2009 Vancouver gang war

The escalation of gang violence in Vancouver, beginning in January 2009, is alleged to have been caused by disruptions to the supply of illegal drugs resulting from the crackdown by the Mexican government against the drug cartels there, who supplied cocaine to British Columbia in return for marijuana. This reduced the profits of the Independent Soldiers (IS) and their sometime allies the United Nations gang. The IS are primarily an Indo-Canadian gang while the United Nations gang is made of a multitude of different ethnic groups. More recently, Chinese and Guatemalans and other various nationalities have been recruited. Both of these gangs' main modus operandi is gun running and smuggling marijuana known as BC Bud to the United States. The cocaine trade became very profitable due to the ongoing Mexican drug war. The Mexican Army has severely curtailed the ability of the Mexican drug cartels to move cocaine inside the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. government says the amount of cocaine seized on U.S. soil dropped by 41 percent between early 2007 and mid-2008 and claims this is due to this pressure. The price in Vancouver has increased from $23,300 to almost $39,000 a kilo. The police response to the gang war was greatly hindered by the perception that the police forces in the Lower Mainland were grossly inept, which made people unwilling to come forward with information, which was the legacy of the Pickton case. The serial killer Robert Pickton had murdered 49 women, and the police failed to recognize ample evidence that Pickton was the killer in the 1990s. In March 1997, the police received a report from one woman who was bleeding badly from multiple stab wounds that Pickton had tried to murder her at his pig farm, which the police just dismissed as the ramblings of a drug addict. Likewise, another report in 1999 that Pickton had a freezer full of human flesh in his house was dismissed by the police as more ramblings from another drug addict. Pickton was finally arrested in 2002, but the way that the police had ignored the evidence that Pickton was a serial killer gave police forces in the Lower Mainland a reputation for being extremely incompetent and callous, which made ordinary people unwilling to risk their lives to come forward with information during the gang war. ==Progress and escalation==

By the end of the first quarter of 2009, more than 20 people had been killed and 40 wounded. The Hells Angels had primarily stayed out of the fighting up to this point while the IS gang was busy trying to protect its turf from the resurgent Buttar Gang after police in April 2009 functionally dismantled the rival Sanghera Crime Group after a series of arrests which created a vacuum allowing the Buttar gang to expand its operations and encroaching on the IS for its marijuana monopoly. On the night of 16 February 2009 while working at the T-Barz strip club in Surrey, she sent Tilli-Choli a text after seeing Tyler Willock of the Red Scorpions present at the bar, writing "that guy" (Willock) was present. Despite the police statements, Langton noted: "In spite of a few high-profile arrests, including that of Tilli-Choli, it appeared as though the gangsters still ruled the streets of the Lower Mainland Bodies were piling up at a horrendous rate and the few people actually getting arrested seemed to be literally getting away with murder". On 31 March 2009, two Red Scorpions, Sean "Smurf" Murphy and Ryan "Whitey" Richards, were both murdered. The corpse of Murphy was found inside of his automobile in Abbotsford early on the morning of 31 March while later the same day a man out for a walk discovered the shot-up corpse of Richards behind the Yellow Barn Country Produce vegetable market in Abbotsford. In particular the police went after the leadership of the UN and Red Scorpion gangs and closely monitored the Bacon Brothers after they survived a rash of hits against them. On 1 April 2009, Dennis Karbovanec turned himself in to the police and confessed that he had been one of the gunmen involved in the Surry Six massacre of 2007. In an interview with Kim Bolan, the crime correspondent of The Vancouver Sun newspaper, Karbovanec stated that hearing Eileen Mohan on television had inspired him to "come clean". On the basis of the information provided by Karbovanec, Jamie Bacon was arrested on 3 April 2009. In May, police arrested eight senior U.N. members, including the leader, Iraqi immigrant Barzan Tilli-Choli, on charges of conspiracy to kill the Bacon brothers, while Dennis Karbovanec a member of the Red Scorpions pleaded guilty to previous crimes. Langton wrote that it once would have been "preposterous" for a "full patch" Hells Angel like Skreptak to engage in such activities "instead of pawning it off on some underling". ==Gang-related homicides and shootings==

Gang shootings were the subject of intense media coverage in Vancouver in 2009. These events include: January • 20: Jamie Bacon's car shot at while driving through Abbotsford. Bacon was the subject of an unusual public warning issued by police earlier this year, suggesting anyone dealing with him could be at risk. • 22: Forty-two-year-old man wounded in an apparent robbery at Abbotsford marijuana grow-operation. • 23: Two men wounded by shots fired outside Abbotsford home. • 24: Occupant of a Surrey home wounded by early-morning shots fired through door. • 27: Andrew (Drew) Cilliers, 26, shot outside a home in what appeared to be a targeted attack. February • 2: James Ward Erickson, 25, shot in an apartment in Surrey. • 3: Brianna Helen Kinnear, 22, found shot in a truck in Coquitlam. • 3: Raphael Baldini, 21, shot in a busy parking lot in Surrey. • 6: William Wayne Cloud, 19, fatally stabbed in a house. • 6: Kevin LeClair, 26, Surrey man shot in the parking lot outside a Langley grocery store. • 8: Man wounded in shooting in west-side Vancouver parking lot. • 11: Nicholas Gordon Smith, 24, shot in the basement of a house. • 12: Shots fired at a Burnaby home, no suspect found. Some suspect Babez Crew was involved. • 16: Driver wounded after shots fired at SUV outside Surrey strip club; police later arrest five people, charge two with attempted murder. • 16: Nicole Alemy killed in Surrey while driving husband's car with four-year-old son in back seat. • 17: Shane Alan Messent, 24, shot while committing a home invasion. • 22: Man known to police wounded in shooting in east Vancouver. • 26: Cory Stephen Konkin, 30, shot in his car in Maple Ridge. • 27: Man shot outside Surrey home in what police call targeted attack. March • 2: Sukhwinder Singh Dhaliwal, 32, found fatally shot. • 3: Young woman killed and man wounded in shooting at Burnaby apartment. • 3: Sunil Mall, 27, shot in his car in East Vancouver. • 3: Shots fired in drive-by shooting outside suspected drug house in Surrey. • 5: Man shot in drive-by shooting at Vancouver home. • 10: Two men fatally shot in an apartment. • 15: Laura Lynn Lamoureux, 36, gunned down in a Langley gutter early Saturday morning. • 19: Marc Bontkes, 33, found fatally shot in the parking lot of Hi-Knoll Park. • 30: Sean Murphy, 21, fatally shot in his car on Bateman Road and Latimer Street. • 31: Ryan Richards, 19, fatally found in a field behind a produce store. • 6: Lionel Tan, 24, shot to death outside a gas station. • 15: Betty Yan, 39, found fatally shot in a grey Mercedes at a dark industrial Richmond strip mall. May • 1: Joseph Randay, 18, and Dilsher Singh Gill, 17, were abducted and then fatally shot in an abandoned SUV. • 12: Damon Michael Martin, 33, found fatally shot with a shotgun lying on a road in the Panorama Ridge area of Surrey. • 16: Christopher Roy Whitmee, 34, fatally shot on 176 Street and 57th Avenue in Cloverdale, a town centre in Surrey. Another man was critically injured. • 26: Parminder Adiwal, 30, alleged leader of Independent Soldiers, was shot over 20 times in his Burnaby underground parking lot. He miraculously survives. • 28: Sarbjit Nagra, 29, shot on a Maple Ridge street. Drove himself to hospital where he died of his injuries. June • 11: Jeffrey Qi Feng Bian, fatally stabbed in an 18th-floor Yaletown condominium. • 30: Jaswant Rai, 36, found shot to death in an SUV on Mount Lehman Road between Townshipline Road and Downes Road. July • 13: Unidentified South Asian male found shot dead inside the A Canadian Autobody and Painting workshop in Surrey. • 16: John William Hanna, 25, found dead in a burned-out car in Burnaby, killed in a targeted hit. ==See also==