Lots of prisoners managed to escape from the Big Circle and, accompanied by defectors from the Red Guards, they fled to Hong Kong, which was at the time a British colony. Hardened by their time in captivity and at odds to make ends meet in one of the world's most expensive cities, many of them turned to crime. They started with robbing couriers, then moved onto bigger targets. Their loose association became known as “the Big Circle Boys.”
Fortuitously for them, the West fired one of its last blows of the Cold War by liberalizing immigration policies in many countries, especially for immigrants who had fled a communist regime. Because the people of Hong Kong were officially British subjects—and many were eager to leave, with the knowledge that Britain was due to turn the colony back over to Chinese ownership in 1997—many went to Canada. They regrouped in Chinese neighborhoods in many cities there, particularly Vancouver and Toronto.
The Big Circle Boys first came to the attention of Canadian law enforcement in 1988 when a rash of pickpocketings hit Toronto's Chinatown and adjacent subway stops. Credit cards were being copied and put into use, and phone cards—all but extinct now, but common at the time—were being run up to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each month. Further investigations led law enforcement to believe that the Big Circle Boys were importing drugs to Canada from East Asia and that they ran a number of brothels in Chinatown and Scarborough in which the employees had been trafficked from impoverished Asian countries with promises of legitimate jobs.
As they grew in strength, the Big Circle Boys expanded their repertoire. They would go into restaurants in large groups, eat and drink all they wanted, then leave. Any waiters or others who challenged them would be threatened with violence. And they also ran a “window cleaning” scam—in which shop owners who did not pay them a monthly stipend could expect to have their windows smashed.
Later, the gang specialized in home invasions, simply barging their way into the houses and condos of wealthy Asian-Canadians and taking what they wanted. They were also linked to counterfeiting cash and passports, as well as trafficking heroin into the United States. A 1996 report by the Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada (CISC) stated:
There are clear indications Asian heroin traffickers such as the Big Circle Boys are co-operating with Vietnamese gangs, Laotian, Fukienese and Taiwanese criminals, Italian organized crime, [the] Hells Angels and with any criminal organization that will buy drugs.
But the nature of the Big Circle Boys, and the code of silence that is strictly enforced in Chinese Canadian communities, make their moves nearly impossible for law enforcement to monitor. So it came as a complete surprise on November 4, 2007, when a 10-year-old girl called 9-1-1 to report that her dad had been shot in front of their mansion in Vancouver's upscale Shaughnessy neighborhood. The victim was Hong Chao “Raymond” Huang. He was dead by the time emergency crews arrived at the scene. The 45-year-old had done his best to keep a low profile but was well known as a Dai Lo (Big Brother), a high-ranking member of the Big Circle Boys. Neighbors had been suspicious of the Huang family, who purchased the $3.7-million house with extra security in 2003. They told media they found it odd that the family had never learned to speak English and kept a number of large guard dogs—very rare among Chinese families—on the premises.
The case was never solved; an indication of just how easy it is for the Big Circle Boys and other gangsters to fade into the background when they have to.
In the 1960s, Vancouver experienced another mass migration. Rumors of abundant drugs, relaxed laws and cheap rent attracted a remarkable number of young people, most of whom were—correctly or not—described as hippies. By 1967, the area had become frequently described as Canada's hippie capital, and young people and their fashionable habits were commonplace in the area. Mayor Thomas J. Campbell referred to them as “a scum community” and added, “If these young people get their way, they will destroy Canada. From what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world!”
But the sheer numbers of hippies and others who thought like them had a remarkable effect on the city. Vancouver opposed freeways, became a forerunner of relaxed drug laws and even gave birth to Greenpeace in 1971. But while the people of Vancouver had different attitudes than the rest of the country when it came to drugs, they still had to abide by federal laws. That became abundantly clear in the summer of 1971. The city's chapter of the Youth International Party (better known as the Yippies) organized a “smoke-in”—a protest in which about 2,000 people openly smoked marijuana in defiance of the law—in Gastown's Maple Tree Square on August 7. Mayor Campbell, who had embedded undercover officers among the series of Yippie-inspired protests that summer, sent in the riot police. Although a CBC cameraman on the scene claimed that protesters were throwing bottles and pieces of pavement at officers to provoke them, the footage that was carried in the media was exclusively of helmeted officers without identifying badges beating what appeared to be helpless youths with long riot batons. Things got far worse for the cops' reputation when a 16-year-old from Ontario sued them, claiming that a cop had broken his leg with his baton and threatened to break the other if the boy did not stand up and leave. A total of 79 arrests were made in what are now known as the “Gastown Riots.”
Mayor Campbell and the cops may have hated them, but to organized crime, the hippies were something of a godsend. Generally law-abiding people otherwise, they had an insatiable hunger for drugs and, as they became settled in the prosperous city, the money to pay for them.
But it was not always easy for the hippies—almost exclusively white English-speakers—to go to Chinatown and communicate a desire to buy drugs, especially with traffickers who were ever vigilant for undercover cops. That gap was filled by another cultural phenomenon that came to Vancouver in the 1960s—outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Like the outlaw motorcycle gangs in other parts of the world, the ones in the Vancouver area aped the fashions and lifestyle popularized by the 1955 Marlon Brando film The Wild One and codified by the Hells Angels. They rode chopped and stretched-out Harley-Davidsons with extra-loud pipes, they grew their hair long and wore leather jackets with their clubs' names and logos on the back. And they sold drugs. Most outlaw motorcycle gangs sold drugs they manufactured, like methamphetamine, while others relied on crime organizations like the Mafia to supply them with heroin or cocaine. In the Vancouver region, though, the outlaw motorcycle gangs were generally supplied by the Chinese and, as marijuana cultivation began to become widespread in the Fraser and Okanagan Valleys, from local growers.
There was no shortage of recruits. White kids in Vancouver had banded together as gangs for decades. Collectively called “the Park Gangs,” each group was focused on the park they considered their turf. Before the bikers became the driving force in the area, the park gangs generally acted like a parody of 50s greasers with souped-up cars they'd race on city streets every Friday night, denim jackets, chains and switchblades. Their drug activities included drinking beer and sniffing glue.
Generally, they were into small-time crime. Jim Chu, Vancouver's police chief and a graduate of Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School, remembered his first experiences growing up near one of the Park Gangs. “The Riley Park gang was a product of the housing project by Ontario and 33rd Avenue. They were lower-income, often single-parent families living there. I didn't think of them that way at the time—they were just kids I went to school with,” he said. “They wore jean jackets and jeans. Other kids wouldn't wear that—that signified you were a Riley Parker. They were tough guys who fought with tire irons and chains, and if you fought one of them, you had to fight them all.”
He generally steered clear of the gang members but was confronted by them in 1973 when he was a 14-year-old paperboy. “Our shack at 26th and Main won recognition for the fewest complaints in the city. Our supervisor said, ‘You guys did great, I'm going to buy you some burgers and pop,’” he recalled. “The day came, and he brought the burgers to the shack. And just as soon as he dumped th
em on the table, the Riley Park guys came over and said, ‘These look good, and we're gonna help ourselves,’ and ate them all. The supervisor didn't do a thing. He was too scared to get involved. To look back, it's sort of funny now. Whenever I see the character of Nelson Muntz on The Simpsons, I think of the kids who became Riley Parkers.”
Though their appearance may cause him to grin now, Chu remembers that some Riley Park gang members were far from small-time miscreants. “I remember one student from my Grade 5 class who was a hardcore Riley Park gang member,” he said. “I later played rugby with him at Tupper before he was expelled. Then, in his 20s, he was arrested for murder. By that time he'd gotten pretty heavily into a life of crime and violence. He's dead now.”
The most notorious of the Park Gangs was the Clark Park gang from the Kensington neighborhood. Through informants, Vancouver police discovered not only that they were selling drugs, but that they had also incited some hippie gatherings to riot and attack police. Constable Ken Doern went undercover and infiltrated the gang for five months in 1972. He was unable to prevent an attack on two police officers by Clark Parkers, who used dog chains with lead weights tied to them, but he did learn of a plan to violently disrupt a Rolling Stones concert at the Pacific Coliseum later that summer. The cops decided that the planned attack had political overtones far more important than proving who were the toughest guys in Clark Park, so they formed a strategy to prevent, or at least lessen, the effects of the assault.
Alongside the standard security, there were 50 uniformed officers present and another two dozen in full riot gear hiding in a nearby building. The doors opened at six, and things got ugly right away. About 2,500 angry people who had bought fake tickets were milling around the parking lot, many of them already drunk or high, or both. Police and security were still dealing with them when the Clark Parkers showed up at nine, as the Stones were into their first set.
Instantly recognizable in their checkered lumberjack shirts (what's called a “Kenora dinner jacket” in Ontario) and steel-toed boots, the Clark Park gang made their presence known by throwing a homemade smoke bomb into the crowd and then empty bottles at the Coliseum's glass doors. The police rushed in, and the crowd grew more aggressive, throwing bottles, planks from a nearby fence, rocks, pieces of concrete, and even Molotov cocktails. Aware that the riot would become uncontrollable once the 17,000 people inside the building came out at 11:30 p.m., the police called in reinforcements from the RCMP. Unable to quell the mob by other means, the RCMP executed a mounted charge at 11 p.m., which finally led to the combatants retreating.
The riot left 31 police injured, including 13 who were taken to hospitals. Among the 22 arrested was a man who was wielding a chain with a sharpened hook on one end and a leather handle on the other.
Keenly aware that the Clark Park gang was a serious threat to security, the police formed a new group called “the H-Squad.” Made up of big, tough cops—the minimum height was said to be six foot four—the H-Squad hung out in Clark Park, posing as regular citizens. The official plan was that if any gang members tried to rob them, assault them or sell them drugs, the cops would arrest them. Others have told me it didn't exactly work out like that. The cops, said to be armed with baseball bats, were rumored to have sought out gang members and beat them or thrown them into Burrard Inlet. No matter what happened, the Clark Park gang ceased to exist after a while, and the other Park Gangs also calmed down. But those same bored, alienated white youth soon found another way to bond and make money—outlaw motorcycle gangs.
In Vancouver, as with the rest of Canada, outlaw motorcycle gangs started small—usually just a group of high school friends—and only succeeded if they were tough enough to protect their territory and smart enough to make powerful alliances. Perhaps realizing this, in 1977, two prominent Vancouver-area outlaw motorcycle gangs—the Gypsy Wheelers of White Rock and the 101 Road Knights of Nanaimo—decided to join a prominent East Vancouver outlaw motorcycle gang called “the Satan's Angels,” becoming chapters of that club. Sensing their opportunity, the Satan's Angels did their best—through threats of violence and actual violence—to chase off other prominent clubs like the once-powerful Ghost Riders.
Suddenly, the Satan's Angels became the most prominent outlaw motorcycle gang in British Columbia. They became known for their annual summertime pilgrimage to the Okanagan Valley. A fruit-growing Mecca, the Okanagan invites thousands of migrant pickers every year. These days, many are from Mexico, but back in the 70s and 80s, they were almost entirely French Canadian. And they were not well-liked by the locals. Derisively called “Frogs,” they had a reputation for wild parties and petty crime. And they had experienced run-ins with both the police and the bikers before.
After a few locals raided a camp set up by French Canadian fruit pickers on the night of June 26, 1980, causing damage and injuries, no charges were laid. But the local Osoyoos RCMP detachment promised to keep investigating. They also warned the French Canadians to leave town for the next week to avoid having a problem with the Satan's Angels, who were having a “run” in the area. Many pickers left immediately, and those who didn't pitched their tents in the safety of the orchards they worked in. “We heard a rumor the bikers were coming to clean up our French problem for us,” joked RCMP Sergeant Lou Turcott.
The reputation of the Satan's Angels spread, and they were soon approached by Sonny Barger's Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels to become prospective chapters of the big club. The Hells Angels were eager to expand back then, especially into areas with lucrative drug markets. A few years earlier, in 1977, the New York City chapter had sponsored Canada's first Hells Angels chapter in Montreal, but they had no connections on the West Coast and—you can call this irony if you want—they were all French speakers.
The Satan's Angels jumped at the chance to be part of the big club, but the guys in Oakland had one condition: the Satan's Angels had to eliminate, chase off or subdue every other outlaw motorcycle gang in British Columbia. The Satan's Angels went to work, and by the summer of 1983, there were just three outlaw motorcycle gangs left in the province—the Satan's Angels, the Tribesmen of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and the Highwaymen of Cranbrook in the mountains near the Alberta border. The agreement was that the Tribesmen would be a prospective Satan's Angels (and later Hells Angels) chapter, while the Highwaymen would become what outlaw motorcycle gangs call a “support club” and law enforcement calls a “puppet club”—a smaller gang that pays tribute to the parent club and performs various tasks for its members.
To celebrate, the newest chapters of the Hells Angels threw a huge party. Delegations from Oakland and Canada's other chapters in Sorel and Laval, in Quebec (along with their friends from prospective chapters in Sherbrooke, Quebec; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Hamilton, Ontario) arrived. Oakland's brass and Canadian national president Yves “Le Boss” Buteau withheld the Satan's Angels' new patches until they got rid of some of their less dedicated members. Still, there were more than enough bikers to go around, and the Hells Angels opened chapters in East Vancouver—some of the most lucrative drug-selling territory in North America—on December 22, 1983; in Haney (now part of Maple Ridge, British Columbia) on June 13, 1987; and in Burnaby on July 23, 1998.
The Hells Angels soon emerged as the top dogs in the organized crime world in Vancouver. They trafficked drugs and prostitutes from the Chinese and also from Quebec—especially, law enforcement contends, from the Hells Angels new Sherbrooke chapter. Taking a cue from other successful crime organizations, the British Columbia Hells Angels were rarely ever caught doing anything wrong. Instead, they invested their money in legitimate business—often strip joints and bars—and hired, coerced or extorted others to do their work for them, often using prospective membership as a lure.
That gave rise to a large group of loosely associated young men who were unofficially affiliated with the Hells Angels but ready to do their bidding at the merest hint. Called support crews, they were easy to identify. Uniformly white—because n
on-whites could forget about ever becoming a full-patch Hells Angel—they tended to wear red and white, the club's colors, and have words like “Support 81” either on their clothes or tattooed on their skin. The number 81 is a none-too-sophisticated code for Hells Angels, derived from the fact that H is the eighth letter of the alphabet and A is the first.
But being on top did not make the Hells Angels invincible. Although, as is often the case with outlaw motorcycle gangs, the people the Hells Angels had most to fear were their own “brothers.” And that also extended to their friends and associates. John Ginnetti, whom everyone called “Ray,” was a flamboyant guy with a quick temper. Ginnetti met and befriended a number of Hells Angels and their associates when he was a successful car salesman on the Kingsway in East Vancouver in the 1980s. He quit that job and became first a direct marketer, then a stock broker and financial adviser, first working for Canarim Investment (Vancouver's largest at the time), then going independent. Police allege that a big part of his business came from legitimizing the investments of his pals in the Hells Angels. He made no secret of the fact he had friends in the club. He had run into trouble once, when investigators burst into his telemarketing company in 1986. Inside they found an illegal boiler-room operation with “sucker lists” of potential scam victims. Just as they were about to confiscate a bag alleged to contain $50,000, an employee threw it out the window. The investigators allege Ginnetti caught it and drove away.
Ginnetti was a temperamental man and once came to blows with volatile actor Sean Penn at a Vancouver restaurant (the pair had to be separated by waiters). He had hired Roger Daggitt—a former mixed martial arts fighter before he became an enforcer for the Hells Angels—as his full-time bodyguard. The position required that Daggitt quit his post with the Hells Angels, mostly because Ginnetti worked with other criminal organizations, including some Russians. Quitting the Hells Angels is not always an easy thing, but Daggitt's size and ferocity made it possible.
The Notorious Bacon Brothers Page 3
