Gang war spills blood in Kelowna

With Bacon murder trial set to start, reporter looks back at shooting that shook Kelowna 6 years ago

It was a public execution that shook Kelowna to its core.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in August 2011, outside a popular hotel and casino, a Porsche Cayenne carrying gangsters from Metro Vancouver was sprayed by gunfire.

When the shooting stopped, notorious Red Scorpion Jonathan Bacon was dead, his Hells Angels pal Larry Amero was seriously wounded, and their Independent Soldier associate James Riach was grazed and in shock.

Two young women in the white luxury SUV were also wounded. Leah Hadden-Watts was struck in the neck and paralyzed, and Lyndsey Black was hit in the leg.

The public gunplay left local residents stunned, and police across B.C. scrambled to find those responsible and contain retaliatory violence.

Eighteen months later, three men linked to a rival gang — Jujhar Singh Khun-Khun, Jason Thomas McBride and Michael Kerry Jones — were charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder.

Their judge-alone trial is scheduled to begin on May 29 before Justice Allan Betton, who was appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court just two months before the Kelowna shooting.

Former mayor Sharon Shepherd still remembers that devastating day when her community was rocked by the unprecedented gang violence.

Residents sitting on patios nearby were almost caught in the gunfire, she said. The art gallery was hit with one of the bullets. City hall is only half a block away.

“There were mothers walking with children nearby,” Shepherd said.

Then there were the workers at the Delta Grand hotel, where the Porsche had been parked just before the shooting.

“Certainly it was very emotional and worrisome to the community when the incident happened, and I certainly know there was a lot of talk among those who were working at the Grand at the time,” said Shepherd.

“This really was something unsettling for our community that we hadn’t experienced up to that time. . . . It made us feel quite vulnerable.”

She said the coming trial, expected to last months, will force the city to relive that terrible day.

“It’s too bad it has taken so long to come to a trial, because it kind of brings back all the memories again for those who were there,” she said.

Long before the Bacon murder, city officials and the RCMP were aware that Lower Mainland gangs had opened up shop in the lakeside resort community. The Hells Angels started a Kelowna chapter in 2007. Gangs had infiltrated some local businesses and efforts were made to shut them down, Shepherd said.

“I stood up, maybe nervously at times, to say the individuals weren’t welcome in our community,” she said.

But before Aug. 14, 2011, gangsters in Kelowna were “quite quiet,” the former mayor recalled.

“It certainly was a shock to have that shooting take place.”

The Kelowna hit was not as shocking to anti-gang investigators with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit.

They had been watching Bacon, his younger brothers Jarrod and Jamie, and their Red Scorpion gang for years, both as potential targets for violence and as suspects in a litany of crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder.

At the time of the Kelowna shooting, the two younger Bacon brothers were in jail awaiting trial.

The CFSEU had issued warnings to the public to steer clear of the siblings in case they were shot at. Some members of the rival United Nations gang were already charged with plotting to kill them and were being held in pretrial custody.

Police were also aware that Jonathan Bacon, Amero and Riach had formed a loose gang alliance they had dubbed the “Wolf Pack.”

Pat Fogarty, then a superintendent with the special unit, said last week that the Bacon murder was not “a well-planned event,” but came from a chance sighting.

After the shooting, the suspects fled in a greenish Ford Explorer that was later discovered charred and abandoned.

“They helped the police gods in leaving evidence all the way up the trail with the burning of the car,” said Fogarty, now CEO of Fathom Research Group.

“My understanding was that . . . there was an opportunity. They saw Amero there and they saw Bacon there, made a phone call (and were told), ‘Go up and get ’em. We got them at a particular spot.’

“And then they mustered a crew together and they went from there.”

At the time, gangsters were ahead of police on the technology front, said Fogarty, using encryption programs on their BlackBerrys that allowed them to communicate freely about murders and other criminal business.

“Every single bad guy was on these encrypted things and they would just drop them at the end of the day or just wipe them. It was quite interesting stuff,” Fogarty said.

Police couldn’t get court orders for servers being used since they were located out of the country.

“They would talk very openly on these things,” Fogarty said.

“There was a series of shootings and retaliations, and we had this ongoing sort of war that developed from there.”

Within a month of the Bacon murder, there were more police warnings and retaliatory strikes.

Khun-Khun, already a suspect, was shot in September 2011 outside the home of his gang leader Sukh Dhak — who himself would later fall victim to the “Wolf Pack war” in November 2012 in Burnaby.

Khun-Khun survived the 2011 shooting, only to be targeted again in January 2013.

Miraculously, the man nicknamed “Giani” (or priest) survived the second shooting too. His associate Manny Hairan, another suspect in the Bacon murder, wasn’t as lucky. He died instantly.

For months before Hairan was shot to death in Surrey, he had been secretly helping police in the Bacon investigation — dubbed ENitrogen.

After his death, there were more shootings and more murders.

But the conflict between the Wolf Pack and those who police dubbed the Dhak-Duhre-UN group didn’t begin in Kelowna.

It was a spinoff conflict from one that started years earlier in Abbotsford, when the UN gang put bounties on the heads of the Bacons and their associates.

That UN hunt — or “human safari” as it was described in court — resulted in the murders of several men linked to the brothers. Jonathan Bacon was seriously wounded when the UN shot him outside his family home in the fall of 2006.

A former UN gang leader, who can only be identified as C due to a publication ban, recently testified at the Cory Vallee murder trial about his gang’s efforts to recruit new members after several were arrested in 2009.

Vallee is charged with killing Bacon pal Kevin LeClair and plotting to kill the Bacons in 2008 and 2009.

C testified that a respected UN elder named Manh (Versace) Nguyen brought a young gangster named Billy Tran into the UN fold. Tran became a member and was presented with UN rings.

Tran operated his own drug lines along with his close associates — brothers Gurmit and Sukh Dhak. While the Dhaks never joined the UN, C said, they did become official “associates.”

The problem with granting UN membership to a gangster with his own underworld history is that you take on all his “beefs” and enemies. In the case of Tran and the Dhaks, there were many. On October 2010, Gurmit Dhak was with his wife and young kids at Burnaby’s Metrotown Mall when a gunman approached. Dhak was killed in front of his devastated family.

No one has ever been charged in Dhak’s murder, but the assassin is believed to be from the Wolf Pack side, thus dragging the UN into the new war even if some original members were reluctant.

Police were on high alert the day of Dhak’s memorial service. Anti-gang police officers were following Tran and Jason McBride, one of the accused who will go on trial this month, as they left the service and drove to Vancouver’s Kensington Park for a meeting.

Police moved in. Two of the gangsters present had firearms and a photo of a rival who the cops believe was the next murder target. The plot was foiled and Tran soon left Canada for Vietnam.

In February 2013, Khun-Khun, McBride and Jones were arrested in the Kelowna murder.

C testified that he paid money every month into the jailhouse accounts of all three so they could buy snacks and other items in the canteen.

He said he got the money from Versace, who also fled Canada as the police probe into the UN ramped up.

C was reluctant to keep up the payments because he was worried it would link him to the Bacon conspiracy and leave “the impression I was paying to keep them happy.”

While C insisted he had nothing to do with the Kelowna murder, he admitted that he and others in the UN had uploaded photographs and other information about Bacon, Amero and Riach to an online site called Photo Bucket.

Defence lawyer Mike Tammen asked C about the intelligence-sharing method.

“You were posting those photos on Photo Bucket so that people that were interested — I suppose people on your side of the Wolf Pack war — would know what people on the other side of the Wolf Pack war would look like?” he asked. “Right,” C replied. Like C, there are other former gangsters who have co-operated with police and are expected to testify at the Kelowna trial.

It is not known if any of the other victims in the Porsche Cayenne that day will take the stand.

Amero, the Hells Angel, remains in jail in Montreal facing cocaine importing charges. He is due to go to trial in July, but is applying to have the case thrown out over delays.

Independent Soldier Riach was charged with drug trafficking in the Philippines in 2014, but a judge later freed him due to problems with the investigation. He is believed to be living in Greece.

Hadden-Watts, the most seriously injured of the survivors, is continuing with a lawsuit she filed against all three accused, as well as the Delta Grand and neighbouring casino, seeking damages for her life-altering injuries.

Hadden-Watts declined an interview this week about the murder trial finally starting.

“It is very difficult for me to talk about what has happened,” she said. “I’m trying my best to move forward from the incident.”

Fogarty, the retired Mountie, said police deserve a lot of credit for the work they did on E-Nitrogen.

“When police start squeezing various components within (the suspect) group, eventually they fall,” he said. “But it takes a long time for that to happen.

“I do believe we had a lot of success back then through a lot of tiring and long work. The results didn’t come easy. It didn’t start overnight and it’s not going to be resolved overnight.”