The Notorious Bacon Brothers Read online

  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

  Principal Lower Mainland Gangs and Their Leaders

  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

  Lesser Lower Mainland Gangs

  The Renegades

  The King Pin Crew

  The Game Tight Soldiers

  Special Law Enforcement Agencies

  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 peop
le 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.

  Chapter 1

  The Surrey Six: October, 2007

  As soon as the SkyTrain stopped, Eileen Mohan was worried. She knew they didn't stop the SkyTrain between stations unless it was a major emergency. The unscheduled stop had happened just before her station. She immediately worried about her son. She called home, but there was no answer. She knew she couldn't get him if he'd already left home, as he had said he would, because the two shared a cellphone—she took it on weekdays and he had it on weekends.

  Eileen had left for work at 8:00 a.m. and was on her way home at 7:30 p.m. Chris, her 22-year-old son, was at home. He had the day off from the liquor store where he worked and wanted to play basketball with some friends in the nearby city of Burnaby. The Mohans—Eileen, her husband and Chris—lived in Balmoral Tower, a luxury condo development at 9830 East Whalley Ring Road in Surrey. Although it's technically the second-largest city in British Columbia, Surrey is generally regarded as the most low-end of Vancouver's suburbs.

  The Mohans, who had emigrated to Canada from Fiji 11 years earlier, had lived on the 14th floor of Balmoral Tower for a year, but when a penthouse suite on the top floor, unit 1504, opened up a week earlier, they'd jumped at it. But the penthouse would be temporary, as the family had almost saved enough money to buy their own house. Although the Balmoral was a condo building, many of its residents were renters because a number of units were owned by offsite investors who brought in tenants to pay their mortgages for them.

  Chris was a normal kind of kid. He wore his hair jelled-up like the guys on Jersey Shore and loved to work out.

  He was average-looking with a big grin and fashionable hip-hop–inspired clothes. He'd long since traded in his glasses for contact lenses. Since graduating high school, he had worked part time at a liquor store, but all he really cared about was lifting weights, playing basketball and eating fast food. And he would indulge in all three whenever he could. “He was really into working out,” said an old high school friend named Nikkie Ewasiuk. “That was one of his main goals; he wanted to be big. The last time I saw him, I couldn't believe how big he had gotten.” He wasn't too big for his Spider-Man bedspread, though.

  Like most people of his generation, he expressed himself through online social media. Describing his personality on MySpace, he wrote, “I am an outgoing kind of person and I always want to be doing stuff because being bored out of your mind sucks. I like making people laugh by telling jokes or doing stupid things. But I know when to be serious.” His mom, Eileen, ran a disciplined household, threatening to throw Chris's clothes in a garbage bag and him out on the street if the police ever came to her door looking for him.

  On October 18, 2007, he accepted an invitation to go play basketball with some friends in nearby Burnaby but promised his mom he would stay home until the guy came by to service the unit's gas fireplace. At two in the afternoon, Chris called his mom to tell her that the gas guy and the building manager had arrived, and that he was leaving to play with his friends in Burnaby. “Mom,” he said. “I've got to go—love you.” She told him she loved him, too.

  The gas guy was Ed Schellenberg. Originally from Coal
dale, a small hardscrabble town in Alberta, Schellenberg's family moved to Abbotsford—another small British Columbia city that had been absorbed by the Greater Vancouver area—when he was 3. Schellenberg was from a very close family of strong Mennonite faith. In fact, after high school, he had served a mission for his church, working with kids at a youth detention center in Ohio, then traveled to Poland and lived in the Northwest Territories before returning to Abbotsford. Many would consider that kind of life dangerous, and Ed wasn't a very big or intimidating man. He stood just five foot eight. He was bald and stout, and did not carry himself like a tough guy. Because he wasn't. No, he was a charmer. His oversized red handlebar moustache, ready smile, twinkling eyes and quick wit had always been enough to get him out of trouble in the past. He didn't need to be tough.

  Back in British Columbia, Schellenberg had started a gas installation and maintenance business at which he employed his brother-in-law, Steve Brown, and Steve's 21-year-old son, Zachary. Balmoral Tower was one of his biggest clients. Among the building's selling points was that every unit came equipped with a gas fireplace. Insurance regulations (and common sense) required that the gas systems be professionally maintained on a regular basis, and Schellenberg and his crew were generally regarded as the best in the business.

  Schellenberg, Brown and his son had spent a week that October working on Balmoral Tower, starting on the bottom floor. Because they were so far ahead of schedule, Brown left early, sure that Schellenberg and Zachary would have no problem finishing the job. By the end of lunch break, the two of them had just the seven units on the top floor to do. At two o'clock, he and the building manager knocked on the Mohans' door. Chris let them in and they chatted while Schellenberg did his work. His nephew was supposed to handle the last unit, 1505, across the hall, but the building manager took Ed aside and asked him if he could do it instead. There were four young guys who lived in there, although they didn't seem like bad guys, but he'd just feel a little more comfortable if it was Ed who did their unit. It was, after all, the kid's first week on the job. Ed smiled and said it would be no problem.