DRUG DEALER SAYS ASSAULTS WERE DIVINE INSPIRATION

VANCOUVER - A Bible-toting drug dealer who filmed himself attacking
his customers and who claimed the violent assaults were staged to
spread the gospel will be sentenced next week in B.C. Supreme Court,
four months after beating a related allegation of directing a criminal
organization.

On Thursday, a jury found Anthony (Big Tony) Terezakis guilty of 11
counts of assault and assault with a weapon.

The burly 46-year-old, who pleaded guilty to trafficking cocaine and
heroin at the outset of his trial, insisted that he had acted on
religious impulse while punishing drug users inside two skid row
hotels near Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

Yesterday, one of two Crown prosecutors involved in the trial called
it "the weirdest I have ever seen and probably the weirdest ever tried
in a Vancouver courtroom."

To convict, the Crown relied almost exclusively on 12 hours of video
footage.

It depicts a deranged looking Terezakis bursting into dilapidated
hotel rooms and berating drug users for various transgressions,
including the purchase of "product" from other sources.

The footage also shows Terezakis kicking his trembling victims,
hitting them with his fists and with a small wooden club, and then
shouting religious slogans, such as "Praise Lord."

The videos were shot in 2002 with help from Terezakis's teenage son,
and were discovered a year later by the accused's estranged wife. She
handed them to police in October, 2003, two months after the
trafficking charges were laid.

Terezakis testified in his own defence. He told a jury earlier this
month that the video footage was meant to impart Christian values and
to depict life in Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood.

He also said he hoped to market the footage under the title "Bible
Thumpers."

None of the assault victims testified for the Crown. Two appeared as
witnesses for the defence.

They claimed that they had merely been acting in front of the video
camera, and swore that the beatings they received and those they were
instructed to help arrange were not real.

Members of the jury did not buy it, and found Terezakis guilty of
assault. However, jurors could not come to agreement on one charge of
unlawful confinement. The Crown stayed that charge on Thursday.

Terezakis escaped further sanction when a new section of the Criminal
Code under which he had also been charged --which makes it illegal for
a member of a criminal organization to instruct someone else to commit
an offence -- was ruled unconstitutional by the judge presiding over
his trial.

In December, Madame Justice Heather Holmes called parts of Section
467.13 of the Criminal Code "vague" and "essentially undefined."

Terezakis thus became the first in Canada to successfully challenge
the new section, which is aimed at beating back organized crime.

B.C.'s department of justice has appealed the ruling; in March,
Saskatchewan's Court of Queen's Bench found the same section dealing
with organized crime to be valid.

Terezakis is expected to appear again in court next Thursday for
sentencing.

Crown prosecutors say they will ask Justice Holmes to send him to
prison for "a substantial amount of time."

Terezakis had already spent three years in custody leading up to his
trial.