LICENCE TO KILL

Depending on your point of view, Richard Young was a deadbeat, a
thief, a liar, even a child molester. But, despite warnings to the
contrary, to the Mounties in Victoria he was a trusted informant, one
they paid handsomely. In exchange for his inside information on an
alleged heroin ring, which turned out to be more lies, they paid off
his debts, erased his past and gave him a new identity. He cost
taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then he vanished. And
then he committed murder.

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 this guy
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 all the same.

They gave him a handler, an RCMP officer who was assigned to build
trust with Mr. 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
Mr. 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: Mr. 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 Mr. Young's fledgling career, he gave the RCMP a gift.

At a Christmas party on Dec. 5, 2000, Mr. Young met and befriended Barry Liu.

The Mounties had been after Mr. 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.

Mr. Liu worked as a waiter and as a grocery clerk, but allegedly
owned 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 Mr. Liu's crew.

Mr. Liu didn't speak English well and needed a new lawyer to
represent him on the heroin charges. Mr. 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 Mr. Liu to the
lawyer and Mr. Bulmer agreed to take Mr. Liu's case.

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

They were practically attached to each other. If Mr. Liu went to the
lawyer's office, Mr. Young went with him. It was the same with
restaurants and coffee shops. Mr. Young became a fixture at Mr. Liu's
car shop, Auto FX Accessories, where a lot of young Asian men, with
souped-up Honda Civics and Preludes, spent their time and money.

The intelligence began pouring in to the RCMP.

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

"Generally, I just let him talk," the officer would later testify.

It was amazing. This guy had plugged the RCMP into Barry Liu and his
crew. The timing couldn't have been better, because on Jan. 9, 2001,
Mr. Young said he had come across some terrifying news.

He told his handler Mr. 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
handler's superiors told him to watch the situation closely.

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

Two days later, the list of targets expanded to five. Now, as well as
Judge Smith, there was Crown attorney Brian Jones, an old defence
lawyer of Mr. Liu's named Jeff Green, RCMP Const. Martin Stoner --
one of the officers who helped bring down Mr. Liu in 1999 -- and a
fifth person not named by Mr. Liu, Mr. Young said.

It got worse for the targets. 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 affixed themselves to Mr. 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 Mr. Young's stories, the Mounties had no evidence: Nothing
from the wiretaps. Nothing from the surveillance. Nothing from other
sources. And guarding the people on the alleged hit list was costing
the Mounties a lot of money.

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 Mr. Young's
reliability. The informant had already given the Mounties a 103-page
statement and Supt. 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 Mr. 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 Victoria Mounties' 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.

Sgt. Konarski had been forwarded Mr. 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 Sgt. Konarski, who questioned whether Mr.
Young believed what he was telling his handler. "(Mr. 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 Sgt. 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 informant continued to get paid
for his information and Sgt. Konarski's report was filed away. The
head of the drug section didn't read it. Neither did the handler's
immediate supervisor.

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

All of the questions about him went unanswered, including the most obvious one:

Who was Richard Young?

Since the time he was old enough to get into bars, Richard Young had
been a fixture on the Victoria nightclub scene, always talking about
how he was going to buy various bars in the downtown core with his
family's money.

But the huge inheritance just never arrived.

The men and women who served him drinks remember him well, seated at
the bar and drunk.

He was wimpy, and would flinch and whine if someone laid a hand on
him, even in jest. He was dishevelled, many days wearing the same
clothes he'd worn the night before, and always desperate for someone
to listen to him. One minute he'd boast to bar staff about his
business plans and his money, and the next he'd help load the
dishwasher, or better, ask if he could crash at their place for a few days.

To convince everyone of his unseen fortune, he handed out promissory
notes for thousands of dollars. No one dared let him run a tab.

"He had a promissory note to everyone in town. ... You could
wallpaper a room with them," said Sam Perry, a former bartender.

His big business deals were many: He offered to buy the Boom Boom
Room from its owner, for about half a million dollars. He claimed he
was a part-owner at the Skybar. And there was Bobby McGee's, another
pub he said he was involved with. In fact, he was; he ran errands for
the owner.

"I've been in the nightclub business for many years. I've seen a lot
of people try to play that," said one of the managers at the Boom
Boom Room. "He just wanted to be somebody."

Mr. Young tried so hard to appear to be a high roller that he handed
out black pens bearing his name and telephone number to bar-goers and managers.

The truth is, the only thing Richard Young inherited from his mother
was a ton of baggage.

Mr. Young was the second-oldest of five children. His brothers and
sisters can't agree on exactly how many men fathered them -- two or
three? -- but they do agree that their household was in disarray.

Richard and his siblings lived in a rented duplex in the municipality
of Saanich, on the outskirts of downtown Victoria. For most of their
lives, their mother was on disability, dying of cancer that started
in her breast and moved up to her brain.

Their clothes were second-hand and certainly not cool -- jogging
pants and bargain-basement running shoes. There were toys in the hall
and dirty dishes piled on the counter. The neighbours repeatedly
complained to the municipality about the overgrown grass and the
garbage on the lawn, which was dumped from the second-storey deck by
the children. Social-service workers were a common sight at the house
until his mother died.

And though Richard's siblings debate who initiated the violence --
Richard or their mother -- they all say the screaming and punching
were frequent. Richard was prone to explosions and fits over the
strangest things. If someone put onions on his sandwich, he would
yell and scream.

The rest of his brothers and sisters coped with their upbringing in
different ways, and most of them moved on to hold jobs and have families.

Richard had his own way of dealing with it.

"You never believe anything that guy says," says a younger brother.
"From the time he was eight years old, he was a pathological liar."

Richard started with basic thievery, which evolved into con artistry.
The clerks used to follow him around the nearby Mr. Grocer because
his pockets always attracted candy. The police got involved when he
moved on to jewelry -- an engagement ring -- and auto theft -- a car
motor, his family says.

His brothers and sisters can't remember if the police were notified
when he was accused of molestation as a teenager.

A sister remembers the day she got the phone call from the family's
social worker, who told her Richard had been accused of molesting a
boy he babysat.

"I phoned him and told him, 'I love you, but did you do this?' "

He said he hadn't.

His sister says she believes he received some sort of treatment, but
isn't sure if he was ever charged with a crime. "If he did it, I
can't hate him for it. He's never done it to anybody else," she
believes. "I think it was a boy, but he treated this kid like it was
his own, like he does every kid."

Richard maintained his fondness for children, something that always
bothered the bar staff he got to know so well. "He always had some
foster kid around," said Mr. Perry, the former bartender. "He'd buy
them pizza and take them to the arcade. ... Everyone thought it was a
little weird."

After his mother died, Richard was separated from his siblings and
moved in with a foster father. He dropped out of high school and
never kept a part-time job for long. It was always easier to have pretend jobs.

It was about six years ago that the younger brother let Mr. Young
sleep at his bachelor apartment for a few weeks. The brother had gone
to live with a relative after their mother's death and hadn't seen
his older brother since childhood. Richard told him about all of his
nightclubs, and the famous people he knew: Microsoft founder Bill
Gates and Vancouver Canucks centre Trevor Linden.

By the end of Richard's stay, he had racked up a slew of long
distance phone charges, taken $300 and vanished, his brother says. "I
was kind of choked. .. I had my own place and my own car and I was
working at McDonald's ... and he just took it."

Richard later reconnected with his youngest brother, who had also
moved in with relatives after their mother died. When Richard found
out his little brother was in an up-and-coming boy band, he told him
he worked for the music label BMG, the brother says. "We believed him
because we were kids."

Richard convinced the father of one of the band members to front
$4,000 for recording equipment on the promise that BMG would pay it
back, his brother says.

Shortly after Richard got the money, he disappeared, his brother says.

"He's a crazy kid who always loved money because he never had any,"
says the brother, who now works as a dance choreographer. "He's a
very insecure person who needs to tell lies to make himself feel
better. And I honestly think he believes them."

It was a surefire formula: With every person he met, Richard Young
adjusted reality to make himself look good. Whatever anyone wanted,
he could get it.

A recording studio? No problem.

Money for a nightclub? Sure thing.

Proof of an assassination plot? Coming right up.

The only problem was, it was always a temporary fix. He didn't have
the power to permanently change the truth and escape his past --
until the RCMP helped him transform reality for good.

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

Nothing Mr. 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.

Mr. Young had warned them about this. He was still in constant
contact with his handler. From mid-January to early March, there had
been only six days they hadn't spoken.

The informant had promised that Mr. 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. Another time, an
officer was followed by an Asian man talking into a walkie-talkie.

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

An agent is a big step up from an informant. Informants merely report
back to their handlers what they see and hear -- they aren't given
orders. But as an agent, the Mounties could instruct Mr. Young to buy
drugs from Mr. Liu so their officers could swoop in and arrest the
accused drug dealer. They didn't have enough evidence to charge Mr.
Liu on the murder-for-hire allegations, but at least this way, Mr.
Liu would be back in jail and the targets would be safe.

Mr. Young's new status as an agent also meant that his paycheques got
fatter. His official contract, which he signed on March 29, 2001,
guaranteed him $2,500 a month. He wasn't a fink-for-hire anymore. He
was an official employee of Canada's national police force.

But that wasn't the sweetest part of the deal.

The RCMP promised to do for Mr. 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. Mr. Young asked Mr.
Liu to hook him up with some cocaine, and when he did, the police
swept in and arrested him.

That's when Mr. 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 Mr. Young
sit in on his client's defence strategy sessions. They also sat back
and did nothing when Mr. Young accessed his client's legal file.

The lawyer called it the grossest violation of solicitor-client
privilege in the history of Canada and then took it a step further by
accusing the RCMP of defrauding him.

(It was Mr. Young who had promised to pay Mr. Liu's legal fees, and
he had written Mr. Bulmer a $75,000 cheque. Not surprisingly, Mr.
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 Mr.
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 Mr. Young's credibility. Every time the
Mounties had gone to a judge seeking permission to tap Mr. 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.

But there was more unravelling to be done. The more Mr. Bulmer looked
at Mr. Young's hit-list story, the less sense it made.

Why in the world would Mr. Liu want to murder Judge Smith? Mr. Liu
had only appeared in front of the judge three times. He had acted as
a remand judge, merely asking Mr. Liu to come back to court at a
later date. He had nothing to do with deciding the accused drug
dealer's guilt or innocence.

Could Mr. Young have concocted the whole thing?

Judge Smith's name appeared in Mr. Liu's file, the same file that Mr.
Young had permission to peruse and once took home. There were other
names in the file, too -- the names of every person on the hit list.

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 Mr. Young took him out for dinner one night and
made him a strange offer.

Everyone at the shop already thought Mr. Young's stories were beyond
belief, but this was a doozy.

Mr. 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.

Mr. Young explained that he was planning a break-in to get the money
back. But in order 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. He even had walkie-talkies
for the job.

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, Mr. 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 Mr. Young's gang and agreed to help.

He didn't believe Mr. Young either, but he took the walkie-talkie and
completed three missions in his Honda Civic because Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Young.

"I find, on the evidence before me, the 'surveillance' activity was a
cruel charade orchestrated entirely by the machinations of Mr.
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 two-and-a-half-year investigation were off the hook.

And thanks to the Witness Protection Program, so was Mr. Young.

His contract guaranteed him protection, despite the fact that 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.

E8060, who had already wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayers'
dollars, would end up costing Canadians a lot more.

During one of his final submissions before the judge, Mr. Bulmer
accused the Mounties of negligence for dismissing Sgt. Konarski's
report. He had no idea how much his argument would foreshadow what was to come.

"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. Mr. 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.