Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (37 page)

The two of them had many Asian friends who, since many of them were physically quite small, were often bullied by white kids. This offended Coulter and Roueche and they began to look out for their friends. For mutual protection, their crew started going out to bars in increasingly greater numbers. That confidence led more than a few of their guys to start picking fights.

One night in 2000, the group ran into some Hells Angels associates at a since-closed Abbotsford nightclub called Animals. It was pretty obvious who they were because they were wearing “Support 81” T-shirts, which Hells Angels supporters wear because they are not allowed to wear the Hells Angels name. The Hells Angels associates, as usual, started pushing other guys around, especially the Asians.

But much to the would-be bikers' surprise, they fought back. “I remember back in the day, everyone and their dog used to be afraid of anyone who had a Hells Angels [support] shirt,” said Coulter years later, “and you would tread lightly, you would tiptoe around those people and we were just a bunch of kids and thought, you don't have to be afraid of people. Right? You don't want to be bullied around. Numbers rule. We had a lot of numbers.”

As the cops were breaking it all up, the Hells Angels supporters threatened Coulter and his friends. They told them they were “dead” and that they were coming back next weekend.

The crew started calling themselves the “United Nations” to reflect their ethnically diverse membership and as a subtle jab at the Hells Angels' whites-only membership rule. They went back to Animals, about 70 of them. The Hells Angels supporters showed as well, maybe two dozen. They saw the United Nations crowd and called for reinforcements, boosting their number to about 40 guys.

Coulter later recalled that evening: “I'll never forget. There was the big fight inside. It lasted maybe five minutes. Then everyone started running outside. I remember I came out the front doors and there were probably about five or six different fights happening out on the street and I seen an Abbotsford police officer pull up and he gets out of his car and he's on his walkietalkie and he's like, ‘There's H.A.! There are fights everywhere!' It was like he had never seen anything like this before. Nor had I. That was one of the bigger fights I had ever been in.”

It put the United Nations on the map, and more and more young men wanted to join up. Roueche emerged as the club's president and established its structure. Members were expected to learn and practice martial arts and get the words “honor, loyalty, respect” tattooed on their bodies, often in Chinese characters rather than Western text. Members usually wore hoodies with metallic embellishments, often depicting dragons.

They started to make a lot of money. Expanding from their base of selling ecstasy, crack and meth to ravers, they began to export the super powerful BC Bud to the U.S. — often using helicopters — for incredibly large profits.

And they made enemies. In the clubs, the white and East Asian United Nations started stepping on the feet of the more established mainly Indian and Pakistani members of Independent Soldiers. As the United Nations matured as a gang, a number of crimes committed against members of the gang and the Independent Soldiers occurred and went unsolved. In 2008, there were more than 100 gang-related shootings in Vancouver, with 20 fatalities. It was a gang war not unlike Quebec's in that young men were shooting at each other to maintain and expand drug-selling territory, but instead of the combatants being two easily identifiable groups, it was a number of small, unfamiliar factions. None of the victims or accused belonged to Hells Angels.

As the United Nations grew more ambitious, they decided there was only one place to go in order to raise themselves above the mass of small gangs vying for space in the Vancouver area — and this is where the irony kicks in — so they formed a working relationship with Hells Angels. They weren't a puppet gang in the traditional sense, but allied independent contractors.

It had been going on for years, but only came to police attention when they were investigating Hells Angels and a United Nations member named Omid Bayani kept showing up in taped conversations. Bayani's an interesting guy. He was born in Iran and raised in the Baha'i faith — a religion whose adherents have sworn off violence, even in cases of self-defense. His father was murdered just before his family moved to Canada, and his family (when Omid was 16) moved to Turkey, then later to the desolate streets of Red Deer, Alberta.

Bored and out of both work and school, Bayani started robbing convenience stores for cash and cigarettes. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend ratted on him and he found himself in court. His lawyer called him “really just some sort of young puppy out on the lot.” The judge disagreed, and sentenced him to five years.

At the Bowden Institution, a medium-security prison just outside Red Deer, Bayani's personality came out. He found his calling in life. Almost as soon as he arrived, he got in trouble for beating a fellow prisoner with a homemade club that had the words “goof beater” carved into it. While he served his sentence, Bayani had 21 new charges leveled against him, including threats and assaults against guards. His official report said: “The subject has a history of being sullen and defiant of officers.”

He was transferred to the Kent Institution, a maximum security prison in Agassiz, B.C., about an hour away from Abbotsford. The reports on him did not improve:

His case was brought to the attention of the people at immigration, and an order signed by the federal immigration minister called for Bayani's deportation because his presence “constitutes a danger to the public of Canada.”

But they never got around to getting rid of him. The official story is that the people at immigration just lost track of him.

They should have asked the police where he was. The cops saw him in a car in Abbotsford and stopped it. A search yielded a loaded .38-caliber handgun, a machete, a hunting knife, a piece of a wooden chair that police thought would be used as a club, some marijuana and cocaine. And he was arrested — along with his partner, full-patch Hells Angel Vincenzo Sansalone from the Haney Chapter — on April 4, 2007 for trafficking 600 liters of GHB, better known as “roofies” or the “date-rape drug.”

After his arrest, his connections with Hells Angels became clear. “Mr. Bayani, although he is a UN gang member, was known to work and associate criminally with other gangs,” RCMP biker specialist Inspector Gary Shinkaruk said. “The fact that he is charged jointly with a member of the Hells Angels is not a surprise to us and it is really indicative of the networking and the relationships that now exist in the Lower Mainland and throughout Canada where these criminal organizations are working cooperatively with each other.”

And it's not like Bayani was a maverick member of the United Nations who dealt with the Hells Angels against club wishes. The cops realized that when they watched the May 15, 2008 funeral of Duane “D.W.” Meyer, who was shot on the front porch of his friends' house in Abbotsford by some men in a silver Mercedes-Benz SUV. Meyer had been a prominent member of the United Nations. His funeral was attended not just by all the important members of the United Nations, but also all the local Hells Angels, including full-patches. Clearly, the United Nations — which had actually been incorporated in opposition to Hells Angels — were now working for them.

But the United Nations ran into a far bigger opponent than Hells Angels. American authorities caught Roueche on a stopover in Texas while he was flying to Mexico. He was arrested for conspiring to possess cocaine, conspiring to export cocaine, conspiring to import marijuana and conspiring to launder money. The prosecution wanted Roueche to get 220 years in prison. They didn't get it, but they weren't exactly disappointed. He was sentenced to 30 years and fined $8 million.

That did not leave the United Nations leaderless. Barzan Tilli-Choli, born in Iraq, took over and moved the United Nations' focus onto another group, Red Scorpions.

Barzan Tilli-Choli

Red Scorpions were very much like the United Nations. They were a multi-racial gang who dealt drugs through nightclubs and had generally white leadership. Tilli-Choli decided that the best way to cripple Red Scorpions was to target their leaders, the Bacon brothers. The Bacons — Jonathan, Jarrod and Jamie — had been dealing drugs for years out of their mom's Surrey apartment. They were so successful that their gang became the United Nations' primary opponents in the South Vancouver area.

So it was decided among the United Nations leadership that they would assassinate the Bacon Brothers. Using taped phone conversations and evidence gained from other listening devices that had been ordered as part of the Roueche investigation, the police arrested the conspirators before they could act. In all, eight men were arrested in connection with the assassination plot, and one name in particular stands out. They were: United Nations leader Tilli-Choli, 26; his second-in-command Daniel Ronald Russell, 27; members Karwan Saed, 32, Soroush Ansari, 28, Dilun Heng, 25, and Yong Sung, 27; and associate Aram Ali, 23; and Ion William Croitoru, 43.

The last guy is, of course, Johnny K-9. It is entirely possible that Johnny could have fallen in with these much younger, mostly Asian gangsters naturally, as he did with the Gravelle brothers in Hamilton, but my sources in the city tell me a much more likely story. Johnny, looking for work, approached the Hells Angels and they put him in contact with the United Nations for the Bacon Brothers hit.

While it led to a number of arrests in the end, the relationship between Hells Angels and the United Nations in British Columbia looks like the template for their continued success in Canada. The Hells Angels in British Columbia are generally an older group. They own bars and other legitimate businesses, and are not the type to get their hands dirty by handling drugs or anything else that could get them into trouble.

Traditionally — as under the Nomads model established by Stadnick — the Hells Angels would rely on associates in support organizations and puppet clubs to work for them and potentially take the fall. But the Animals nightclub incident in Abbotsford proved that wasn't going to work anymore. They were just too few in number to compete on the streets of Vancouver.

So Hells Angels employed a more diverse gang with much bigger numbers. It wasn't unprecedented; Stadnick himself used the Zig Zag Crew in Winnipeg with its many Iranian and Aboriginal members; even the mighty Rockers of Laval had a black president in Greg Wooley.

The difference between these new allied gangs and the traditional puppet gangs is motivation. The members of puppet gangs and support crews work for the Hells Angels — even put their lives on the line for them, often for meager rewards — in the hopes of becoming Hells Angels down the road. But the members of these new, more diverse gangs (at least the non-white ones) don't have that option.

Instead, they work with the Hells Angels because it's in their best interest to do so. The Hells Angels have access to drugs and weapons and other resources that the individual gang members could never get without them. For many, the quickest road to wealth involves working with the Hells Angels, like it or not. And, of course, the white ones — for a perfect example, look at former Crip turned full-patch Hells Angel David “White Dread” Buchanan — still get the chance to become a Hells Angel.

There are all-white puppet gangs and support groups, especially in suburban and rural areas. In the area around Toronto alone, Hells Angels can expect help and support (and potentially new members) from Aces & Eights, Iron Horse, the Rangers, Redline, the Brotherhood and perhaps also the Comrades and the North Wall.

Their existence (and the willingness of the more diverse gangs to work with them) is testimony to the Hells Angels' strength in Canada. In fact, Hells Angels are so strong in Canada, they can make national headlines simply by being mentioned in a scandal.