The Independent Soldiers
They took the name because they answered to nobody. A crew of Indo-Canadian kids from a community centre in south Vancouver who decided in the late 1990s that they would not work for the men who already ran the city. Within a decade they were the Hells Angels’ proxy in British Columbia — doing the recruiting the Angels could not be seen doing, and dying in the numbers the Angels did not have to. The founders are almost all dead.
The Sunset Boys
They began as the Sunset Boys, named for the Sunset Community Centre in southeast Vancouver where they gathered. Most were Indo-Canadian, from the city’s large Sikh community, and most came from ordinary middle-class families rather than anything resembling a ghetto — a point police and researchers have made repeatedly about Lower Mainland gangs of this era.
They started at the bottom, as street-level dealers working for the established Punjabi crime figures who controlled the trade. The name they eventually chose announced the whole point of the enterprise: they intended to be independent, to work for themselves rather than for the Hells Angels or anyone else. The Canadian scholar Mark Totten, who studied them, described a group that was not especially territorial, had none of the elaborate rituals other gangs used, and was essentially single-generational — a cohort, not a dynasty.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. A gang with no mechanism for replacing its leadership is a gang that ends when its leaders do.
Loft Six
A man associated with the Hells Angels had beaten an Independent Soldier earlier that year. On the night of 16 August 2003 he walked into the Loft Six nightclub on Water Street, where Independent Soldiers were drinking, and the room went up. Witnesses described bullets flying across a crowded dance floor and people crawling over one another to reach the door.
Three people were killed. Eight were wounded. The dead were John “JJ” Johnson, the Hells Angels associate; Jon Popovich, the club’s DJ, who had nothing to do with any of it; and Mahmoud Alkhalil of the Independent Soldiers — a name that connects this file to the Alkhalil Brothers.
Loft Six was the turning point, though not in the way the name of the gang would suggest. Reporting on the period holds that many of the original members walked away afterwards, having concluded the life had become too dangerous. The men who replaced them had no particular commitment to independence from the Hells Angels — and some of them were not Indo-Canadian at all.
The Founders Die
The original leadership came apart inside two years, and mostly not at the hands of police.
Gerpal “Paul” Singh Dosanjh was shot dead in March 2004 while eating at a restaurant in Vancouver. His brother Sukhvinder “Bicky” Singh Dosanjh, by then the gang’s leader, died in a car crash in 2005, leaving the organization in disarray. Parminder “Peter” Singh Adiwal took over after getting out of jail in 2007. In 2009 he was shot twenty times in a Burnaby parking lot and survived.
Donald Bryce Lyons, another early member, was convicted in the 2007 Project Drill investigation over cocaine trafficking and firearms.
Randy Naicker — Randynesh Raman Naicker, an Indo-Fijian immigrant — started an Independent Soldiers clothing brand in 2004, and maintained for the rest of his life that the Independent Soldiers were a clothing line and nothing more, and that he had no involvement in crime. Police did not accept this. Neither did the parole board, and neither, in the end, did whoever was waiting for him in Port Moody.
Working for the Angels
By the middle of the decade the gang that had named itself for its independence was functioning as the Hells Angels’ instrument — a pattern documented in detail in the support and puppet club structure the Angels operate across Canada.
The clearest example is a meeting at the Castle Fun Park in Abbotsford in 2006. The journalist Jerry Langton described it as a recruiting meeting, with the Independent Soldiers acting — as he put it, as they always did — as the Angels’ proxy, pulling the Bacon Brothers away from the increasingly unreliable United Nations gang and towards the more compliant Red Scorpions. The Angels wanted the Bacons moved. The Independent Soldiers did the moving.
That is what a proxy is for. The parent club never appears in the room.
The Wolfpack
When the Wolfpack Alliance was assembled around 2010–2011 in the wake of Gurmit Dhak’s murder, two of its four founders came from the Independent Soldiers: Randy Naicker and James Riach. The other two were Larry Amero of the Hells Angels and Jonathan Bacon of the Red Scorpions.
On 14 August 2011, Amero, Bacon and Riach left a Wolfpack gathering at the Delta Grand Okanagan in Kelowna in Amero’s Porsche Cayenne, with two women in the back. Four masked gunmen opened fire with assault rifles as the vehicle left the parking lot. Bacon was killed. Amero was seriously wounded. Riach survived. Leah Hadden-Watts, 21, was left a quadriplegic.
Ten months later, at about 4:45 in the afternoon, a masked gunman shot Randy Naicker to death in a parking area off Queens Street in Port Moody, beside a Starbucks. He was 34, from Burnaby. Witnesses described the shooter firing repeatedly into him and then leaving in a waiting vehicle; a pistol was found discarded nearby. It was Port Moody’s second gangland killing in a month.
Naicker had told the parole board that his problems began when a newspaper published a photograph of him with Larry Amero at a Kelowna party, both men showing their gang tattoos. Police called the killing targeted. Nobody was immediately identified.
What Was Left
With Bacon dead and Naicker dead inside a year, the Wolfpack came apart and the Independent Soldiers had no founding figure left. Reporting on the years that followed describes the remnants absorbed into the Angels’ orbit outright, with the gang’s surviving members functioning as foot soldiers rather than as anything independent, and rivals — the Dhak-Duhre group, and later the Brothers Keepers — picking off members one at a time. The Red Scorpions, once the gang the Independent Soldiers helped build, became a rival.
The name did not disappear. It moved. Members and associates surfaced in Kelowna, Prince George and Abbotsford, and across the border into Calgary and Edmonton, and in 2018 the name attached to cross-country drug shipments in a Manitoba investigation.
The Kelowna Resurgence
In early 2014 CFSEU-BC opened an investigation after receiving information that a Kelowna-based Independent Soldiers member was actively recruiting for a planned revival of the gang. The investigation ended in arrests of that member and his girlfriend on firearms and drug offences; a gang associate was later sentenced to five years and six months.
CFSEU-BC’s own account of the file describes the resurgence as foiled. That is the most recent point at which a named police agency publicly claimed to have stopped the Independent Soldiers from rebuilding as an organization.
Standing of This File
Verified | The Loft Six shooting and its three deaths; the deaths of Paul Dosanjh, Bicky Dosanjh and Randy Naicker, and the dates and locations of each; the 2009 shooting of Peter Adiwal; the Kelowna shooting of 14 August 2011 and its casualties; the Project Drill conviction of Donald Bryce Lyons; the CFSEU-BC Kelowna investigation, its arrests and the resulting sentence.
Alleged, Not Adjudicated | The characterisation of the Independent Soldiers as a Hells Angels proxy or puppet club, which rests on police statements and journalism rather than a court finding; the account of the 2006 Castle Fun Park meeting, which comes from a journalist’s reporting; the internal leadership sequence, which police and reporters describe but no court has established as a whole.
Not Established | Nobody has been convicted of killing Randy Naicker. Nobody has been convicted of killing Paul Dosanjh. The Independent Soldiers have not been declared a criminal organization by any Canadian court, unlike the Hells Angels in Ontario in 2009 or Bacchus in Nova Scotia in 2018.
Update Trigger | A criminal-organization finding against the group; a charge in the Naicker killing; a new CFSEU-BC enforcement file naming the gang; any documented attempt to rebuild it.
Hells Angels Support Clubs in Canada
- CFSEU-BC — releases on the Kelowna Independent Soldiers investigation, the arrests arising from it, and the sentence imposed on an associate
- CBC News — “Notorious gangs of British Columbia” (Aug. 2011); reporting on the identification of Randynesh Naicker following the Port Moody shooting (June 2012)
- Postmedia / Vancouver Sun and Burnaby Now — contemporaneous reporting on the Naicker killing and his parole board statements
- Langton, Jerry — The Notorious Bacon Brothers: Inside Gang Warfare on Vancouver Streets (2013), including the Loft Six account and the Castle Fun Park meeting
- Edwards, Peter & Nájera, Luis Horacio — The Wolfpack (2021)
- Totten, Mark — Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Lives of Gang Members in Canada (2012)
- Gangland Files — Wolfpack Alliance, Red Scorpions, Bacon Brothers, Larry Amero, Hells Angels Canada, Hells Angels support clubs and Alkhalil Brothers profiles (internal cross-referencing)