Pubdate: Fri, 23 Mar 2007
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2007 Southam Inc.
Contact:  http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Greg Mcarthur and Gary Dimmock, CanWest News Service

THE MANY LIES OF AN RCMP INFORMANT

To the RCMP in Victoria, Richard Young was a trusted informant. In 
exchange for his inside information on an alleged heroin ring, 
information that turned out to be untrue, they paid off his debts, 
erased his past and gave him a new identity. And then he committed 
murder. None of the details of that crime can be published because 
the man is legally shielded as a member of the Witness Protection 
Program. But this much can be told.

Richard Young wasn't recruited by the Mounties for his information. 
He approached them in the summer of 2000 -- a "walk-in," as one 
officer referred to him.

The RCMP in Victoria have never explained why they thought he would 
be useful. They didn't know a lot about him, and what they did know 
wasn't flattering. He was being investigated by a local police 
department on allegations that he defrauded his landlord of $48,000. 
They also knew he owed his foster father $78,500 on a line of credit 
he had taken out for him. But they signed him up as a police informant.

They gave him a handler, an RCMP officer who was assigned to build 
trust with Mr. Young and extract tips about Victoria's criminal underworld.

The officer was in unfamiliar territory, too.

He had just started with the RCMP's Vancouver Island District Drug 
Section and Mr. Young was his second informant in 12 years of policing.

He had no formal training in handling informants: He'd once had the 
chance to take a course on dealing with sources, but had been too busy.

The informant and the handler followed protocol: Mr. Young was given 
a code name, E8060, and he talked to the officer regularly. The RCMP 
hasn't specified how much he made in those early days -- only saying 
he was paid on "an individual evaluation of information basis" -- but 
it couldn't have been much. He hadn't infiltrated any big-name gangs. 
None of his tips had led to the execution of any search warrants or wiretaps.

But three months into Mr. Young's fledgling career, he gave the RCMP a gift.

At a Christmas party on Dec. 5, 2000, Mr. Young met and befriended Barry Liu.

The Mounties had been after Mr. Liu for years, and had arrested him 
in 1999 as part of what they alleged was an international heroin 
smuggling ring.

Mr. Liu worked as a waiter and as a grocery clerk, but was alleged to 
own three homes and was a part-owner in an auto detailing shop.

The RCMP believed he was behind much of the heroin on the streets of 
Victoria and that he was an associate of a Vancouver criminal network.

Mr. Liu didn't speak English well and needed a new lawyer to 
represent him on the heroin charges.

Mr. Young seemed to know his way around and had the name of a lawyer, 
Tom Bulmer, whom he had hired in an unsuccessful bid to buy a 
nightclub. He introduced Mr. Liu to the lawyer and Mr. Bulmer agreed 
to take Mr. Liu's case.

The accused heroin dealer and Mr. Young became so close that Mr. Liu 
asked him to serve as a sort-of legal liaison. Mr. Young had full 
access to Mr. Liu's legal file, and on at least one occasion, took it 
home from Mr. Bulmer's office so he could read it and explain some 
things to his Asian friend.

They were practically attached to each other. If Mr. Liu went to the 
lawyer's office, Mr. Young went with him. It was the same with 
restaurants and coffee shops. Mr. Young became a fixture at Mr. Liu's 
car shop, Auto FX Accessories.

The intelligence began pouring in to the RCMP.

Mr. Young paged his handler constantly with news.

He was asked to draw diagrams, so the police knew exactly who was 
sitting where with Mr. Liu at his various meetings. Sometimes, Mr. 
Young spoke to his handler several times a day.

Then, on Jan. 9, 2001, Mr. Young said he had come across some terrifying news.

He told his handler Mr. Liu had threatened to harm an unnamed Crown attorney.

The Mountie needed more information. This was serious. There was a 
lot at stake in the upcoming heroin smuggling trial, one of the most 
expensive cases in the history of the RCMP. Was it possible the 
accused drug lords were trying to derail it with bloodshed?

The next day, the threat escalated. Mr. Young told the Mountie that 
Mr. Liu was talking about taking out British Columbia judge named Wayne Smith.

Two days later the list of targets expanded to five, including more 
lawyers and officers.

According to the informant, the accused heroin dealer had gone to 
Vancouver and paid someone $45,000 to do the deeds.

The Mounties went on high alert. Security units raced across Victoria 
and Vancouver to protect the targets. The police discussed setting up 
silent alarms at their homes. Every officer in the drug squad was 
assigned to the case.

The Mounties attached themselves to Mr. Liu.

They got authorization to tap his phone, and a surveillance team 
sprung into action.

"We'd put him to bed at night and pick up right from first thing in 
the morning," the handler later testified. "Wherever he went, we were 
with him."

But at least some of the top Mounties in Vancouver wondered about the 
source of these threats.

Besides Mr. Young's stories, the Mounties had no evidence: Nothing 
from the wiretaps. Nothing from the surveillance.

After a week, the Victoria Mounties were summoned to E Division 
headquarters in Vancouver.

By the end of the meeting the officers from Vancouver and the 
officers from Victoria would walk away with very different 
impressions of what they had decided.

The top Mountie in the room, Chief Supt. Gerry Braun, told the 
officers to use a "statement analysis" to test Mr. Young's reliability.

The informant had already given the Mounties a 103-page statement and 
Supt. Braun thought a polygraph expert should scrutinize the 
statement. Was this guy worth all the time and money?

But the Victoria officers had a lot invested in this young man who 
had so quickly manoeuvred himself into the backrooms of Barry Liu's 
life. They argued that Mr. Young's statement wasn't appropriate for 
such an analysis, and that it was unnecessary in any case. It also 
appears one of the Victoria officers was miffed at the brass from 
Vancouver for meddling in the case.

"Obviously, we had far more information about the aspects of this 
case than Chief Supt. Braun," he later testified. "I have always 
operated on the principle that it's the working group of 
investigators who make decisions about what steps to take in an investigation."

So he was surprised when he opened his e-mail the next day and found 
an eight-page report by Sgt. Richard Konarski, a polygraph specialist 
who has since gone on to teach criminology at Simon Fraser University.

Sgt. Konarski had been forwarded Mr. Young's statement, and he had 
some serious doubts about the Mounties' star informant and his claims 
of a hit list.

"It would seem critical to determine the subject's motivation in 
coming forward," wrote

Sgt. Konarski, who questioned whether Mr. Young believed what he was 
telling his handler. "(Mr. Young) has demonstrated a lack of 
commitment to the substantive issues of concern in this investigation."

The Victoria Mounties have never publicly and fully explained what 
they thought of Sgt. Konarski's report. A few of them, including the 
handler and some of his superiors, were briefed on the report, but 
beyond that, not much changed.

The Victoria officers decided the investigation was up to them and 
they believed Mr. Young was the real deal. They didn't know what kind 
of person he was, or exactly what had inspired him to come forward.

Seven months after Mr. Young was first interviewed by the Mounties, 
it looked as if they had overvalued their informant.

Nothing Mr. Young had told the police was going to happen had 
materialized. They got authorization for more wiretaps and still 
turned up nothing.

It appeared the five people on the hit list were safe -- until one 
day in March 2001 when a suspicious-looking Asian man showed up in 
the RCMP's parking lot.

Mr. Young had warned them about this. He was still in constant 
contact with his handler.

The informant had promised that Mr. Liu's people were planning 
counter-surveillance on the Victoria Mounties, and now, out in the 
parking lot of the RCMP's Nanaimo Street building, there was an Asian 
man going from car to car, writing down licenceplate numbers.

It intensified. Over a series of days the Mounties kept seeing the 
same Asian faces in their rearview mirrors.

One night, an Asian man in a Honda Prelude followed an officer's 
unmarked vehicle out of the RCMP parking lot.

This settled it. It was time for the RCMP to get Barry Liu off the 
streets. It was also time to make Mr. Young an official agent of the 
Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The informant had proven his worth.

Now, the RCMP promised to do for Mr. Young what he had tried so 
desperately to do his entire life: Erase his identity.

They arranged a "buy-and-bust" for June 12, 2001. Mr. Young asked Mr. 
Liu to hook him up with some cocaine, and when he did, the police 
swept in and arrested him.

Mr. Young entered the federally funded Witness Protection Program. As 
per policy, the federal government paid his debts to his landlord and 
his foster father -- $130,000 -- and he got a new name, a new 
location and an opportunity to become whatever and whomever he 
wanted. The Victoria Mounties handed Richard Young a licence to lie 
and sent him on his way.

Ever since Barry Liu's arrest, Tom Bulmer knew there was something 
rotten about Agent E8060.

First off, the lawyer was enraged when he discovered it was Richard 
Young who had squealed on his client. The Mounties had let Mr. Young 
sit in on his client's defence strategy sessions. They also sat back 
and did nothing when Mr. Young accessed his client's legal file.

The lawyer called it the grossest violation of solicitor-client 
privilege in the history of Canada and then took it a step further by 
accusing the RCMP of defrauding him.

(It was Mr. Young who had promised to pay Mr. Liu's legal fees, and 
he had written Mr. Bulmer a $75,000 cheque. Mr. Young didn't have 
enough money to cover it.)

But the lawyer had a hunch there was more to this informant. His 
first clue came from the Crown Attorney's office, weeks after Mr. 
Young had been handed his new life.

Almost as soon as Barry Liu was charged in the June buy-and-bust, the 
trafficking charges were stayed. The prosecutors discovered there was 
a report that had been written by an RCMP polygraph expert that 
raised serious doubts about Mr. Young's credibility. Every time the 
Mounties had gone to a judge seeking permission to tap Mr. Liu's 
phone they had forgotten to bring the report with them. The judges 
had no way of knowing that Agent E8060 might not be a solid source.

The lawyer kept at it, and when he got word that some of the teens 
who hung out at Auto FX had a story for him, he was able to do what 
the Mounties had refused to do -- show Richard Young for who he really was.

Jason Cheung, a 19-year-old college student who hung out at Auto FX, 
told the lawyer that Mr. Young took him out for dinner one night and 
made him a strange offer.

Everyone at the shop already thought Mr. Young's stories were beyond 
belief, but this was a doozy.

Mr. Young said he worked for a gang and the RCMP had $50,000 of the 
gang's money in their Nanaimo Street building, the teen said.

Mr. Young explained that he was planning a break-in to get the money 
back. But in order to do that he needed someone to get the 
licence-plate numbers of the officers' cars; that way he'd know when 
the fewest Mounties were in the building.

The teen didn't believe him, but he went to the parking lot that same 
night. "He was giving things like cigarettes and gas money to do this 
stuff, and it was easy money to do nothing," the teen would eventually testify.

Another night, Mr. Young asked the teen and his friend to go back to 
the RCMP building and follow a van. The teen did it --in his 1993 
Honda Prelude.

Another teen heard the same story about Mr. Young's gang and agreed to help.

He didn't believe Mr. Young either, but he completed three missions 
in his Honda Civic because Mr. Young bought him dinner and gas.

"We just thought it was just his way to make us hang out with him or 
something," he eventually testified.

By the time he was done, Mr. Bulmer had tracked down three people, 
all of whom had heard the same story about the gang, and he put them 
on the witness stand.

Their testimony was enough for Judge Dean Wilson to make up his mind 
about Mr. Young.

"I find, on the evidence before me, the 'surveillance' activity was a 
cruel charade orchestrated entirely by the machinations of Mr. 
Young," the judge ruled on Sept. 6, 2002.

The Mounties' case, constructed entirely on the word of a guy who 
walked into their office one day, collapsed.

To make matters worse for the RCMP, Judge Wilson eventually stayed 
all the charges in 1999 heroin case because he believed the Victoria 
officers hadn't taken the proper steps before resorting to wiretaps.

Barry Liu and the six other Asian-Canadian men arrested in the 
two-and-a-half-year investigation were off the hook.

And thanks to the Witness Protection Program, so was Mr. Young.

His contract guaranteed him protection, despite the fact that a judge 
had decided he was a liar.

But if the Mounties had any hopes their secret agent would transform 
himself into an honest and productive citizen, they were mistaken.

During one of his final submissions before the judge, Mr. Bulmer 
accused the Mounties of negligence for dismissing Sgt. Konarski's report.

"If you knew that there could be damage down the road because you 
were given a report saying this man may be subverting justice -- you 
can pray that no harm comes, but if it comes, it's yours because you 
should have known," the lawyer said.

"Even if you didn't want the harm to happen ? if something bad 
happens, it's your problem."

Something bad did happen. Mr. Young was convicted of killing someone 
while using his new identity, provided by the RCMP. Although Tom 
Bulmer went to the press, demanding an inquiry into the conduct of 
the RCMP and their secret agent, the RCMP has never said why that 
request went nowhere.
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