The Notorious Bacon Brothers (9 page)

An associate would go to a nightclub or bar and hand out cards, much the same way promoters do for concerts and other special events. The cards would then be marked with a name chosen by the local distributor—one well-known one was “Dark Alley”—and a telephone number. The numbers led to prepaid cellphones, which were changed every three to four weeks to escape detection. The phones would be answered by the distributor or another associate and the order taken. Then another associate would deliver the drugs to the customer.

It was so effective that it was widely imitated. By 2003, there were dozens of competing dial-a-dope lines in the Lower Mainland. Of course, any plan is only as good as its talent, and many less careful and sophisticated dial-a-dope operations quickly attracted the attention of law enforcement and, even worse for them, rival dealers. Usually, it was only the delivery guy who'd get caught, and if the distributor could depend on him to keep quiet and even take one for the team, the operation could survive.

And that's why the fanatic loyalty Roueche instilled in the members of the United Nations (as Le and Narong would later among the Red Scorpions) proved essential to their survival.

Later, yet another gang was forming in response to the stranglehold the Hells Angels and their allies held over the drug trade on the Lower Mainland. At first, it was just a bunch of Indian Canadian (mostly Sikh) friends who hung out at the Sunset Community Centre and Sunset Park. They began to get into the usual amount of trouble boys that age do. They had spray-painted walls, gotten into fights, gotten drunk, and smoked weed. The Sunset Boys, as they came to be known, were considered small-time until they gained the notice of some of their old idols—the surviving members of Bindy Johal's old Indo-Canadian Mafia.

Connections with these older, more established gangsters didn't just give the Sunset Boys jobs to do and drugs to sell, but it also emboldened them.

Unlike so many other gangs of young men who met their idols and, out of awe or fear, yielded to become their vassals, the Sunset Boys dealt with the Indo-Canadian Mafia if not as equals, then at least as independent contractors. In fact, as the Sunset Boys matured as an organization, they assumed the name “The Independent Soldiers.”

And it was into this environment that a family moved from Edmonton. The father, David Bacon, was a special education teacher who had recently been hired by the Abbotsford School District. His wife, Susan, quickly found a job as manager of property and premises for Prospera Credit Union, meaning she was responsible for the Abbotsford-based company's maintenance staff. They appeared to be a typical middle-class Canadian couple who (like many others) came to the Lower Mainland for its climate, physical beauty and financial opportunities.

And they brought three boys with them: Jonathan David (born in 1981), Jarrod (1983) and James Kyle “Jamie” (1986). I managed to speak with two women who knew Jonathan, though not well, at Abbotsford's W.J. Mouat Secondary School. Neither wants her name published because both still live in Abbotsford, and as one said, she knew how brutal it could be for people who talked. For the purposes of the book, let's call them Stephanie and Amy.

Stephanie described Jonathan as popular, with a number of friends. Other published reports from high school contemporaries have called him “normal,” as being “well liked” and even “mild mannered.” Amy agreed, saying that it did not seem to her as though Jonathan had any one particular best friend, but that he was always with a group of kids.

Amy said that she and most of the girls she knew considered him decent-looking, if not actually handsome, and that Jonathan was not very big, though athletic. Mouat is a school that takes its sports very seriously, and Jonathan simply did not have the size to compete in football or basketball. They were surprised, both said, that he went into wrestling and even succeeded. But since wrestling is a sport divided into weight classes, Jonathan's overall lack of size was negated because he would only face guys his own weight.

Amy, who lived close to the Bacons' first Abbotsford residence, noted that they seemed like a normal enough family and were considered fortunate to have both parents living at home and enough money to go around. She was “vaguely aware of” Jonathan's younger brothers and knew that both were considered “bad news” in the neighborhood, despite their youth.

Both women noted that charming, personable Jonathan became a little less open, friendly and polite as he advanced through school. “It's not like he became mean and nasty, or like a bully or anything,” said Amy. “It's just that he became less friendly, more of a tough guy.” Stephanie agreed, and added that as Jonathan gradually changed, he started running around with a different group of friends. “They were older, some of them in their 20s,” she said. “They all had cars and expensive stuff like jewelry and watches. When [Jonathan] started to hang out with them, he started acting like them, talking like them, dressing like them.” When I asked if any of Jonathan's new friends had tattoos, Stephanie said that many of them did “and that wasn't anywhere near as common back then.” When I asked them if they ever saw any tattoos that said “UN” or “Honour, Loyalty, Respect,” neither could remember specifically, but Amy did remember that many of them, including non-Asians, had tattoos made up of “Chinese writing.”

Neither woman could definitively say if they knew Jonathan was involved in the drug trade while in high school, but both had their suspicions. “When you see a kid start to have more money all of a sudden,” said Stephanie, “You immediately figure it's drugs.”

Jonathan graduated from W.J. Mouat in 1999 and did not attend college. He did, however, get into trouble quickly. He was arrested in 2000 for possession of a controlled substance and again in 2001 for possession of stolen goods with a value of less than $5,000. For each conviction, he spent one day in prison.

Although Jonathan's criminality was clearly emerging, his younger brothers were not quite as well-mannered, polite and polished as he was; especially Jamie, the youngest.

In 2001, the family moved into a far ritzier neighborhood in Abbotsford. The house—at 35475 Strathcona Court—was massive, with seven bedrooms. A colleague of David Bacon's told me that it was a topic of conversation at school as to how a special-ed teacher and a maintenance manager could afford such an impressive home.

Jarrod, 18 at the time of the move, and Jamie, 15, were enrolled in nearby Yale Secondary School. Like Jonathan, Jamie was an accomplished high school wrestler. But unlike Jonathan, Jamie was huge and had the requisite mean streak to put him on top. In 2002, he wrestled in the 84-kilo (185-pound) class, moving up to 110 kilos (242 pounds) the following year, and winning the provincial high school championship.

But while Jonathan may have been remembered as a popular kid who began to hang out with a rough crowd, Jarrod and Jamie actually were the rough crowd. Stephanie, Jonathan's contemporary from W.J. Mouat, remembered Jarrod well. “He was a tough guy, pushing his weight around,” she said. “While Jonathan could be quite charming at times, Jarrod was more like a thug. My little brother and all his friends would avoid him at all costs. They were scared of him.”

As with Jonathan and W.J. Mouat, the people who knew Jamie from Yale and agreed to be quoted for this book did not want their names used. Andrea and Christine attended school with Jamie and remember him as aggressive and boorish. “He was a jerk,” said Andrea. “I never liked him. At that age, lots of guys can be immature, but Jamie was mean; like, over the top, like he seemed to enjoy pissing other people off.” Christine has similar recollections. “I couldn't believe it when I heard he was a teacher's son,” she said. “He was disruptive in class and seemed not to care at all about the work.”

But both admitted that he was, in his own way, popular. “Oh yeah, he had a whole bunch of kids who hung around with him, like an entourage,” said Andrea. “He totally influenced them. They would dress like him and act like him. One day he called someone a ‘knob,' then all his friends started calling each other ‘knobs.' It was like that. He would do something, and they would all follow suit.”

Christine pointed out that Jamie always had lots of money and flaunted the affectations of wealth. “He always had new fancy things, like clothes and jewelry, and he had a car when he was very young—a big car, an expensive one.” I asked her if she knew how he got all that money, if he had a job or not, and she told me: “I just assumed it was drugs.”

Not long after moving to the big house on Strathcona, Jamie got into trouble. At the age of just 15, on May 12, 2001, he was arrested for assault. This subsequently came out in court when he was tried as an adult, but details of the incident and trial have not been made public.

But the Bacons were still very small-time compared to some of the bad dudes out there—bad dudes who would eventually become their friends and business partners.

Part II

The Path to War

While in Vancouver, I always listened to a lot of talk radio because a lot of it was about crime. The consensus among the experts and the callers alike was that the root cause of crime was economic and social disadvantage. The thinking is that if we, as a society, give youth career and leisure-time activities, they will choose a different path.

There is good logic behind this idea, and even some real-world evidence to back it up. It's a well-documented fact that a lack of realistic or desirable career opportunities can very easily make a young man or woman seriously consider crime as a career option. And strict schools, cooperative employment and programs like midnight basketball have done wonders in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods in the United States.

But like all conventional wisdom, it's a half-truth at best. While the factors people normally associate with disadvantaged upbringings can indeed make a career outside the law an appealing option, that does not mean that if we could get every at-risk youth a job and something to do in their free time, we would have a society free of crime. Crime becomes attractive to a larger number of people as the profits gets higher and the risks become lower. A perfect example of this occurred in Canada in 1994. The Jean Chretien Liberal government passed a massive tax increase on the price of cigarettes. Hundreds of Canadians reacted by smuggling cigarettes over the border from the United States. While much of the smuggling was limited to people hiding cartons in their cars and not declaring them to customs, a group of professional smugglers emerged almost immediately. Many of them were ordinary Canadians who just saw a chance to make a quick buck. They would buy cigarettes in bulk over the border (often from tax-free Native American reservations), then spirit them over the St. Lawrence, Niagara or Detroit Rivers in speedboats under the cover of darkness. It became so common that law enforcement was compelled to act. In response, the smugglers began to arm themselves, and occasional firefights took place. They also attracted the attention of organized crime—particularly outlaw motorcycle gangs—who provided them with vehicles, distribution, contacts and weapons. It was a billion-dollar industry almost overnight.

The situation was out of hand. Later in the year, the Chretien government repealed the tax in hopes of curbing the rampant and increasingly dangerous smuggling epidemic and to get back the tax revenue they were losing. By their own estimates, the federal government admitted that 70 percent of all cigarettes sold in Quebec and 35 percent in Ontario had been smuggled in from the United States.

What was remarkable about that debacle was how quickly ordinary Canadians were willing to break the law when their idea of how expensive a cigarette should be was challenged. And it wasn't just the smugglers, but also the consumers who knew what they were doing was illegal.

A similar analogy can be observed in the advent of Apple's iTunes Store. Before the iTunes Store, people downloaded songs illegally because they believed that it was not worth paying a record company $20 for a CD when all they wanted was one song. There were risks associated from malware and other nasty things from the Internet (and a more vague threat from law enforcement), but millions started doing it, claiming that they were only getting back at a recording industry that had been stealing from them for years. So when the iTunes Store came out in 2003 offering individual, legal song downloads for 99 cents, most of those same people adopted it very quickly. It did not end illegal downloads (nor did Chretien's admission of defeat stop cigarette smuggling), but it moved the mainstream user to legal downloads by providing a safe, reputable service.

The situation in British Columbia was very much like Ontario and Quebec in 1994 or the music business before 2003. There was an abundance of marijuana in the province. Everybody wanted it, and the Americans were willing to pay top dollar. The risks from law enforcement were slight (at least, north of the border).

It was a dynamic, booming industry that attracted thousands. Some, like James Coulter, came from predictably disadvantaged circumstances, but many were simply attracted to the idea of fast, easy money.