The owner of 1505 was a man named Ceasar Tiojanco, but he didn't live there. A successful agent at Regent Park Fairchild Realty, Tiojanco and his wife, Myrna, actually owned six properties in the area and had rented out unit 1505 ever since they had purchased it for $82,000 in 2003. In the spring of 2007, he rented 1505 to a 20-year-old man who had run into a few problems with the law. When he took over the unit, Raphael Baldini was facing charges related to a break-and-enter incident. But Baldini soon moved out of the unit and sublet it to some friends.
Although it was a one-bedroom unit, in October 2007, a total of four young men lived in 1505. And they were, to use a shop-worn expression, “known to police.” All of them had been charged with a number of serious crimes, and all of them had connections to known gangs. In fact, the foursome had become something of a gang themselves.
The de facto leader of the quartet was Edward “Eddie” Sousakhone Narong, 22. Trouble for him started early. Back in 2000, his buddy—then-14-year-old Quang Vinh Thang “Michael” Le—had been severely beaten by a gang of Korean youths. Ethnic biases learned from parents and grandparents often came with immigrants over the Pacific to the New World, just as they had come over the Atlantic for earlier generations. In places like Coquitlam, where they both lived, Southeast Asians like Le, who was Vietnamese, and Narong, who was Thai, frequently found themselves the targets of other bullies, who were almost as often of European descent, or Aboriginal Canadians, as they were from other parts of Asia.
Le decided not to let the issue drop. He assembled a gang of mostly Southeast Asian buddies, including Narong, to exact revenge. The little army invaded the Hi-Max karaoke club, which the original bullies frequented, and attacked their alleged leader, 16-year-old Richard Jung, as he headed to the men's room. They beat him so badly, he was dead before the ambulance arrived.
Le was charged with second-degree murder, a charge that was reduced on appeal to manslaughter. Narong, the only other member of the gang to face charges, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In 2002, both were sentenced to conditional terms of 18 months. The others walked.
Almost as soon he got out of Willingdon Youth Detention Centre, Narong started getting in trouble again. In fact, between his release in 2003 and October 2007, he faced more than 30 different criminal charges, mostly related to drug trafficking and weapons, but somehow managed to get most of them stayed for various reasons. One he couldn't shake involved assaulting a police officer back in May 2007. In October, he was still on probation for that. It was said that he was part of—in fact, the leader of—a shadowy street gang called the Red Scorpions, but that he had recently left the organization to branch out on his own. Other elements had wrested control of the gang from him, and he was no longer welcome there.
With him in suite 1505 were the Lal brothers. Twenty-six-year-old Michael Justin Lal and 22-year-old Corey Jason Michael Lal were alleged at the time to have been career drug dealers, working mainly for a rival street gang known as the Independent Soldiers, before joining forces with Narong. Just as Narong had experienced with the Red Scorpions, outside forces had taken over the Independent Soldiers, making most of the old guard uneasy, to say the least.
A year earlier, Michael had received a conditional 17-month sentence for trafficking, and Corey was facing charges for trafficking after having been arrested in the summer of 2007. One of Michael's closest friends, Mahmoud Alkhalil, had been murdered in 2003 when he was just 19. Police allege the killing was connected to the 2001 slaying of Alkhalil's older brother Khalil and the subsequent attacks on Phil Rankin, the lawyer defending Michael Naud, the man many accused of killing Khalil Alkhalil. The Alkhalil brothers were accused of being members in yet another street gang, the Indo-Canadian Mafia.
Rounding out the little group—which was becoming known on the streets as the Lal Crew—was 19-year-old Ryan Bartolomeo. He too had been arrested for drug trafficking. In December 2006, he was charged with four counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a controlled substance, and two firearms-related charges, and was still facing those charges in October 2007.
He was close to his older cousin, Damon Bartolomeo, who in 2002 was one of four men accused of breaking into a Surrey marijuana-growing operation, beating its owner with brass knuckles and holding him captive. One of the co-accused was Juel Ross Stanton, a full-patch member of the East End chapter of the Hells Angels, arguably the dominant gang in Vancouver. The four accused got off the hook when witnesses refused to testify or were found unreliable and the victim, Alexander Goldman, died of a stroke in 2004. The incident happened just two blocks from Balmoral Tower.
At the same time that Chris Mohan let Schellenberg and the building manager into 1504, all four of the Lal Crew were inside 1505.
Eileen Mohan didn't know the guys in 1505. She had met only Baldini, whom she had judged to be an okay guy based on his appearance and external habits. “There was no traffic in and out of the suite. The only guy I saw was the tenant. He looked like a normal guy. He was dressed nicely—no tattoos, no bling-bling, nothing alarming,” she said. “If they had told me the person living beside me was a drug dealer, do you think I would have stayed there?”
At about four o'clock on that Friday, the building manager noticed Schellenberg's truck in the parking lot. Since he should have left at least an hour before that, the manager chose to investigate. Getting out of the elevator on the top floor, he could immediately tell something was wrong. The door of 1505 was open, and so was that of 1504. It was eerily silent. He slowly approached 1505. He saw Schellenberg facedown on the ground. There was a pool of blood under his nose, but it was no longer flowing. He was clearly dead.
Although he couldn't smell anything, the building manager immediately thought there had been a gas leak, and that Schellenberg had asphyxiated. Scared the entire building could go up in flames, the building manager raced down the stairs and called 9-1-1.
The fire department arrived and evacuated the building, and as protocol dictated, authorities shut down the SkyTrain and blocked off the nearby highways. The firefighters went up to the 15th floor, and their gas detectors indicated there was no leak. They went into 1505. Inside, they found six corpses. It was no gas leak. All six men were lying in pools of blood, and there were visible holes in their heads. It was clearly not a job for the fire department. They called the police.
Despite its size and high crime rate, Surrey doesn't actually have its own police force. Instead, they have a 640-officer RCMP detachment. Alerted by the firefighters, the RCMP sent out a HAZMAT unit and members of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (IHIT), a unit formed by a number of police forces and RCMP detachments in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia to investigate all homicides across city and town borders.
RCMP Superintendent Wayne Rideout was in charge of the IHIT, but he had already left for the weekend. And many of the other IHIT officers were investigating an incident earlier that day in which a small private plane, a twin-engined Piper Seneca, had flown into the ninth floor of an apartment building in nearby Richmond.
Overwhelmed by the massive amount of evidence at the crime scene, the IHIT officers at Balmoral Tower called Rideout at home. “I got the call from the plainclothes commander at the Surrey detachment,” he said. “They were suspecting now that it was a multiple homicide. We called out multiple teams.” Rideout drove out to Balmoral Tower. “I knew this was going to change IHIT forever,” he said. “We had never had anything like this.” Indeed, it proved to be British Columbia's biggest mass murder in recent history.
Before long, more than 100 investigators from the already stretched IHIT were on the scene. “It doesn't just impact that investigation. It impacts all investigations,” Rideout said. “It has really drained resources.”
On the stopped SkyTrain, Eileen Mohan started to hear rumors of a gas leak. She immediately thought of the gas guy looking at the furnaces in Balmoral Tower. At least, she thought to herself, Chris had left for his basketbal
l game even if something had actually happened there.
She got off the train and walked the rest of the way home. The cops and fire department cordon was still in place. She could not go home. She knew something bad had happened but wasn't worried about Chris—at least, consciously. “I was looking to the very side of the building where my son lay dead. I had no idea,” she said. “There was no fear in me.” Unable to get inside and unwilling to stand out in the cold rain, Eileen headed to a relative's house nearby to wait for the authorities to declare Balmoral Tower open again. Still she couldn't get over the sick feeling in her stomach. “I thought, ‘why am I feeling this way?’”
Unable to relax, she went back to Balmoral Tower after midnight. It was still closed, and the worry she had felt rose to the surface. “It began to register on me. My son hadn't called. It was one o'clock,” she said. “He always called to let me know where he was.”
She rushed back to her relatives' place. Unable to call Chris himself, she called the friends he had told her he was going to play basketball with. They told her that Chris had never made it to the game in Burnaby. Sitting on the couch in her relatives' house, Eileen heard on the news there had been a murder in Balmoral Tower. “It was then that my heart sank,” she said. “I went limp.”
The next morning, Eileen began to get calls from some of Chris's other friends. He was supposed to have attended the funeral of a close friend at ten o'clock that day, and they wanted to know why he hadn't shown up. She didn't know what to say. She returned to Balmoral Tower at four o'clock that afternoon. She was still not allowed in. She now knew that six people had been murdered in the building and had even heard people say that it had happened on the 15th floor. She went up to a detective, and begged him for any information about her son.
“Does your son have any tattoos?” he asked.
“No, my son does not have a single tattoo on his body,” she answered, surprised by his question. “Christopher has a mole here.” She pointed at her chin, where she too had a mole. “And he has a mole here,” she pointed at her sternum, where she also had a mole. The detective said he couldn't help her.
Then Eileen asked a couple of RCMP officers if they had heard about her son; he was missing and had not called. She saw their faces drop. They asked her if she had a picture of her son.
A few hours before Eileen Mohan's heart was broken, concern started to wash over the Schellenberg house in Abbotsford. Ed's wife Lois had made pizza for dinner, but Ed had not returned to eat it. She got Kevin, their son, to call him. No answer. But that wasn't too strange; Ed would never pick up when he was with a customer or on the road.
She had heard on the TV news that night that there had been a gas leak at Balmoral Tower but didn't worry about Ed, even though she knew he was working on the gas lines in that very building. She was confident he knew what he was doing. The news of the small airplane crashing into the Richmond apartment building dominated the program. She hadn't heard the whole story, so she immediately called her sister who lived in an apartment building in Richmond to see if everybody was okay. Her sister was fine—it wasn't even that close to where she lived—but she brought up what was going on in Surrey, aware that Ed, his brother-in-law and nephew had all been working there. Lois said it was just a leak or something, nothing to worry about. Her sister disagreed. “Haven't you heard? It's been upgraded,” she said. “It's a murder or a police incident.”
Now it was serious. She called Brown, who told her he left Ed and the 21-year-old boy at the building to finish the job and had not heard from either of them since. Lois called their two other children and told them to return home immediately. Brown called his son. The boy told him that they had finished all the units except for 1505, but that Uncle Ed was going to take care of that one, so he went downstairs to get ready to go. Then the fire department and police arrived and took him from the building. They didn't answer any of his questions, but the other people they evacuated were all talking. They kept asking him if he was okay, if he was hurt. He was confused; he had no idea what had occurred. He was waiting in the parking lot when one of the other residents of the 15th floor called him. He asked the caller what was going on. “Something terrible has happened on the 15th floor, and your guy's van is still down in the parking lot, and his tools are still out in the hallway,” the caller said. “Something horrible has happened in 1505.”
Chapter 2
The Gangster's Playground: 1907–1998
Chris Mohan, Ed Schellenberg, Eddie Narong, Michael Le, and the Lal brothers would soon be known as the Surrey Six, and the events at the Balmoral Tower in October 2007 would mark a turning point in the history of criminal violence in the Lower Mainland. But that history was long and deeply entrenched.
For most of the early part of the twentieth century, organized crime in Vancouver was largely under the radar of the media, but without realizing it, the combined governments of Canada, British Columbia, and Vancouver had put together a perfect incubator for organized crime. They called attention to specific ethnic groups (primarily the Chinese, but also immigrants from the Indian subcontinent) and passed laws that specifically targeted them. The government isolated these groups in their own segregated neighborhoods, which the city had declared high-crime areas, and the only official interaction with the government these groups had was with a police force that had a reputation for excessive and even unnecessary violence. And, as though that weren't enough, the government gave these groups an instant black market by banning opium, which was not only a major part of these ethnic groups' culture, but also a huge source of revenue for the otherwise poor Chinese neighborhoods.
It was the same kind of situation that has bred crime organizations around the world, most notably the Mafia in Sicily and Calabria. As with the Mafia, powerful Chinese men, mainly merchants, banded together for their own benefit, cooperating with one another to ensure mutual success. These groups, perfectly legal to form, eventually became known as “tongs,” from the Chinese word for “meeting place.”
Eventually, others in the Chinese community began to approach the tongs to acquire loans, to settle disputes and to get protection. And, just as the mafia had, the tongs began to act as a shadow government for Chinese communities around the world who felt alienated by their official governments. Of course, unelected leaders with extra-legislative powers are as prone to temptation as anyone, and many influential members of tongs used their prestige to become involved in loan sharking, extortion, human trafficking, prostitution and drug trafficking. Organizations within tongs that are dedicated to organized crime are called “triads,” from a phrase that means “secret society.”
The first triad to be discovered in Canada was the Hung Shan Tong (Red Mountain Society) in Barkersville, British Columbia, in 1863. Members of a much larger tong in San Francisco had come to the tiny mountain town after gold was discovered there and quickly set up businesses appealing to the Chinese community already there.
Tongs spread all over British Columbia and, to a lesser extent, Chinese communities in the rest of Canada as well. One member in Vancouver, Shi Mei (also spelled Shu Moy), rose to prominence after the 1908 opium ban, using an ingenious method. Opium was still legal in Asia, and many tourist boats traveled there, including Canadian Pacific's Empress Line. Shi bribed the line's mostly Chinese employees to smuggle opium back to Canada. After he became wealthy, he started a local string of gambling parlors catering mainly to Chinese patrons, who played a number of games, especially a dice game called “barboodey.” He was part of the focus of McGeer's 1928 crime probe, which called him “king of the gamblers” and accused him of paying the police $50 a month for protection.
Police made crackdown after crackdown over the years, but had little success in stopping the vice trades in Chinatown. Before long, the people of Vancouver came to tolerate, even ignore, vice crimes in Chinatown, developing a “what happens in Chinatown stays in Chinatown” mentality.
In the late 1970s, competition for trade among
gangs operating out of Chinatown was fierce. The Lotus Gang, also known as the Lotus Brothers—founded in 1976 by Ling Yue Jai (who also went by the name David So)—was young and aggressive, and began to upset the equilibrium that had been established. They especially annoyed another young gang, the Gum Wah (Golden Chinese), and the two came close to war. Outnumbered, the Gum Wah preemptively entered into a mutual relationship with the Hung Ying (Red Eagles), a smaller gang made up mainly of immigrants from Hong Kong and ethnic Chinese immigrants from a number of Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia. Looking for more manpower to catch up, the Lotus Gang formed a loose alliance with Los Diablos, a street gang that was originally made up of Hispanic immigrants but, after a series of arrests and deportations, had become mostly made up of Indian Canadians.
War was avoided, but attrition through arrests and defections led to there being three prominent gangs in Chinatown: the Hung Ying, the Lotus Gang (by then led by a man named Park Shing Low) and the Viet Ching (made up primarily of ethnic Chinese immigrants from Vietnam and led by Hy Hang and Law Kin Keung, also known as Allan Law). The Gum Wah had been largely sidelined, having been eclipsed by the Hung Ying.
Throughout the 1980s, the Hung Ying and Viet Ching fought a war of attrition, leaving the Lotus Gang as the top crime organization in Vancouver's Chinatown. But they would soon see another rival, one with roots in China's Communist Party.
The Red Guard, established to prosecute Mao Zedong's bloody Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, established a number of prison camps, which were taken over by the Communist Party. The biggest of them—just outside Guangzhou (still known to many Westerners as “Canton”)—was called the “Big Circle” because the barracks were constructed in a ring around the guardhouse.
The Notorious Bacon Brothers Page 2
