A new book on Canada's colourful, tragic organized crime underworld has cast more light on Prince George than perhaps any other.
Jerry Langton's latest title The Notorious Bacon Brothers focuses on the damage caused by the infamous Lower Mainland family gang, both to themselves, many levels of victims, and to the B.C. economy.
Many lines are drawn by Langton between the Lower Mainland drug trade and the Prince George drug trade, as well as other B.C. communities. The murder of Hells Angels puppet club president Billy Moore (head of the Renegades Motorcycle Club); the duo-killing of gang affiliates Garret McComb and Brittany Giese; and the homicide by arson of Linda Fredin, mother-in-law of Game Tight Soldiers member Joey Arrance, are all discussed in the book.
"In a book like this there is always the particular and the general," said Langton. "The particular is the Bacon Brothers but the general is how the drug trade has affected British Columbia communities all over. It is like night and day compared to a few years ago."
Although the massive series of violent events that painted the early 2000s in blood have dwindled from the headlines, Langton urges the public to disbelieve the gang wars are over. He has written 10 books and works on the editorial staff of the Toronto Star, much of his attention focused on Canadian organized crime. His experience tells him the drug trade is just as deadly and economically crippling now as it was when brazen violence was erupting on the B.C. streets, including Prince George, in broad daylight only a few years ago.
"As long as gangsters kill other gangsters, nobody seems to mind very much but when innocent bystanders are killed or seriously injured, that's when people seem to act," he said. "Whenever you have sides, and one is weak, it wants to assert itself. The Hells Angels still dominate the drug trade in B.C. and they really make it difficult for small-time traffickers and growers, they are too demanding and impose a lot of rules. People [on the wrong side of the law] resist that and band together and pick at the Hells Angels. That causes conflict. That conflict is going on right now."
What happened to the Bacon Brothers, he said, is indicative of the Canadian organized crime profile as a whole. Young, unscrupulous people were attracted to a life of easy money, lavish possessions, sexual preening, and a mystique of power and lack of consequences. One by one they were attacked, murdered and imprisoned as were their associates and a lot of their rivals. The glamour was fake.
"You see places like Prince George where a lot of youth saw gang life as an appealing career choice," he said. "When someone with a high school education rolls up in a luxury car and girls available and spends what you think is a lot of cash, that turns some heads. That is still going on but it was a real movement when the Bacon Brothers were starting out, and gangs were developing like the Red Scorpions and the UN Gang and the Independent Soldiers and the Game Tight Soldiers. What you're seeing now - and it is why I focused on the Bacon Brothers - is people idolized because of the gangster lifestyle are now showing the reality of what that lifestyle eventually means: pain, fear, prison, torture, murder inflicted on you. I think young people are noticing this."
The speedy rise and fall of the Bacon Brothers (and many others) did a lot of human and economic damage that is still underway, said Langton. Communities can look at the new book as a how-to manual for recognizing the signs of what gangs can do, but also give hope that opposing their activities is possible and positive results can happen.
