The Notorious Bacon Brothers

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Key Players

Part I: Welcome to Lotusland

Chapter 1: The Surrey Six: October, 2007

Chapter 2: The Gangster's Playground: 1907–1998

Chapter 3: United Nations: 1997–2001

Part II: The Path to War

Chapter 4: Bumps in the Road: 2001–2004

Chapter 5: Going Global: 2005–2006

Chapter 6: New Friends: 2006–2007

Chapter 7: Going Public: 2007–2008

Part III: Breaking the Bacons

Chapter 8: Paralysis: 2008–2009

Chapter 9: War: February–May, 2009

Chapter 10: The Year of the Rat: 2009–2010

Chapter 11: The Wolf Pack: 2010–2011

Chapter 12: Bacons' End: 2011–2012

Index

Copyright © 2013 Jerry Langton

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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Langton, Jerry, 1965-

The notorious Bacon Brothers : inside gang warfare on Vancouver streets / Jerry Langton.

Includes index.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-118-38867-9

1. Bacon Brothers (Gang). 2. Gangs—British Columbia—Vancouver. 3. Violent crimes—British Columbia—Vancouver. 4. Vancouver (B.C.)—Social conditions. I. Title.

HV6439.C32V3 2012 364.106′60971133 C2012-902325-6

ISBN: 978-1-118-40460-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-40457-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-40459-1 (ebk)

Production Credits

Cover design: Adrian So

Typesetting: Thomson Digital

Cover images: Thinkstock/iStockphoto

Editorial Credits

Executive editor: Don Loney

Managing editor: Alison Maclean

Production editor: Pamela Vokey

John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.

6045 Freemont Blvd.

Mississauga, Ontario

L5R 4J3

Bacon Country: The British Columbia Lower Mainland

The Vancouver region has always been different from the rest of Canada, and almost certainly always will be. There are two interconnected reasons for that—geography and history.

The word that best describes Vancouver's geography from a human perspective would be isolated. From the west, the open Pacific, to find it, you would almost have to be looking for it specifically. Nestled behind two huge land masses—Vancouver Island and Washington State's Olympic Peninsula—the site of Vancouver would be easy for explorers from the Pacific to miss, and they often did. From the east, the area is surrounded by tall mountains with only the valley of the Fraser River, which winds more than 850 miles from its source of dripping snow high up in the Rockies to salt water.

Key Players

• The Indo-Canadian (or the Punjabi) Mafia—Bhupinder “Bindy” Singh Johal
  
• The Big Circle Boys (originating in China)
  
• The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club
  
• Red Scorpions—Quang Vinh “Michael” Le and Eddie Narong
  
• The United Nations—Clayton Roueche, later Barzan Tilli-Choli and Doug Vanalstine
  
• The Independent Soldiers
  

• The Renegades
  
• The King Pin Crew
  
• The Game Tight Soldiers
  

• Integrated Homicide Investigation team (IHIT)
  
• Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU)
  
• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
  

Part I

Welcome to Lotusland

“You're just going to go buy crack!” the woman screamed. The toddler she was holding looked terrified, but the man she was shouting at only looked bothered, and a bit embarrassed. He wouldn't look directly at her while she begged him to come back home, do the right thing, and reassume his role as father and husband.

This intensely sad little drama took place at the corner of West Georgia and Thurlow in downtown Vancouver a year ago when I was in the city to address a symposium on true accounts in the media. To my surprise, the other people on the busy corner, including a tour group from Japan who were staying in my hotel, did their best to ignore the couple even though the woman was wailing and the man had openly threatened her physically a couple of times. I couldn't ignore them. Years of reporting have effectively forced me to investigate such things. Noticing my attention, the man shot me a glare, and asked “What are you looking at?” before walking quickly away.

The woman, a dazed look on her face, paused for a moment, then walked away dejectedly in another direction. The toddler, who had been silent throughout the exchange, looked back at me as though there was something I could do to help.

It was a far cry from where I had been earlier that day, even though it was physically just a few blocks. Walking through the West Vancouver neighborhoods like Kiltsilano and Arbutus, the handler the university provided me proudly pointed out some of the most expensive real estate in North America. It's very pretty and captures all of the physical beauty the Vancouver area is famous for. The old stone mansions and super-modern condos are impressive. Running, as many do, about $6 million or so, it's hard to imagine who can afford them.

So I asked a couple of real estate agents who told me that they were mainly owned by families in East Asia. One agent laughed and told me she hadn't sold anything to a Canadian in at least ten years. They're investment properties, for the most part, and are often occupied by the family's children who may be going to university or just having an extended childhood.

The almost unlimited supply of foreign investors—and a booming population—has driven Vancouver's real estate prices through the roof. The effect has led to huge numbers of people moving from the city. They settle in what were small towns but have recently become sprawling suburbs and even cities unto themselves.

My handler had another appointment and asked me if I needed a ride back to the hotel. I told her I'd walk. It's a great hotel—comfortable, friendly and well-appointed—and I wouldn't stay anywhere else in Vancouver. My favorite part is the old dog who greets guests in the lobby. I'm pleased every time she remembers me.

On the way there, the atmosphere changed. Downtown Vancouver always struck me as an impersonal place, even more so than Toronto. There are the obvious trappings of commercial success there, but I always get a feeling that there's something a little wrong. A lot of the businesses appealing to young people have an aesthetic that seems to me a bit brutish. I was a little surprised to see a few windows boarded up—a grim reminder of the Stanley Cup riots a few months before my visit. There were lots and lots of modified cars, trucks and motorcycles, more than a few intentionally made to be aggressively and annoyingly loud. There were plenty of panhandlers, some quite insistent, and a number of people who seemed not quite altogether there. Maybe it's because of what I write about, but I tend to blame stimulant drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine every time I see someone acting erratically in public.

After that incident, I came back to my senses. I kept walking until I got to the Downtown Eastside. Widely referred to in the media as the worst neighborhood in Canada, it certainly lives up to its reputation. According to
The Globe and Mail
, the average annual income for the residents of Downtown Eastside is just $14,024—$6,282 if you take away government checks. That's a ridiculously small amount of money to live on in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The result is absolute squalor. Homeless are everywhere, and so are prostitutes. Drug use is commonly seen out in the open. It's like a different country. “We've basically got a Third World country stuck in the middle of downtown Vancouver,” said Krishna Pendakur, a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University and co-director of Metropolis British Columbia, an urban think tank. From outward appearances and the lack of hope in the people I spoke with there, I think he's right.

From there I took the SkyTrain—the Vancouver area's rail transit—to Surrey, British Columbia's second-biggest city. It's more familiar; it looks like many Canadian cities that have grown quickly. It's full of newer buildings, strip malls and other hastily constructed amenities. The only thing really striking about Surrey to me was how segregated it was. In one area, all the signs, shops and restaurants catered to Koreans; a few blocks over, all the text was Vietnamese.

Later, I drove down the Fraser Valley to see the towns in which most of the action in this book took place. Towns like Abbotsford and Chilliwack made Surrey look like Ancient Rome. Truly suburban, these towns seem utterly devoid of any structure more than 20 years old. In between developments, there are lush stands of trees, but where the houses are, there are only recently planted saplings, none thicker than my arm.

In the Southern reaches of this region, where there are still some farms, you come to 0 Avenue. It doesn't look like much—just a lonely highway with a few houses and farms on each side. But it's much more than that. It's the border between Canada and the United States. Unlike most international borders, it's absolutely unprotected. Crossing it is no more difficult than looking both ways and walking 30 feet or so.

And that's another ingredient in the strange mixture that has led to the gang wars in British Columbia. America, as it always has, beckons with the siren song of easy money. The kids from places like Abbotsford know that the quickest way for them to be parking a Porsche at a Kitsilano address is to sell drugs to the Americans.

Environmental conditions and a relaxed attitude towards marijuana use have combined over the years to make British Columbia one of the world's primary exporters of high-quality weed. It's relatively easy to make great sums of money by bringing that weed across the border.

But there's a problem with that. The ease and huge profits of moving weed was like a modern-day gold rush. Competition grew fierce. And it drew the attention of organized crime, in particular the Hells Angels. They were determined to monopolize the market—as they had with strip joints a few years earlier—by force, if necessary.

The increased danger forced traffickers to band together to protect themselves. Now, instead of just money flowing over the border from the south, there was also a steady stream of firearms. Making matters worse, the same people who had been dealing weed were now dealing in even-higher-profit drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and Oxycontin. That caught the attention of brutal Mexican and Colombian gangs.

Suddenly, what were sleepy little towns were bustling, impersonal metropolises full of desperate young men who had money, guns, enemies and addictive drugs. The violence was inevitable.

The Bacon Brothers stood out simply because they were definitive of the new-style gangster. They didn't come from any ethnic ghetto; they didn't come from poverty or an abusive or broken home. In fact, they came from exactly the opposite upbringing that many social critics say incubates crime. The Bacon Brothers lived in middle-class affluence in a nice house with their supportive parents. They went to good schools at which they excelled athletically and were popular socially.

They were not inner-city kids forced into crime because they had no other option. They were just some guys who thought they could get rich selling drugs.

And they were hardly alone. They represented a new kind of gangster—one who weighs the pros, cons and risks, and makes a conscious effort to make a career out of crime.