A specialized police unit that investigates crime on the waterfront will be cut by almost a third after Port Metro Vancouver axed $400,000 a year of its funding.

The cut takes effect Jan. 1, meaning the RCMP-led National Port Enforcement Team will be reduced from 13 to nine officers, Sgt. Annie Linteau confirmed Wednesday.

The funding cut comes just months after a Vancouver Sun investigation revealed that at least 27 Hells Angels, associates, criminals and other gangsters work as longshoremen on the Port Metro Vancouver docks. The Sun also obtained government and police documents that show an unaddressed organized-crime problem on the waterfront dating back more than 20 years.

Police told the Sun that organized crime maintains its foothold on the waterfront for strategic purposes — so drugs and other contraband can be smuggled in some of the more than 1.5 million containers that pass through the four container terminals at Port Metro Vancouver every year.

Just over three per cent of the containers arriving here are screened by the Canada Border Services Agency.

Port Metro Vancouver vice-president Peter Xotta said the decision was made to cut the funding because policing is not part of his agency’s mandate.

“As you know we don’t have direct legislative authority around policing on the waterfront,” Xotta told The Vancouver Sun.

He said the port has invested in all kinds of technology to improve security at all its terminals, including 600 cameras, access gates, patrol boats and a high-tech operations centre.

“We felt that because there’s ongoing need to continue with those investments, it was no longer appropriate for us to fund something that is outside of our mandate. So we are transitioning our funding from supporting this particular initiative financially to those other endeavours,” Xotta said.

He said Port Metro has paid the $400,000 annually to the policing unit since 1997.

“We recognize this creates a funding issue for the RCMP and we are sympathetic to that but we have to focus on what our mandate is,” he said. “We have committed well over $10 million to increasing security at the port over the past number of years.”

Linteau said Port Metro’s contribution has covered the cost of two municipal police officers seconded to the team, as well as two of its RCMP members.

“We respect Port Metro Vancouver’s decision to dedicate these funds to other security and operational priorities and we will continue to work closely with our law enforcement partners,” she said.

“While we are currently assessing what impact this decision will have on RCMP operations at the port, we will continue to prioritize our efforts and continue to advance our mandate in the ports.”

NDP MLA Kathy Corrigan said to cut policing at the port now is “really wrong-headed.”

“It seems to me that it’s the worst time to be cutting back on security and policing at our ports at a time when we are particularly concerned about gun violence, gang violence and drugs,” said Corrigan, who represents Burnaby-Deer Lake. “That is reflected in places like Surrey where basically we’ve had a shooting a week this last year.”

Corrigan said the B.C. government “has not done a good job about pressing hard for British Columbians’ interest on this.”

Delta Mayor Lois Jackson said she is concerned about Port Metro’s decision to cut the cash and has asked municipal staff to look into the situation.

“We have to make sure that due diligence has been performed. We will be looking at this very closely and speaking to the powers that be,” Jackson said. “It’s really concerning to have an asset like we have there, which is vulnerable. They may not think it is, but everything is vulnerable.”

Justice Minister Suzanne Anton said in an emailed statement that she had been notified of the funding cut.

“I understand that RCMP’s federal resources remain in place within the RCMP’s National Port Enforcement Team and we anticipate the federal team will continue to provide appropriate policing services to maintain security for B.C.,” she said.

kbolan@vancouversun.com

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Predators or prey?

After four months in front of a B.C. Supreme Court jury, the trial of the Surrey couple found guilty of terrorism in connection with the 2013 Canada Day plot begins a new phase.

In proceedings expected to last all of July, the wannabe Boston Marathon bombers — John Nuttall, 40, and Amanda Korody, 32 — hope to avoid lengthy prison terms by arguing police entrapped them.

Crown prosecutor Peter Eccles, who participated in one of the leading cases on entrapment involving a Granville Mall buy-and-bust drug operation, insisted this investigation is above reproach.

“This was a standard undercover operation using standard techniques,” Eccles said, “the same techniques used investigating a drug transaction, the same techniques they would use going after the Hells Angels. They were tried and tested undercover techniques.”

Still, lawyers for the pair will put the 240-officer RCMP sting under a microscope and say the sophisticated five-month operation was an abuse of process.

They claim the Mounties manufactured the crime, taking advantage of two patsies.

Justice Catherine Bruce must decide whether to stay Tuesday’s guilty verdicts for planting pressure-cooker devices at the legislature because of police misconduct.

Judicial concern about entrapment arose in the 1970s and 1980s because of police conduct while waging the war on drugs. The key case involved a 1983 B.C. drug deal in which an addict was pressured by an undercover agent to sell cocaine.

The high court said in its 1988 ruling that police had substantial leeway investigating drug trafficking because of its insidious nature and pernicious social consequences, but they could provide only an opportunity for someone to commit a crime, not entice, prod or pressure them into it.

Last year, the top bench, in ruling on Mr. Big investigations (which are designed to produce confessions from murder suspects) also cautioned judges about elaborate undercover scenarios that run the risk of becoming abusive when officers provide targets with inducements — especially when the suspects are naive or mentally challenged.

Still, dangerous or duped is a good question considering this duo’s vulnerabilities: Their circumstances were squalid.

Nuttall and Korody were invisible, not in the bandage-wrapped, horror-film sense of the word, but invisible in that the welfare-and-methadone dependent pair was missing from the group photograph of ordinary Canadians. They were socially and culturally out of the picture.

The closer you examine the revelations and the rhetoric of the trial, the more it dawns that neither Nuttall nor Korody was particularly political, ideological or religious.

They were badly confused and frustrated, their inner life more akin to a video-game consciousness, a world view peopled with angels and Djinns.

It wasn’t just the Mounties who were acting in the imaginary, RCMP-directed tragicomedy.

Nuttall and Korody were role-playing, too — intoxicated with themselves, enthusiastically participating in the Islamic-extremist ruse because it gave their lives significance: They were lonely losers no longer.

Their solitude was immense — recovering heroin junkies living in a Surrey basement suite with the curtains perpetually drawn.

They hardly ever went out, had few if any close friends, played video war games hour after hour to pass the time or occasionally engaged in mock paintball battles.

Police offered them a life that mirrored their own make-believe, Internet-fuelled reality, full of Rambo-style adventure.

They were so alienated from mainstream Canada they were more than willing to commit mass murder to restore a medieval Muslim caliphate.

What transformed two aimless, searching misfits into eager recruits for virulent Islamic extremism? Half the time they couldn’t remember the difference between a Sunni and Shiite, halal or haram.

This couple didn’t appear to be psychopaths; they worried about what would happen to their cat if they were killed and stiffing the landlord for the rent. They had feelings and a conscience.

But they were in despair, tormented by failure — drifting from Christianity to Satanism, from witchcraft to an alien-inspired cult, before stumbling, literally, upon Islam while drunk — he in his punk camouflage outfit, she in a halter-top and miniskirt.

Still, after less than 18 months, what sobered them up and impelled them to plan mass murder for Allah instead of seeking the next street party?

The rationale they recorded in a “shaheed” video to explain their death after a massacre, hopefully on the scale of 9/11, is an off-the-cuff skit — two nobodies filled to the brim with their own ego, dysfunctional, dissocial narcissists in Muslim costumes.

They didn’t take the stand and nothing the Crown offered truly explains why two British Columbians embraced a plan to commit grotesque slaughter.

Their lawyers hope to establish the RCMP made them do it.

Given the findings of the 12 jurors, I think, that’s a tough sell.

It is difficult to empathize with these two.

Lots of people have difficult childhoods, end up on the street and find salvation in religious faith without becoming terrorists.

In the landmark 1988 entrapment case, police conduct crossed the line, the court said, and under the circumstances the addict did what any ordinary Canadian might have done.

Nuttall and Korody don’t appear to fall into that category.

They were damaged invisible nobodies, or as they put it themselves, ghosts — people who thought they could only establish an identity through violence.

Ironically, they have managed to achieve infamy. Luckily, there were no victims, save perhaps themselves.

imulgrew@vancouversun.com

A generation after Canada’s first medical cannabis dispensary opened in Vancouver in 1997, city council and police are scrambling to regulate the business as if taken by surprise.

City Manager Penny Ballem says Ottawa has created “greyness and confusion,” sounding incredulous that there is a pot precinct downtown and more cannabis cafés on corners than Tim Hortons.

Where has she been?

The federal government has never been clearer about the demonized weed and has used the plant to draw a hardline for the fall election between it and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose is unequivocal in the current Reefer Madness-like TV campaign that warns marijuana fries teenage brains, provides no provable medical benefit and is most definitely illegal.

The law only looks “grey” if you’re standing in sideways West Coast rain or a cloud of 21st century, high potency Purple Kush, certainly not your grandfather’s grass.

Ottawa overhauled the medical cannabis program a year ago and the public prosecution office stridently asserts the right to cut down every last plant under personal cultivation.

The new rules created a free-market regime with approved, high-security corporate producers, catalogue shopping, secure home delivery and public companies shilling shares and stock.

The massive reform was a response to municipalities across the nation loudly whining about neighbourhood grow operations and the supposed hazards caused by home cultivation.

Free-standing clinics, compassion clubs, pot dispensaries, smoke shops, hash houses, marijuana cafés, call them what you will, they were not part of the old scheme and are not part of the new.

They were not and are not legal in Canada — and that’s the black-and-white truth. Get over it.

Ballem should drop the hypocrisy and the disingenuous naiveté — there are reasons dispensaries popping up like mushrooms isn’t an issue elsewhere. And it isn’t our rain.

For nearly 20 years, this city has thumbed its nose at the law in the rest of Canada while profiting from a reputation as Vansterdam on the Pacific.

In 2004, then-Mayor-now-Senator Larry Campbell (who wanted to tax and regulate marijuana) and the cops shut down the mega-successful Da Kine café to emphasize discretion was an essential element of the laissez-faire city policy toward pot.

The international news coverage about the shop and lineups down the street embarrassed the good burghers who wanted liberal tourism but no overt boasting or profit-making that called attention to the thriving underground economy.

Not surprisingly, when Da Kine owner Don Briere got out of jail he returned to the lucrative illegal business and now is a major player in the current green rush.

And in June 2012 The Vancouver Sun pointed it out with a big story and picture pointing out this booming illegal business.

We haven’t seen the same exponential growth in marijuana dispensaries in other cities because they have not tolerated them in this way.

Similarly, because B.C. was the prime Canadian producer of pot for the U.S., the province’s guerrilla gardeners have had to find another market given the surplus created by the advent of legalization in two states and medical production in two dozen others.

The appearance of more than 80 dispensaries in Vancouver in the last two years is a direct result of the collapse of the U.S. black market.

Yet Police Chief Jim Chu’s minions issued an edict last year that essentially said unless you were dealing to kids or wearing Hells Angels colours you were free to sell pot.

I’d like to see him defend that if, as widely surmised, he runs for the Conservatives in the next election.

More than that, I’d like to hear him explain how you can buy marijuana wholesale without dealing with criminals or gangsters?

The Dutch decriminalization model has always suffered from this flaw — permitted pot cafés make consumers happy, but the owners deal with crooks so society continues to deal with pernicious results.

There is no legal supply chain for any of these outlets in Vancouver. None.

In spite of Ballem’s professed confusion and the benign police policy, the civic authorities know this.

They now are proposing a regulation without so much as a phone call to those in the business.

The outrageous fees, the wrong-headed ban on edibles and derivatives, the sudden haste, all are big flags the proposal was thrown together without serious thought.

This city has the most experience and the longest history of dealing with widespread open marijuana use and its retail sale; it should take advantage of that.

Vancouver’s politicians, civic staff and police should be using the insight gained over the last 20 years to lead an honest, evidence-based discussion.

Instead, the vapid comments and the badly framed approach leaves me wondering what they are smoking.

imulgrew@vancouversun.com

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Two young men who watched the fatal beating of a Kelowna man by two Hells Angels have lost an appeal of their manslaughter convictions.

Even though Matthew McRae and Anson Schell didn’t inflict the fatal blows, they were part of the events that led to the brutal attack on Dain Phillips in June 2011, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday.

Phillips, 51, had tried to intervene in a dispute between his sons and McRae and his brother Daniel when the attack occurred on a road outside of Kelowna on June 12, 2011.

McRae and Schell had both argued on appeal that they were not directly involved in the assault by Norm Cocks and Rob Thomas, both full-patch Hells Angels.

The bikers pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to 15 years in jail.

Appeal Court Justice Elizabeth Bennett summarized the horrific attack in her ruling.

"Phillips was out of the vehicle with his hands up, when Norman Cocks armed with a ball-peen hammer and Thomas armed with a baseball bat ran over to Dain Phillips and severely beat him. He died of his injuries the next morning," she said.

Bennett dismissed the arguments of McRae and Schell and upheld their convictions.

"There was ample evidence that they formed a common intention with Cocks and Thomas to fight the Phillipses," she said. "They armed themselves in advance. They attended with several others to the fight scene, demonstrating strength in numbers and they got out of their vehicles and started to run towards the Phillipses."

She said the trial judge had more than enough evidence that "the two appellants did acts that aided or abetted, that they knew Cocks and Thomas were going to commit an assault and had an objectively foreseeable risk of bodily harm and they intended to aid or abet in the commission of the assault."

Appeal Court Justices Mary Newbury and David Tysoe agreed.

Bennett also pointed to intercepted conversations of McRae’s brother Daniel and Schell after the fatal beating where they made fun of what had happened.

"They speak callously and mockingly about Robert Thomas and Norman Cocks rushing towards Dain Phillips, aggressively confronting him about affronting the Hells Angels and beating him," Bennett said.

In October 2014, Matthew McRae was sentenced to 31/2 years in prison and Schell received a three-year prison term. Daniel McRae was sentenced to five. He filed an appeal as well, but abandoned it last fall.

kbolan@vancouversun.com

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Read the full ruling here: http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/ca/16/00/2016BCCA0019.htm

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During the last century, from about the mid-1960s to the early ’80s, revolution was in the air.

Cultural and political norms around the globe were experiencing a shakeup and, in the West, the civil rights, antiwar and free speech movements were all gaining momentum, as were feminism and gay rights. Thousands of young people, rebelling against the “button-down” way of life of their postwar parents, joined causes, became activists, and went “back to the land” in a wholesale challenge of mainstream social and political ideals. The cultural landscape was changing fast and the gentle, dope-smoking hippie emerged as one of the dominant symbols of the era.

It wasn’t all peace and love, however.

There were also a number of underground political organizations forming in the U.S. and attracting fledgling young revolutionaries committed to changing the world. The Weathermen (1969-77), with their aim of overthrowing the U.S. government, and the Symbionese Liberation Army (1973-75) with the infamous Patty Hearst caper, were two examples.

In the late ’70s, the Communist Party USA (Provisional Wing) was formed as an offshoot of the anti-poverty group, the National Labour Federation. A left-wing cult, its leader was a former disc jockey and con man from California named Gerald Doeden. By then he had changed his name to Eugenio Maria Perente-Ramos and it is Perente-Ramos, or the Old Man as he was called by his followers, that is the main subject of first-time author Sonja Larsen’s memoir, Red Star Tattoo.

Larsen was a true child of the era. Infrequently schooled, she lived in communes in the U.S. and Canada with a continually changing band of hippies. The younger of two daughters, her separated parents were seldom around to guide or nurture her. Her father was a drug dealer in Montreal and her mother, a committed Communist, lived mostly in California. Larsen’s older sister fled communal life when she was 15.

Growing up, Larsen was given an excess of freedom and was even used, at nine years of age, as a hitchhiking ploy for commune members because people would stop for a child holding a teddy bear. During this time she endured the horrific murder of her teenage cousin, Dana, and her own sexual molestation by her mother’s boyfriend, Karl. Her 13th birthday was spent as a “comrade in arms” in California handing out leaflets about the revolution with her mother.

“Choice,” she writes, “was what our parents gave us when they had nothing else to give, not protection, not sympathy.”

Though slow to begin and written with a narrative style that is, at times, flat in tone, Larsen’s memoir eventually engages. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a brainwashed devotee of a mad charismatic leader, look no further. At 16, Larsen became the youngest full member of the Communist Party USA (Provisional Wing) and was living in her leader’s command post in Brooklyn. By 17 she was one of his many lovers. The revolution, he proclaimed, would happen on Feb. 18, 1984.

Perente-Ramos’s activities included giving lectures to volunteers about the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. The volunteers, all with a common hunger for a better world, were, as Larsen tells us, “the bent, the damaged, the scarred … Fresh from jail, runaways, or just rundown, people joined and left every month.”

Larsen stayed. Though unpredictable in his attentions to her, she believed Perente-Ramos had a deep interest in her life, something she had never experienced from another person. She stayed with him and the movement as well, because once rudderless, she now “had a reason to get up in the morning … This revolutionary life I had been on the edge of since I was a child now had a place for me.”

The first time she saw Perente-Ramos, “he was wearing aviator glasses, a Hells Angels biker vest and a black T-shirt that claimed he was the ‘meanest motherf–ker in the valley.’” This boast proved to be true as Larsen unflinchingly chronicles the physical and sexual abuse he inflicted both on her and other female volunteers. Perente-Ramos controlled people with a mix of hyperbolic idealism, fear and guilt, heavy workload, poor food, and sleep deprivation, the classic modus operandi of messianic cult leaders.

Feb. 18, 1984, came and went. “We didn’t win. Nothing happened,” Larsen tells us. She was 19 by then and, disillusioned by the movement’s failure, drifted away. In the years since, she has struggled to make sense of those times. The result is Red Star Tattoo, an insightful and moving memoir.

Sonja Larsen will be appearing at the Vancouver Writers Festival’s Incite on Feb. 3at 7 p.m. at the Central Library, 350 W. Georgia St.

M.A.C. Farrant’s new book, The Days, will appear from Talon in the fall.

Beeba Boys

Sept. 27, 6:15 p.m. and Sept. 29, 3 p.m. | Centre for Performing Arts

Tickets and info: viff.org

Watching Beeba Boys, you could be led to believe that the streets of Vancouver are criss-crossed by fast-talking Indo-Canadian gangsters sporting snazzy tailored suits, driving the latest sports cars and brandishing shiny weapons willy nilly.

The latest film by Academy Award-nominated director Deepa Mehta paints a Scorsese-inspired and Tarantino-esque portrait of the recurring crime stories you read in the pages of this very paper or that you see in flashy sound bites on the nightly news in B.C.

Beeba Boys tells the story of Jeet Johar (played by Bollywood star Randeep Hooda), the leader of the movie’s eponymous stylish gang (meaning “the good boys”). He rules his territory with a fist full of chrome, battling with a rival gang for supremacy over the drugs and weapons trade.

During the course of the story he gets involved with a juror from his trial, Katya Drobot (played by Sarah Allen), and the movie spirals into a series of confrontations with rival gangsters and the police, with a special appearance by Paul Gross as a particularly distasteful crime associate.

If this sounds a bit familiar — say, like the tale of famed ’90s gangster Bindy Johal and his romantic interest Gillian Guess, as well as the involvement of then VPD commanding officer Kash Heed — it’s because it is.

Mehta is quick to say the parallels between Beeba Boys and the real-life events that inspired the film are many.

“It’s not inspired by just one story — Beeba Boys is an amalgamation of true events and true characters,” Mehta said. “Jeet is not inspired solely by Bindy Johal. I’m glad I’m talking to The Vancouver Sun and I can say this once and for all: This is not Bindy Johal’s story.

“It’s definitely set in Vancouver with what started in the ’80s. What I read (to inspire the film) was one of your amazing reporters Kim Bolan’s stories, which I first read in the late ’90s. Once I started researching it — she’s followed Indo-Canadian Sikh gangsters for the last 20 years — I was so shocked.

“It’s a very Vancouver story,” she added. “And in a way it’s fascinating to find something that’s so particular in Canada, actually.”

Beeba Boys is ultraviolent, hyper-vulgar, and it takes no prisoners. It’s also about being an immigrant and wanting to be accepted and respected, and it immerses the viewer into Indo-Sikh culture.

But does Beeba Boys glamorize or sensationalize a very real and very dangerous lifestyle that has been adopted by a small section of the Indo-Canadian population in the Vancouver area?

“Every gang movie has a style,” Mehta said. “You look at Casino, for example, or the films of Coppola. Everything is very stylized. It’s interesting: No white community will give the opportunity for any immigrant to be stylized. Then it becomes sensational. Why are we all right with white people being stylized and stylish, and why do we get uncomfortable when brown people are?

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“The whole point of the film in many ways is, ‘How do we belong?’” Mehta added. “Jeet says, ‘If you want to be seen, then want to be seen.’ They want to be accepted and they aren’t respected. Crime doesn’t pay — that’s the moral of the story. But if you want to be seen, you have to commit to being seen.

“Every brotherhood has a way of expressing who they are, to show that they are a brotherhood — whether they’re gang members or they belong to a club or they work in a bank.”

Mehta, most famous for her “Elements Trilogy” — Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and Water (2005) — and for working with Salman Rushdie on Midnight’s Children (2012), said her love of gangster movies goes deep. There’s Scorsese and Coppola and Tarantino in the mix, evidently, but she also mentioned the films of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, whose work from the 1960s helped inform the style of Beeba Boys.

“Suzuki did four really stylized yakuza films in Tokyo, which really rooted the gangs in a form which I’d never seen before.

“Every gangster story is essentially the same when you look at it: It’s about a hunger for power, to be recognized. There’s an ascendancy and a descendency. That’s every film, whether it’s Goodfellas or The Godfather or Scarface.”

Mehta’s choice to keep the story located in Vancouver for the purpose of the film was essential, she said. There was no way the story would have worked in any other city, as the settings, the people and the style of the film had everything to do with the Vancouver area.

In fact, she presented the film for members of the Indo-Canadian community here, including Kash Heed and Ujjal Dosanjh, before the film was selected to screen at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals.

“(Heed) said he was ‘really happy,’” Mehta said. “It’s difficult for a community to see even an aspect of oneself in perhaps a negative light. It’s difficult. We come to a country, we want to be embraced, we want to be loved and accepted. We don’t want anything negative said about us — that’s the first instinct of anybody: To want to belong.

“It’s important we talk about it. Everybody has a negative side. It’s not just Indo-Canadians. It’s Italian-Canadians, the Somalians, the Irish, the Hells Angels — the strongest white gang in Vancouver; it’s the Triads, the yakuza. It’s every community. As a community we hold a responsibility to our youth. Look at the grieving mothers, the orphans. We should do something about it. And if we can’t talk about it then we aren’t being responsible Canadians.”

fmarchand@vancouversun.com

twitter.com/FMarchandVS

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VANCOUVER — A B.C. man who is now a member of the elite Nomads chapter of the Ontario Hells Angels has been arrested in B.C.

Damion Ryan was out on bail on drug and weapons charges filed in the Ottawa area when he was picked up by Vancouver police on Jan. 29.

“Damion was arrested for an outstanding warrant in the 1400-block of Commercial Drive around midnight on Friday,” Sgt. Randy Fincham said. He appeared in Vancouver provincial court Tuesday where Judge Gregory Rideout ordered his release on $10,000 bail.

Rideout heard that Ryan had alerted his bail supervisor in Ontario that he was headed to B.C. for Christmas.

On Jan. 16, Vancouver Police were called to the Penthouse strip club to investigate a fight that started inside but spilled out onto the street. When police reviewed security footage from the club, they allege they spotted Ryan violating his Ontario bail conditions by drinking alcohol and using a cellphone. That led to the warrant and his arrest.

Undercover biker cops were in the courtroom for his brief appearance.

Ryan must check in regularly with Vancouver police while on bail here, plus provide an address and remain at it between midnight and 6 a.m. daily. He is due back before a Vancouver judge Feb. 10.

Ryan recently posted his condolences on the Facebook page of his friend Yonatan (JK) Kassa, who was gunned down in Port Coquitlam Jan. 22. “#RIP to my little homie I’ve never been so sad to have gotten the news I just got today… RIP Jon "jk",” said Ryan.

Ryan, 35, was associated with the so-called Wolf Pack alliance while he was in Metro Vancouver. It consisted of some Independent Soldiers’ gangsters, some members of the Red Scorpion gang and some Hells Angels.

The alliance was locked in a bloody gang war that resulted in the slayings of several high-profile gangsters including Red Scorpion Jonathan Bacon, Sandip Duhre and brothers Gurmit and Sukh Dhak.

Ryan’s name surfaced last year in a B.C. Supreme Court ruling in a gun case involving his associate Dean Wiwchar, who’s a suspect in the 2012 Duhre murder.

Police saw Ryan, Wiwchar and another man driving around a Burnaby neighbourhood where investigators believed they were hunting for someone. Ryan then accompanied Wiwchar and his co-accused Philip Juan Ley, to Mexico on April 18, 2012, the ruling said.

Ryan faced dozens of firearms charges in B.C. that were thrown out by a provincial court judge in Vancouver four years ago.

His lawyer successfully argued that the RCMP violated his Charter rights when they forcibly entered his Burnaby basement suite after shots were fired outside.

The judge said three handguns and an AK-47 were not in “plain view” and that the police improperly searched the suite, finding two guns behind a stuffed animal and assault rifle under a mattress.

Ryan was wounded in a gangland shooting at an Oak Street restaurant in Vancouver on Dec. 12, 2010. Ten people were injured in the unprecedented shootout, which Vancouver police said at the time was in retaliation for the Oct. 16, 2010 assassination of Gurmit Singh Dhak at Burnaby’s Metrotown Mall.

Ryan was sentenced to five years in 2005 in connection with a violent home invasion involving a marijuana-growing operation.

kbolan@vancouversun.com

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METRO VANCOUVER — Before Rajinder Soomel was shot to death in the middle of Cambie Street six years ago, he shouted at his killers to “hold on, hold on, hold on,” a Crown prosecutor told B.C. Supreme Court Tuesday.

Michael Barrenger outlined the Crown’s case against Kevin James Jones and Colin Victor Stewart, charged with first-degree murder in Soomel’s fatal Sept. 29, 2009 shooting.

“I anticipate that a witness who saw the shooting, who was located close to it, will testify that Raj Soomel, before he was shot, said: ‘hold on, hold on, hold on,’” Barrenger said.

“Eight bullets were fired into Raj Soomel. The bullets pierced his head, his chest and his abdomen. Raj Soomel collapsed in the road dead just south of the intersection at Cambie and 19th.”

Barrenger explained to jurors that his opening statement is not evidence, but a summary of the evidence the Crown expects to call during the trial at the Vancouver Law Courts.

He said other witnesses saw Soomel’s killers, wearing dark hoodies, chase him across Cambie after he stopped to get food at a local pizza joint.

And he expects witnesses to tell the trial they saw the two killers get into a grey or silver getaway car near the Starbucks metres from where Soomel collapsed.

Barrenger said police found a trail of evidence linked by DNA to Jones and Stewart that appeared to have been thrown from the vehicle as it raced away.

Police found a gun in the alley east of Cambie between 19th and 20th.

“That gun is one of the two guns used to shoot and kill Raj Soomel,” Barrenger said.

Closer to 20th, a pair of Remington Camoflauge gloves were located. Then a block away at 20th and Yukon, police found “the other gun used to murder Raj Soomel,” Barrenger said.

About three blocks away in the 4000-block of Yukon, police found another pair of gloves, a black hoodie and a bandana.

“DNA on three of those items came back to Colin Stewart. And DNA on two of those items cam back to Kevin Jones,” Barrenger said.

Soomel was gunned down about two blocks from the Dick Bell-Irving halfway house where he had been staying since August 2009.

Barrenger said staff at the halfway house noticed suspicious activity in the days before the slaying.

Cars were seen driving back and forth in front of the house just west of Cambie on 21st.

And there were phone calls made to the facility, including one that was traced to Jones’s girlfriend.

The suspicious incidents started after another South Asian prisoner named Randy Naicker was paroled to the halfway house on Sept. 24, 2009, Barrenger said.

Soomel left the halfway house just after 10 p.m. on the night he was killed. A staff member mistakenly wrote in his log that Naicker had gone out to the store, Barrenger said.

“Within minutes, two men armed with guns with their faces partly concealed burst into DBI. One of them screamed at him: ‘Where’s Randy? Where’s Randy?’”

A gun was pointed at the worker’s head.

“You will also hear his recollection that he was struck in the head with the gun, injuring him,” Barrenger said.

The worker told the gunmen that Naicker had gone to the store.

“The two armed men then left.”

Barrenger said that at the time of the murder, Jones was living in a halfway house in downtown Vancouver. He signed out before the slaying and returned about 20 minutes afterwards.

And Stewart was living in Coquitlam with a man named Jesse Adkins, who Barrenger suggested had a role in the murder though has never been charged.

"You will hear about Jesse Adkins in this trial," he said. "You will hear that Jesse Adkins has not been seen in years and can’t be located."

Both Stewart and Jones have pleaded not guilty.

The trial is expected to last eight weeks.

kbolan@vancouversun.com

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twitter.com/kbolan

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A Metro Vancouver longshoreman is appealing a decision by the federal government to deny him security clearance because of drug smuggling allegations against his brothers, who also work on the docks.

Arun Randhawa filed an application in the Federal Court of Canada last month seeking a judicial review of a refusal by the minister of transport to give him the special clearance necessary for some waterfront jobs.

In his court documents, Randhawa says he’s a casual longshore worker who registered for employment in March 2013 and applied for the Marine Transportation Security Clearance.

He was told in a November 2014 letter that he wouldn’t get the clearance because of “his alleged association on a daily basis with two individuals identified as executive members of an Indo-Canadian organized crime group, one of whom was caught with 107 kilograms of cocaine in the United States and was sentenced to 60 months in prison.”

The minister also alleged in the letter that “this group is known to police to traffic narcotics between the United States and Canada … and is involved with the Hells Angels, Japanese Mafia and Chinese criminals,” according to Randhawa’s application.

While the two associates are not named in the court documents, Randhawa’s eldest brother Alexie was arrested in California in 2008 with 107 kilograms of cocaine. He served four years of his five-year sentence before returning to Canada and his job as a Vancouver longshoreman in November 2012.

And Randhawa’s middle brother Alvin, also a longshoreman, has been charged in New York State with six counts of smuggling and distributing both cocaine and marijuana. He consented to committal for extradition in B.C. Supreme Court last November and is awaiting a decision by Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould on whether he will be sent to the U.S.

U.S. court documents say that decision is expected by May 6.

The New York indictment alleges Alvin Randhawa and three other Canadians were involved in smuggling marijuana across the border and into the state between 2007 and late 2010, as well as exporting cocaine from the U.S. into Canada from 2007 until May 11, 2011.

Both Arun and Alvin wrote reference letters for the L.A. judge in Alexie’s case when he was being sentenced.

Arun called Alexie his “best friend and mentor.”

“We come from a respected family within our community and were raised with love, compassion, morals, responsibility and honour,” Arun wrote, adding that both he and Alvin “look up to Alexie for his strong sense of knowledge, integrity and leadership skills.”

Arun Randhawa says in his appeal documents that the minister “erred in law, exceeded his jurisdiction and overstepped the bounds of ministerial discretion in making his decision that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that Randhawa poses a risk to marine security.”

“The minister erred in failing to give due weight to Randhawa’s explanations for the alleged events and associations,” the documents say.

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