Gang associate jailed five years for conspiring to murder rival

A United Nations gang associate has pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder gangster Randy Naicker, and has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Sheldon Paine, 28, entered his plea and was sentenced Friday in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.

Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen said the case would normally attract a much more severe sentence but there were “exceptional” circumstances involved. He noted the guilty plea, expressions of remorse from Paine and the accused’s plans to turn his life around.

In an agreed statement of facts read out in court, Crown counsel Gordon Matei said the murder of Naicker, 34, in June 2012 was a “highly sophisticated, coordinated” event that occurred on a busy public street in Port Moody with numerous members of the public exposed.

Paine was in the vicinity when two masked men shot Naicker multiple times at close range near St. Johns and Queens streets, before speeding away in a getaway vehicle.

Matei said Paine’s main role in the murder was to assist his close friend, Michael Jones, a member of the UN gang. Jones said the gang was trying to kill Naicker — a onetime high-ranking member of the Independent Soldiers gang — so Paine made efforts to locate him, the prosecutor said.

Sometime before the shooting, Paine drove Jones to Naicker’s building, where Jones accessed the parkade using a key fob and fixed a tracking device under Naicker’s vehicle, Matei told the judge.

On the day of the shooting, Paine drove Jones to Port Moody and they watched Naicker’s vehicle from a nearby location, Matei said. Paine heard shots fired and then saw the getaway vehicle speed by, with firearms being thrown from the getaway vehicle.

The murder was part of the ongoing gang conflict between the UN and Independent Soldiers, Matei said.

Len Doust, Paine’s lawyer, told the court that, after the shooting, there were several attempts on his client’s life, so Paine fled to South Africa.

In November 2015, Paine was arrested in a suburb of Johannesburg and extradited back to Canada. He returned in June.

Doust told the court that his client, who has no prior criminal record, had ambitions to restore his life and has had no contact with his former gang associates.

“He wants nothing to do with those people,” he said.

Paine told the court he wanted to say he was sorry for ever getting involved in the gang lifestyle and taking part in the murder plot.

In a victim impact statement read in court, Naicker’s father, Hemraj Naicker, said: “Randy’s murder has taken everything from me. I am unable to take joy from the simple pleasures of life.”

The judge imposed a sentence of seven years in prison, but after giving Paine credit for pre-sentence custody, reduced the sentence to five years.