Gangster linked to burning of getaway car

Security footage shows bodyguard buying gas can

A bodyguard for the late Sukh Dhak bought a red jerry can five hours before the getaway vehicle used by Jonathan Bacon’s killers was set alight, a security camera shows.

Thomas Mantel purchased the gas container at a Kelowna service station at 11:43 a.m. on Aug. 14, 2011, according to footage played Wednesday in B.C. Supreme Court in Kelowna.

The purchase is significant in the Crown’s view because a red jerry can was seen under an SUV found burning at 5:20 p.m. that day on Commonage Road in Lake Country.

Mantel was the bodyguard for Dhak, who the Crown says was behind the killing of Bacon and the wounding of three others outside the Delta Grand hotel.

Mantel and Dhak were killed the same day in November 2012 in what police say was a revenge hit for the attack at the Grand, which was itself part of an ongoing bloody feud between organized crime groups.

Other security footage viewed in court Wednesday showed Mantel and another associate of Dhak, Stephen Leone, checking into the Comfort Inn in West Kelowna at 6 a.m. on the day Bacon was killed.

Mantel and Leone, who has since also been murdered, entered one room together carrying duffel bags, then emerged together and checked out of the motel at 11:32 a.m.

Security footage taken from the William R. Bennett Bridge cameras shows a silver truck similar to the one Mantel was driving earlier that day crossing Okanagan Lake toward Kelowna at 11:43 a.m.

The timing of Mantel’s movements in West Kelowna matches testimony given earlier at the trial by a gang member turned Crown witness.

That witness, who cannot be named, said he met Mantel and others in downtown Westbank early the morning of the day of the shooting.

The Crown says that Dhak instructed three men to stage the attack in Kelowna because he believed one of the people in the Porsche Cayenne that was shot up, Hells Angel Larry Amero, had been involved in the killing of Dhak’s brother Gurmit in 2010.

Those three men, Jason McBride, Jujhar Khun-Khun and Michael Jones, are charged with the murder of Bacon, and with the attempted murder of Amero, Lyndsey Black and Leah HaddenWatts.

Bacon died at the scene, HaddenWatts was shot in the neck, Amero was shot in the face and chest, and Black was shot in both legs. A fifth person in the vehicle, James Riach, was not injured and ran away.

The accused killers have been in custody since their arrest in 2013. Their trial is being conducted in a second-floor courtroom specially fortified for the proceedings, under heavy security.

The trial, which continues today, is being held without a jury in front of Justice Allan Betton.