SHOOTOUT LINKED TO DRUG FEUD

Police Had Never Seen This Many Shots Exchanged During a Clash

Last Thursday night's brazen shootout at Dover Neighbourhood School
Park was just the latest chapter in an on-going war over illegal drugs
and unsettled debts, with battlefields mainly in Richmond and North
Vancouver.

One of the hospitalized victims of the Jan. 4 park shooting, Nikki
Tajali, 26, is the younger brother of 30-year-old David Nima Tajali,
who was gunned down in the hallway of his Richmond apartment building
late last year, on the day he dodged another bullet of sorts.

The elder Tajali was shot Nov. 16, on the very day the B.C. Supreme
Court sentenced several of his co-accused to between four and seven
years in prison for their involvement in a dial-a-dope criminal
organization known as Dark Alley. (Dark Alley doled out cocaine,
heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine mainly via telephone requests
and was shut down by the Langley RCMP following a year-long
investigation in 2003.)

For some reason, charges against David Tajali were either stayed or
dismissed.

He was shot repeatedly at Casuarina apartments, a new 246-unit
residential high-rise on Hemlock Drive, near Westminster Highway and
Garden City Road. An apartment resident, who narrowly avoided a bullet
fired in the hallway sliced through his bathroom wall, dragged a
heavily-bleeding Tajali into his apartment and called 911.

Retaliatory Shot?

In the latest violence, young men armed with automatic weapons fired
as many as 150 shots at Dover Park, near a Dover Crescent home with
links to the Tajali family, sources say.

In addition to Nikki Tajali, who remains in hospital recovering from
serious injuries, the two other men injured during the gunplay were
Vahid Mahanian, 30, and Sahand Askari, 22.

All are well known to police, according to Sgt. Shinder Kirk, of the
Integrated Gang Task Force, which is one of the police forces
assisting the Richmond RCMP investigation.

"Certainly from the gang task force perspective, we know these
individuals...we're not just aware of them...we know what they do, we
know who they associate with, and now it's just a question...of
bringing them before the courts."

Richmond RCMP Cpl. Peter Thiessen said investigators have received no
co-operation from the three men who have been hospitalized with
gunshot wounds.

All are being treated as suspects first and victims second, he
said.

As of press time Wednesday, two of the men were still in hospital
under police guard.

One man, who was recovering in Richmond Hospital, had a police officer
stationed at the door to his private room, and a security guard
checking the identification of all visitors to the ward.

Although some of those involved are of Persian descent, Sgt. Shinder
Kirk noted that the criminal organization believed linked to the park
shooting has members from all ethnic groups: Caucasian, Asian and
Middle Eastern.

Kirk said he's never seen this many shots exchanged during a
clash.

North Shore Link

The apartment and park shootings appear to be linked to earlier
serious violence in North Vancouver.

Last July, a man and a woman were kidnapped after their white SUV was
fired at repeatedly at a sports complex in North Vancouver.

One of the kidnapping victims was rescued by police in Richmond the
following day in the same building in which David Tajali was shot in
November.

Vahid Mahanian, who suffered a serious gunshot wound to his lower body
sustained during the park shooting, also has links to the North Shore.

In 1999, he and his girlfriend were sentenced to four years in prison
for a 1997 home invasion in North Vancouver in which the pair
brandished machine guns and terrorized a young family.

Sahand Askari had also previously been charged in connection with a
home invasion in North Vancouver in 2002.

David Tajali is also well known to police for more than just being a
shooting victim.

He was charged in Vancouver in October 2003 with carrying a concealed
weapon, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and
unauthorized possession of a firearm. All those charges were either
stayed or dismissed.

In June 2005, he was charged with drug trafficking and possession of a
controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking, but one charge
was stayed and the other dismissed.

David Tajali's co-accused weren't as fortunate in the dial-a-dope
police investigation.

Eric Montgomery was sentenced to seven years and eight months, John
Wayne Newson to six years, Philipe Zopf to five years and eight
months, and Margit Mikelsons to four years. Their last names suggest
they are from various cultural backgrounds, as police have indicated
about this crime group.

The group David Tajali was linked to, Dark Alley, had a reputation for
being brazen.

Its members issued business cards with phone numbers for their
round-the-clock drug operation. There were managers running each
community--from Aldergrove to Abbotsford, Langley to Cloverdale and
other Lower Mainland cities--and they created shifts to ensure drugs
were available and supplied seven days per week, 24 hours per day.

At the time of David Tajali's 2003 arrest--police issued a press
release in in which his name was misspelt Talaji--he was also living
in Richmond.

Thiessen said it was a miracle that those living in the hundreds of
homes that border three sides of Dover Park, as well as those
strolling through the park, or walking their dogs, avoided the errant
gunfire.

Some bullets struck homes in six residential complexes, including
bedrooms.

Thiessen said police are devoting the bulk of their resources to this
investigation, including 135 police officers who were called to the
park shooting within the first 12 hours.

He noted that two semi-automatic assault rifles and four
semi-automatic handguns were recovered from the scene of the
Thursday's shooting.

"We're not talking small arms here. We're talking semi-automatic
assault rifles that are meant for one purpose. I think it's clear what
the purpose was and what was going on in this park."

Violent History

A new Middle Eastern integrated crime unit was recently created on the
North Shore, involving the West Vancouver Police Department and the
North Vancouver RCMP.

North Vancouver RCMP Const. John MacAdam said there is organized crime
in the Middle Eastern community, but not on the same level as mafia or
biker gangs.

"There's an element of organized crime they do deal with, with drug
dealing, dial-a-doping and fraud rings," he said.

Professor Robert Gordon, director of the school of criminology at
Simon Fraser University, suspects the Dover Park shooting was actually
an attempted hit that went sideways.

"(They ran) into problems because the other side...were more canny and
better equipped and able to push back more vigorously than they had
anticipated," he said. "These guys don't bother with lawyers. They
have much less expensive and much more effective ways of dealing with
their disputes. And they just use handguns...'You've got to abide by
our agreement otherwise we're going to start popping you off.'"

Knocking out a drug competitor may also have been a motivation for the
shooting, Gordon said.

In the early 1990s, the gang Persian Pride operated from the North
Shore.

It comprised young men, between 16 and 23 years of age, mainly from
the Iranian community. With about a dozen people at its core, the gang
sold drugs and provided the muscle, and had links to organized crime
groups.

"It sounds very much as if there's a resurgence of criminal groups
operating...out of North Vancouver and one assumes if they're ranging
as far as Richmond that they're involved in drugs. I'd put my money on
it."

Gordon said he wrote an organized crime and gang report for the B.C.
Attorney General's ministry in the late 1990s in which he predicted
that there would be a resurgence in crime group or gang activity.

"I don't think it will be anything like it was last time around
because the government learned a hell of a lot from that. But it
obviously is resurging."

Gordon doesn't believe this is an ethnic-based clash.

He likened the violence to that seen in recent years in the
Indo-Canadian community, with "warring groups involved in various
aspects in (the drug) market."