The Notorious Bacon Brothers (2 page)

Chapter 1

The Surrey Six: October, 2007

As soon as the SkyTrain stopped, Eileen Mohan was worried. She knew they didn't stop the SkyTrain between stations unless it was a major emergency. The unscheduled stop had happened just before her station. She immediately worried about her son. She called home, but there was no answer. She knew she couldn't get him if he'd already left home, as he had said he would, because the two shared a cellphone—she took it on weekdays and he had it on weekends.

Eileen had left for work at 8:00 a.m. and was on her way home at 7:30 p.m. Chris, her 22-year-old son, was at home. He had the day off from the liquor store where he worked and wanted to play basketball with some friends in the nearby city of Burnaby. The Mohans—Eileen, her husband and Chris—lived in Balmoral Tower, a luxury condo development at 9830 East Whalley Ring Road in Surrey. Although it's technically the second-largest city in British Columbia, Surrey is generally regarded as the most low-end of Vancouver's suburbs.

The Mohans, who had emigrated to Canada from Fiji 11 years earlier, had lived on the 14th floor of Balmoral Tower for a year, but when a penthouse suite on the top floor, unit 1504, opened up a week earlier, they'd jumped at it. But the penthouse would be temporary, as the family had almost saved enough money to buy their own house. Although the Balmoral was a condo building, many of its residents were renters because a number of units were owned by offsite investors who brought in tenants to pay their mortgages for them.

Chris was a normal kind of kid. He wore his hair jelled-up like the guys on
Jersey Shore
and loved to work out.

He was average-looking with a big grin and fashionable hip-hop–inspired clothes. He'd long since traded in his glasses for contact lenses. Since graduating high school, he had worked part time at a liquor store, but all he really cared about was lifting weights, playing basketball and eating fast food. And he would indulge in all three whenever he could. “He was really into working out,” said an old high school friend named Nikkie Ewasiuk. “That was one of his main goals; he wanted to be big. The last time I saw him, I couldn't believe how big he had gotten.” He wasn't too big for his Spider-Man bedspread, though.

Like most people of his generation, he expressed himself through online social media. Describing his personality on MySpace, he wrote, “I am an outgoing kind of person and I always want to be doing stuff because being bored out of your mind sucks. I like making people laugh by telling jokes or doing stupid things. But I know when to be serious.” His mom, Eileen, ran a disciplined household, threatening to throw Chris's clothes in a garbage bag and him out on the street if the police ever came to her door looking for him.

On October 18, 2007, he accepted an invitation to go play basketball with some friends in nearby Burnaby but promised his mom he would stay home until the guy came by to service the unit's gas fireplace. At two in the afternoon, Chris called his mom to tell her that the gas guy and the building manager had arrived, and that he was leaving to play with his friends in Burnaby. “Mom,” he said. “I've got to go—love you.” She told him she loved him, too.

The gas guy was Ed Schellenberg. Originally from Coaldale, a small hardscrabble town in Alberta, Schellenberg's family moved to Abbotsford—another small British Columbia city that had been absorbed by the Greater Vancouver area—when he was 3. Schellenberg was from a very close family of strong Mennonite faith. In fact, after high school, he had served a mission for his church, working with kids at a youth detention center in Ohio, then traveled to Poland and lived in the Northwest Territories before returning to Abbotsford. Many would consider that kind of life dangerous, and Ed wasn't a very big or intimidating man. He stood just five foot eight. He was bald and stout, and did not carry himself like a tough guy. Because he wasn't. No, he was a charmer. His oversized red handlebar moustache, ready smile, twinkling eyes and quick wit had always been enough to get him out of trouble in the past. He didn't need to be tough.

Back in British Columbia, Schellenberg had started a gas installation and maintenance business at which he employed his brother-in-law, Steve Brown, and Steve's 21-year-old son, Zachary. Balmoral Tower was one of his biggest clients. Among the building's selling points was that every unit came equipped with a gas fireplace. Insurance regulations (and common sense) required that the gas systems be professionally maintained on a regular basis, and Schellenberg and his crew were generally regarded as the best in the business.

Schellenberg, Brown and his son had spent a week that October working on Balmoral Tower, starting on the bottom floor. Because they were so far ahead of schedule, Brown left early, sure that Schellenberg and Zachary would have no problem finishing the job. By the end of lunch break, the two of them had just the seven units on the top floor to do. At two o'clock, he and the building manager knocked on the Mohans' door. Chris let them in and they chatted while Schellenberg did his work. His nephew was supposed to handle the last unit, 1505, across the hall, but the building manager took Ed aside and asked him if he could do it instead. There were four young guys who lived in there, although they didn't seem like bad guys, but he'd just feel a little more comfortable if it was Ed who did their unit. It was, after all, the kid's first week on the job. Ed smiled and said it would be no problem.

The owner of 1505 was a man named Ceasar Tiojanco, but he didn't live there. A successful agent at Regent Park Fairchild Realty, Tiojanco and his wife, Myrna, actually owned six properties in the area and had rented out unit 1505 ever since they had purchased it for $82,000 in 2003. In the spring of 2007, he rented 1505 to a 20-year-old man who had run into a few problems with the law. When he took over the unit, Raphael Baldini was facing charges related to a break-and-enter incident. But Baldini soon moved out of the unit and sublet it to some friends.

Although it was a one-bedroom unit, in October 2007, a total of four young men lived in 1505. And they were, to use a shop-worn expression, “known to police.” All of them had been charged with a number of serious crimes, and all of them had connections to known gangs. In fact, the foursome had become something of a gang themselves.

The de facto leader of the quartet was Edward “Eddie” Sousakhone Narong, 22. Trouble for him started early. Back in 2000, his buddy—then-14-year-old Quang Vinh Thang “Michael” Le—had been severely beaten by a gang of Korean youths. Ethnic biases learned from parents and grandparents often came with immigrants over the Pacific to the New World, just as they had come over the Atlantic for earlier generations. In places like Coquitlam, where they both lived, Southeast Asians like Le, who was Vietnamese, and Narong, who was Thai, frequently found themselves the targets of other bullies, who were almost as often of European descent, or Aboriginal Canadians, as they were from other parts of Asia.

Le decided not to let the issue drop. He assembled a gang of mostly Southeast Asian buddies, including Narong, to exact revenge. The little army invaded the Hi-Max karaoke club, which the original bullies frequented, and attacked their alleged leader, 16-year-old Richard Jung, as he headed to the men's room. They beat him so badly, he was dead before the ambulance arrived.

Le was charged with second-degree murder, a charge that was reduced on appeal to manslaughter. Narong, the only other member of the gang to face charges, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In 2002, both were sentenced to conditional terms of 18 months. The others walked.

Almost as soon he got out of Willingdon Youth Detention Centre, Narong started getting in trouble again. In fact, between his release in 2003 and October 2007, he faced more than 30 different criminal charges, mostly related to drug trafficking and weapons, but somehow managed to get most of them stayed for various reasons. One he couldn't shake involved assaulting a police officer back in May 2007. In October, he was still on probation for that. It was said that he was part of—in fact, the leader of—a shadowy street gang called the Red Scorpions, but that he had recently left the organization to branch out on his own. Other elements had wrested control of the gang from him, and he was no longer welcome there.

With him in suite 1505 were the Lal brothers. Twenty-six-year-old Michael Justin Lal and 22-year-old Corey Jason Michael Lal were alleged at the time to have been career drug dealers, working mainly for a rival street gang known as the Independent Soldiers, before joining forces with Narong. Just as Narong had experienced with the Red Scorpions, outside forces had taken over the Independent Soldiers, making most of the old guard uneasy, to say the least.

A year earlier, Michael had received a conditional 17-month sentence for trafficking, and Corey was facing charges for trafficking after having been arrested in the summer of 2007. One of Michael's closest friends, Mahmoud Alkhalil, had been murdered in 2003 when he was just 19. Police allege the killing was connected to the 2001 slaying of Alkhalil's older brother Khalil and the subsequent attacks on Phil Rankin, the lawyer defending Michael Naud, the man many accused of killing Khalil Alkhalil. The Alkhalil brothers were accused of being members in yet another street gang, the Indo-Canadian Mafia.

Rounding out the little group—which was becoming known on the streets as the Lal Crew—was 19-year-old Ryan Bartolomeo. He too had been arrested for drug trafficking. In December 2006, he was charged with four counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a controlled substance, and two firearms-related charges, and was still facing those charges in October 2007.

He was close to his older cousin, Damon Bartolomeo, who in 2002 was one of four men accused of breaking into a Surrey marijuana-growing operation, beating its owner with brass knuckles and holding him captive. One of the co-accused was Juel Ross Stanton, a full-patch member of the East End chapter of the Hells Angels, arguably the dominant gang in Vancouver. The four accused got off the hook when witnesses refused to testify or were found unreliable and the victim, Alexander Goldman, died of a stroke in 2004. The incident happened just two blocks from Balmoral Tower.

At the same time that Chris Mohan let Schellenberg and the building manager into 1504, all four of the Lal Crew were inside 1505.

Eileen Mohan didn't know the guys in 1505. She had met only Baldini, whom she had judged to be an okay guy based on his appearance and external habits. “There was no traffic in and out of the suite. The only guy I saw was the tenant. He looked like a normal guy. He was dressed nicely—no tattoos, no bling-bling, nothing alarming,” she said. “If they had told me the person living beside me was a drug dealer, do you think I would have stayed there?”

At about four o'clock on that Friday, the building manager noticed Schellenberg's truck in the parking lot. Since he should have left at least an hour before that, the manager chose to investigate. Getting out of the elevator on the top floor, he could immediately tell something was wrong. The door of 1505 was open, and so was that of 1504. It was eerily silent. He slowly approached 1505. He saw Schellenberg facedown on the ground. There was a pool of blood under his nose, but it was no longer flowing. He was clearly dead.