THE MANY LIES OF AN RCMP INFORMANT

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 untrue, they paid off his debts,
erased his past and gave him a new identity. And then he committed
murder. None of the 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 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.

Mr. 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.

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 close 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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 licenceplate 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 Mr. Young an official agent of the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The informant had proven his worth.

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

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. 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.

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.

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 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 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.

During one of his final submissions before the judge, Mr. 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 ? 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.