The Notorious Bacon Brothers (11 page)

Molsberry not only befriended the Hells Angels, but went into business with them. He ran an after-hours club they frequented and used as a drug-retailing store. And he started and tended a marijuana grow operation supplying the Hells Angels with product. It was a pretty lucrative deal until someone raided Molsberry's grow op, stealing all of his plants. He told his contact with the Hells Angels that he would not be able to make his ordinary shipment because of the theft. In response, the Hells Angels fined him $10,000. Without any product, he was unable to pay that—and the $1,500 he owed them for an ounce of cocaine he had been fronted earlier—on time, so they took him behind Number 5 Orange and beat him up.

That was it for Molsberry. He went to the police and offered to tell them everything he knew. “Fuck these guys,” he told them. “I made them so much money over the years, and they do this to me. Well, fuck them.” He agreed to become a paid informant in exchange for immunity. The investigation, called Project Breakpoint, yielded no arrests, but evidence from it led to another operation called Project Nova. In it, Molsberry made deals for cocaine with several members of the Hells Angels, and surveillance recordings determined that Hells Angels and members of the Regulators—a Burnaby-based puppet gang that had originally been a boxing club—were dealing in a variety of illegal drugs including GHB, the so-called “date-rape drug.”

Just weeks after Hells Angels spokesman Rick Ciarnello appeared on a radio show and dared the police to prove they were a criminal organization, they did. A total of 76 people were arrested, many of them members and associates of the Hells Angels and the Regulators. Among the arrested were full-patch Hells Angels Francisco “Chico” Pires, Ronaldo “Ronnie” Lising and Vincenzo “Vinnie” Brienza. Also arrested was Brienza's brother, Romano, who had been president of the Regulators. He was charged with possession of a kilo of cocaine, 30 pounds of marijuana and an illegal handgun. One Hells Angels hang-around, Rob Alvarez, was arrested after police overheard him being told to remove anything potentially incriminating from Lising's house. Police also seized more than $12 million worth of drugs, cash, property and weapons.

In July 2003, police spotted full-patch Hells Angel Glen “Kingpin” Hehn and his close associate Ewan Lilford loading boxes from a Public Storage unit he had rented at 5555 192nd Street in the Cloverdale section of Surrey into a truck. They arrested the two men and found $1.5 million worth of cocaine in boxes both in the truck and the storage unit. As is often the case with Hells Angels, brotherhood broke down quickly, and both men blamed the other. Hehn said that Lilford had a key to the unit and had let himself in and that Hehn rarely used the locker himself. He had happened to come by, he said, and saw Lilford loading the boxes and decided to help him without asking what was inside them. For his part, Lilford made basically the same claim, transposing the names, and pointed out that he did not have a key on him. The police charged them both with trafficking, but they stuck to their stories at the subsequent trial.

The other major crime organization in the Lower Mainland, the Independent Soldiers, was also still gaining in prominence. Their top guys would hang out in a Gastown nightclub called Loft Six. The club had something of a past. It had been owned by Hells Angel Donald Roming, who made a name for himself in the 1990s as an enforcer when the club was taking over all the strip joints and stripper agencies in the Lower Mainland. Although he was never arrested because witnesses were always reluctant to talk, it was well known that he had brutally beaten several holdouts in the industry, including one 67-year-old man who had to be hospitalized. Roming, however, was murdered on March 9, 2001, when two men began to argue with him just before closing time at a Yaletown nightclub called Bar None, shooting him after the dispute had spilled over into the parking lot.

The club reopened under the same name with new management and a $200,000 renovation. But while the Independent Soldiers frequented Loft Six, it was not exclusively their turf. Members from other gangs would often show up there with little or no problem. But things changed on the night of August 16, 2003. Not only were the Independent Soldiers and their associates in the bar, but there were also Hells Angels and their supporters. Despite the use of metal detectors, many of the patrons at Loft Six that night were armed.

There are varying stories of what happened next, but I have heard from reliable sources that sparks started to fly when one of the Independent Soldiers recognized a guy named John “JJ” Johnson. Apparently, Johnson had worked at a Hells Angels–associated strip joint called Brandi's and had so much trouble with one loud mouthed customer that he decided to beat him into the hospital. When he later found out the guy was an influential Indian gangster, he went into hiding. And when he showed up in the midst of the Sikh-dominated Independent Soldiers, it was only a matter of time before trouble erupted.

Despite there being about 200 people in the club, most of them innocent bystanders, at just before 4 a.m., shots came from every direction. “A fight broke out, and all of the sudden bullets started flying,” one witness said. “We just ran. We were right in the line of fire. We couldn't see anybody; we didn't know who was shooting, and people began crawling over top of each other to get out of the way.”

When the smoke cleared, three people were dead, and eight, mostly innocent bystanders, were injured. Gerpal Singh “Paul” Dosanjh—cousin to two of the original Indo-Canadian Mafia members, Jimmy and Ron Dosanjh—was shot in the head but survived. Not as lucky were Johnson, whose presence sparked the melee; John Popovich, an innocent DJ visiting Vancouver from Windsor, Ontario; and Mahmoud Alkhalil, a member of the Independent Soldiers and little brother of Khalil Alkhalil, who was murdered in Surrey in 2001.

After the Loft Six murders, things began to change among the criminal organizations on the Lower Mainland, particularly the Indian Canadian ones. The Independent Soldiers—who had always been predominantly Indian—began working with more and more white guys, many with connections to the Hells Angels.

And as the region was still reeling from the November 28 murder of Mao Jomar Lanot—a teenager who had a glass soda bottle broken over his head when a mob outside Sir Charles Tupper High School attacked him—it was shocked by two murders of young Indian Canadian men in two days.

On December 12, the Richmond RCMP unit received a call from the New Westminster police about a shooting. When they arrived, 20-year-old Naveen Shiv Daval was already dead. He had been shot in an apartment and managed to get to his vehicle before passing out and dying behind the wheel. The other occupants of the East Richmond apartment he was shot in—a 20-year-old Indian Canadian and a 19-year-old white kid—were questioned but eventually released. The case was never solved, and police told media that Daval's death was most likely a case of mistaken identity.

On the following morning, at about 9:20 a.m., a couple had just finished a pleasant walk in Surrey's Bear Creek Park when they planned to return to their car. On their way to their car, they noticed a late-model Mercedes-Benz sedan with its engine running and its lights on. Moving closer, the couple described what they saw as an Indian-looking man behind the wheel. He appeared to be unconscious, so they called 9-1-1. When paramedics arrived, they determined that the man in the car—36-year-old Gurwinder Singh Bath—was dead.

His death was eerily reminiscent of the May discovery of Karmen Singh Johl, who had also been found shot dead behind the wheel of his car in the same neighborhood. In fact, Bath and Johl were both involved with a company called “R&S Trucking,” which had been the subject of a major investigation involving shipping marijuana over the border in tractor-trailers. Despite the fact that Johl had a long series of drug-related convictions, both men avoided charges by claiming they did not know what was in the trucks they were driving.

But while many people in the Lower Mainland had come to regard Sikh-on-Sikh violence to be a problem limited to that community, those minds changed at the start of 2004. On the night of January 2, Rachel Davis—a pudgy 23-year-old blonde who looked a lot like her mother, Janet Wright, one of the featured actors on the Canadian sitcom
Corner Gas
—went to the Purple Onion nightclub with some friends. On the way out, she noticed an Indian Canadian man involved in a fight with a group of other Indian Canadian men. As the man, 25-year-old drug dealer Imran Saff Sharif, was thrown to the ground, Davis intervened, putting herself between Sharif and the men who threw him down. As she was attempting to calm the situation, Sharif pulled a handgun and started firing wildly. He shot and killed Davis and a passerby named Richard Hui. It came out in Sharif's trial that he was running a dial-a-dope operation and had strong gang connections, but the authorities would not reveal which gang or gangs he worked with (they often keep this information to themselves because it's something the defense would make them prove in court).

There were a few more suspicious murders in the Lower Mainland with no obvious connection to established gangs, until March 6. At 5:00 a.m. that morning, Paul Dosanjh and an associate, both armed, were engaged in a summit meeting with a pair of rival drug dealers—one Indian Canadian, one white—over a territorial dispute at the Gourmet Castle, an East Hastings Street Chinese-food restaurant. Shots were exchanged, and Dosanjh was killed. “Because he is well-known to police and because of the family connections that are well-known to police, we are obviously looking at the gang link and the drug link,” a Vancouver police spokesman said. “But at this point, we don't have any idea why he was targeted.” Still, they did issue a media release indicating they would have an armed presence at his funeral.

By this time, of course, everything was changing. The organized-crime landscape looked very different on the Lower Mainland in 2005 than it had just a few years earlier when guys like Bindy Johal were acting all “gangsta” on local television newscasts.

The big players were still the Hells Angels and the Chinese, but—more than ever before—they were working behind the scenes, operating the street-level drug and other vice markets by proxy. There was no shortage of young men (and, to some extent, women) who wanted to be involved in the drug trade, particularly because of the ease and relative safety of dial-a-dope operations.

The only problem was getting the drugs to supply. For decades, dealers would have to connect with the Chinese or the Hells Angels for cocaine, heroin or meth, but could get marijuana from any of the thousands of independent growers in the area. But—just as they had with independently owned strip joints, escort agencies and other vice-related businesses—the Hells Angels had used violent, one might even say terroristic, methods to gain control of growers who did not want to play ball by selling exclusively to Hells Angels–associated dealers at a price determined by the bikers. Independent growers could expect to be robbed, beaten or even murdered if they tried to stay independent.