The Notorious Bacon Brothers (15 page)

The Americans knew exactly who they wanted. It was just a matter of how and when they'd get him.

But it's not as though Canadian law enforcement were sitting on their hands. While the Americans were intent on tearing down the UN because they trafficked marijuana into their country and attracted more dangerous elements from the south, the Canadians had their own agenda.

Sure that the drugs and violence could all be linked back to the Hells Angels and their allies, the police in Canada put particularly heavy pressure on them. After Plante's testimony led to the arrest of Lising and 17 others, the police used evidence gathered from that investigation to fuel new ones.

One of the major players who had not been arrested in Operation E-Pandora was Kerry Renaud, the meth cook and street-level dealer who worked with both Lising and Punko. Based on what they had learned in E-Pandora, police were given permission to wiretap his residence.

It was not exactly his first run-in with the law. A few years earlier, a man who lived on the ninth floor of a 20-floor Surrey high-rise noticed a strange “chemically” smoke coming from the apartment below and called 9-1-1. When the police, who responded first, entered the eighth-floor apartment, they found Renaud on the balcony cooking methamphetamine on a cheap, two-burner hotplate using kitchen utensils. They also found more than 13 pounds of high-quality meth—with a retail value of about $500,000—and the ingredients to make much more. Renaud tried to flee but was apprehended. Since it was a first offense, he was given a particularly light sentence.

Since then, he had become more sophisticated and more cocky. He looked like a meth cook. He had tattoos, a shaved head and that tilted-head stance guys who think they're tough always take. Police heard him talk about how he outwitted them when they raided the Abbotsford barn he used as a lab by moving all his product—nine buckets of high-grade meth—elsewhere just hours earlier. They also heard him instruct the people who worked for him how to cook. “I'm the one running the show,” he boasted. “This is how it's going to work. This is how we are going to make our money.”

After he was arrested, the judge in his trial ordered a publication ban. It was made clear that he was cooking meth for a particular Hells Angel. The judge attempted to protect the identity of the biker in question, but since Plante had already testified that Renaud cooked for Lising and Punko, and Lising was already behind bars, it didn't take a brain surgeon to make an educated guess.

Unable to infiltrate their ranks because of strict new entry requirements, the police knew it was necessary to turn another informant. And they found one in the Prince George puppet gang the Renegades. This as-yet-unnamed source bought more than nine kilos of cocaine on several trips to the Langley house of East End full-patch Cedric Smith's house. He also managed to get Smith on tape telling him that the coke had come from East End president Norman Krogstad. Both Smith and Krogstad were arrested, the first time a chapter president had gone down in B.C. Both were sentenced to four years. In the raid that brought them down, police also seized 14 kilos of cocaine, 11 kilos of BC Bud, four handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, a civilian version of an AK-47 assault rifle modified for automatic fire, some $100,000 in U.S. currency and three lawn tractors recently reported stolen from a nearby golf course.

But while both were released after one-third of their sentences, they were only allowed to walk under the condition they not associate with people involved in the drug trade. That, of course, made the Hells Angels clubhouse and all of their haunts absolutely off-limits. The concept—arrest as many as you can and release them under the condition they essentially leave the club—was not new. Police in Ontario had used the same plan to take the teeth out of the once-powerful Outlaws, reducing them both in number and effectiveness.

To those other than perhaps his Hells Angels brothers, Robert Thomas was considered an egregious individual. Ugly, pig-nosed and flabby, Thomas was originally from Sarnia, Ontario—a dead-end chemical-industry town with particularly high crime rates. When he was bumming around southwestern Ontario, he was arrested several times for petty crimes, mostly B&Es, in Sarnia, Guelph and Windsor.

In 1986, Ontario was glad to see him go as he moved to Kelowna and graduated to drunk driving and assaults (sucker punches, from what I've heard). At one of the assault arrests, he was found to be carrying an illegal handgun, a mistake that would net him a lifelong gun ban.

But shortly after Smith and Krogstad went down, police found Thomas in possession of a stolen handgun with ammunition nearby (not to mention several other stolen items).

At his trial, Thomas said that he bought the gun from what he thought was a reputable dealer and that he had forgotten about the gun ban he'd been handed. He also went so far as to say he purchased the weapon to hunt in “the woods” in an effort to connect with his aboriginal roots, although hunting with a handgun is not only extremely unusual and difficult, but illegal in B.C. As for his membership in the Hells Angels? Well, that was because of his enthusiasm for motorcycles and to promote his burgeoning tattoo business.

In the end, Thomas was sentenced to four months for the gun and two more for the other stolen property. In the ruling, Justice P.V. Hogan did not issue any restriction on him after his release and explained it by writing, “I suppose I could be cute and pretend that he was being rehabilitated by being kept away from the Hells Angels, but I think that is just a twist of wording more than anything else.”

And sometimes the police did not even have to work to catch a Lower Mainland Hells Angel. On April 28, 2006, White Rock sergeant-at-arms Villy Lynnerup was at Vancouver International Airport headed to a 4:45 afternoon flight to Edmonton. At 4:30, he threw his black canvas carry-on bag on the conveyor belt to go through the X-ray machine. The image that showed up onscreen in front of security was very obviously a Bryco .38-caliber handgun. Lynnerup was immediately arrested. The gun was illegal in Canada because of its barrel length.

At his trial, Lynnerup acknowledged that the bag and the other items in it were his, but he had never seen the gun before. The judge told him he might have believed that he had forgotten that he had put the gun in his bag (despite the obvious bulge and extra weight it caused), but to deny any knowledge of it was ridiculous. He was sentenced to 18 months and eight days, and received a lifelong firearms ban. He later appealed the judgment after serving his prison term—in hopes of getting the government to lift the firearms ban—but lost.

More important than the gun, though, was something else in Lynnerup's bag of tricks. He was carrying official club documents that indicated that the recently formed Outcasts were a puppet club for the East End chapter and that the Surrey-based Jesters were applying for the same position under the sponsorship of the White Rock chapter. Rick Ciarniello, who has acted as something of a spokesman for the Hells Angels in the Lower Mainland, denied that on a radio talk show, claiming the other clubs were simply informing the Hells Angels of their formation as a professional courtesy.

The Hells Angels weren't exactly reeling after the arrests, but they had lost a significant chunk of their manpower, at least temporarily. More important, however, they realized they were the number-one target of law enforcement in the region and that the police were willing to go to great lengths—including paying a low-level functionary like Plante more than $1 million—to turn informants.

At the same time, the United Nations had taken on a more powerful enemy than it had ever seen before—the U.S. government. As Roueche and his allies were becoming increasingly aware, federal agents were just beginning a series of increasingly sophisticated operations against their activities south of the border and sharing information with their Canadian counterparts.

At the same time, other gangs like the Duhre Brothers—natural heirs to the Indo-Canadian Mafia—were shooting each other in the streets.

It was a perfect opportunity for someone—perhaps an intelligent, crafty gangster with ice water in his veins like Jonathan Bacon—to take control.

Strathcona Court looks like an ideal place to raise children. It's quiet, tree-lined and pretty. The houses are big, and there's plenty of room for parking. It's designed in such a way that you'd never be there unless you had a specific reason to be there. Cars come along rarely, except when the parents are going to work or coming home, so the street itself is often used by kids playing games and parents socializing. There's an elementary school near the end of the street. And of the 16 houses on the cul-de-sac in the summer of 2006, just two of them were without school-age children. One of those housed the Bacons.

Most of the other families did their best to steer clear of the Bacons, especially—as one former neighbor told me—when there was a “lineup of expensive-looking cars there.”

Thursday, September 21, 2006, was pretty much like any other late-summer day. Kids were playing outside after dinner and before bedtime (it was a school night), trying to enjoy the last bit of late sunshine and warmth before October brought its gray skies and cool rains.

The last of them were hustled into their homes, complaining that it was still light out, at about eight. About 15 minutes later, a strange car turned the right-hand corner. It was an unfamiliar car, something that made most of the neighborhood look out of their windows out of curiosity. Of course, strange cars came to visit the Bacons at all hours of the day and night, but none of their friends would be seen in this thing, a refrigerator white, rusting mid-80s Toyota Camry. Those who bothered to look probably decided it was just someone who was lost and went back to their business.

Until the shots silenced everything else. There were dozens of them. Six went into the home of the Bacons' next-door neighbors, including one right through the front door. “They just kept coming and coming,” said one neighbor who would not be identified. “It was a nightmare.” Children, thrown to the ground for cover by concerned parents, were screaming and crying. It was chaos. One resident told the media: “They didn't care who saw them. They didn't care who they hit. My kid could have been riding her bike up the hill at that time. I won't let my children play out front. My son asked me, ‘Are they going to come back?'”

When the shooting was over and the piece-of-crap car burned rubber and sped away, some of the neighborhood dads ran out to see what was going on. They saw a man—and they all knew who he was—laying in an increasingly spreading pool of his own blood. Jonathan Bacon had been shot four or five times, including once in the head and neck.

As a neighbor held him, waiting for the ambulance to come, Bacon said the same thing over and over: “I'm dead. I'm dead.”

Chapter 6

New Friends: 2006–2007

Jonathan Bacon was wrong. He was not dead. In fact, quick medical attention and poor aim had combined to get him back to relatively normal health very quickly.

But the shooting was something of a wake-up call. Up until that point, the Bacon Brothers had been operating more or less independently but in conjunction with the United Nations. They received their drugs from the UN, but they were far from members. They didn't have the requisite tattoos, and they didn't go for any of Roueche's juvenile faux-Asian, semi-religious rituals.

And they could see the writing on the wall. The UN was being decimated by arrests, mostly in the United States, but also in Canada. It could be time, the Bacons thought, to look for new friends, new partners who could give them what the UN had given them, but with more personal security and a more secure future.

While Jonathan recovered, many of his duties fell to little brother Jamie, the monstrous, childish, monosyllabic bodybuilder and wrestler.

Jamie had been in a little bit of trouble of late, though. On the night of October 25, 2005, he and his new friend Dennis Karbovanec—a close associate of the UN's biggest rivals, the Red Scorpions—got into a shouting match with some small-time dealers in front of a townhouse on Sandy Hill Road, and when police came to quiet things down it had escalated to the point at which they were both charged with pointing weapons and uttering death threats.

In January 2006, Jamie and two other friends—arsonist-for-hire Steven Porsch and armed robber James Potgieter, both of whom also had ties to the Red Scorpions—were caught robbing a grow op in nearby Mt. Lehman and terrorizing its owner.

Every large community has at least one. Loud, frenetic spots where parents can bring (or leave) kids for a day's amusement playing video games, driving go-karts or slapping out a few grounders at the batting cage.

In Abbotsford, it's the unimaginatively named Castle Fun Park. With a vaguely medieval theme, Castle Fun Park is something of a dumping ground for Lower Mainland kids to burn off energy or stress. It's around the corner from the house Jonathan Bacon lived in with Burton.

As with most of these places, it's rare to see anyone other than frenzied kids, annoyed parents or exhausted grandparents. So on December 7, 2006, when a group of thickly muscled, densely tattooed 20-somethings were gathered in a recreation area usually reserved for parents and grandparents to catch their breath while their kids ran around, it drew some attention. There were a number of topics on the agenda of the 20-somethings, not the least of which was what would be done about the Lal Brothers, who had recently left the Red Scorpions and become competitors. And when one of the thugs attending the meeting just happened to expose a handgun under his jacket when he extended his arm, a couple of concerned parents called 9-1-1.

A SWAT team arrived and rounded up the gangsters. They were surprised by whom they got. The Bacon Brothers' representative was Jamie, wearing a sleeveless shirt to show off his mighty arms and intricate tattoos. He was on bail, awaiting trial on a number of charges stemming from a 2005 home invasion at a reluctant marijuana supplier's grow operation.

Then there was Randy Naicker, who was also out on bail. He—along with Harpreet Narwal, his brother Roman Narwal and Sarpreet Johal—had, in January 2005, participated in the kidnapping, extortion and beating of Harpreet Singh. He just also happened to be one of the founding members of the Independent Soldiers—one who was not entirely unhappy about the Hells Angels' takeover of his old gang.

Another man, Barry Espadilla, was also out on bail—on a charge of manslaughter. Espadilla trafficked cocaine, meth, heroin and ecstasy for the Independent Soldiers. Back in May 2003, some friends ran into a group of Red Scorpions in a nightclub. A brawl broke out, and the fight spilled out into the parking lot. The next day, the leader of the rival gang's brawl contingent was murdered. Espadilla was originally charged with first-degree murder, but the judge preferred to believe his portrayal of himself as a frightened errand boy. He eventually was sentenced to two years and given a firearms ban.

And there were some other bad dudes at Castle Fun Park that day, too, representing the Red Scorpions. Among them were drug dealer and murderer Anton Hooites-Meursing, Jeff Harvey, Justin Prince, and Jamie Bacon's close friend Dennis Karbovanec, who had recently become a fully fledged Red Scorpion.

After the cops rounded up the summit participants, they found several to be carrying handguns, and three actually were wearing bulletproof vests. Although the logic behind having such a meeting at a kids' amusement park would appear to be that the participants would be much less likely to shoot, it was clear that all three sides came prepared to do so if they had to.

Although the cops busted it up, the Castle Fun Park meeting was significant because it showed that alliances in the Lower Mainland were constantly in flux and that the Hells Angels were always somewhere in the background of the picture. At the meeting, Jamie Bacon was representing the Bacon Brothers, who had previously had close ties with the United Nations but were edging closer to the Red Scorpions. He was meeting with veteran gangsters who had once been with the Independent Soldiers, a gang that had once been all Indian Canadian, but had since become just another Hells Angels puppet club. And also there were the Red Scorpions, a mostly Asian gang that were bitter, even deadly, rivals of the UN. The Red Scorpions were no longer a few prison buddies who banded together for mutual protection. They had morphed into a major crime organization with powerful connections and an enviable distribution network.

Clearly, the landscape of organized crime in the Lower Mainland was changing, and the Bacon Brothers wanted to be part of it.

Despite the arrests, business was booming for just about everyone, especially the Hells Angels. On January 13, 2007, they improved their strategic and corporate standing by opening up yet another chapter in the Lower Mainland.

On 3910 Grant Street, in an industrial area of Burnaby, the Hells Angels established the Burnaby Nomads chapter. In the highly stratified Hells Angels caste system, the Nomads are at the top. Their job is to tell Hells Angels what to do, just as members tell prospects, prospects tell hang-arounds and so on down the chain. Originally, Nomads were to be elite members of various chapters who could travel freely among all chapters, but would have no specific Nomads clubhouse. That has evolved over the years, and now many Nomads have dedicated chapters and clubhouses of their own.

It's interesting to note that the company that owned the building, Grant Street Holdings Ltd., was owned by known Hells Angels Bob Green, Gino Zumpano and Frank Amoretto, and was acquired from 666 Holdings, which was also owned by Green and Zumpano.

Green, the chapter's president, was best known as the former manager of the North Burnaby Inn, where police had broken up an illegal gambling ring and where a man named Terry Hanna—wielding a knife and hammer, and high on cocaine—died after being tasered by the RCMP.

Zumpano was well known as the unofficial manager of the notorious Brandi's Show Lounge strip club. It was a rough place known for fights, drug trafficking and the fact that both Hells Angels and UN members hung out there. It was a far cry from the early days in which UN and Hells Angels supporters fought on sight.

And Zumpano, in fact, may have been responsible for the change in heart the UN had experienced regarding the Hells Angels. Taped conversations between informant Michael Plante and Hells Angel Johnny Punko indicated that it was Zumpano who first reached out to the UN. In one conversation, Punko said that Zumpano “took a walk” with UN leader Clayton Roueche, which Plante testified he took to mean the two had an important meeting. Punko also indicated that he could see the UN becoming the Hells Angels' allies, but that he wasn't happy about it and would rather not see them at his favorite hangout, Brandi's. “If we walk in there and they're in Brandi's,” he said, “They're going to get pounded out.”

But whether Punko liked it or not, UN members did start to show up in Brandi's with greater and greater frequency. And their relationship with the Hells Angels became closer and closer.

How close they had become was made very clear to law enforcement in the spring of 2007. By then, Ontario biker cops had managed to turn a full-patch Hells Angel into an informant. This was Stephen “Hannibal” Gault, who had been treasurer of the powerful Oshawa chapter, and had taken pride in the fact that he had once bitten off a rival's ear in a fistfight. Naturally, he provided a wealth of information that led to many arrests.

One of them occurred on April 4, 2007. Gault had heard that Merhdad “Juicy” Bahman, a Hells Angels prospect from the Downtown Toronto chapter, had bought 600 pounds of GHB, the notorious date-rape drug, from some guys on the West Coast. After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the GHB came from an interesting pair. The two-man team who sold the illegal substance to Bahman were Haney chapter full-patch Hells Angel Vincenzo “Jimmy” Sansalone and his partner in crime, high-ranking UN member Omid Bayani.

Though hardly a typical UN member, Bayani was a definitive one. Born in Iraq, he was constantly in trouble for armed robberies and other crimes after his family emigrated to Alberta. In and out of correctional institutions, Bayani earned a reputation as an extremely violent individual, striking out at both fellow prisoners and guards whenever possible.

When he was released, he was ordered deported but continued to live in Canada—he had relocated to Abbotsford—and made a living trafficking drugs and stolen goods. Eventually, he caught the attention of the UN and quickly rose through the ranks.

While out on bail for the GHB charges, Bayani disappeared and has not been seen since. I have been told he now lives in Mexico.

The arrest was a milestone in some ways. It was later discovered that the executive team of the Downtown Toronto Hells Angels chapter—Larry Pooler, Douglas Myles and John Neal—had stepped into the situation because they had heard that Bahman owed the “B.C.” Hells Angels and the UN $100,000 for the GHB, and were encouraging him to pay rather than face severe consequences, even murder. They did this, they maintained, not because the chapter was involved in drug trafficking, but because Bahman was their friend and they did not want to see anything happen to him. They did not extend that same courtesy to their “brothers” on the West Coast, testifying that Bahman was dealing with the Haney chapter and the UN as organizations, not with Sansalone and Bayani as individuals.

What that arrest did was prove to the public that the UN—so defiant in the past—were little more than vassals to the mighty Hells Angels crime empire.

But the alliance was not news to law enforcement on the Lower Mainland. They had known that individuals from both clubs had helped each other for a while. And while the Hells Angels were certainly the dominant of the pair, their members were anything but too proud to take on jobs from their former enemies.