by Kim Bolan/Special to the Langley Advance
Before he was gunned down in Langley eight years ago, Kevin LeClair had quit the United Nations to join the Bacon brothers and their Red Scorpion gang, a Crown prosecutor told B.C. Supreme Court on Monday.
David Jardine said in his opening submissions at the murder trial of Cory Vallee that LeClair was a target of the UN because he knew the gang’s secrets.
Jardine said two ex-UN members now co-operating with the Crown are expected to testify about how LeClair made it onto the gang’s hit list.
“I expect they will say that Kevin LeClair had been a member of the UN,” Jardine told Justice Janice Dillon. “He quit the UN and started associating himself with the Bacon brothers.”
That made LeClair “a higher risk for the UN gang… because he knew them, knew what they looked like and some of the residences or the addresses that they were associated with,” Jardine said. “So he accordingly was one of their targets.”
LeClair was fatally wounded in the parking lot of Thunderbird Village in Walnut Grove on Feb. 6, 2009.
Jardine said several UN gangsters were out hunting LeClair and the Bacon brothers in two vehicles that day.
“They spotted Mr. LeClair’s truck driving past them and they followed it. They followed it to the Thunderbird Village Mall where Mr. LeClair went into the Browns Restaurant,” Jardine said.
One of the UN men parked his car so he could see when LeClair left the restaurant. A second vehicle, containing one of the Crown witnesses, Vallee and a man named Jesse Adkins, was also in the parking lot.
“At 4 p.m., LeClair was seen exiting the restaurant and Adkins and Vallee then… exited the van and ran to shoot Mr. LeClair,” Jardine said. “You will hear witnesses this week describing two men shooting and murdering LeClair while he was trying to get away in his vehicle.”
He said the two murder weapons – a 9-millimetre and an AR-15 rapid-fire gun – were left in a bag in the parking lot.
Vallee was charged with the first-degree murder of LeClair, as well as conspiracy to kill the Bacon brothers over several months in 2008 and ’09. He fled to Mexico, where police located him in August 2014 and he was returned to B.C.
Jardine also described the war between the UN and the Bacon brothers that escalated in 2008 after the murder of UN member Duane Meyer on May 8, 2009. Within hours of Meyer’s murder, there were three retaliatory shootings in Burnaby by UN gangsters and associates, Jardine said.
The violence culminated that day when stereo-installer Jonathan Barber was shot to death in the 7400-block Kingsway after he was mistaken for one of the Bacon brothers.
Barber, who had no involvement in gang life, had met Jonathan Bacon in the parking lot of a nearby McDonald’s to pick up his Porsche Cayenne to install a new sound system, Jardine said.
The judge-alone trial is expected to last several months at the Vancouver Law Courts building.
– Kim Bolan is a reporter with the Vancouver Sun.
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