CRIME WEBS ALARM CITY POLICE CHIEF

Battershill Likens Emerging Culture Of Gangs To Vancouver 15 Years Ago

They're young, vicious, armed to the teeth, quickly getting rich moving
cocaine by the kilo -- and they're giving the cops the willies.

Mid-level organized crime is growing stronger in the capital, said Victoria
Police Chief Paul Battershill, reminding him of what Vancouver looked like
15 years ago at the blossoming of the gang culture and nightclub shootings
that now plague the Lower Mainland.

The same signs, he said, are emerging here. "We're turning up more and more
guns that are loaded and ready to go."

Three or four Victoria-area murders in the past year or so are believed to
be drug-related hits. Violence in bars, some of them controlled by
organized crime, is getting nasty. "If we don't get a grip on that in the
next few years, we're going to have the same problems as Vancouver,"
Battershill said Friday.

He's not talking about street-level dealers selling flaps to kids on the
corner. Nor is he referring to the high-up, low-profile criminals raking in
fortunes in the international drug trade.

Battershill is concerned about the ones in the middle. There are probably
fewer than a score of them in Victoria, an ethnic mix of whites,
Indo-Canadians and Asians in their twenties, doing business with a handful
of B.C.'s organized-crime gangs.

"The mid-level gang activity is emerging," said the chief. "It's
characterized by some degree of organization, firearms and violence."

The men deal in crystal meth and heroin, but mostly in cocaine, anywhere
from an ounce to five kilograms at a time.

A kilo of cocaine costs $22,000 to $25,000, earning maybe four times that
after being sold by the ounce to street-level dealers.

That leaves the men with a lot of cash, which they like to flash around the
bars in which they gather. Just like the guys Battershill remembers from
his days with the Vancouver police -- and unlike more disciplined gang
members who tend to shy away from anything that puts them in the spotlight
- -- they enjoy violence that has no business purpose.

Police warn that one of them will intentionally harass a woman with the
goal of picking a fight with her boyfriend, who will suddenly find himself
set upon by four or five men.

"They're dangerous," said Battershill. And they're well-armed, eschewing
low-end pistols in favour of 9-millimetre and 40-calibre Glocks, Berettas
and Walthers, freshly bought in Las Vegas. "When you start to see the
semi-automatics, that's another sign that you're into the gang-coke stuff."

The chief is saying all this just days before going to city council to
argue for more police officers, but he maintains the timing is irrelevant.

"It's going to seem like this is contrived, but it's not," he said. "We've
known for a year or two now that this stuff is starting to grab us."

Police haven't been inactive. This December, as part of a sting in which
cocaine and ecstasy was bought from people in five downtown clubs, police
negotiated the purchase of a kilogram of cocaine. And the December 2003
legislature raids grew indirectly from a Victoria police investigation
aimed at mid-level Indo-Canadian cocaine traffickers.

Battershill's concern is that he has seen this movie before. Over the last
decade or so, the Lower Mainland has seen scores of gang-related murders,
often the product of drug rip-offs, territorial disputes among dealers, or
old-fashioned machismo.

Gang activity there has spread, drawing in more young men seduced by what
they see as a glamorous lifestyle. Lots of money. Lots of babes. Nice cars.
Drugs. Action.

"In some respects they become Antichrist-as-role-models," said Battershill.

Not that they last in the life too long. Battershill, who used to lead the
team that did take-downs of armed gang members in Vancouver, said many of
the criminals he dealt with in the early 1990s are now dead or paralyzed
from gunshot wounds.

But Victoria isn't Vancouver yet, he said.

"That's what we want to avoid."