PROSECUTORS, POLICE FACE INTIMIDATION

VANCOUVER - A 2002 raid on the Hells Angels clubhouse in Coquitlam
turned up a file containing photographs of police officers, some with
their faces circled.

"It was disturbing," said Insp. Andy Richards, a biker gang expert
with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, who participated in
the raid.

The raid on the Coquitlam clubhouse on Jan. 28, 2002, was spearheaded
by Delta police as part of their investigation into an alleged
extortion by two Hells Angels prospects -- one of whom, Rick Mandi,
was convicted last January. Richards said about a dozen photos were
found in a file folder marked "Cops" in the clubhouse's downstairs
office.

One series of photos appeared to have been taken by someone on the
street during a police drug raid on the Blunt Brothers marijuana cafe
in Vancouver, Richards said.

"All the drug squad members were in plain clothes. They had their
faces circled and a little notation beside it saying, 'drug
officers,'" he said. "[And] there was one picture of an ERT [Emergency
Response Team] member from that same raid standing outside and his
picture was circled and it said beside that: 'Works undercover a lot.'"

A second group of photos included what appeared to be several personal
snapshots that happened to include officers who were working
undercover at the time.

"People in the pictures were circled and they were identified as
undercover police officers," Richards said.

A separate file in the office included photos of people suspected of
being police informants.

"These appeared to be surveillance photos, as if they'd taken them
themselves or hired a private investigator to take them," Richards
said.

He said police believe the pictures were used to identify possible
undercover officers and not to target officers for violence. Still,
the photos were troubling, he said. "It kind of begs the question,
why, if they are just a group of motorcycle enthusiasts, is there this
apparent obsession with police and informants?" said Richards.

The clubhouse photos are just one example of the kind of intimidation
faced by police and prosecutors who work on organized crime cases in
B.C.

In 1996, one of the lead investigators involved in Project Nova -- an
operation that resulted in the 2001 conviction for drug trafficking of
Hells Angels members Ronaldo Lising and Francisco Pires -- received
two threatening phone calls at home.

Brad Parker, then a Vancouver police investigator and now a
superintendent with the Delta police, said the two calls were made to
his unlisted home phone number late one night.

On the first call, Parker recalls, a man said, "Stop what you're
doing. You're going to get it," and then hung up.

The second call was made about five minutes later, Parker said, by
someone with a younger-sounding voice. "He said something to the
effect of, 'You better f---ing watch your back,'" he said.

The calls led him and his wife to lay down firm rules for their
children about answering the door or picking up the phone, he said.

Richards said that when Parker informed his superiors about the
threatening phone calls, one of the force's inspectors, along with two
"big, burly" members of the force's emergency response team, paid a
visit to John Bryce, president of the Angels' East End chapter, at his
motorcycle shop in Burnaby, Hi-Way Choppers. Richards said Bryce told
the inspector he didn't know who had made the calls and couldn't
control what his members did.

According to Richards, the inspector responded: "Then neither can
I."

In an interview, Bryce said he remembered the inspector's visit to his
shop. "I recall something like that," he said. "But it's been a while."

But Bryce said that neither he nor his fellow Hells Angels, had
anything to do with the calls to Parker's home.

"We didn't do that," he said. "We don't want to have any problem with
the police, right. So why would we do that?"

Larry Butler, a biker gang expert with the Vancouver police, said fear
of intimidation -- or violence -- is part of the job for an organized
crime investigator. "You can't run around being paranoid all the
time," he said. "The job is to be able to step up and deal with these
guys."

In Quebec, the assassination of two jail guards in 1997 and the
near-fatal shooting of newspaper reporter Michel Auger in 2000 led the
government there to crack down on biker gangs.

Richards thinks gangsters in B.C. are smart enough to know that
similar violence here would only intensify the law-enforcement
pressure against them.

Police aren't the only members of B.C.'s justice system who have been
subject to intimidation.

In 2001, Ernie Froess, a Crown prosecutor working on the prosecution
of Lising and Pires, was threatened with death in a downtown food
court by John Virgil Punko, a member of the Angels' East End chapter.
Punko was subsequently convicted of obstructing justice in January
2002 and sentenced to eight months in jail and two years probation.

"I didn't take the threat lightly," Froess said. "I felt some concern
for my safety and that of my family."

However, Vancouver police immediately took security measures that made
him feel safer, he said.

Froess said the timing of the threat was bizarre."They [Lising and
Pires] were convicted the day before," he said. "So Punko was a little
late in trying to affect the outcome."

Concern about intimidation by organized crime led the federal Justice
Department to launch a project in the late 1990s to survey police,
prosecutors and judges about the problem.

"The intimidation is intended to destabilize the criminal justice
system particularly where the prosecution of organized crime is
concerned," reads a discussion paper on the issue prepared by the
department and obtained by the Vancouver Sun through the Access to
Information Act.

The Vancouver Police Department's submission to the justice
department, obtained by the Sun through the Freedom of Information
Act, says that members of its gang crime and outlaw motorcycle units
have been subject to threats. And, submissions from other police
forces, prosecutors and judges were also obtained by the Sun and
reveal instances of intimidation across the country.