The Notorious Bacon Brothers (21 page)

On January 11, 2009, he received a phone call at his mother's house at about 8:30 p.m. He took the phone out to the back patio to talk and never returned. His family found the phone on the patio table and were immediately suspicious.

They reported him missing on January 13, and police became more suspicious of his whereabouts when he didn't show up to appointments with his parole officer.

In August, a boater on the Fraser River near Douglas Island in Port Coquitlam discovered a badly decomposed body in the water. Tattoos and other factors led the coroner to identify it as Hedrick's.

January 16, 2009, was an ordinary day for Abbotsford police until they received a number of calls from people claiming they had seen a man with a gun at Sevenoaks Shopping Centre. When police arrived, witnesses pointed out the group of men they had seen with the firearm. The cops were not surprised to see that the men in question were all three Bacon Brothers. They were searched and questioned, but no gun was found. Jonathan was wearing a bulletproof vest, but since it wasn't stolen, there was no basis to charge them and they were released.

The fact that he was wearing a bulletproof vest in a mall in broad daylight was a testament to how dangerous the Bacon Brothers perceived their lives to have gotten, especially after the Karbovanec shooting. And they were right.

Four days after the Sevenoaks incident, Jamie was driving his black Mercedes-Benz SL55 convertible northwest on South Fraser Way when he pulled up beside an SUV stopped at a red light at the intersection of Sumas Way. It was about 10 minutes before four in the afternoon. As he was waiting for the light to change, the back window on the right side of the SUV slid down and someone inside the truck fired at Bacon. Six shots went into the Mercedes (another blew out the back window of a nearby pickup truck, but the driver was unhurt). Jamie floored it, speeding through the intersection, down South Fraser, before merging onto West Railway Street, where he hit the median and crashed into the front entrance of a Keg restaurant. Police, alerted to the area after the first shots were fired, found Jamie a few hundred yards away from the wrecked Mercedes. He was wearing a bulletproof vest under his trademark hoodie. It probably saved his life.

People I've talked to who knew many of the people killed in Vancouver's gang wars invariably tell me that the person who was killed was a good person, not just a gangster. They were kind or generous or good with children. They had a quality or number of qualities that transcended gangster life.

Of course they did. The drug trade, at least at the top end, is extremely lucrative and is one of the increasingly rare career choices for those who are not educated or bright enough to establish a legitimate career. Or, for those who can, the drug trade offers a very lucrative, even glamorous, option. In the Lower Mainland, with spiraling prices and declining employment, the drug trade attracted thousands. Many of them were otherwise ordinary people lured by the easy money, camaraderie and glamorous lifestyle.

One of them was Andrew “Dru” Cilliers. He had received minor acclaim in February 2004 when he and two friends, Simon Prodromidis and Andrew Henderson, pulled an unconscious man from a burning car. What the papers did not say was that Cilliers was out on bail awaiting trial for a drug trafficking charge in 2002. Found guilty shortly after the heroic incident, he received a six-month conditional sentence (which meant no jail time if he made weekly visits to a parole officer), nine months probation and, for reasons not made clear at the time, a ten-year firearms ban.

Some years later, Cilliers, who had a job at an auction house, moved into 6267 131A Street, a nice reddish brown house at the corner of 62B Avenue. He had originally moved in with his girlfriend, but after many arguments loud enough for the neighbors to be aware of, she left in the summer of 2008. Dru was not alone long, though. Soon after the girlfriend left, Dru's brother moved in.

Friends and neighbors considered Dru affable and hardworking. But he had revenue streams aside from the auction house, and he had friends who might have been operating on the far side of the law. Len Pelletier—best known as the Hells Angels associate who'd been shot at while dropping his son off at school and the cousin of notorious Nomad Bob Green—just happened to have cosigned on the lease of a Harley-Davidson for Cilliers.

Neighbors—who generally had positive feelings toward Cilliers, at least, after his girlfriend left—were shocked to hear gunshots at his house just after midnight on January 27, 2009. When police arrived, they saw Cilliers, shot in the head, still alive but unconscious in the driveway beside the house. Paramedics put him in an ambulance and he died in a nearby hospital at 3:30 a.m.

Who killed him and why are still mysteries. Pelletier's wife Cynthia appeared to be sincerely broken up about his death, calling him an “excellent, excellent guy” and claiming he was just like family to them. “It is too sad. It is too fucking sad,” she said. “All I can say is he was a great kid. The young people today don't realize once you're gone, it's gone.”

There was an outpouring of public sympathy on social media that dwarfed the one for “J Money” Krantz. A Facebook page dedicated to his memory (since deleted) had several hundred followers and thousands of views. Cilliers might have been the great guy his friends say he was, but he was definitely in a risky business.

As if to underline exactly who ran things in the Lower Mainland, Cilliers' friends threw him a memorial party at T-Barz, the notorious strip joint frequented by Hells Angels.

With the number of drug-related shootings at an astounding level—but arrests rare and convictions rarer—police were frustrated, and their options were running out. After finding out that Jonathan Bacon had moved into a condo at 651 Nootka Way in their city, the authorities in Port Moody reacted in what they thought was the best way to maintain public safety. On February 3, 2009, the day after Erickson was murdered, the City of Port Moody and the Port Moody Police Department issued the following warning:

As part of the response to gang violence which has gripped many communities throughout B.C., the Port Moody Police Department is taking steps to warn the public, friends, and associates of the BACON brothers, that there are significant threats to their safety.

The Port Moody Police Department through its investigation and information received from other police agencies, have learned there are plans to murder Jarrod, Jamie and Jonathan BACON. The BACON brothers are well known to the police and have been linked to violence and weapons in the past. The BACON brothers have been approached by police and advised of these threats, but appear to be unconcerned for their safety or that of their friends, associates and, particularly the public. Due to the seriousness of the threats made against the BACON brothers, those associated to them in any way are being advised to discontinue their association or interaction immediately.

The Port Moody Police Department has been aware of a BACON presence in Port Moody for some time, and specifically one BACON brother is currently residing in Port Moody. Highly–trained and specialized officers are routinely patrolling areas of concern within our community and monitoring any suspicious activities related to the BACON brothers. The recent escalation in indiscriminate public violence has caused us sufficient concern to issue this public warning.

The safety of the public is paramount; the Port Moody Police Department in partnership with other police agencies, in particular the Abbotsford Police Department and the Integrated Gang Task Force are working vigilantly to ensure that the safety of the public is uncompromised.

Particulars for the BACON brothers are:

Jonathan David BACON, DOB 1981-01-31, age 28

Description: Caucasian male, 5'-11” 201 lbs, black hair blue eyes

Marks/Scars: scar left wrist

Jarrod Wayne BACON, DOB 1983-03-14, age 25

Description: Caucasian male, 5'-9” 190 lbs, brown hair and brown eyes

Marks/Scars: “Sleeve” tattoo left arm, scar on forehead

James Kyle BACON, DOB 1985-08-01, age 23

Description: Caucasian male, 5'-10” 236 lbs, brown hair and brown eyes

Marks/Scars: “Sleeve” tattoos both left and right arms.

The warning about Karbovanec hadn't worked. But the authorities in Port Moody hoped the warning about the Bacon Brothers would.

Chapter 9

War: February–May, 2009

Not surprisingly, the Port Moody warning didn't work. If anything, it only made the gangsta-wannabe kids in the Lower Mainland admire the Bacon Brothers even more. The boys had proven they were not just untouchable by law enforcement, but also by their enemies. They were wearing fancy clothes, driving the best cars with pretty girls and doing whatever they felt like, and nobody could stop them. Their lives were like the twisted fantasies of a bored 12-year-old. The warning only put an official stamp on it.

It's not that the police were not investigating. The killers had more chutzpah and ego than they had any technical knowledge of how best to go about assassination. They left behind a huge mess of DNA and other evidence. But real investigations are not at all like the magic they show on TV and in movies. To build a compelling case from even the sloppiest murder scene takes lots of hours of hard work and no small amount of luck.

And though the killings sparked outrage in the community, among those in organized crime, it drew respect. The Red Scorpions, who many in the know blamed for the murders, made a loud and clear statement. By publicly executing those who would not play by their rules, the Red Scorpions established themselves as a force to be reckoned with. Sadly, the murder of eight people raised their credibility on the streets.

One of the Bacon Brothers' closest friends, Raphael Baldini, did not heed the warning. Baldini, of course, was well known as the tenant who had leased the apartment in which the Surrey Six murders had taken place. He was not there at the time, of course, and was not considered a serious suspect, but many—including Eileen Mohan—believed that he had information that could lead to an arrest or arrests. And he was still allegedly in the game, out on bail facing a trafficking and weapons charge with co-accused Jaspreet “Justin” Chahil from an October 2008 raid. Chahil, who was also charged with assault and uttering death threats, would later plea bargain down to one charge of trafficking and be sentenced to one year. Baldini was also facing charges from November 2007—one month after the Surrey Six murders—after a search of his vehicle yielded two loaded, unregistered handguns.

Hours after the warning about the Bacon Brothers was issued, Baldini was sitting in the driver's seat of a friend's white Range Rover SUV, talking on the phone. The car was parked in the lot of the Guildford Town Centre, a large and busy mall in Surrey. At about 5:20 p.m., rush hour, the unidentified person on the other end of the call heard Baldini's final words: “Oh my God.”

What had shocked Baldini was the sight of armed thugs piling out of an SUV that had screeched to a halt right in front of him. They opened fire on the Range Rover, hitting Baldini several times before laying rubber for a quick exit.

Police and an ambulance arrived after a flood of 9-1-1 calls. A desperate attempt was made to save Baldini's life, but he expired in the parking lot, although further attempts to revive him took place in the ambulance and at a nearby hospital. “It certainly appears as though it's a targeted event, and has all the earmarks. There were multiple shots heard and all of them entered the deceased,” said Corporal Dale Carr of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. “We've got a lot of witnesses to deal with, and we're speaking to each one of those as the night goes on.” He added that the parking lot was very busy at the time and that it was surprising nobody else got hurt.

Baldini's was no ordinary hit. And it set tongues wagging all over the Lower Mainland. His closeness to both the Bacon Brothers and the Surrey Six murders could not be denied. His murder could well have been from the usual circumstances, but it could also have been a targeted assassination aimed at weakening the Bacon Brothers' organization, or it could also have been someone who wanted to make sure he kept his mouth shut about the Surrey Six, even though police claimed he was not cooperating with them. No matter what the intent, both missions were accomplished.

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Baldini's mother, Cindy, maintained her son had no gang connections. “It's easy for police to say that because he's gone,” she told the CBC. “He's gone, but I'm here to defend my son's name.”

As was becoming increasingly popular, social media sites were flooded with tributes, ranging from people who barely knew Baldini to his mom. One of the more interesting ones came from Jourdane Lal, younger sister of the two Lal brothers killed in the Surrey Six massacre. She wrote,

no words can explain how our family will miss your smilin face, you are one of the few who truly cared, who cried tears not for us but with us, i can only hope to show the same love to your family as you always showed for us, thank you for being there, they'll take care of you up there ... rest peacefully my friend.

She, at least, believed that Baldini had nothing to do with the murders of her brothers.

As if to further mock (or reinforce) the police warning, an hour and a half later, another body was found. At seven o'clock that evening, a man walking down a residential street in Port Coquitlam noticed a red pickup truck with the driver's-side window broken. He looked inside to see a blonde-haired woman slumped over the wheel. The corpse belonged to 21-year-old Brianna Kinnear, who had been shot several times while in a friend's truck.

She was five weeks into an eight-month conditional sentence she received for trafficking Oxycontin, cocaine and weed. She operated the phones at a dial-a-dope organization with her boyfriend, Jesse Margison, and their mutual friend Tiffany Bryan. Margison and three other members of their organization had been shot at and survived.

The Lower Mainland was clearly at war. And it was clearly more complicated than the UN against the Red Scorpions. The Bacon Brothers had thrown their lot in on the Red Scorpions' side, and since both sides were actually supplied by the Hells Angels and their allies, neither could count on support or allegiance from them or any of their related gangs like the Independent Soldiers. Even if they had wanted to stop any confrontation, the Hells Angels did not have the manpower (or reputation anymore) to impose their will upon what were now established, powerful gangs. That meant that the war in Vancouver was less a conventional side-against-side confrontation than it was a guerrilla war in which nobody really knew whom they could trust, and who was their enemy. The solution for many was to trust nobody, pack a weapon and, if you could, wear a bulletproof vest everywhere you went.

But business had to go on, so the movers and shakers had to extend their trust to those close to them. And one of the Bacon Brothers' closest confidantes was Kevin LeClair. A Port Moody native, LeClair was a mixed martial arts fighter and trainer. He even had a professional win under his belt—against Lethbridge, Alberta's Brenden Anderson—to go with losses to an American and a Brazilian. He also had a number of arrests on his record, dating back to 2001, including an assault in May 2008.

A couple of days after the warning, on February 5, 2009, Port Moody police watched as LeClair drove his silver Lincoln pickup truck to Jonathan Bacon's building on Nootka Way a little after noon. Jonathan got into the truck, and the two headed downtown. They had only driven a block when they were stopped and questioned by the cops. Jonathan “nonchalantly” told them they were headed out for coffee at the Starbucks in the NewPort Village shopping complex. The cops had no reason to detain them further.

On the following day, February 6, 2009, LeClair drove the same vehicle to the Thunderbird Centre mall in nearby Langley. As he was parking his truck in front of the Marketplace IGA grocery store at about four in the afternoon, he was approached by two men. Within a few feet of the Lincoln, they pulled guns from under their coats and sprayed the big truck with bullets. Dozens of witnesses claimed to have seen them running toward the mall's movie theater, where they were picked up by a vehicle and spirited away. “I was washing a front table, heard what sounded like firecrackers, looked up and there was a guy holding a handgun shooting at a truck over in front of the IGA,” said a witness who did not want to be named. “The whole parking lot was full of smoke. All of a sudden, the truck started revving constantly. A young man jumped into a van and pulled out of here with two cars following behind.”

Because of the extent of his injuries, first responders summoned a helicopter to airlift LeClair to a nearby hospital. He lingered overnight and died the following morning.

Later that week, on February 12, 2009, the Port Moody police issued another public warning, this one about Dennis Karbovanec. I doubt anyone felt the least bit safer.

But Nicole Marie Alemy probably felt safe driving down 148th Street in Surrey with Green Timbers Urban Forest by her side and her 4-year-old son in the backseat of her husband's snazzy pearl white Cadillac CTS coupe. It was 10:30 a.m. on a bright Monday morning. Her mind might well have been on her birthday—which had just happened to fall on Valentine's Day two days earlier—and the gift that was still waiting for her at her mom's house in White Rock. But as she stopped at the light at the corner of 96th Avenue, the passenger windows in the car beside her slid down and men with guns sent a volley of shots at Alemy's head.

Nicole was killed immediately. As the perpetrators sped off, her foot no longer supplied pressure on the brake pedal and the Cadillac rolled into the ditch and came to a stop after colliding with one of the Green Timbers trees. Two witnesses ran to the car, rescuing the 4-year-old.

Nicole had never been in trouble with the law before—just a few tickets—but her husband had. Alleged to be a high-ranking member of the UN, Koshan Alemy had been arrested on May 12, 2007, after a search of his car (not the Cadillac Nicole was driving) uncovered a loaded Ruger P39 semiautomatic pistol with the serial number filed off.

Nicole's murder was no case of mistaken identity. Nicole looked nothing like Koshan. And, although she had been ticketed for excessively tinted windows in the past, the windows of the Cadillac were perfectly clear.

After Nicole's murder, social media came alive. Facebook, Twitter and the message boards on media outlets were inundated with comments. They took two sides: one maintained that if Nicole was engaged in the drug trade, her murder was the product of a risk she had taken for herself and that she had put her son in extreme danger because of it; the opposing view suggested that there was little if any evidence that Nicole was engaged in drug trafficking and that, even if she was, it did not make her responsible for what happened to her. Many theories were floated online as to why she was assassinated, but the one that kept coming up over and over again focused on her close friendship with Raphael Baldini.

But something else happened that surprised many. The people of the Lower Mainland, who had been almost unanimously reluctant to speak out against crime, started to talk. In fact, the tip lines set up by police received so many calls that they were swamped. For the first time in the area's history, potential tipsters actually had to be put on hold because traffic was so intense. “We're starting to see a bit of a groundswell, if you will, of people just saying, ‘Enough is enough, we're fed up, we're going to give a call,'” said RCMP Corporal Dale Carr of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. Two calls in particular stood out—both by men who admitted to being longtime gang members, but were also disgusted by the brutal murder of a mom in front of her horrified 4-year-old.

There was far less moral outrage over another violent event that day. Tyler Willock had worked closely with the Independent Soldiers and the UN, but of late had become a close associate of the Red Scorpions and the Bacon Brothers. Because of a shooting incident from the previous December, Willock was out on bail awaiting trial on five weapons charges when he and his friend, Fraser Sutherland, and two unidentified women were riding in Sutherland's Range Rover during a night on the town on May 9, 2008. They were stopped in front of the T-Barz parking lot when they were met with gunfire from another SUV that pulled up alongside.

As soon as he realized what was going on, Sutherland sped away towards his home in Langley. Willock, in the back seat, was unharmed, but Sutherland had been hit in the left shoulder. Losing blood and unable to maintain a grip on the wheel, Sutherland made it as far as 216th Street and the Fraser Highway before giving up. Willock called an ambulance. Sutherland survived. The two women were unhurt.

Earlier in the same day, two ambitious Surrey youth—Paul Hillsdon, who ran for city council at age 18, and Trevor Loke, another 18-year-old who was the Green Party candidate for Surrey-Newton—announced they were holding an anti-gang rally in Surrey's Central City Plaza on February 22, 2009. Several hundred people attended, and several speakers, including Eileen Mohan, made speeches.

One person who had no plans to attend such a rally was Red Scorpions tough guy Shane Messent, who also went by the name Randy Jones. He had a long criminal record. Between July 30, 2005, and June 1, 2006, alone, he faced no fewer than 11 charges for trafficking, assault and assault with a weapon from seven separate incidents. The night after the Alemy murder and Willocks-Sutherland shooting (and the anti-gang rally announcement), Messent went to practice his profession. The Red Scorpions had told him there was a grow op in a house on Fraser Street that was not cooperating and needed to be taught a lesson.

On February 17, 2009, Messent and 19-year-old associate Travis Chartrand arrived at the house and knocked on the door. For what happens next, we have to rely on the claims made by Nazreen Dean, the woman who answered the door. She says she was greeted by two armed men she did not recognize asking for someone she did not know. When her brother Aleem Mohammed came to see what was going on, Messent shot him in the chest and both visitors then fled. At that point, her other brother, Amir Mohammed, chased Messent down, tackled him, wrestled the gun away from him and shot him in the chest, killing him immediately. Aleem Mohammed survived, and charges against Amir Mohammed were stayed. It was all, according to Dean, a case of mistaken identity. Her mother, Mabel Mohammed, agreed, pointing out that the intruders were looking for someone named “Azim,” and her boys were named Aleem and Amir.