Richmond.

Overwhelmed by the massive amount of evidence at the crime scene, the IHIT officers at Balmoral Tower called Rideout at home. “I got the call from the plainclothes commander at the Surrey detachment,” he said. “They were suspecting now that it was a multiple homicide. We called out multiple teams.” Rideout drove out to Balmoral Tower. “I knew this was going to change IHIT forever,” he said. “We had never had anything like this.” Indeed, it proved to be British Columbia's biggest mass murder in recent history.

Before long, more than 100 investigators from the already stretched IHIT were on the scene. “It doesn't just impact that investigation. It impacts all investigations,” Rideout said. “It has really drained resources.”

On the stopped SkyTrain, Eileen Mohan started to hear rumors of a gas leak. She immediately thought of the gas guy looking at the furnaces in Balmoral Tower. At least, she thought to herself, Chris had left for his basketball game even if something had actually happened there.

She got off the train and walked the rest of the way home. The cops and fire department cordon was still in place. She could not go home. She knew something bad had happened but wasn't worried about Chris—at least, consciously. “I was looking to the very side of the building where my son lay dead. I had no idea,” she said. “There was no fear in me.” Unable to get inside and unwilling to stand out in the cold rain, Eileen headed to a relative's house nearby to wait for the authorities to declare Balmoral Tower open again. Still she couldn't get over the sick feeling in her stomach. “I thought, ‘why am I feeling this way?'”

Unable to relax, she went back to Balmoral Tower after midnight. It was still closed, and the worry she had felt rose to the surface. “It began to register on me. My son hadn't called. It was one o'clock,” she said. “He always called to let me know where he was.”

She rushed back to her relatives' place. Unable to call Chris himself, she called the friends he had told her he was going to play basketball with. They told her that Chris had never made it to the game in Burnaby. Sitting on the couch in her relatives' house, Eileen heard on the news there had been a murder in Balmoral Tower. “It was then that my heart sank,” she said. “I went limp.”

The next morning, Eileen began to get calls from some of Chris's other friends. He was supposed to have attended the funeral of a close friend at ten o'clock that day, and they wanted to know why he hadn't shown up. She didn't know what to say. She returned to Balmoral Tower at four o'clock that afternoon. She was still not allowed in. She now knew that six people had been murdered in the building and had even heard people say that it had happened on the 15th floor. She went up to a detective, and begged him for any information about her son.

“Does your son have any tattoos?” he asked.

“No, my son does not have a single tattoo on his body,” she answered, surprised by his question. “Christopher has a mole here.” She pointed at her chin, where she too had a mole. “And he has a mole here,” she pointed at her sternum, where she also had a mole. The detective said he couldn't help her.

Then Eileen asked a couple of RCMP officers if they had heard about her son; he was missing and had not called. She saw their faces drop. They asked her if she had a picture of her son.

A few hours before Eileen Mohan's heart was broken, concern started to wash over the Schellenberg house in Abbotsford. Ed's wife Lois had made pizza for dinner, but Ed had not returned to eat it. She got Kevin, their son, to call him. No answer. But that wasn't too strange; Ed would never pick up when he was with a customer or on the road.

She had heard on the TV news that night that there had been a gas leak at Balmoral Tower but didn't worry about Ed, even though she knew he was working on the gas lines in that very building. She was confident he knew what he was doing. The news of the small airplane crashing into the Richmond apartment building dominated the program. She hadn't heard the whole story, so she immediately called her sister who lived in an apartment building in Richmond to see if everybody was okay. Her sister was fine—it wasn't even that close to where she lived—but she brought up what was going on in Surrey, aware that Ed, his brother-in-law and nephew had all been working there. Lois said it was just a leak or something, nothing to worry about. Her sister disagreed. “Haven't you heard? It's been upgraded,” she said. “It's a murder or a police incident.”

Now it was serious. She called Brown, who told her he left Ed and the 21-year-old boy at the building to finish the job and had not heard from either of them since. Lois called their two other children and told them to return home immediately. Brown called his son. The boy told him that they had finished all the units except for 1505, but that Uncle Ed was going to take care of that one, so he went downstairs to get ready to go. Then the fire department and police arrived and took him from the building. They didn't answer any of his questions, but the other people they evacuated were all talking. They kept asking him if he was okay, if he was hurt. He was confused; he had no idea what had occurred. He was waiting in the parking lot when one of the other residents of the 15th floor called him. He asked the caller what was going on. “Something terrible has happened on the 15th floor, and your guy's van is still down in the parking lot, and his tools are still out in the hallway,” the caller said. “Something horrible has happened in 1505.”

Chapter 2

The Gangster's Playground: 1907–1998

Chris Mohan, Ed Schellenberg, Eddie Narong, Michael Le, and the Lal brothers would soon be known as the Surrey Six, and the events at the Balmoral Tower in October 2007 would mark a turning point in the history of criminal violence in the Lower Mainland. But that history was long and deeply entrenched.

For most of the early part of the twentieth century, organized crime in Vancouver was largely under the radar of the media, but without realizing it, the combined governments of Canada, British Columbia, and Vancouver had put together a perfect incubator for organized crime. They called attention to specific ethnic groups (primarily the Chinese, but also immigrants from the Indian subcontinent) and passed laws that specifically targeted them. The government isolated these groups in their own segregated neighborhoods, which the city had declared high-crime areas, and the only official interaction with the government these groups had was with a police force that had a reputation for excessive and even unnecessary violence. And, as though that weren't enough, the government gave these groups an instant black market by banning opium, which was not only a major part of these ethnic groups' culture, but also a huge source of revenue for the otherwise poor Chinese neighborhoods.

It was the same kind of situation that has bred crime organizations around the world, most notably the Mafia in Sicily and Calabria. As with the Mafia, powerful Chinese men, mainly merchants, banded together for their own benefit, cooperating with one another to ensure mutual success. These groups, perfectly legal to form, eventually became known as “tongs,” from the Chinese word for “meeting place.”

Eventually, others in the Chinese community began to approach the tongs to acquire loans, to settle disputes and to get protection. And, just as the mafia had, the tongs began to act as a shadow government for Chinese communities around the world who felt alienated by their official governments. Of course, unelected leaders with extra-legislative powers are as prone to temptation as anyone, and many influential members of tongs used their prestige to become involved in loan sharking, extortion, human trafficking, prostitution and drug trafficking. Organizations within tongs that are dedicated to organized crime are called “triads,” from a phrase that means “secret society.”

The first triad to be discovered in Canada was the Hung Shan Tong (Red Mountain Society) in Barkersville, British Columbia, in 1863. Members of a much larger tong in San Francisco had come to the tiny mountain town after gold was discovered there and quickly set up businesses appealing to the Chinese community already there.

Tongs spread all over British Columbia and, to a lesser extent, Chinese communities in the rest of Canada as well. One member in Vancouver, Shi Mei (also spelled Shu Moy), rose to prominence after the 1908 opium ban, using an ingenious method. Opium was still legal in Asia, and many tourist boats traveled there, including Canadian Pacific's Empress Line. Shi bribed the line's mostly Chinese employees to smuggle opium back to Canada. After he became wealthy, he started a local string of gambling parlors catering mainly to Chinese patrons, who played a number of games, especially a dice game called “barboodey.” He was part of the focus of McGeer's 1928 crime probe, which called him “king of the gamblers” and accused him of paying the police $50 a month for protection.

Police made crackdown after crackdown over the years, but had little success in stopping the vice trades in Chinatown. Before long, the people of Vancouver came to tolerate, even ignore, vice crimes in Chinatown, developing a “what happens in Chinatown stays in Chinatown” mentality.

In the late 1970s, competition for trade among gangs operating out of Chinatown was fierce. The Lotus Gang, also known as the Lotus Brothers—founded in 1976 by Ling Yue Jai (who also went by the name David So)—was young and aggressive, and began to upset the equilibrium that had been established. They especially annoyed another young gang, the Gum Wah (Golden Chinese), and the two came close to war. Outnumbered, the Gum Wah preemptively entered into a mutual relationship with the Hung Ying (Red Eagles), a smaller gang made up mainly of immigrants from Hong Kong and ethnic Chinese immigrants from a number of Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia. Looking for more manpower to catch up, the Lotus Gang formed a loose alliance with Los Diablos, a street gang that was originally made up of Hispanic immigrants but, after a series of arrests and deportations, had become mostly made up of Indian Canadians.

War was avoided, but attrition through arrests and defections led to there being three prominent gangs in Chinatown: the Hung Ying, the Lotus Gang (by then led by a man named Park Shing Low) and the Viet Ching (made up primarily of ethnic Chinese immigrants from Vietnam and led by Hy Hang and Law Kin Keung, also known as Allan Law). The Gum Wah had been largely sidelined, having been eclipsed by the Hung Ying.

Throughout the 1980s, the Hung Ying and Viet Ching fought a war of attrition, leaving the Lotus Gang as the top crime organization in Vancouver's Chinatown. But they would soon see another rival, one with roots in China's Communist Party.

The Red Guard, established to prosecute Mao Zedong's bloody Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, established a number of prison camps, which were taken over by the Communist Party. The biggest of them—just outside Guangzhou (still known to many Westerners as “Canton”)—was called the “Big Circle” because the barracks were constructed in a ring around the guardhouse.

Lots of prisoners managed to escape from the Big Circle and, accompanied by defectors from the Red Guards, they fled to Hong Kong, which was at the time a British colony. Hardened by their time in captivity and at odds to make ends meet in one of the world's most expensive cities, many of them turned to crime. They started with robbing couriers, then moved onto bigger targets. Their loose association became known as “the Big Circle Boys.”

Fortuitously for them, the West fired one of its last blows of the Cold War by liberalizing immigration policies in many countries, especially for immigrants who had fled a communist regime. Because the people of Hong Kong were officially British subjects—and many were eager to leave, with the knowledge that Britain was due to turn the colony back over to Chinese ownership in 1997—many went to Canada. They regrouped in Chinese neighborhoods in many cities there, particularly Vancouver and Toronto.

The Big Circle Boys first came to the attention of Canadian law enforcement in 1988 when a rash of pickpocketings hit Toronto's Chinatown and adjacent subway stops. Credit cards were being copied and put into use, and phone cards—all but extinct now, but common at the time—were being run up to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each month. Further investigations led law enforcement to believe that the Big Circle Boys were importing drugs to Canada from East Asia and that they ran a number of brothels in Chinatown and Scarborough in which the employees had been trafficked from impoverished Asian countries with promises of legitimate jobs.

As they grew in strength, the Big Circle Boys expanded their repertoire. They would go into restaurants in large groups, eat and drink all they wanted, then leave. Any waiters or others who challenged them would be threatened with violence. And they also ran a “window cleaning” scam—in which shop owners who did not pay them a monthly stipend could expect to have their windows smashed.

Later, the gang specialized in home invasions, simply barging their way into the houses and condos of wealthy Asian-Canadians and taking what they wanted. They were also linked to counterfeiting cash and passports, as well as trafficking heroin into the United States. A 1996 report by the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada (CISC) stated:

There are clear indications Asian heroin traffickers such as the Big Circle Boys are co-operating with Vietnamese gangs, Laotian, Fukienese and Taiwanese criminals, Italian organized crime, [the] Hells Angels and with any criminal organization that will buy drugs.

But the nature of the Big Circle Boys, and the code of silence that is strictly enforced in Chinese Canadian communities, make their moves nearly impossible for law enforcement to monitor. So it came as a complete surprise on November 4, 2007, when a 10-year-old girl called 9-1-1 to report that her dad had been shot in front of their mansion in Vancouver's upscale Shaughnessy neighborhood. The victim was Hong Chao “Raymond” Huang. He was dead by the time emergency crews arrived at the scene. The 45-year-old had done his best to keep a low profile but was well known as a Dai Lo (Big Brother), a high-ranking member of the Big Circle Boys. Neighbors had been suspicious of the Huang family, who purchased the $3.7-million house with extra security in 2003. They told media they found it odd that the family had never learned to speak English and kept a number of large guard dogs—very rare among Chinese families—on the premises.

The case was never solved; an indication of just how easy it is for the Big Circle Boys and other gangsters to fade into the background when they have to.

In the 1960s, Vancouver experienced another mass migration. Rumors of abundant drugs, relaxed laws and cheap rent attracted a remarkable number of young people, most of whom were—correctly or not—described as hippies. By 1967, the area had become frequently described as Canada's hippie capital, and young people and their fashionable habits were commonplace in the area. Mayor Thomas J. Campbell referred to them as “a scum community” and added, “If these young people get their way, they will destroy Canada. From what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world!”

But the sheer numbers of hippies and others who thought like them had a remarkable effect on the city. Vancouver opposed freeways, became a forerunner of relaxed drug laws and even gave birth to Greenpeace in 1971. But while the people of Vancouver had different attitudes than the rest of the country when it came to drugs, they still had to abide by federal laws. That became abundantly clear in the summer of 1971. The city's chapter of the Youth International Party (better known as the Yippies) organized a “smoke-in”—a protest in which about 2,000 people openly smoked marijuana in defiance of the law—in Gastown's Maple Tree Square on August 7. Mayor Campbell, who had embedded undercover officers among the series of Yippie-inspired protests that summer, sent in the riot police. Although a CBC cameraman on the scene claimed that protesters were throwing bottles and pieces of pavement at officers to provoke them, the footage that was carried in the media was exclusively of helmeted officers without identifying badges beating what appeared to be helpless youths with long riot batons. Things got far worse for the cops' reputation when a 16-year-old from Ontario sued them, claiming that a cop had broken his leg with his baton and threatened to break the other if the boy did not stand up and leave. A total of 79 arrests were made in what are now known as the “Gastown Riots.”

Mayor Campbell and the cops may have hated them, but to organized crime, the hippies were something of a godsend. Generally law-abiding people otherwise, they had an insatiable hunger for drugs and, as they became settled in the prosperous city, the money to pay for them.

But it was not always easy for the hippies—almost exclusively white English-speakers—to go to Chinatown and communicate a desire to buy drugs, especially with traffickers who were ever vigilant for undercover cops. That gap was filled by another cultural phenomenon that came to Vancouver in the 1960s—outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Like the outlaw motorcycle gangs in other parts of the world, the ones in the Vancouver area aped the fashions and lifestyle popularized by the 1955 Marlon Brando film
The Wild One
and codified by the Hells Angels. They rode chopped and stretched-out Harley-Davidsons with extra-loud pipes, they grew their hair long and wore leather jackets with their clubs' names and logos on the back. And they sold drugs. Most outlaw motorcycle gangs sold drugs they manufactured, like methamphetamine, while others relied on crime organizations like the Mafia to supply them with heroin or cocaine. In the Vancouver region, though, the outlaw motorcycle gangs were generally supplied by the Chinese and, as marijuana cultivation began to become widespread in the Fraser and Okanagan Valleys, from local growers.

There was no shortage of recruits. White kids in Vancouver had banded together as gangs for decades. Collectively called “the Park Gangs,” each group was focused on the park they considered their turf. Before the bikers became the driving force in the area, the park gangs generally acted like a parody of 50s greasers with souped-up cars they'd race on city streets every Friday night, denim jackets, chains and switchblades. Their drug activities included drinking beer and sniffing glue.

Generally, they were into small-time crime. Jim Chu, Vancouver's police chief and a graduate of Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School, remembered his first experiences growing up near one of the Park Gangs. “The Riley Park gang was a product of the housing project by Ontario and 33rd Avenue. They were lower-income, often single-parent families living there. I didn't think of them that way at the time—they were just kids I went to school with,” he said. “They wore jean jackets and jeans. Other kids wouldn't wear that—that signified you were a Riley Parker. They were tough guys who fought with tire irons and chains, and if you fought one of them, you had to fight them all.”