Vancouver hearing reveals how Asian gangs work in Canada

VANCOUVER — An immigration hearing for an alleged organized crime boss is pulling back the curtain on the murky world of Asian triads and the ties that bind them to Canada.

Seventeen years after Lai Tong Sang stepped off a plane in Vancouver, Canada Border Services Agency is asking the Immigration and Refugee Board to find him in admissible on the grounds that he has ties to organized crime.

An investigation into stolen vehicles being shipped overseas for sale first alerted British Columbia law enforcement officials that a major player in the Macau underworld had landed on their shores, Patrick Fogarty, the former superintendent of the Co-ordinated Law Enforcement Unit told the board Tuesday.

A wiretap in that 1996 investigation captured a conversation about a contract taken out on Lai's life.

"During the initial phases of Project Bamboo, evidence was brought to my attention of a group that we were investigating taking a contract from Hong Kong to locate and kill (Lai)," testified Fogarty, a veteran police officer and expert in Asian organized crime.

Fogarty said the players being asked by someone in Hong Kong to organize the hit were Wilson Wong and Simon Chow, who were key members of the so-called 14K gang in Vancouver.

"Fortunately for us, Wilson was not much aware of what was going on with a gang war in Macau and this person explained there was a war between the Chipped Tooth (gang) and Lai."

"The person in Hong Kong was asking if Simon (Chow) would take the contract. It would put him in good favour if he would take the contact," Fogarty said under questioning from Becky Chan, the lawyer for Canada Border Services Agency.

Wiretaps later captured the head of the 14K gang and his right-hand man discussing HK$1 million contract.

"In my world, a contact means to kill," Fogarty said. "If it's a contract to break somebody's legs they actually qualify that."

With nothing but the prefix of a cellphone number, Wilson — the man Fogarty described as the No.2 man for 14K in Vancouver — began a flurry of activity to find Lai.

"It was clearly established that from the perspective of these particular individuals operating in Vancouver that Tong Sang Lai was the head of the Shui Fong, the Water Room gang," Fogarty said.

"Nobody knows the underworld like the underworld."

CBSA is seeking to have Lai and the rest of his family declared inadmissible on the grounds that they misrepresented material facts in their applications for permanent residency.

Board adjudicator noted that Lai has already filed a challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in relation to the agency's attempt to remove him for links to organized crime.