Column One

A MEXICO CRACKDOWN PUTS THE SQUEEZE ON COCAINE DEALERS IN CANADA

Up Here, As the Violence Grows, Bodies Pile Up

Same Drug War, New Border

The latest mayhem started at the end of March, when 21-year-old Sean
Murphy, a popular former high school hockey player, drove into a
withering blast of gunfire near Bateman Park. He was probably dead
before his car coasted to a stop in the weeds.

That same night, Ryan Richards, 19, abruptly left a friend's house
after getting a cellphone call. His body was found the next morning
behind a rural produce store. The stab wounds on his hands told the
tale of a furious fight for his life. The undertaker apologized to
his family for not being able to conceal them.

The bodies of two local high school seniors, Dilsher Gill, 17, and
Joseph Randay, 18, were found May 1 in their car on a remote road
just outside this normally quiet town of 134,000 near Vancouver. The
boys had been seen driving away with an armed man the night before.

This crisp region of polished high-rises, emerald spruce, azure
waterways and feel-good vibes finds itself in the midst of a gang war
that has killed at least 18 young people this year.

Drug dealers are gunning down women (one in a car with her 4-year-old
son in the back seat), high school students with no gang allegiances
and, especially, one another, in broad daylight in and around the
city that will host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

It got so bad this spring that police erected concrete barriers
outside the homes of two gangsters to slow down potential drive-by assassins.

"Let's get serious. There is a gang war, and it's brutal. What we
have seen are new rules of engagement for the gangsters," Vancouver's
chief police constable, Jim Chu, told reporters in March.

Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on
cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for
cocaine north of the U.S. border.

Canada's outlaw retailers are fighting to the death over market
share, police say, a situation exacerbated by personal vendettas and
power vacuums left by the arrests of gang leaders.

"The war in Mexico directly impacts on the drug trade in Canada. . .
. There's a complete disruption of the flow of cocaine into Canada,
and we are seeing the result," said Pat Fogarty, operations officer
for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, British Columbia's
main law enforcement agency targeting organized crime.

The province became an important player in the Mexican cocaine
marketplace in part by bartering its powerful home-grown marijuana,
"B.C. Bud," which helps fuel what is estimated to be a
$6.3-billion-a-year industry.

Canadian drug organizations now use planes, helicopters and, in one
case, a tunnel to move drugs. They have equipped trucks with secret
panels and devices to avoid detection by X-rays and drug-sniffing dogs.

The Lower Mainland has become a playground for young up-and-coming
gangsters, who speed around town in armor-plated Cadillac Escalades,
Porsche SUVs and BMW sedans.

The worst violence can be traced to the verdant Fraser Valley
southeast of Vancouver, where the Red Scorpions gang has been at war
with a multi-ethnic criminal organization called the United Nations.

The founder of the U.N. is Clayton Roueche, 33, son of a scrap metal
dealer from Chilliwack, population 80,000.

Authorities believe Roueche was going to attend a wedding and meet
trafficking associates in Mexico in May 2008 when authorities there
turned him away. He was flown to Dallas, where U.S. agents arrested
him on a drug indictment out of Seattle. He pleaded guilty in April
to conspiracy and money-laundering charges and faces as many as 30
years in prison.

Two months later, the man he allegedly was going to meet in Mexico
was shot to death in a Guadalajara restaurant, along with another
U.N. associate.

The U.N. adopted its name in honor of the variety of nationalities it
encompasses, including Iraqis, Chinese and Guatemalans. It is known
for its Asian mystic-themed motto of "Honor-Loyalty-Respect," created
by Roueche, who has a passion for martial arts and Buddhism.

The cemetery in Chilliwack is dominated by the graves of two former
U.N. members, flanked by a pair of 5-foot-tall granite monuments
inscribed with the same "U.N." monogram found on the gang's packets
of cocaine. The phrase "Warrior of the United Nations" is engraved in
Chinese characters. At the foot of the graves, a pair of stone
Chinese foo lions stands guard.

The carnage between the U.N. and the Red Scorpions is believed to
stem from the fatal shootings of six men in an apartment in the
comfortable suburb of Surrey in 2007.

Five associates of the Red Scorpions have been arrested in the case.
One pleaded guilty and was sentenced in April to life in prison.

Dozens of other slayings followed, many of them retribution killings
and commercial disputes between the U.N. and three Abbotsford men
associated with the Red Scorpions: the Bacon brothers.

Jonathan Bacon, 28, and his brothers, Jarrod, 26, and Jamie, 23, are
the rock stars of the Fraser Valley underworld, their exploits and
the efforts of the police to keep them alive documented regularly in the media.

Jamie Bacon, who was charged in April in one of the Surrey Six
slayings, survived a mid-afternoon shooting at an Abbotsford
intersection Jan. 20, when a gunman fired as many as eight bullets
into his Mercedes.

Jonathan Bacon was shot and wounded in the driveway of his parents'
home in Abbotsford in 2006.

Not surprisingly, the Bacons have changed residences several times,
and their car has armored plating and bulletproof windows. They kept
an arsenal for protection: As part of a plea bargain for an associate
in 2007, Jonathan Bacon delivered to police 114 sticks of dynamite, a
grenade, seven handguns, two shotguns, a rifle and an Uzi submachine gun.

With so many people apparently eager to kill a Bacon brother, police
took the unusual step this year of warning citizens to avoid the
family or risk being caught in the crossfire.

That is what happened to Jonathan Barber, 24, who ran a custom stereo
business in Abbotsford. One night in May, Barber picked up a Porsche
Cayenne SUV belonging to one of the Bacon brothers to install a new
audio system. A gunman opened fire, killing Barber and injuring his
17-year-old girlfriend.

"Young people in the past used to have a fight in the schoolyard. In
a park or something. But now everyone seems to have a gun," Barber's
father, Michael, said one recent afternoon. "There used to be a code
in gangs: Don't touch the women, don't touch the children. But no one
is safe anymore. No one is safe in our city."

Mathea Angelica Sturm, a 17-year-old student at W.J. Mouat Secondary
School, started a Facebook page recently to memorialize the young
people who have died in Abbotsford and Chilliwack. The names quickly
numbered in the dozens.

Among them were Dilsher Gill and Joseph Randay, the two teenagers
found dead in their car in May. Both were seniors at Mouat.

"You see it in movies and stuff, but you never think it's going to
happen in your town," Sturm said. "Especially in Abbotsford. It was a
pretty peaceful town, and then all of a sudden, it was like a big
swoop of something came in."

Her mother, Wendy, said: "It kills me that every week my child comes
home in agony, in tears, that she lost another friend. And to have
the three most notorious gangsters [the Bacon brothers] living in our
own town? My other daughter is terrified to go to her own high school
reunion because she went to school with one of them."

Police, the mayor and the school board chairman recently issued a
letter warning parents and students that even the slightest
involvement in drugs or gangs can be dangerous. Neither Gill nor
Randay was a known gang member, friends say.

Ryan Richards, the 19-year-old whose body was found behind the
produce shop, got involved with the Red Scorpions only because he
couldn't get financial aid for college, according to his mother,
Wendy, who was hospitalized after her son's death and still breaks
down in sobs.

"He said he wanted out," she said.

"He told another kid, 'Don't do it. It's not a very good life. I'm
getting out of it,' " Wendy Richards said one recent afternoon,
sitting on the front porch and hugging her knees.

Richards said she believes her son was a low-level salesman who may
have come under suspicion within the Scorpions. He had been taken
into custody a few weeks before his death, and his cellphones were confiscated.

"They might have thought that he ratted them out," said her
boyfriend, Ken Peters. "So they sent somebody out. Somebody who has
no remorse."

On a Friday night in the Lower Mainland, two teams from the
integrated gang task force patrol the restaurants, clubs and bars
where gang members drink, spar and sometimes kill.

With the Winter Olympics only a year away, officials in British
Columbia have made it clear that the gang problem must end. Money has
poured in for new officers. Legislation is being proposed to expand
surveillance capability, toughen sentences, crack down on firearms
smuggled in from the U.S., and outlaw armored cars and flak jackets.

There have been successes: In May, police arrested eight senior U.N.
members, including the new reported leader, Iraqi immigrant Barzan
Tilli-Choli, 27, on charges of conspiracy to kill the Bacons.

A month earlier, Vancouver police announced a series of arrests that
they said had "functionally dismantled" the notorious Sanghera crime
group, whose conflict with other gangs in southeast Vancouver had led
to nearly 100 shootings in the last few years.

"We targeted them for whatever kind of offenses we could get them
for, from minor charges like causing a disturbance to attempted
murder. We ended up incarcerating literally the whole group, and the
result of that has been a decrease in shootings," said Mike Porteous,
who led Project Rebellion, the gang sweep that netted the Sanghera group.

"I call it death by a thousand cuts," said Cpl. A.C.J. Coons, head of
the four-vehicle gang patrol on the Friday night shift.

Coons and his partner, Constable Michael Clark, execute sharp U-turns
when they see a suspicious Escalade or BMW and start checking IDs.
They prowl the bars, scrutinizing driver's licenses and ordering
known gang members to leave under laws similar to U.S. gang injunctions.

The bouncer at the Canvas Lounge in central Vancouver's Gastown
district reports that one of the Skeena Boys (named for the apartment
project in east Vancouver where the gang originated) challenged him
when he wouldn't let him in. The man grabbed his hip, as if signaling
he would have a gun when he returned, the bouncer said.

Coons and Clark head off on foot to corner the young man, who is
wearing rhinestone earrings and a T-shirt with a jeweled tiger. He
and two companions smirk and stare at the sidewalk; they insist they
were simply looking for someplace else to drink.

"In some ways, we've lost this generation of gangsters, they're so
immersed in the gang world," said Sgt. Keiron McConnell, standing
nearby in the red-and-blue glare of the police lights. "About the
only thing we can do is incarcerate them."