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Few of the club kids had legitimate sources of income, and even those who did often supported their drug, fashion and party habits by selling drugs. Most of them started in high school, distributing weed to their friends for a few bucks, but by the late 90s, they were supporting their relatively hedonistic lifestyles selling weed, ecstasy and crack in Lower Mainland nightclubs. In a move eerily reminiscent of how a group of drug dealers in Montreal—sick of the Hells Angels' attempts to monopolize the drug market there—banded together to form the Dark Circle (which aligned with the Rock Machine, starting the Quebec Biker War) in 1991, Coulter, Roueche and their friends in May 1997 formed a gang they called the United Nations.

Roueche was firmly in charge and modeled the UN after his own beliefs and ideals. The gang's motto was “Honor, Loyalty, Respect.” Members used the phrase when addressing one another and were also expected to have it tattooed on their bodies, usually in Chinese characters. “I liked honor, loyalty and respect. I thought those were good virtues,” Coulter said. “You honor your family, you respect others—you treat others the way you want to be treated.”

Eastern mysticism (which fascinated Roueche) was a key factor in almost all parts of the United Nations. The standard uniform was a hoodie bedecked with East Asian–style imagery like tigers and dragons, and jewelry with similar images or the gang's motto. Members were required to learn and practice mixed martial arts, especially kickboxing and jiujitsu. And Roueche developed some rituals based on Buddhist and Shinto practices that he performed on special occasions.

Using the template so historically effective with outlaw biker gang tradition, the United Nations had a set hierarchy and a strict set of rules. Punishments for breaking club rules were usually group beatings, with the accused returning to good standing once the beating was complete.

Before long, the United Nations was a cohesive group, with members hanging out together at nightclubs, particularly Animals in Abbotsford. Coulter appreciated the group as a surrogate family. “You go to a club with 20, 30, 40 guys, and as soon as you get there, you give hugs to everyone. It is like a family, right?” he said. “And that is something I never had. I never had a family. So that was my family.”

As much as it was like a family, the United Nations was also like a corporation. There was money to be made, and everybody had his job. Coulter's was as an enforcer or, as he prefers, “mediator.” When someone had a problem—usually about money—with the club, Coulter was one of the members who would be sent to straighten things out. To facilitate this, he started taking his first drugs stronger than weed, steroids. With them and daily visits to the gym, he eventually packed 220 well-muscled pounds on his formerly slight five-foot-ten frame.

By 2000, bigger trouble was in store. One Friday night, while the United Nations were partying at Animals (the club later renamed itself the Luxor before going bankrupt after a license suspension), they noticed a few Hells Angels support crew in their midst. It's very unlikely they were there by accident. The Hells Angels, particularly in Canada, are notoriously intolerant of drug dealers in their territory, and the UN was beginning to make a name for itself in trafficking circles.

Usually, the presence of a few muscular young men in Support 81 gear is enough to scare off opponents, or at least get them to start negotiating. But the United Nations did not knuckle under as so many had before. After a brief scuffle, the support crew guys were turfed. Coulter, who admits his memory of those days is hazy at times, distinctly recalled them yelling back, “You guys are dead! We're coming back next week.”

So the United Nations leadership rallied the membership. The next Friday night, there were about 70 members of the United Nations at Animals, all ready to fight for control of the nightclub. Before long, about 15 support crew guys showed up. Assessing the situation, they called for reinforcements. Coulter distinctly recalls hearing one shouting into his cellphone, “There are a bunch of Asians here and a bunch of guys here, and they started shit with us.” Reinforcements did indeed come, some from as far away as Haney, but there were only 30 or so of them. Badly outnumbered, the support crew stood their ground, probably thinking the Hells Angels' violent reputation would prevent a brawl.

It didn't. Coulter recalls the melee:

I'll never forget. There was the big fight inside. It lasted maybe five minutes. Then everyone started running outside. I remember I came out the front doors, and there were probably about five or six different fights happening out on the street. And I seen an Abbotsford police officer pull up, and he gets out of his car and he's on his walkie-talkie and he's like: “There's HA! There are fights everywhere!” It was like he had never seen anything like this before. Nor had I.

When the dust cleared, the support crew were gone. The United Nations had won. But it was more than just a bar fight they had won. It was their right to exist, their right to sell drugs in the Lower Mainland without paying the Hells Angels. It was, as history has pointed out time and again, a dangerous position to be in.

Richard Shatto saw Roueche's rise in power from a great vantage point—right next door. The consultant was at home one day in 1998 when an elderly Vietnamese couple dropped by. They introduced themselves and told him they had just bought the house next door for their children.

Shatto didn't think much of it but was quite charmed by the couple's daughter and her 2-year-old girl. “She was just the cutest thing,” he said. “And so nice.”

But things started to change as more people moved into the house, including the daughter's boyfriend and father of her little girl, Clayton Roueche. Clayton, the only one of the group who was not Vietnamese, “floated in and out,” according to Shatto, and kept mainly to himself. He wasn't rude or standoffish, he just didn't go out of his way to make friends with the neighbors.

Things started to change very quickly at the house: bigger, better vehicles, numerous home renovations (including a 10-foot-long aquarium), and two massive Neapolitan mastiff puppies imported from Italy. Those changes and frequent interruptions with electricity led Shatto to believe the couple were running a grow op in the house. Grow ops are common in the area, and most people know to look for certain signs—young people with excessive, quick wealth, massive electrical consumption, guard dogs, and lots and lots of young visitors.

And then the parties started. Roueche's house was constantly being visited. There was a steady stream of guests and well wishers who invariably dressed alike. “They wore black and white with white bandannas,” Shatto said. “When they were going out to a club or a party, they always wore black or white fedoras.” They all had fancy SUVs or “souped-up sport cars.” Often, when they would go out partying, they would all ride together in a limousine.

When they partied at home, they partied loud and late, with lots of drinking and sex. One day, his interest was piqued when he saw an unmarked trailer parked in front of the Roueche house. There was one of their more raucous parties that night. Shatto stayed up to see what was going on. At about one in the morning, the music stopped, and Roueche shouted, “Let's go!”

At his command, the partygoers marched out of the house single file and approached the now-open trailer. Each person took a single item (Shatto could not make out precisely what they were) from the trailer and carried it back into the house. Convinced the strange parade had something to do with the grow op, Shatto called the Abbotsford police. “If you come right now,” he told them, “you can catch them in the act.” They didn't come.

In fact, several people had called the police about goings-on at the Roueche house, but the police never showed up. Discouraged, Shatto started to do his own investigating. He first warned his own kids to keep an eye out for the people who lived at and visited the house and report anything odd they saw there. Then he spent a lot of time watching the house on his own, collecting the license plate numbers of everyone who visited.

Oddly, Shatto had heard Roueche's name in the news and read it in the paper, but he had never matched it to the guy next door.

The police refused to visit, and most neighbors did their best to avoid confrontation. On one occasion, a neighbor—who Shatto said was a former member of the band Loverboy and hated drug dealers because he worked with kids whose brains had been affected by drugs—confronted them. The youngsters threatened him but eventually backed down. When someone later broke the mirror off the neighbor's car, Roueche's girlfriend visited a number of neighbors, including Shatto, to apologize for what her friends had done.

After about three years, a “For Sale” sign went up for one day (probably to gauge the house's worth), and about a week later, Roueche's girlfriend told Shatto that they had sold the house to a friend for cash. The new couple had much less in the way of obvious wealth and acted nervous and afraid. The man lost his rather modest car and then his motorcycle. The couple began arguing loudly enough for Shatto to hear. “They'd scream things like, ‘We're dead now,'” he said. Then one day they just ran, returning a month later to tell Shatto and some other neighbors that they had been foreclosed on and that if there was anything inside that they wanted, they could have it.

Shatto entered the house out of curiosity and saw how drug dealers live. There were holes in the walls for ventilation and a hidden trap door to the basement since the stairs had been blocked off and built over. More chilling, however, was something he found in the front closet—a baseball bat embedded with about 200 drywall screws. “It looked like some kind of medieval weapon,” he said.

It was around this time that another new multiethnic Vancouver gang took shape. For their part in the murder of their alleged tormentor Richard Jung, teenagers Michael Le and Eddie Narong, who in half a dozen years would find themselves in suite 1505 at the Balmoral, were sentenced to the notorious and now repurposed Willingdon Youth Detention Centre. If the hope was to rehabilitate them, it was in vain. The two remained close for mutual protection and also made a number of new friends with serious drug connections.

Though still just teenagers, Le and Narong collected their new group and presented them with a plan. They would form a new gang. It would be multiethnic (though predominantly Southeast Asian), have the same hierarchy and rules as an outlaw motorcycle gang, and embrace Eastern philosophies and martial arts, and members would be identified by a tattoo on their wrist or neck. And, in a move that could only have come from teenagers, the name of the club was to be the Red Scorpions.

It's unclear whether they were aware of the success of the United Nations or not, but their blueprint was remarkably similar. And it set them on a course that would lead to all-out gang warfare on the streets of the Lower Mainland.

Although the brawl at Animals had established the United Nations as a force to be reckoned with, the streets of the Lower Mainland were still a very dangerous place for individual dealers, especially those not affiliated with the Hells Angels. To combat this, the United Nations came up with a simple, yet very effective, strategy. Called “dial-a-dope” by the cops and media, the plan limited the amount of exposure dealers and their employees had to law enforcement and rivals.