The Notorious Bacon Brothers (12 page)

Of course, there were holdouts—small-time suppliers flying under the radar of the Hells Angels—but their output was small and the methods they used to stay out of the Hells Angels' way often led to them being invisible to other potential dealers as well.

So, despite all the talk of loyalty and honor and brotherhood, dealers went where dealers have always gone—to established organized crime. The United Nations—the very gang whose original stated reason for existence was to protect its members from the Hells Angels—began to play both sides of the fence. Roueche had connections with East Asian drug importers through his girlfriend's relatives, but other notable members and associates of the United Nations began buying marijuana and other drugs first from Hells Angels associates and then members themselves. The United Nations never really became a puppet gang, as they have been characterized in the media. Some UN members continued to deal without any connection to the Hells Angels or their allies, and continued their antipathy toward them. But many of them they did leave their original ideals behind for the sake of easy money and started dealing for the Hells Angels and kicking profits upstairs just like everyone else. Still, it was at best a tenuous relationship, and many members of the UN retained their loathing of the bikers.

Of the other two major youth gangs on the Lower Mainland—the Independent Soldiers and the Red Scorpions—both were becoming increasingly diverse and territorial. After the Loft Six shootings, many of the original members of the Independent Soldiers quit and were replaced by more Hells Angels–friendly members who rapidly rose through their ranks and eventually swayed that gang, as well, from anti– to pro–Hells Angels. Whether this was an intricate plan of infiltration by the Hells Angels or just a coincidence, a result of the Independent Soldiers evolving in the face of the same contemporary zeitgeist as the United Nations has been the subject of intense debate. Either way, the Independent Soldiers steadily became less and less independent.

The lone holdout at that point were the Red Scorpions. Although I have been told by their supporters that it was because its members had more integrity and were made of sterner stuff, I have also been told by others that the Hells Angels rejected them as small-timers. Since that kind of rationalizing—my group is right no matter what it does, and all other groups are wrong if they are in opposition—is rampant, an essential part of the culture among gang members, the truth is anyone's guess.

But few were guessing at what the Bacon Brothers were doing. Like pretty well everyone else who agreed to talk to me for this book, the guy I will call Nelson asked me to protect his identity. Originally from the Toronto area, Nelson moved to the Lower Mainland with his graphic-designer wife and later shifted from a mid-level job at TD Bank to setting up his own business as a broker of a (legal) commodity he also won't let me name, but one that he will admit draws an entirely Asian market. The extra income allowed him to move into a much better house on Strathcona Court, not far from the Bacons.

When Nelson moved to Strathcona, the Bacon Brothers were all in their early 20s and, to his mild surprise, living at home with their parents. He did not like the family and, in his opinion, neither did anyone else. He described the neighborhood as “nervous” because of the Bacons' presence. “Nobody wanted to run into them because they were obnoxious and rude,” he told me. “It started with the old man. He was not just rude, but aggressively so. I have no idea how he had a job as a teacher.” Nelson explained that he did not know the boys' mother very well but said he “had a pretty good handle” on the brothers themselves.

He characterized Jonathan, the oldest, as “a pretty normal-looking guy” and also noted that he was the most approachable of the family, the least likely to be belligerent. He said Jarrod, the middle boy, was “flashy” and “tried to look like a gangster” in dark suits and expensive sunglasses. “He looked like he had more money than taste,” Nelson mused.

But the two of them appeared gentlemanly, in Nelson's opinion, compared to Jamie, the youngest. “He was the size of a moose and seemed about half as smart,” he said with a straight face. “While the other two had macho swagger, Jamie looked like a psycho.” He made it a point to steer clear of the young man, in case he experienced a “'roid rage.”

The Bacons, he said, tended to consider the street to be theirs and would park and hang out wherever they felt like. They were loud and kept late hours, often coming home or “partying” well into the morning, to the consternation of neighbors.

All three boys had late-model luxury cars, which they traded in, according to Nelson, annually. He told me about their other conspicuous signs of wealth—including clothes, jewelry and huge parties—and I asked them where he thought three boys could afford such as ostentatious lifestyle. He looked at me like I was crazy. “They sold drugs, of course,” he said.

The police, too, were aware of the Bacons, and their alleged drug sales operation, but could not acquire enough evidence to receive a warrant or even to mount a surveillance operation. Those in the know, though, have told me that the Bacons were selling drugs they had received from the United Nations, which could be traced back to the Hells Angels.

But things changed very rapidly in 2004, when Jarrod Bacon was charged with attempted murder after an altercation in the seedy Fraser Valley Inn. He went out back with two men, presumably to straighten things out, and shot one of them. The other fled. Nelson recalled, “Jarrod got into an argument with a guy at the pub about who could do what where and shot him. I guess it must've been bad because I know he was charged with attempted murder.”

But, just as the people who I spoke with were loathe to allow me to reveal their identities for this book for fear of retribution, the man the Crown alleged Jarrod was trying to kill refused to cooperate with police. Although the Crown continued to press the charge, the judge had no choice but to stay the case due to a lack of evidence, allowing Jarrod to walk free.

It was a valuable lesson for the Bacon Brothers: if nobody talks, you have nothing to fear.

Chapter 5

Going Global: 2005–2006

While the Bacon Brothers and others like them didn't think they had much to fear from law enforcement if they could convince the people around them, including the victims, to stay quiet, competition on the streets of British Columbia for product, territory and customers was leading to widespread violence. And, as they had in the past, the Hells Angels did their best to intimidate the competition, often through the use of puppet gangs and support crews.

One of the most violent of them was simply called the Crew. In fact, it was something of an oddity—a puppet gang of a puppet gang. Prince George, tucked away in British Columbia's mountainous interior, is a hardscrabble timber-and-mining community and has been named “Canada's most dangerous city” twice by
Maclean's
magazine because of its disproportionate rates of murder and other violent crime.

With prosperous markets for drugs and other vices, Prince George is a vital part of Canada's underground economy. And, as such, it could not be ignored by the Hells Angels. “The north has always been an expanding field. There are a lot of drugs consumed in the north,” said Inspector Gary Shinkaruk, head of the RCMP's Outlaw Motorcycle Gang unit. “They [the Hells Angels] want to tap into that lucrative market.”

But operating there and living there are two very different things. In the early 2000s, the Hells Angels visited and recruited some of the local tough guys to form a gang, the Renegades, to act as their representatives in the city, moving product and preventing anyone else from trying. They did their job with gusto, flooding the city with drugs. But they quickly realized they needed to enforce their dominance in the city.

To accomplish this, the Renegades recruited guys they knew to act for them on the streets, both as dealers and enforcers. Called the Crew, these guys acted viciously, conducting severe public beatings and worse. One such case occurred when a local (and, it would appear, uncooperative) drug dealer named Patrick Patriquin struggled into a convenience store covered in blood. When the shocked clerk saw that Patriquin was missing his left hand, he called 9-1-1. Patriquin regained consciousness in a hospital bed the following day but refused to cooperate with police. The hand was never found. Law enforcement officers on the street were convinced that the incident was the work of the Crew, but they could not get enough evidence to make any arrests.

Prince George, even more than most such places, has a voracious appetite for crack. One frequent user was a Shawn Giesbrecht. In order to have enough money to buy crack, he also sold crack. And like everyone else in Prince George who sold crack, he got it from the Crew. In fact, he got it from the Crew's president, Scott Payne.

Payne was a particularly nasty fellow. Abandoned by his mother at the age of 5 to a father who was constantly in and out of prison, Payne was found wandering the streets of Maple Ridge at the age of 8 and taken into foster care. As later revealed in his trial as an adult, his first convictions, when he was 15, were small time and netted him just probation. But in January 2000, he was caught with crack and sentenced to one day in jail. Less than two weeks later, he was arrested again, for assault and carrying a concealed weapon. In June 2000, he was caught fencing stolen goods. In 2001, it was assault with a concealed weapon again. In 2003, he was caught with an illegal handgun, and in 2005, he was found to be carrying crack again and added resisting arrest to his list of charges.

Giesbrecht was, quite reasonably, scared of Payne. And on November 14, 2004, he was absolutely terrified. For various reasons, he had fallen into arrears with his supplier. He was $170—a fortune in crackhead terms—short. It might have made sense to lay low, but Giesbrecht didn't have that option. Not only did he need more product to sell if he wanted to make the money back, but he also needed crack for his own addiction—and there was no place else to get it. So he headed to Payne's crack shack and explained to his boss what had happened.

Payne calmly told him to put his left hand on the table that was between them. Giesbrecht complied. Payne then pulled a long, serrated hunting knife out of his pocket and sawed off the little finger on Giesbrecht's left hand. He then put the severed digit in a cardboard box with a lid, telling Giesbrecht and the others in the shack that he'd use it as a warning to others.

Payne was also present when his close associate Alia Brienne Pierini—a 21-year-old mother of a toddler—attacked Alphonse Holtz, another addict–turned–street-level-dealer who couldn't pay his bills, with an axe in an apartment the pair often used to process crack.

But arrests of various members of the Crew, including Payne and his right-hand man Joshua Hendrick, led to an intolerable amount of bad press and police surveillance, and the Crew was shut down. To replace them, the powers that be collected the remaining worthwhile members of the Crew, a couple of new recruits and some tough guys from Kelowna and formed them into the Prince George chapter of the Independent Soldiers.

It was a telling strategic move. Law enforcement now realized that the Independent Soldiers were no longer controlled by the gang's old Indian Canadian founders, but were actually just another club taking orders from the Hells Angels. And they had no problem recruiting in a city where fewer than half the provincial average attend higher education, despite the fact that its few visible minorities are almost entirely Native Canadians with almost no South Asians in the area. “Some of these guys think, ‘What the hell. I'm going to give it all I got because I don't think I'll live past 30,'” said one RCMP officer in Prince George. “In one check stop that we made on Highway 16 West, we stopped an 18-year-old kid who had $8,000 cash in his pocket. He just looked at me and said, ‘If you think I'm going to work for minimum wage when I can make this kind of money, you're crazy.'”

But while the Hells Angels and their underlings were gaining ground in their desire to monopolize the drug market, there were, as always, internal tensions. When the RCMP let Renegades president William “Billy” Moore know how much evidence they had collected against him, he elected to turn paid informant rather than face trial.

It was a bad career choice. On March 25, 2005, responders to a raging fire at his home found him just outside the flaming house. His corpse, full of bullet holes, was sitting in the front seat of his car. The Hells Angels who attended his funeral—under the watchful eye of media and law enforcement—praised him as “a nice man.” His replacement, Romano Brienza, who had just beaten trafficking charges, died of natural causes a month later.

And there were other leaks. Michael Plante was a bodybuilder who occasionally worked as a bouncer to pay his way through college. He'd never been in any real trouble before—he was charged once for assault when an argument at a gym got out of hand, but it never went to trial—but the first bar he worked at, in the North Burnaby Inn, was owned by Hells Angel Bob Green. Alarmed by the amount of crime he saw, Plante moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta, for a year but came back when he saw it was no different when it came to how bouncers had to work for criminals. Back in B.C., he took a job loading trucks for Costco to get away from shady dealings but eventually found himself working as a bouncer again.

He worked at a series of bars, often connected to the Hells Angels. At one location, the Dell Hotel in Surrey, he was sometimes asked to watch over a room the Hells Angels used to stash cocaine. He worked the door at a couple of strip joints, the Marble Arch and the Cecil Hotel, both of which were owned by Hells Angels associates. It was at the strip joints where he met and became friends with a number of gang members who frequented the spots. He was surprised, in fact, at how many different gangs would socialize at the Cecil Hotel, an indication of how many allies the Hells Angels had on the streets.

Eventually, Plante started ferrying drugs and cash for Randy Potts, who owned the Cecil Hotel, ran a stripper/escort agency and had just been elevated to prospect status as a Hells Angel. As a hang-around, the level below prospect, he was given a leather vest that indicated his status on the front. The vests are a Hells Angels prized possession and hang-arounds are instructed upon receiving one never to allow a non-member to even touch it. Potts was wearing his vest proudly in 2003 when he was set upon by an old rival named Audey Hanson. Not only did Hanson beat him up and black his eye, but he stole Potts's vest.

Embarrassed, Potts went to see his sponsor, full-patch Hells Angel Lonnie Robinson, to let him know what happened. For moral support, he brought along Plante, a mutual friend. It didn't do much good. Robinson knocked Potts to the floor with an open-handed slap to the face and instructed him to get the vest back at any cost.

Potts recruited Plante to help him stake out Hanson's house. After two months of watching, Potts determined that Hanson would be alone, and he and Plante paid him a visit. But Plante quickly found out that Potts had more on his mind than simply beating Hanson up and taking the vest back. He handed him an Uzi, .38 handgun and a balaclava and told him to shoot Hanson. Plante did shoot, but intentionally missed him with the .38 and claimed the Uzi had jammed. Potts was angry, and gave the job to another friend who managed to shoot but not kill Hanson.

Plante, who was initially reluctant to get involved with the gang, was upset that they'd expect him to kill over a leather vest and appealed to the police to become a paid informant. But it was not just his desire to be a good citizen that motivated him. After it got rolling, Plante's deal paid him $14,000 a month, along with a 1997 Mustang, the lease of a Harley-Davidson, dinners out with bills of up to $2,000 and vacations to Mexico.

But Plante—later known as the million-dollar rat in the media—was the only way the police had to get inside any of the drug trafficking organizations. And because the Hells Angels had since become linked with the Independent Soldiers and the United Nations, the potential was there to disrupt a lot of trafficking.

Over the next several years, Plante acted as an informant for the RCMP under a project known as Operation E-Pandora. He learned and relayed who the players were and how they operated. For example, a gesture simulating turning a car's ignition key indicated a “key” or kilogram of drugs in conversation. His account of working in the underworld all came out in testimony against his former associates.

One of his primary suppliers was a Hells Angels associate named Kerry Ryan Renaud, who cooked and sold methamphetamine for full-patch Hells Angels Ron Lising and the unfortunately named Johnny Punko. Since both believed they were working with Plante and Renaud exclusively, Plante had yet another secret to keep.

The cops hit the mother lode on September 6, 2004, when Plante received a phone call instructing him to meet Lising and his friend Nima Ghavami at 8 Rinks sports center in Burnaby. It was, he said, going to be a big deal. The cops tailed Plante, who was driving the black Mustang they bought him. At the meeting, Lising told Plante to drop off a pound of meth on the counter of a deli in Vancouver's Champlain Mall. Despite the obvious danger, the police okayed the plan.

They followed along and filmed him making the drop off. Later that day, Plante received text messages from Lising asking to visit so he could tell him where he could pick up the cash for the meth. He was then instructed to go to a restaurant in Hope, sit at a table, read a newspaper and wait for a man from Kelowna to give him $10,000. He also handed Plante a note that he was instructed to hand over to the bag man. Apparently Lising was upset that the guy from Kelowna was using a phone Lising had given him for personal calls when it was intended just for drug transactions. “I don't care if you are calling taxis or pizzas, don't use that fucking phone,” Lising threatened.

Plante went to the restaurant and met the money man. He handed Plante $5,000 in cash hidden in a rolled-up newspaper. Plante texted Lising with the news. Lising answered with a message to the guy from Kelowna: “Hey fuck face, that's not what you promised.” The guy didn't have any more money, so Plante left with the $5,000 and let the other two work out how the rest would be paid.

But it didn't matter in the larger sense. Plante had done the job the RCMP had paid him in excess of $1 million to do. He gave them enough evidence to storm in and arrest 18 men, six of them full-patch Hells Angels and the rest associates. Their defense pointed out that, while an undercover informant, Plante sold drugs and committed several assaults. But that didn't matter, either. Plante's defense was that since he was posing as someone auditioning for the club, he had to act the part, and committing crimes on a regular basis was part of that. The Hells Angels were guilty and Plante, as bad as he was and as many tax dollars as he took with him, had brought at least a few of them down.

“It was like Grand Central Station up there,” Jeremy Enright told me when asked to describe life around 2005 and 2006. “All you had to do was wait a few minutes and another airplane or helicopter would go by. It's a wonder none of them ever crashed into one another.” Enright, who lives in Bellingham, Washington, likes to hike and camp in the North Cascades, near the Canadian border.