The Notorious Bacon Brothers (7 page)

After both Johal and Buttar were released, they went to work. They started with extortion and debt collection before getting back into trafficking. On October 26, 1996, Johal's close friend, Roman “Danny” Mann, was buying two kilos of cocaine from Randy Chan. After he sampled it, he declared it impotent, watered down with baby powder or some other adulterant. Angered by the perceived attempt to swindle him, Mann forced Chan outside and into his car. Perhaps suddenly aware he had made a big mistake—Randy was younger brother of Lotus Gang member Raymond Chan and well connected—Mann drove his hostage to Johal's house. Undaunted, Johal quickly came up with a plan. He called Raymond Chan and went into negotiations. Raymond played tough—Randy was in their hands for 56 hours in total—but when Johal shoved his little brother into the trunk of his car and drove him around Vancouver while negotiating over the phone, Raymond relented. It was finally decided that Randy's life was worth five kilos of coke.

After that, Johal started settling some old scores. The first to die was Amarjit Singh Dheil. As he left the Marpole-Oakridge Community Centre after a floor hockey game with friends on January 19, 1997, Dheil was gunned down. Johal believed he had been in cahoots with the Dosanjh brothers.

Buttar began to notice that Johal used the Elite for his own purposes, almost at his whims, and not always for the overall strategic plan. On October 21, 1997, Gorinder Singh Khun Khun was shot and killed as he was exiting his home. Khun Khun had been an old friend of Johal's, dating back to the Tupper days, but Johal was convinced he was involved in the blundered assassination attempt that had killed Olson. On July 1, 1998, Johal ordered Buttar to arrange for the Elite to kill another old friend, Vinuse News MacKenzie, saying that he had been holding out from the organization. Buttar went ahead but had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason MacKenzie died was because a certain girl Johal fancied actually preferred MacKenzie.

Those killings disturbed Buttar, but the one that really turned him around was that of Derek Chand Shankar. Buttar sincerely liked Shankar, a good kid and a solid earner, and when they went out clubbing on September 19, 1998, they called Johal to come and join them. But the boss begged off, saying he was too tired. Shankar, already drunk, called Johal an “idiot” and a “baby,” and mocked him for not being willing to have a few drinks with his crew. Johal snapped, reminding Shankar who he was talking to. A few hours later, Johal showed up at the nightclub with his old pal Mann and asked where Shankar was. Buttar told him he was sleeping in his truck. Johal suggested they go for a drive. Buttar could not gather the courage to oppose him. The men drove under New Westminster's Queensborough Bridge, a few yards from the salvage yard where the Chana murder took place. Throughout the trip Buttar kept telling Johal that Shankar was just a drunk kid and that he didn't mean any harm. They stopped under the bridge. Johal shot the barely conscious Shankar. Buttar briefly considered killing Johal then and there, but instead helped him throw Shankar's corpse into the cold Fraser River.

But Johal was hardly the only source of violence in the Indian Canadian community. A friend of his, Vikash Chand, was told he could get a free stolen car to chop up for parts if he met some guys he knew at Rags to Riches Motorcars in Burnaby on the afternoon of October 7, 1998. When he arrived, a meticulously planned assassination was put into effect that resulted in Shane Shoemaker (who was paid $7,000) shooting and killing Chand while he was screwing a stolen license plate onto the car he had been promised. As planned and rehearsed, Shoemaker then ran to a minivan driven by his friend Haddi Binhamad, who spirited the shooter away to what they thought was safety.

They would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for a sharp-eyed witness who reported the license plate number of the minivan, which belonged to Binhamad's mom. Caught, Binhamad traded testimony for immunity. He confessed he had tried to kill Chand a couple of times before but had failed, and had been given the gun by George Wafsi, the mastermind behind the assassination. Binhamad later gave the gun to Shoemaker. Chand was a drug dealer supplied by Wafsi and had run up some major debts with him.

On November 29, one of Johal's oldest friends, Mann, told him he wanted out of the gang. It was just too dangerous, he said. Johal punched him in the face, cutting his lip. Later, Mann's body, with a single bullet wound to the back of the head, was found in a vacant industrial lot in Burnaby not far from the Queensborough Bridge. When Buttar asked about what had happened and what he was going to do about it, Johal told him, “Blame it on the HA [Hells Angels].” Then he asked Buttar if he wanted to go out clubbing that night.

A few weeks later, the pair did go out. They were headed down Scott Road in Delta to a club in Surrey when Johal pulled a surprise 180-degree turn. A cop saw them and turned on his lights. As the police car approached, Johal showed Buttar a gun, which surprised Buttar because he knew the boss rarely carried a weapon. Buttar convinced Johal to hide the gun, but the cop saw it and called for backup. Johal told Buttar to say it was his gun, to take the blame and the jail time. Buttar agreed, but not out of loyalty. He realized that Johal had to go. Johal had lost it. He was killing innocent kids like Shankar, and even his best friends like Mann. Buttar knew he could persuade the Elite to kill the boss, and he knew that being behind bars would be the perfect alibi. He rationalized the order to himself by the belief that if he did not kill Johal, Johal would soon kill him.

Johal was partying at the Palladium nightclub at 4:30 in the morning of December 20, 1998. A lone gunman approached him on the dance floor and shot him in the back of the head at extremely close range. Despite the presence of about 350 revelers in the club at the time, not a single person came forward to describe the assailant.

The death of Bindy Johal did not end the violence in Vancouver's Indian community. In fact, bloodshed increased as the gangsters underwent a Balkanization process, as the Indo-Canadian Mafia splintered into bitter factions.

And that was the Vancouver the Bacon Brothers grew up in. It was a place with spectacular wealth just blocks from ridiculous poverty. It was a place with almost unprecedented diversity that had self-segregated itself into a set of insular, paranoid communities. It was a place with plenty of idealists and entrepreneurs—and lots of people who were prepared to take advantage of them. It was also a place in which organized crime was based on ethnicity. But that was about to change.

Chapter 3

United Nations: 1997–2001

Times were changing. The old models of who associated with whom were breaking down. Ethnicities began to stop self-segregating as the children and grandchildren of immigrants started hanging out with anybody they liked, regardless of where their families came from.

One of the people who grew up thinking that ethnicity was a lot less important than friendship and shared experience was James Coulter. He had it rough growing up in the Lower Mainland, but nothing like the kids he saw in Central America. When he was sent down south, he was appalled at the conditions in which the people there lived. He knew why they were so bad off, and he knew he was part of it. He saw how their economy, their culture, their families and any sense of normality they had were ruined by the drug trade. It was enough to make him give it all up. The money, the cars, the clothes, the friends: he would miss it all, and he knew there was no way he could have gotten it without being a gangster. But he just didn't want to be part of something that was ruining so many lives all over the world.

While not as rough as those of the kids he saw in Latin America, Coulter certainly had a disadvantaged start in life. He came from a family with severe addiction issues. In fact, when Coulter was born, his heroin-addicted teen mother, Bobbi Smoker, was in prison, and his father, also a drug user, was absent. Smoker admits that both she and Coulter's father robbed banks, even though that's not what she was behind bars for. Corrections Canada let Coulter's mother keep him until he was 6 months old, and then he was taken to a foster home. He was handed from foster home to foster home until his mother earned the right to get him back when he was 5. But their home life was far from ideal, and she lost custody of him again when he was 12. Coulter says his mother was abusive; Smoker denies that, saying Coulter liked foster families because they spent more money on him. Over the next three years, he was again shuffled from one foster home to another—15 of them. Tired of them, he struck out on his own at just 15 years old.

By his early 20s, he was leading a dissolute life. He had moved to Abbotsford in 1996 and was running through a series of dead-end jobs, including cooking at a Keg restaurant and manning the kill room at a Lilydale poultry processing plant, before settling in at a warehouse. He liked to party and would go to nightclubs and raves as often as he could. Many of the friends he met there were involved in the drug trade, and he quickly came to admire them and their wealth. “I just got caught up,” he said. “I started hanging out with kids with nice cars. And you know, they would go to the gym in the day, and that really conflicted with my warehouse hours. And they had a couple of jobs here or there for me, and they would say, ‘Hey, do you want to learn how to grow [marijuana]? Do a week of work, and you'll get a couple of grand.'”

Before long, he found himself selling the weed his grower friends supplied, and eventually, he moved up the dealer food chain. At the very beginning of 1997, at a rave in Chilliwack, some friends introduced him to a big guy with tattoos named Clayton Roueche. He wasn't handsome, but he was very charismatic and always surrounded by lots of friends.

A little older than Coulter, Roueche came from more settled surroundings. His dad, Rupert “Rip” Roueche, owned a scrapyard and metal recycling business in Chilliwack that he told people made in excess of $1 million annually. He also said that he planned to hand it over to his son when he retired. Clayton graduated from high school in 1993 and went through a variety of retail sales jobs before becoming a sales manager. He gathered his resources to fulfill his dream of opening a restaurant, but it was unsuccessful and soon closed.

The two hit it off and became close friends. Even after everything that happened, Coulter would always hold Roueche in high regard. In fact, Roueche showed him a type of tough love that had been missing in Coulter's life when he stayed with him through the horrible withdrawal symptoms Coulter suffered when kicking his drug habit.

Coulter and Roueche also became business partners. Roueche had been in the drug trade for a long time. The first time he came to police attention was back in 1994, when he was 18. He paid a visit to a known drug trafficking house in Chilliwack, and the police questioned him. They reported that he was cooperative, even friendly, and showed them a recent tattoo on his back that he said read “blood brothers forever” in Chinese characters. They had nothing to charge him with and let him go.

By the time he met Coulter in 1997, Roueche had access to all kinds of drugs, much better drugs than Coulter could get on his own. And he always had tons of cash and admirers. But Roueche also had a steady girlfriend, later his wife; he was helping her raise her son from a previous relationship and was eager to start a family of his own. His girlfriend happened to have an uncle who was reputedly very well-connected with the highest reaches of Vancouver's Asian gangs.

That would explain why Roueche had access to seemingly infinite amounts of high-quality drugs, while Coulter's other friends were small time. Because of the Hells Angels' drive to monopolize the drug trade on the Lower Mainland, the best anyone outside their circle could usually hope for was a small amount of weed, furtively grown by another friend desperate to stay under the bikers' radar. Growers and dealers who did not kick a portion of profits up to the Hells Angels could expect violence until they did. And that intolerance for others in the trade was hardly limited to growers; even street-level dealers who did not cooperate could expect a visit from someone working on the bikers' behalf.

Although they had a great time partying night after night, not everything was as idyllic for all of Coulter's friends. They were hardly the only group attending the nightclubs and raves on the Lower Mainland. Most groups of friends, even gangs, had always done their best to keep the peace, let everyone have a good time and a share of the market. In those days, with a few exceptions, Indians hung with Indians, Vietnamese with Vietnamese, and everyone else with “their own kind.” And that's also usually whom they sold to.

But things were changing. Second- and third-generation immigrants were far more likely to hang out with and befriend people of other ethnicities. And if the Korean kids had the best connections for ecstasy or some white guy was plugged into a steady weed supply, the power of economics would eventually overcome any fear of outsiders or racism. Everyone's money was the same color.

But there was one group who didn't want the old ways to change. The Hells Angels were on the top of the heap, and they sold to anyone. But they did not include everyone in their ranks. Although the organization tends to be coy about it, everyone in the Lower Mainland knew that you had to be white to get into the Hells Angels. Historically, there has never been a non-white full-patch Hells Angel (although there is a persistent rumor of one in London's East End, he has yet to show himself if he exists). Their supporters will eagerly point to Greg “Picasso” Wooley as an example of how a non-white can be a Hells Angel, but he is actually a good indicator that one cannot. Wooley, born in Haiti and black, was an outstanding soldier for the Montreal Hells Angels. He made millions selling drugs for them, he beat dozens of people up for them, and even allegedly killed some. He was best friends with the notorious Maurice “Mom” Boucher, and could be seen at every party and event thrown by the Hells Angels. But he never spent a single day wearing the winged skull. Despite all he had done, despite his connections, his wealth and his obvious capability, Wooley was barred from the club because of the color of his skin. Instead, he was made president of the Rockers, a Laval-based puppet club who did the Hells Angels' dirty work for them. And he was the only non-white Rocker. Notably, Wooley's previous gang experience came with Master B, which was all black; and Boucher's was with the SS, which was not only all-white, but avowedly racist.

From time to time, Hells Angels members and supporters will argue that their club is not all-white, but nobody has ever shown me a full-patch or prospect Hells Angel who was black or Asian. It doesn't really matter if someone ever did produce evidence of a non-white Hells Angel, and not just because he would represent just one of several thousand, but because my opinion or theirs doesn't actually matter in this context. The fact is that every kid in the Lower Mainland in the late 1990s knew that non-whites had no chance to be Hells Angels there.

But lots of white kids did think they had a chance, and they did what they could to prove their worth. They sold drugs (kicking much of the profit upstairs), collected debts, and intimidated witnesses—anything they could to catch the eye of a full-patch member who might one day sponsor them. It's a fool's game, of course, to risk your freedom and life for a chance at illegal riches, but it's one with no shortage of players, especially back then.

You saw them everywhere. Some kids called them Hells Angels or, more often, just Hells or HA, but they were not actually Hells Angels. Nor were they prospects or even hang-arounds. In fact, it would be a stretch even to call them associates. They were wannabes—kids who believed if they showed enough toughness and cunning, they would get picked for a shot at the big time. The Hells Angels and the kids themselves called them “support crews.”

They were easy to spot. They wore what the clubs call support gear. Because the Hells Angels forbid non-members from wearing their logo or name, the alternative is to wear clothing with the phrase “Support 81.” The clothes—mostly T-shirts and hoodies—are sold by the Hells Angels and indicate the wearer's affiliation to the club. These clothes are almost invariably black, with the text and any images in the Hells Angels' familiar red and white.

And, since they were aligned with the top dogs, the support crews had a sense of entitlement. Being a member of a support crew conferred certain powers and privileges. It wasn't merely because they were a largely tough group of young men who traveled in packs, but it was also because it was hard to tell how connected any of them were. If you had a dispute that culminated in a fight, under normal circumstances, you could expect it to end there or your opponent might bring back some of his buddies to try to win back some credibility. But—accurate or not—the belief among many in the club scene on the Lower Mainland was that if you messed with a support crew member, you were taking on the Hells Angels and could wind up at the bottom of Burrard Inlet.

It was a reputation that was not just well earned, but well publicized. A videotape of an East Vancouver Chapter associate and dealer named Anthony “Big Tony” Terezakis torturing a debtor was discovered after his arrest. In it, an addict known as Tommy sits on a filthy couch as Terezakis—a huge, ugly man covered in tattoos and wearing a massive gold crucifix—asks him for his money. When Tommy (who was high at the time) demurs, Terezakis pummels him with his fists and repeated kicks to the head. All the while, Terezakis is spitting on Tommy and repeatedly shouting, “Praise the Lord!” Later, Terezakis claimed that the tape was part of a reality-show idea he had called
Bible Thumpers.

It was also revealed at about that time that Mickie “Phil” Smith, a former insurance salesman turned contract killer, had been contacted by a mysterious Asian businessman named Brian who hired him to kill a man for the East Vancouver chapter of the Hells Angels. The man in question was Paul Percy Soluk, a 33-year-old who made the mistake of stealing from a Hells Angels–associated grow op. Smith quickly located his prey in a Downtown Eastside crack house and forced him into his car. Smith drove Soluk to an empty garage and shot him dead. Smith testified at his trial that he then called a man called Yurik to help him chop up the body and dispose of it. When the Crown asked if Yurik was a Hells Angel, Smith replied, “He's not an Angel, but he works with the Angels. I know he's done lots of hits.”

While that news may have made the general public more aware of the Hells Angels reach and ferocity, anybody already involved with the drug trade already knew that crossing the Hells Angels was extremely dangerous and often meant a death sentence. The support crews had no compunction about taking advantage of that fear and used it to intimidate and belittle anybody who got in their way or even crossed their path. The majority of the guys Coulter and Roueche hung out with were East Asian—Chinese and Vietnamese. Coulter and Roueche sincerely admired their cultures, particularly martial arts, which they both practiced. The Asians among their little group were often physically slight and frequently found themselves targets of bullying and intimidation from members of support crews.

But it was more than just friction over dance-floor space at the nightclub. The Hells Angels are very intolerant of other people selling drugs in their territory. While not all support crew members sold drugs for the Hells Angels, it was expected that they would at least report any unauthorized drug sales they saw and, if possible, put the offending dealer out of business.

Many young club-goers on the Lower Mainland took ecstasy. Also known as “X” or by its scientific name, “MDMA,” ecstasy was originally a clinical drug used to fight depression. It became popular—first in gay clubs, where it was known as “adam” or the “no-calorie martini”—in the 70s and was outlawed in most countries, beginning with the United States in 1985. Increasingly popular, ecstasy gives the user a euphoric feeling mixed with heightened confidence and a feeling of goodwill toward others. It became synonymous with all-night parties and raves in the 90s.

In truth, ecstasy is not seen as one of the more dangerous illicit drugs. Its potential for user dependence is fairly low (about on par with marijuana and lower than caffeine), and overdoses are very rare. The big problem with ecstasy as a recreational drug is its purity. Unlike most other recreational drugs, ecstasy must be manufactured in technically advanced laboratory conditions and is consequentially rare and costly. To overcome that, many dealers adulterate their ecstasy pills with similar-looking powdered substances like ibuprofen, caffeine, and even baby powder. As an illegal, non-regulated product, ecstasy pills may have as little as 1 percent MDMA or even none at all. In order to give the pills a little kick, dealers will often substitute for MDMA with another, cheaper active ingredient—methamphetamine. Unlike MDMA, meth can be made anywhere by just about anyone. It can give the user similar euphoric feelings but with an aggressive element and, perhaps more important, is one of the most addictive of all illegal drugs. Since meth, and cutting ecstasy with meth, were (and are) both rampant on the Lower Mainland, it's very likely that many of Coulter's friends had taken meth at least occasionally.