A LICENCE TO KILL

To the RCMP in Victoria, Richard Young was a trusted informant. In
exchange for his inside information on an alleged heroin ring,
information that turned out to be lies, they paid off his debts,
erased his past and gave him a new identity.

Then he committed murder.

No details of that crime can be published because the man is legally
shielded as a member of the Witness Protection Program.

But this much can be told ...

Richard Young wasn't recruited by the Mounties for his information. He
approached them in the summer of 2000 -- a "walk-in," as one officer
referred to him.

The RCMP in Victoria have never explained why they thought he would be
useful. They didn't know a lot about him, and what they did know
wasn't flattering. He was being investigated by a local police
department on allegations that he defrauded his landlord of $48,000.
They also knew he owed his foster father $78,500 on a line of credit
he had taken out for him. But they signed him up as a police informant.

They gave him a handler, an RCMP officer who was assigned to build
trust with Young and extract tips about Victoria's criminal underworld.

The officer was in unfamiliar territory, too. He had just started with
the RCMP's Vancouver Island District Drug Section and Young was his
second informant in 12 years of policing. He had no formal training in
handling informants: he'd once had the chance to take a course on
dealing with sources, but had been too busy.

The informant and the handler followed protocol: Young was given a
code name, E8060, and he talked to the officer regularly. The RCMP
hasn't specified how much he made in those early days -- only saying
he was paid on "an individual evaluation of information basis" -- but
it couldn't have been much. He hadn't infiltrated any big-name gangs.
None of his tips had led to the execution of any search warrants or
wiretaps.

But three months into Young's fledgling career, he gave the RCMP a
gift. At a Christmas party on Dec. 5, 2000, Young met and befriended
Barry Liu.

The Mounties had been after Liu for years, and had arrested him in
1999 as part of what they alleged was an international heroin
smuggling ring that stretched all the way to Burma and Thailand.

Liu worked as a waiter and as a grocery clerk, but was alleged to own
three homes and was a part-owner in an auto detailing shop. The RCMP
believed he was behind much of the heroin on the streets of Victoria
and that he was an associate of a Vancouver criminal network with
possible links to the Big Circle Boys. The Big Circle Boys, a gang
originating in Hong Kong, had a reputation for being ruthless, and no
one had come close to penetrating them with an undercover agent --
until the new snitch talked his way into Liu's crew.

Liu didn't speak English well and needed a new lawyer to represent him
on the heroin charges.

Young seemed to know his way around and had the name of a lawyer, Tom
Bulmer, whom he had hired in an unsuccessful bid to buy a nightclub.
He introduced Liu to the lawyer and Bulmer agreed to take Liu's case.

The accused heroin dealer and Young became so close that Liu asked him
to serve as a sort of legal liaison. Young had full access to Liu's
legal file, and on at least one occasion took it home from Bulmer's
office so he could read it and explain some things to his Asian friend.

They were practically attached to each other. If Liu went to the
lawyer's office, Young went with him. It was the same with restaurants
and coffee shops. Young became a fixture at Liu's car shop, Auto FX
Accessories.

The intelligence began pouring in to the RCMP. Young paged his handler
constantly with news. He was asked to draw diagrams, so the police
knew exactly who was sitting where with Liu at his various meetings.
Sometimes, Young spoke to his handler several times a day.

Then, on Jan. 9, 2001, Young said he had come across some terrifying
news. He told his handler that Liu had threatened to harm an unnamed
Crown attorney.

The Mountie needed more information. This was serious. There was a lot
at stake in the upcoming heroin smuggling trial, one of the most
expensive cases in the history of the RCMP. Was it possible the
accused drug lords were trying to derail it with bloodshed?

The next day, the threat escalated. Young told the Mountie that Liu
was talking about taking out a British Columbia judge named Wayne Smith.

Two days later the list of targets expanded to five, including more
lawyers and a police officer.

According to the informant, the accused heroin dealer had gone to
Vancouver and paid someone $45,000 to do the deeds.

The Mounties went on high alert. Security units raced across Victoria
and Vancouver to protect the targets. The police discussed setting up
silent alarms at their homes. Every officer in the drug squad was
assigned to the case.

The Mounties attached themselves to Liu. They got authorization to tap
his phone, and a surveillance team sprung into action. "We'd put him
to bed at night and pick up right from first thing in the morning,"
the handler later testified. "Wherever he went, we were with him."

But at least some of the top Mounties in Vancouver wondered about the
source of these threats.

Besides Young's stories, the Mounties had no evidence: nothing from
the wiretaps, nothing from the surveillance.

After a week, the Victoria Mounties were summoned to E Division
headquarters in Vancouver. By the end of the meeting, the officers
from Vancouver and the officers from Victoria would walk away with
very different impressions of what they had decided.

The top Mountie in the room, Chief Supt. Gerry Braun, told the
officers to use a "statement analysis" to test Young's
reliability.

The informant had already given the Mounties a 103-page statement and
Braun thought a polygraph expert should scrutinize the statement. Was
this guy worth all the time and money?

But the Victoria officers had a lot invested in this young man who had
so quickly manoeuvred himself into the backrooms of Barry Liu's life.
They argued that Young's statement wasn't appropriate for such an
analysis, and that it was unnecessary in any case. It also appears one
of the Victoria officers was miffed at the brass from Vancouver for
meddling in the case.

"Obviously, we had far more information about the aspects of this case
than Chief Supt. Braun," he later testified. "I have always operated
on the principle that it's the working group of investigators who make
decisions about what steps to take in an investigation."

So he was surprised when he opened his e-mail the next day and found
an eight-page report by Sgt. Richard Konarski, a polygraph specialist
who has since gone on to teach criminology at Simon Fraser University.

Konarski had been forwarded Young's statement, and he had some serious
doubts about the Mounties' star informant and his claims of a hit list.

"It would seem critical to determine the subject's motivation in
coming forward," wrote Konarski, who questioned whether Young believed
what he was telling his handler. "( Young) has demonstrated a lack of
commitment to the substantive issues of concern in this
investigation."

The Victoria Mounties have never publicly and fully explained what
they thought of Konarski's report. A few of them, including the
handler and some of his superiors, were briefed on the report but,
beyond that, not much changed.

The Victoria officers decided the investigation was up to them and
they believed Young was the real deal. They didn't know what kind of
person he was, or exactly what had inspired
him to come forward.

Seven months after Young was first interviewed by the Mounties, it
looked as if they had overvalued their informant.

Nothing Young had told the police was going to happen had
materialized. They got authorization for more wiretaps and still
turned up nothing.

It appeared the five people on the hit list were safe -- until one day
in March 2001 when a suspicious-looking Asian man showed up in the
RCMP's parking lot.

Young had warned them about this. He was still in constant contact
with his handler.

The informant had promised that Liu's people were planning
counter-surveillance on the Victoria Mounties, and now, out in the
parking lot of the RCMP's Nanaimo Street building, there was an Asian
man going from car to car, writing down licence plate numbers.

It intensified. Over a series of days, the Mounties kept seeing the
same Asian faces in their rearview mirrors.

One night, an Asian man in a Honda Prelude followed an officer's
unmarked vehicle out of the RCMP parking lot.

This settled it. It was time for the RCMP to get Barry Liu off the
streets. It was also time to make Young an official agent of the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police. The informant had proven his worth.

Now, the RCMP promised to do for Young what he had tried so
desperately to do his entire life: erase the truth, erase his identity.

They arranged a "buy-and-bust" for June 12, 2001. Young asked Liu to
hook him up with some cocaine, and when he did, the police swept in
and arrested him.

Young entered the federally funded Witness Protection Program. As per
policy, the federal government paid his debts to his landlord and his
foster father -- $130,000 -- and he got a new name, a new location and
an opportunity to become whatever and whomever he wanted. The Victoria
Mounties handed Richard Young a licence to lie and sent him on his
way.

Ever since Barry Liu's arrest, Tom Bulmer knew there was something
rotten about Agent E8060.

First off, the lawyer was enraged when he discovered it was Richard
Young who had squealed on his client. The Mounties had let Young sit
in on his client's defence strategy sessions. They also sat back and
did nothing when Young accessed his client's legal file.

The lawyer called it the grossest violation of solicitor-client
privilege in Canadian history, and then took it a step farther by
accusing the RCMP of defrauding him. (It was Young who had promised to
pay Liu's legal fees, and he had written Bulmer a $75,000 cheque.
Young didn't have enough money to cover it.)

But the lawyer had a hunch there was more to this informant. His first
clue came from the Crown Attorney's office, weeks after Young had been
handed his new life.

Almost as soon as Barry Liu was charged in the June buy-and-bust, the
trafficking charges were stayed. The prosecutors discovered there was
a report that had been written by an RCMP polygraph expert that raised
serious doubts about Young's credibility. Every time the Mounties had
gone to a judge seeking permission to tap Liu's phone they had
forgotten to bring the report with them. The judges had no way of
knowing that Agent E8060 might not be a solid source.

The lawyer kept at it, and when he got word that some of the teens who
hung out at Auto FX had a story for him, he was able to do what the
Mounties had refused to do -- show Richard Young for who he really
was.

Jason Cheung, a 19-year-old college student who hung out at Auto FX,
told the lawyer that Young took him out for dinner one night and made
him a strange offer.

Everyone at the shop already thought Young's stories were beyond
belief, but this was a doozy. Young said he worked for a gang and the
RCMP had $50,000 of the gang's money in their Nanaimo Street building,
the teen said.

Young explained he was planning a break-in to get the money back. But
to do that he needed someone to get the licence plate numbers of the
officers' cars; that way he'd know when the fewest Mounties were in
the building.

The teen didn't believe him, but he went to the parking lot that same
night. "He was giving things like cigarettes and gas money to do this
stuff, and it was easy money to do nothing," the teen would eventually
testify.

Another night, Young asked the teen and his friend to go back to the
RCMP building and follow a van. The teen did it -- in his 1993 Honda
Prelude.

Another teen heard the same story about Young's gang and agreed to
help. He didn't believe Young either, but he completed three missions
in his Honda Civic because Young bought him dinner and gas.

"We just thought it was just his way to make us hang out with him or
something," he eventually testified.

By the time he was done, Bulmer had tracked down three people, all of
whom had heard the same story about the gang, and he put them on the
witness stand. Their testimony was enough for Judge Dean Wilson to
make up his mind about Young.

"I find, on the evidence before me, the 'surveillance' activity was a
cruel charade orchestrated entirely by the machinations of Young," the
judge ruled on Sept. 6, 2002.

The Mounties' case, constructed entirely on the word of a guy who
walked into their office one day, collapsed.

To make matters worse for the RCMP, Judge Wilson eventually stayed all
the charges in the 1999 heroin case because he believed the Victoria
officers hadn't taken the proper steps before resorting to wiretaps.

Barry Liu and the six other Asian-Canadian men arrested in the
2 1/2-year investigation were off the hook.

And thanks to the Witness Protection Program, so was Young. His
contract guaranteed him protection, despite the fact a judge had
decided he was a liar.

But if the Mounties had any hopes their secret agent would transform
himself into an honest and productive citizen, they were mistaken.

During one of his final submissions before the judge, Bulmer accused
the Mounties of negligence for dismissing Sgt. Konarski's report.

"If you knew that there could be damage down the road because you were
given a report saying this man may be subverting justice -- you can
pray that no harm comes, but if it comes, it's yours because you
should have known," the lawyer said. "Even if you didn't want the harm
to happen ... and you crossed your fingers and put them behind your
back and hoped nothing was going to happen, if something bad happens,
it's your problem."

Something bad did happen. Young was convicted of killing someone while
using his new identity, provided by the RCMP. Although Tom Bulmer went
to the press, demanding an inquiry into the conduct of the RCMP and
their secret agent, the RCMP has never said why that request went nowhere.