BC May Be Facing a New Wave of Gang Violence

The Red Scorpions' logo, via Facebook.[ ](http://grind365.com/news/true-crime/the-rise-fall-of-the-bacon-brothers/)The Red Scorpions, a notorious BC gang, look like the kind of dudes you’d see at high school house parties ‘roided out in MMA brand T-shirts, drinking crappy beer and acting hard, while selling weed and blow wrapped in squares of computer paper or cigarette foil. When all the beer and drugs were gone, they might have left quietly, or, depending on the mood of the evening, sucker punched the host and fled laughing in their parents’ Lincoln.

Comfortably born and raised in Abbotsford to a father who taught special needs kids and a mother who worked at a credit union, they didn’t exactly have a background that might typically lead to a so-called thug life. The Bacons were more of a “gangster next door” kind of criminal. Former classmates at W.J. Mouat High School speaking anonymously to the CBC described the Red Scorpions’ member Jonathan as “a pretty nice kid,” while youngest brother Jamie was a high school wrestling champ. So by the sounds of it, they were essentially just jocks, and probably bearable unless you crossed them.

However, by the time the first of three began to graduate in 1999, the Brothers Bacon had definitely chosen a criminal path. The allure of gang life to kids with these backgrounds—says Michael Chettleburgh, a recognized and oft-consulted expert on Canadian gangs—isn’t based on the more typical risk factors like poverty; it’s simply about making fast money and pumping their own tires.

“For some of the middle-class BC knuckleheads,” Chettleburgh said. “It’s not about basic needs, but more about advanced ‘self-esteem’ needs: respect, achievement, recognition. So gang life and the über-lucrative BC drug trade is seen as a shorter path to success than the workaday lives of successful parents, who have toiled for years to achieve.”

In a relatively short period of time, the Bacon Brothers’ Red Scorpions had established a network of like-minded individuals from a variety of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, through an equation of violence = power = money. They turned their non-traditional (for a gangster) and privileged upbringing into a significant force in the lower mainland’s drug trade, by moving BC bud south in exchange for guns and cocaine.

But the very factors that made the middle class Bacons' rise (or fall) into BC gangsterism unique in the late 90s is apparently becoming a much more common characteristic of Canada’s underworld. “Today's street and mid-level gangs in Canada are mostly hybrid,” Chettleburgh told me. “Which means, among other things, multi-ethnic composition… and members with ‘non-traditional’ risk factors. This is a feature in the BC lower mainland but we see it increasingly elsewhere, that is, young people who aren't from the hood seeking to flex their muscles in the game.”

By the mid 2000s, the Bacons’ likely ‘roided-out biceps were certainly flexing. With the money and violence on a steady incline, the Red Scorpions had begun to attract the attention of law enforcement as well as the ire of one particular and similarly composed rival. Based out of Chilliwack, a community neighbouring Abbotsford, the United Nations (a reference to the gang’s inclusivity to all ethnic backgrounds) was founded by Clay Roueche, who, if maybe a tad more blue collar than the Bacons, also originated from middle class surroundings. Rolling Stone recently featured him in a six-page article, dubbing Clay as a Pablo Escobar of BC bud and a guy who “changed the marijuana game forever.” There’s also a rumour out there that he’s the only white guy to ever be a full patch member of the Triads. Roueche also had close ties with a Chinese man who went to jail for murdering a guy in Niagara Falls, with two daggers, while dressed in a ninja outfit.

With a “this Fraser Valley ain’t big enough for the two of us” attitude, The Red Scorpions and UN engaged in an all-out, very public war. Numerous targeted murders led to Abbotsford being temporarily known as Canada’s murder capital. Jamie and Jonathan survived numerous assassination attempts (including one in the driveway of their parents’ house), and in 2007 the well documented "Surrey Six" massacre—where two innocent witnesses were brought into an apartment and shot to death, along with four UN gang members—brought the lower mainland’s gang warfare into the national consciousness and the Bacon brothers a long way away from their suburban roots.

A screenshot from Clay Roueche's bizarre website, via his bizarre website.

It all started to catch up at the turn of the decade. In April of 2009, Jamie Bacon was arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder for his involvement in the "Surrey Six" murders. The trial is currently underway while Jamie sits in jail, subsequently convicted of other firearms related charges. In November of that same year, Jarrod Bacon was arrested after agreeing to buy 100 kilos of cocaine from an undercover cop, and was recently sentenced to 14 years in prison. Then, in 2011, with both of his younger brothers locked up, Jonathan Bacon (alongside a Hells Angel he was riding with) was gunned down and killed outside of a Kelowna casino. Meanwhile, also in 2009, Clay Roueche was picked up trying to cross the border into Mexico, and is currently serving a 30 year jail sentence in the States for drug smuggling and money laundering—though he recently announced on his Facebook page that he’s applied to serve the rest of his sentence in Canada.

Given all of these murders and prison sentences, and considering the UN Gang’s alleged interim leader is being deported back to Iraq this year, it would have appeared that the heads had been cut off the proverbial snakes and things were quieting down in the world of BC gang violence… until last week.

On January 3rd at 3:45 in the afternoon in the parking lot of an auto mall, Matthew Gordon Campbell, who the Vancouver Sun reports was the current leader of the Red Scorpions, was stabbed in the neck and died of his injuries. The very public and brutal attack is a reminder of the violence that until then seemed to have subsided. This obviously leads to several questions: Will this assassination be the end of the Red Scorpions, or will it blow the lid off simmering conflicts and send the lower mainland spiraling into another round of dangerously public gang warfare?

“The answer to the Red Scorpions and how long they’ll be disabled is that there is instability for sure when a leader goes down, but most of it is internal strife.” said Cathy Prowse, a criminal anthropologist with the University of Calgary who spent 25 years working intelligence with the Calgary Police Force. “When a leader is taken out, the bottom line is that it’s a significant hit. That’s your mobilizing figure, that’s your connected individual. So the higher the person is on the organizational structure, the more the impact there is on the group. But if that leader has really multi-stranded ties that are very, very strong, long and enduring, then the leadership will quickly resurrect.”

Michael Chettleburgh insists there will be bloodshed. And the Red Scorpions, despite two of their leaders being killed in the last four years, won’t be going anywhere.

“Tit for tat defines the gang world, no challenge goes unaddressed. I would expect retaliation. The Red Scorpions aren’t going anywhere. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. There is a fiction that if you cut the head off the snake—or the scorpion as the case may be—the gang dies. It generally does not. For a relatively sophisticated and hungry mid-level gang like RS that has solid connections to traditional organized crime, and that moves a lot of weight on the street, there will be other soldiers that will step up; but it is possible the crew will morph into something by a different name with different or complimentary relationships.”

“It is very dynamic in BC, but I would not hold your breath expecting that the Red Scorpions will ride off into the night never to be seen again. There is just too damn much money to be made in the game and RS/UN et al are resilient. Death, prison, and rip offs by rivals are simply conditions of employment in gang life, not reasons for leaving.”

The retaliation may have already begun, as earlier in the week there were simultaneous shootings, one at a nightclub and the other outside a convenience store that had “all the hallmarks of the shootings that marred Metro Vancouver during 2009’s drug war.” Whether these shootings are a flash in the pan, or the introduction to another sustained period of violence, remains to be seen. But one should probably be advised that if you plan on going out to any nightclubs that the UN or Red Scorpions are known to frequent, it would be wise to invest in a vest.

@ddner