The recent attack that left high-profile gangster Jonathan Bacon dead and a full patch member of the Hell’s Angels injured is highly likely to spark reprisals but not a full-on gang war, says a gang expert.

Bacon, reputed leader of the Red Scorpion gang, survived assassination attempts in the past, but his luck ran out Aug. 14 when he died in a hail of bullets outside an upscale hotel in the lakeside city of Kelowna, B.C.

With 30-year-old Bacon was Hell’s Angel Larry Amero and two women, all of whom were injured. A member of the Independent Soldiers gang, James Riach, fled the scene before police arrived.

Masked gunmen opened rapid fire in broad daylight on the five, who were travelling in a luxury SUV. One of the women injured was the niece of a Hells Angels chapter president. She was shot in the neck and remains paralyzed.

Kelowna RCMP is working with the B.C.’s Integrated Gang Task Force to hunt down suspects and head off any counterattacks that may be in the works.

Michael Chettleburgh, Canada’s foremost expert on street gangs, says that given the status of Bacon and Amero, retaliation is a certainty, although he doesn’t expect a renewal of the gang wars that erupted in the Vancouver area in 2009.

“You can’t commit this incident without there being serious retribution,” he says, adding that the gang most likely to seek revenge is the Hell’s Angels biker gang.

“I would sense that the level of affront is going to feel much more acute with the Hell’s Angels than it would with the Red Scorpions. The Red Scorpions have been somewhat diminished over the last couple years, given police suppression, arrests, and 36 murders. The Hell’s Angels has more tentacles, so, I would say it’s likely to come more from the Hell’s Angels and/or one of their puppet clubs, of which there are several.”

Gang Alliances Common

Police haven’t said whether the gunman was targeting Bacon—the eldest of the three notorious Bacon brothers gang members—or others in the Porsche Cayenne. Bacon, Amero, and Riach had formed a loosely aligned criminal alliance dubbed the Wolf Pack.

Chettleburgh says interconnections between different gangs is more common today than in the past, and the Hells Angels, the Mafia, and other organized crime groups continue to form relationships with mid-level and street gangs to do the street-level work, such as drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution, and protection rackets.

“If they can access drugs better, cheaper drugs, if they can protect each other, and if they can take on what they perceive to be an emerging threat by joining forces in some kind of loose alliance with another group—absolutely, we see that all the time across the country.”

The heyday of the 70s and 80s when there was a brotherhood among Hell’s Angels and limited cooperation with other gangs is long gone, he says. “It’s now the brotherhood of the wallet.”

Police have said a shooting in Surrey on Aug. 15 has no apparent link to the Bacon hit. In that incident, a lone attacker shot at least eight times at a 32-year-old man as he was getting into a car. The man escaped with minor injuries from shattered glass.

Steve Dooley, a criminology instructor at Kwantlen University and a co-investigator with Acting Together, a project designed to prevent youth from joining gangs, says people have been fearful since the hit on Bacon.

“We’ve talked to kids and we’ve talked to parents, and there is a sense of fear in the community about what’s been happening,” he says. “There is a fear in the community based on things that are going on, and especially based on the fact that some of these things are happening in broad daylight where there’s a lot of innocent people around.”

That fear may be linked to the deadly gangland shoot-outs that played out in Lower Mainland streets over several months in 2009.

In all, more than 40 people were killed, mostly members of the Red Scorpions and the United Nations gang who were engaged in a brutal tit-for-tat turf war in the lucrative trade of imported cocaine and locally grown “B.C. Bud” marijuana.

The violence died down after police arrested several senior gang members including UN gang leader Barzan Tilli-Choli.

Infamous Bacon Brothers

Jonathan Bacon’s brother Jamie, who was convicted of weapons charges in 2010, is one of several charged with murder in relation to a shootout in a Surrey apartment in October 2007 in which six men—two of them innocent bystanders—were killed.

Charges of attempted murder against the middle brother, Jarrod, were stayed in 2004. However, he is facing unrelated weapons charges.

In a Vancouver court on Monday, a man linked to the UN gang was charged with conspiracy to kill the Bacon siblings and their Red Scorpion associates between Jan. 1, 2008 and Feb. 17, 2009. Several UN members and associates have been implicated in a plot to murder the brothers.

In 2008, police took the unusual step of warning the general public to avoid hang-outs frequented by the Bacon brothers because of “significant threats” to their safety.

“The drug trade is why you see all this violence,” says Chettleburgh, author of “Young Thugs: Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs.”


“It’s control of a lucrative market that’s worth an estimated $8 to $10 billion-plus in B.C. When you have that much money on the line you have the conditions for crews to fight it out on the street.”

Supt. Tom McCluskie, the head of the Gang Task Force, has said that the tension in the gang world has elevated since the hit on Bacon and that pressure is being maintained on all B.C.’s gangs. However, like Chettleburgh, the police have also said they don’t expect a drug war.