FAST MONEY SEDUCED SON

Info Sought In Gang-member's Murder

There are two faces to Stephen William Johnson: one that stares haughtily
from a police mug shot released the day he was found murdered and the other
sweet and clean-cut, shining in the photo his father clutched yesterday.

"That's the real Stephen," his father Jack said as he held the handsome
portrait. "That's the way we'll remember him, not the way he was the last
few months."

Police have made little headway in the murder of Stephen, 18, a member of
an Asian drug gang.

His bullet-riddled body was found Aug. 30 in a field near Darwell, about 80
km west of Edmonton.

Johnson, 66, who said he knew his son kept dangerous company but couldn't
convince him to break away, is now trying to kick-start the case with a
public plea for information.

"My wife and I knew and we were saying all the time, 'Please, get away from
these gangs. Come home and start a new life.' He saw teenagers with money
in their pockets and he just followed them."

Over the summer, as Edmonton's shooting war between rival drug gangs
intensified, Johnson said his wife Muriel grew more and more worried.

"She was frightened; she was scared something would happen to him," Johnson
said. "But he always said, 'Nothing would happen to me.'

"A few days before his death he had confided in a few friends that he was
frightened, he was scared in case anything would happen to his parents and
his brothers and sisters."

Stephen, the oldest of four boys and four girls, started having troubles
earlier this year, Johnson said, when he first noticed his usually
impoverished son was flush with cash.

"The attraction was a fast dollar," Johnson said. "We always got the idea
he had money in his pockets and he was into selling drugs. The reason he
was selling drugs is like any teenager, he wanted money in his pockets."

He says he still has "loads" of animosity for the gangsters who led his son
away from his dream of drawing for Marvel Comics and into a life of crime.

"We wanted, we pleaded with him, to come home, to leave these Asians and
start a new life," he said.

"His ambition was to get a good job, save money and go to art school
because he was a really excellent artist."

RCMP say they've identified several hundred gang members and talked to many
of them, but aside from ruling out retribution for the gangland slaying of
Hai Van Tran only two weeks before, they've got little to go on.

"It's not necessarily at a dead end, we're still using our tools," RCMP
Cpl. John Griffiths said.

"There's always somebody on the street that knows what's happened and
somebody has said something. We're certainly hopeful that someone will come
forward and give us some information."