RCMP arrests suspects in death of notorious B.C. gangster Jonathan Bacon

The Bacon brothers' blood-soaked rise and fall in Vancouver's lethally competitive drug trade is largely history but police are still picking up the pieces and expect to for some time.

The RCMP's announcement Monday that they'd arrested three men in the 2011 murder of 30-year-old Jonathan Bacon connects some dots in the deadly rivalry among B.C. gangsters but no one's under the illusion the seemingly endless tit-for-tat violence is over.

The eldest of the three Bacons died when the Porsche Cayenne SUV he was riding in with two other gangsters was riddled with bullets in broad daylight outside a luxury resort hotel in Kelowna, B.C. Everyone else in the vehicle was wounded and a young woman riding with them was left a paraplegic.

It was a shocking attack even by the standards of the ongoing gang war over the lucrative cross-border drug business that has seen some very public killings. While Metro Vancouver residents have become used to (if that's the right term) public executions, Kelowna is the normally peaceful hub of the Okanagan Valley's tourism region.

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On Monday, the RCMP-led Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit said they'd arrested three suspects: Jujhur Khun-Khun, 25, of Surrey, B.C., Michael Jones, 25, of Gibsons, on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast and 37-year-old Jason McBride of North Vancouver, who was recently living in Toronto, the Globe and Mail reported. Police say another man, who they wouldn't identify, was also involved but he has since died.

Bacon was head of the Red Scorpions, a gang he controlled with his younger brothers, Jamie and Jarrod. According to police, he was in Kelowna that summer day in 2011 for a meeting with reputed Hells Angel Larry Amero and James Raich of the Independent Soldiers gang to discuss forming an alliance called the Wolfpack.

Vancouver Sun crime reporter Kim Bolan, who has tracked B.C. gang activity for years, said on her blog that the three alleged killers were linked to another slain gangster, Sukh Dhak.

Dhak and a bodyguard were shot to death in the lobby of a hotel in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby last November. Sources told CBC News it's believed the killings were revenge for the hit on Bacon the year before.

Dhak's elder brother, Gurmit, was shot to death at Burnaby's crowded Metrotown Mall in 2010. Other gangsters connected to the brother have also been targeted.

“The flashpoint of this gang violence began with the murder of Gurmit Dhak in Burnaby in October of 2010," Supt. Dan Malo, who heads the special enforcement unit, told the Sun.

"But the Bacon shooting, as it was commonly called became a starting point for a cascade of violence we saw repeated throughout B.C. during the last 18 months."

The Bacons' aggressive push for control of B.C. drug trafficking began in the early years of the last decade.

The brothers, Jonathan, Jamie and Jerrod, grew up in a seemingly normal middle-class home in Abbotsford, about an hour's drive east of Vancouver. By their twenties they'd established themselves as major players, looking the part with close-cropped hair, tattoos and bulked-up physiques.

Their Red Scorpions were implicated in the infamous 2007 Surrey Six killings, when four rivals and two innocent bystanders were slaughtered in a high-rise apartment. Several people face charges but no one's been convicted yet.

The Bacons' fortunes have waned since then. Jonathan is dead, Jamie is serving a seven-year prison term for weapons offences and is charged with murder in the Surrey Six case, while Jarrod is appealing a 12-year-prison term on a cocaine-trafficking conviction.

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Police are under no illusions the latest arrests will lessen the likelihood of future violence.

“This is going to go on for some time,” RCMP Assistant Commissioner Wayne Rideout told a news conference Monday, according to The Canadian Press. “We are doing everything we can to reduce that risk and to identify and disrupt and arrest those involved, but it’s not over.”