Some Stuff About Hell's Angel Lloyd Robinson I Didn't Know Plus Other HAMC Things
Greg Carr
about a man who attacked another with a bat at Park Royal Shopping
Centre in West Vancouver.
Lloyd Peter Robinson, 20, was given a total of two years less a day
by North Vancouver provincial court Judge Bill Rodgers.
With time served in custody before sentencing deducted from the
sentence, it amounts to about another 10 months in jail.
But I nearly choked when I read what the judge had to say during
sentencing. Rodgers said, "His (Robinson's) young age, his strong
family support and his employment prospects lead me to conclude that
the appropriate sentence would be two years less a day minus time
served."
The family referred to by the judge includes dad Lloyd George
Robinson, a long-time member of the East End chapter of the Hells
Angels.
The elder Robinson has had many dealings with police. He was charged
with manslaughter in the late '80s in the death of a Georgia Street
club owner who had the temerity to ask the gang not to wear their
colours in his establishment.
The court was filled with colour-wearing members of the outlaw
motorcycle gang. The charges were dropped.
Robinson was also arrested on the Upper Levels highway in 1996. News
reports at the time said he was alleged to have some guns and $100,000
cash in his vehicle at the time of the arrest.
Those charges and the extortion charges which initiated the arrest
were also dropped.
I'd guess the family support as outlined to the judge may have
neglected to include some details of the family tree.
http://www.primetimecrime.com/columns/Columns%202004/20040707.htm
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Gangland recruits: Why Vancouver kids fall prey
By Carlito Pablo
Publish Date: December 13, 2007
(Comments In Brackets My Own)
When he was a younger man, Jagdeep Mangat used to set out to
Whytecliff Park, marvelling at West Vancouver's luxurious homes with
spectacular ocean views as he drove by. Breathing in the fresh salt
air as he stood on the park's rugged beach, where he watched yachts
glide across the water, the East Vancouver born youth would start to
dream. He, too, would make it big one day.
For 10 years, Mangat chased his dream in a world where money plenty of
it can be had quickly and easily as long as you're tough and hungry
enough to get it. It came with a price. Starting out in the underworld
of crime when he was only 14, Mangat rose to become a gang leader, and
by the time he got out at age 24, he'd been cut, hacked, and shot more
than once. Of course, he roughed up others along the way. He'd also
been arrested, tried in court and convicted, and had served time. "The
first night in jail, it was like, 'What did I do with my life?'" he
said.
It's been more than a decade since Mangat left the streets. Now 34,
he's midway through his first year of law studies at UBC. His parents
were both lawyers in India, but they weren't able to practise their
profession when they immigrated to Canada. When he sat down with the
Georgia Straight one afternoon on the patio of a West Broadway café
after attending class, Mangat said he wanted to be a human-rights
lawyer.
"I was sick of living that life," Mangat said, reflecting on his old
world. "I've got scars on every inch of my body. The fact that I'm
alive today, that's a miracle."
There has been considerable public concern over a spate of shootings
in the Lower Mainland that has killed a number of people known to
police for their gang associations, as well as innocent bystanders.
The drug trade has been largely blamed for this rash of violent
incidents. This doesn't surprise Mangat.
"You got such a tremendous amount of profit to be made from drugs, and
you're seeing competition among different groups to maximize profit,"
he said. "There's a public perception, I think, from watching the
media that there's something extraordinary that's going on right now.
But I would argue that there really isn't."
( When was the last time two totally innocent ppl were killed in a
gangland takeout as is what happened in the Surrey highrise killing of
six ppl? One was a neighbour and another was a tradesman. That hasn't
happened before as far as I know.)
In its 2007 Annual Report on Organized Crime in Canada, the RCMP-led
Criminal Intelligence Service Canada notes that the illicit drug
market, primarily for marijuana and cocaine, "continues to be the
primary criminal market in Canada in terms of estimated generated
illicit revenue, the number of participating organized crime groups,
and the number of consumers.
"As a result, no single organized crime group dominates any specific
illicit drug market, either nationally or regionally," the report
states. "Unchanged from 2006, approximately 80% of all crime groups in
Canada are involved in this market, particularly as street-level
traffickers. A smaller proportion of crime groups are active in more
sophisticated operations such as wholesale distribution, importation
and domestic production."
It also points to periodic firearms-related violence between rival
crime groups and says that such cycles of violence tend to peak in
intensity and subsequently decline, "often due to targeted law
enforcement intervention".
In British Columbia alone, the RCMP E Division estimates that the
"annualized retail return" for marijuana cultivated for local
consumption and export is about $6 billion.
Marihuana alone appears of the same order of magnitude as tourism or
the fishery as a second-rank industry in the province, and dwarfs (by
comparison) the film industry," the division's criminal-analysis
section stated in a June 2005 report, The Scope and Impact of
Organized Crime in British Columbia. The study went on to note that
this "estimate of $6 billion puts BC's marihuana economy at some 4% of
provincial GDP". It also said that as an export-oriented sector, if
"marihuana production factored into provincial accounts BC's current
trade surplus would increase by 230% from $2.6 to $8.6 billion".
According to Mangat, the only difference between people in the drug
trade and legitimate businesses is that the former are excluded from
legal mechanisms to resolve their disputes.
"In what we call the legitimate business world, there's an area of
contract disputes," he said. "What do they do? They go to courts. But
in the background there always must be force, even in legitimate
economic activity. You go to the state, you get an order from the
court; you have to listen to it because if you don't, the police will
come. It's the same shit that's happening on the street."
(Be nice if the Georgia Straight would lose the profanity.)
However, Mangat went on to suggest that in "alienating" capitalist
economies, gangs are part of the social fabric.
(Then why are so many of them immigrants and first generation Cdns?
They should only be about 25% of the total number of gangsters but
seem to make up a lot higher of the number.)
"The most important thing I have to say is that in capitalist
societies, we'll never get rid of gangs, period, ever," he said.
"They're just as much a part of our society. They're a social
institution. They operate within certain unregulated spaces within the
economy, and they meet a demand which arises out of the nature of an
alienating economy, and they're there to provide the supply."
(I disagree. Build more prisons and hire more police. 1,000,000,000
dollars gets 10k police and another billion will imprison around 20k
gangsters. Since this is far more than the number of gangsters in
Canada this should drastically curtail the gang problem.)
Referring to both Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative
government and Premier Gordon Campbell's B.C. Liberal government,
Mangat argued that there is a reason why governments with a
"right-wing agenda" typically respond to gang violence by moving to
impose tougher laws and longer prison sentences.
(These tougher laws and longer prison sentences are not a hallmark of
the Campbell govt. The Campbell govt actually closed courts and some
jails.)
"That right-wing agenda has no way of explaining what's going on the
streets other than describing it as a matter of individual choice," he
said. "It doesn't look at the social context out of which gangs arise,
the demand for their products arise, and the social motives that gang
members have."
(If they blame immigration policy the Mr.Mangat's of the world tend to
quite upset and they seem to really get upset when convicted criminals
who were not born here are slated for deportation.)
He added: "When you gut the social programs, the people will end up
having a greater demand for drugs. Sociologically, it's been
established that the more poverty that exists in a society, the
greater the demand for drugs and alcohol. These are ways of escape.
There's more demand. So it feeds it. It becomes a cycle. They're
contributing to the demand as well as contributing to the supply and
their only solution is to build more fucking prisons."
(Hmm so why does drug use shoot up in boom towns and ppl blame the
current rise in liquor sales on the good economy?)
angat's thesis also seeks to partly explain why gang life is
attractive to some youths. "When you gut labour standards, when you
cut the minimum wage like, you know, for teenagers a job is $6 an
hour, for god's sake there's no positive incentives to make money in a
legitimate way," he said.
(How about not getting shot, not getting stabbed, avoiding prison
rape. Some teens actually earn decent money. I know the teens at my
place of work with no experience start at $11.41/hr. Won't buy you a
Lexus but the police probably won't be investigating you and other
crime gangs probably won't be trying to jack you.)
Mangat even suggested that gangs with their drive to maximize profits
through risk-benefit analysis are, in fact, embodying the capitalist
ideal.
"They're saying, 'Here's the possible benefits; here's the risk.
You're an individual; we're all individuals go out there and pursue
your fucking wealth,'" he said. "The Fraser Institute talks about
minimizing state regulation of the economy, that the invisible hand of
the market will take care of itself. You want to see a perfect classic
example of laissez-faire economics? That's in the world of gangs."
Mangat made it clear he's no gang apologist. As a former counsellor at
the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, he has helped people
dealing with drug addiction, and he considers them victims as well of
gangs.
(DERA is of course heavily ganged up. The ppl in that org do nothing
while pimps beat and shear the hair of prostitutes who lived in the
maria Gomez bldng run by DERA. DERA employees have threatened at least
one city councillor and ordinary citizens such as myself. DERA
employees are notorious drug users.)
Law enforcement, according to him, has a role in mitigating the impact
of gangs. He said that drug busts, for example, particularly the
smashing of marijuana grow ops, would decrease supply. The former
gangster also believes that funding should be increased for drug-use
prevention, treatment, and harm-reduction strategies. He likewise said
that there must be intervention programs that would support gang
members who want to leave a life of crime, programs that he claimed
don't exist.
(Why not just move three provinces away and get a job?)
Indira Prahst is a sociology instructor at Langara College, and Mangat
is one of her former students. Prahst chairs the media committee for
the antigang media watch campaign of the South Asian Community
Coalition Against Youth Violence. She is a regular contributor to the
community paper Indo-Canadian Voice, and she has also organized forums
with speakers such as Attorney General Wally Oppal.
An active antigang educator in the South Asian community, Prahst works
with Vancouver police detectives Adam Dhaliwal and Doug Spencer in
presentations in her sociology course that seek to deglamorize gang
life.
In an interview with the Straight, Prahst noted that youths, including
those who come from relatively well-off families, aren't immune to the
allure of the wealth and status offered by gang life. She said that in
a place like B.C., where drugs are easily accessible, the temptation
to engage in illicit activity is strong.
She asserted that in the context of immigrant families, like many in
the South Asian community, feelings of alienation from mainstream
society serve as an added push a situation that she described as a
part of the "diasporic challenges".
"Some of the diasporic challenges is parents that come to Canada, they
don't have their [professional] credentials recognized, therefore
they're working two to three cheap jobs to make ends meet," Prahst
said. "The experience of racism, the experience of marginalization
that parents have experienced, instills very, very, very powerful
pressure on kids. What some of the youths have told me is they feel
they're failures. Because their parents want them to be doctors, they
want them to be lawyers, they impose a career on them. Not every kid
is academic material. You're forced into this college or university,
and you're doing poorly, so they want to make quick money."
Mangat said that his generation can relate to that situation. "People
my age the gang members in the 1980s and 1990s when we were young men,
they were the children of people who came during the late '60s and
early '70s," he said. "My parents in India were both lawyers. In
Canada they were nothing."
((let me guess if they had stayed in India they would have been
murdered.)
He also recalled overt acts of racism at that time, when people of his
race were regularly abused with taunts of "Fucking Hindu, fucking
Paki, go back to where you came from."
"For young men at that time–that every day being called Hindu, Paki,
sometimes by your own teachers in school for us this was a form of,
'You know what? From now on, nobody's gonna fuck with us, because if
somebody fucks with us, they're fuckin' gonna get it.'"
Mangat, however, noted that now, factors like alienation and
marginalization aren't the driving forces that make youths go to
gangs. "It's not a negative pushing them the lack of options there's
something else," he claimed. "There's also that drive to pursue
wealth."
Prahst also points to the culture clash within families. She said that
a number of parents "don't realize that parenting means unfreezing
your mindset about the way tradition and your society was in your home
country and waking up to see what is going on in contemporary
[Canadian] society". Alienated from their own families, youths seek
out a sense of belonging in gangs.
"Parents are afraid to even seek help from police," she said. "There's
a stigma in their home country: police are dangerous and you're going
to be automatically jailed. Part of bridging the gap for helping
ethnic minorities is to build trust between communities and police."
In July 2005, the federal Liberal government appointed 10 people from
the B.C. Indo-Canadian community to develop an integrated approach to
addressing youth violence. Over the previous two decades, before this
Group of 10 was struck, almost 100 Lower Mainland South Asian men had
been killed in gang-related violence.
The group released a report, Community Response to South Asian Youth
Violence, in 2006 after the Conservative party won the last federal
election. The report noted that it wasn't until the late 1980s that
awareness of criminal lifestyles in their community started to grow.
"Victims and perpetrators of these acts seem to have come from all
socio-economic backgrounds, some growing up in highly affluent
families," it noted.
The Group of 10 recommended the creation of the South Asian Youth and
Family Integration Strategy, which would address a wide range of
concerns, from one-to-one youth-mentorship programs to life-skills
training to teaching parents how to parent in the Canadian context.
Its report stated that such a strategy would be the first of its kind
in B.C.
Rob Sandhu was a member of that group. A UBC-trained retired
secondary-school teacher in South Vancouver, he has been active in
antigang initiatives in the South Asian community for about four
decades.
"Nothing happened," Sandhu said when asked by the Straight what became
of the group's report. "We met with all Indo-Canadian politicians, and
even…they're not very responsive to what was in the report. To be a
cynic, I guess when we have about 20 more deaths in a three-week
period, maybe we'll get some action."
The Sikh Societies of the Lower Mainland, composed of representatives
from various Sikh temples, is continuing to lobby the federal and
provincial governments to institute some of the Group of 10's
recommendations, according to Sandhu.
"How far have we gotten?" he asked. "We're exactly where we were
before. I don't think the Indian community itself is unified to put a
lot of pressure on the government. Politicians say temples are
dysfunctional. Even if you take a look at domestic violence, what do
we do? Woman dies; two weeks later we have a forum. Three weeks go by,
there's peace and quiet. Another woman gets killed we have another
forum. In gang-related deaths, we go to these meetings, we listen to
everything, but no one has taken any action. I'm very pessimistic of
anything happening until something really serious happens in our
community."
The Indo-Canadian voice recently described Vancouver police inspector
Steve Rai as "an excellent role model for Indo-Canadian youths". The
41-year-old officer was born in India's Punjab region and his family
came to Canada when he was a young boy. He's currently the executive
officer for Vancouver's new chief constable, Jim Chu.
Talking to the Straight by phone, the 17-year veteran of the police
force said he's a firm believer in values and effective communication.
"At our house, there was never a push towards money," Rai said. "It
was always a push towards 'Do what interests you,' and a push towards
being a good citizen. My father always emphasized the value of being a
good citizen. It kept us on the right path."
However, Rai also noted that compared to when he was growing up in
Kitsilano ("It wasn't that overt, sort of money in your face from
everywhere you turned"), society has become "much more commercialized
than when I was going to high school 20 years ago".
"If you're a kid growing up, and you're growing up in an inner-city
school, and…your parents are both immigrants and you're living in a
western society…[and] you look around you and everything is fuelled by
money and economics and status, and you're not there yet as a family
'cause maybe you're new or you're second-generation but you haven't
achieved that, it's very hard to look at that every day," he said.
"And I believe some of these problems have to be tackled early on in
teaching life skills and values, whether in schools or at home. As
ethnic parents, sometimes maybe those values and the ways we
communicate it in your first country, they aren't necessarily
successful here."
Noting that gang recruitment in the South Asian community cuts across
income brackets, Rai said that the notion of success appears to have
gotten mixed up. "We need to redefine values to our young people," he
said. "So at an early age we have to teach maybe in the schools
through life-skills teaching, through maybe better education for
parents we need to be able to get a message through to young people. I
don't mean when they get to be 18 or 19, but when they're in Grade 7
or Grade 8 or Grade 9."
Before becoming an academic, Robert Gordon served as a police officer
in Australia, Hong Kong, and London, England. Currently the director
of SFU's school of criminology, Gordon doesn't consider the recent
gangland killings a mere spike in violence.
"It's a sustained period of conflict between various criminal groups
which will likely resurface, I would think, probably within a matter
of weeks," Gordon told the Straight in a phone interview. "This is
something out of the ordinary. That there had been major
disagreements, exactly what that has been is hard to say. It's
difficult to know whether it's a war over turf, a settling of scores,
or whether one group failed to do what it promised to do or one group
ripped off another."
Gordon said that what is certain is that the deployment of the gang
task force, composed of officers from various Lower Mainland police
agencies, is only intended as a stopgap measure.
"The big question is whether or not they're likely to be imposing any
kind of permanent solution, and the answer to that is no," he said.
"It's on the one hand an exercise in PR, because people are very
concerned and there has been pressure on the police and politicians to
respond; and, secondly, they would not be able to sustain that level
of resource commitment for any long period of time."
Reporting on November 21 after the first week's deployment of the
multiregional police antigang Violence Suppression Team, team leader
and VPD inspector Dean Robinson said that the increased profile of
police officers in the entire metro region "is having the desired
effect".
"One of the first results we've seen is gang members and associates
are not as thick in the areas as they were throughout the Lower
Mainland," Robinson said at a news conference. "We're very happy with
the results we have before us."
The police officer also said that the 56-member team will cover the
whole region, seven days a week, and that it's "going to employ every
tool a police officer has to make our presence known".
But according to Gordon, the presence of these officers in areas known
to be frequented by gang members will merely displace criminal
activities to other areas. "The individuals who've been involved in
this particular rather low level of gang activity, which is all
related to the drug trade, just simply go underground for a short
period of time and then figure out new ways of doing their business,"
he said.
Will gangs and criminal activity ever disappear? "There are very few
societies that don't have some kind of criminal business organizations
operating," he said. "The key to understanding it: supplying the
demand that exists for goods and services that have been declared to
be illegal but which nevertheless people want in huge quantities. What
lies at the root of it all is prohibition. But that's not going to
change, however sensible that might be. For example, legalize
marijuana. That's simply not going to happen."
(Yeah. Bring in mandatory jail time for marihuana. One joint do 7 days
in jail.)
The next question, then, according to Gordon, is: what is there to do?
There has always been constant police surveillance and investigation,
and Gordon noted that antigang police task forces have long been
operating in the province, though not entirely successfully. Imposing
harsher penalties for criminal gang activity is also important because
this would increase the cost of doing business, he said.
"The answer is, you make it abundantly clear that you're not going to
tolerate the presence of organized-crime groups in this region," he
said. One way of doing it is to have a crime commission responsible
for five- to 10-year strategic plans, one that has "some kind of
non-police [civilian] oversight".
(Of course Vancouver is a city whose Mayor let a person use crack in
his vehicle and gave money for drugs to another. He also had the city
buy the HAMC owned Drake Hotel and claimed he didn't know they were
the owners even though the Vancouver Sun did an article on it as did
the Province and I had posted about it a few times. Does this seems
conducive to a crackdown on organized crime.)
"If you just go over to the police and hand them a sack of cash, they
can spend it and you won't be able to determine how effective they'd
been in spending it because they will always mystify what they're
doing: 'Oh, we can't tell you; it's secret,'" he said.
Gordon recalled that B.C. used to have such a structure in the
Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit during the 1970s, and that its
management committee involved people who were not police officers. As
far as he can remember, he said, CLEU's mandate and powers were
increasingly watered down until it was replaced by another entity, the
Organized Crime Agency. "OCA just evaporated," he said. "They just
vanished for no particular reason other than, I suspect, police
politics in British Columbia."
(CLEU had a reputation for getting nothing done and being a dumping
ground for alky officers and career burnout and general mediocrity.)
Since getting out of gang life, Mangat has played a number of roles.
He spoke extensively in schools about why gangs are a bad idea as part
of his previous work with South Asian Frontline Education. He's become
an activist identified with such groups as the Anti-Poverty Committee,
the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, and Vancouver's
Radical Desi Youth network.
(Doesn't the APC like ppl in DERA get charged with crimes once and a
while?)
In 2005, he also acted in a play produced by Headlines Theatre.
Written and directed by the activist theatre group's artistic
director, David Diamond, Here and Now tackled the gang issue facing
the South Asian community. Mangat played the role of one of the
gangsters in the play, and several other members of the Indo-Canadian
cast had experience in varying degrees with gangs, either as former
gang members or as kin of gangsters.
What became very clear from the play, Diamond told the Straight, was
that the young guy who gets pulled into a gang doesn't go in kicking
and screaming. "He's open," Diamond said. "He goes there because he
wants to, because there's something attractive there, which is a sense
of family, a sense of purpose, there's money to be made and the family
thing should not be underestimated. Where are those places that we can
belong regardless of our cultural background? In the play that we
developed, he gets involved with people who give him the things he
needs or thinks he needs."
The 54-year-old Diamond the first individual recipient of the City of
Vancouver's cultural-harmony award, in 1996 noted that he's been
around the city for quite a long time, long enough to remember that
before the media spotlight fell on violence in the Indo-Canadian
community, that attention was focused on the Latino community, and
before that the Chinese community.
"It's gone in waves," Diamond said. "Years from now, that community
getting targeted is going to be some other community. One of the
things that we were saying when we were doing Here and Now is that:
why is it that the Hells Angels just get to be called the Hells Angels
and not described as a Judeo-Christian white gang?"
(Uhhhhh duh are you that stupid? No HAMC I have ever heard of goes to
sa church or synagogue. They have admitted pagans in that org and are
not the least bit Christian or Jewish. While it is a racist org and
predominantly white the fact is they have at the lower levels black
members (You'll never get a bottom rocker), they also have Asians and
Indo members. Chico Peres is 100% HAMC as is Ronaldo Lising and they
are Hispanic not Caucasian.
It is interesting to note that according to the Province newspaper a
man named Antonio Lising talked about how quiet the dead man at the
recent Napier St. homicide was and they listed the value of his home
at 581k. Starnet Technologies was a HAMC operation and the dead man
was involved in money laundering in the past and was involved in
internet gambling. Highly speculative I know but perhaps there is a
connection.
The Georgia Straight has never once broke a story about organized
crime and probably never will do to its existence being provided
heavily by prostitute ads.
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2641-HA is parked at a HA gang house located between 14710 and
14734 on 108th Ave. It doesn't even have house numbers on it as
required by
law. The City Of Surrey has failed to get them to follow the law. They
have added red bows to the front of the house to celebrate their
paganism but can't be bothered to put up the house numbers as required
by law.
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Source URL:
http://www.straight.com/article-124456/gangland-recruits-why-vancouver-kids-fall-prey
We are awaiting the return of our JHVH in the flesh or his Son. His Son Yu'shua died on the cross for our sins, was resurrected and walked the earth for awhile then ascended unto Heaven. We await the Third Coming not the Second.
Scottish Quaker Robert Barclay-"The weighty Truths of God were neglected, and, as it were, went into Desuetude. ...
Who will be the last Coalition soldier to be maimed in Iraq?
Canadian troops out of Afghanistan and into Darfur.http://www.amnesty.ca/instantkarma/petition.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI-xlbDzVbQ I Like Big Bibles