The Red Scorpions

On the afternoon of 19 October 2007, in suite 1505 of the Balmoral Tower in Surrey, six people were shot dead on the floor at close range over a $100,000 drug tax. Two of them had nothing to do with it. The killings put a name on British Columbia’s gang war, consumed nineteen years of litigation that ended only on 27 August 2026, put four RCMP officers themselves before the courts, and destroyed the gang that ordered them — slowly, and from the inside.

A Gang Founded in Youth Custody

The Red Scorpions did not begin in Abbotsford, and they did not begin with the Bacon brothers. The founding circle, by every account, was a group of Lower Mainland teenagers who met in and around youth custody in the early 2000s — centred on Quang Vinh Thang “Michael” Le and Edward “Eddie” Narong. The standard press account traces the group’s origin to the summer of 2000, when a Coquitlam-area karaoke-bar beating left a teenager named Richard Jung dead; Le and Narong were dealt with for manslaughter as youths. That account, including the detail that the gang was organised and formalised inside the youth system, rests on book and press sources rather than on any single court record, and the founding roster varies from one telling to the next — some accounts place Matthew Johnston among the founders, others do not.

What is documented is what the group became. By the middle of the decade the Red Scorpions were a multi-ethnic drug gang running dial-a-dope phone lines across the Lower Mainland — cocaine, heroin and ecstasy sold by delivery — with membership marked by “RS” tattoos. The court record of the Surrey Six trial establishes Le as a founder and, at the time of the killings, one of its leaders. The name itself — press accounts say “Red” for blood, “Scorpions” for the nickname of Le’s older brother — is book-sourced, and we mark it that way.

The Bacon Brothers, and Who Actually Ran It

The three Bacon brothers of Abbotsford — Jonathan, Jarrod and Jamie — are the names the public attached to the Red Scorpions, and the attachment is real but late. The brothers were not founders. Press and book accounts have them aligned first with the rival United Nations gang before moving to the Red Scorpions around 2006, after which police descriptions began treating them as the gang’s operational leadership.

What the alignment produced is not contested: from 2007 the Red Scorpions were at war with the United Nations gang, and the Lower Mainland’s gang homicide count climbed toward the open street warfare of 2008–2009.

19 October 2007: The Surrey Six

In the weeks before the killings, Red Scorpions members demanded a $100,000 “tax” from Corey Lal, a young drug dealer operating on what they considered their territory. He did not pay. The plan that followed, as the courts found, was to kill him.

On 19 October 2007 the killers went up to suite 1505 of the Balmoral Tower on East Whalley Ring Road. The trial record in the case against Cody Haevischer and Matthew Johnston describes the two of them entering with a third Red Scorpion known to the record only as Person X; Dennis Karbovanec, by his own later guilty plea, answered for three of the murders. Corey Lal was the target. Five others were in or entered the suite, and no witnesses were left alive. The trial judge’s findings describe the six shot execution-style as they lay face down on the floor, by more than one shooter.

Schellenberg and Mohan are why this case never left the public’s memory. They were killed for being present. Christopher Mohan’s mother, Eileen Mohan, became the case’s public conscience, following it through every stage to the final ruling of August 2026.

Who Answered for It — Every Man, His Own Disposition

Seven people were prosecuted in connection with the Surrey Six file. Their outcomes are not interchangeable, and this section states each one.

Note what the ledger says about the men the courts connected to the killings themselves. Two pleaded guilty to second-degree murder — one of whom cannot be named. One died in custody. One — Haevischer — is the only man serving a first-degree sentence a court has tested to the end. And the man the Crown called the plan’s author, Jamie Bacon, pleaded to conspiracy and is already out.

The Police Scandal Inside the Investigation

This is the part of the story the backgrounders leave out, and it is where a lazy version of the Surrey Six goes wrong. The investigation that broke the case also broke four of the officers who ran it.

Four members of the RCMP’s investigative team were charged in 2011 over their conduct with protected witnesses — including what the later abuse-of-process record described as exploitative sexual relationships with women under witness protection, among them the girlfriend of one of the accused.

None of the four served a day in custody. Their conduct became a central pillar of the convicted killers’ attempt to have the whole prosecution thrown out — which is the next part of the story.

Nineteen Years of Litigation

The Surrey Six produced two marathon legal wars after the verdicts, and both ended only within the last six years. They are worth setting out precisely, because each produced a moment where the entire prosecution nearly disappeared.

Kelowna, 14 August 2011: the Gang Loses Its Name

By 2011 the surviving Bacon brother at liberty was Jonathan, and the Red Scorpions’ leadership had folded itself into something new — the cross-gang coalition that became the Wolfpack Alliance: Red Scorpions figures alongside Hells Angels and Independent Soldiers.

On 14 August 2011, outside the Delta Grand hotel in Kelowna, gunmen opened fire on a Porsche Cayenne carrying Jonathan Bacon, Hells Angel Larry Amero, Independent Soldier James Riach and two women. Jonathan Bacon died. Amero was seriously wounded; Leah Hadden-Watts was left paralysed. The shooting was the Dhak-Duhre side’s answer to the Wolfpack, and it detonated the next phase of B.C.’s gang war.

What Happened to the Rest

Jarrod Bacon was convicted in February 2012 of conspiracy to traffic cocaine, out of a police sting, and sentenced that May to 12 years, reduced substantially by pre-trial credit — a sentence the B.C. Court of Appeal later raised to 14 years. He was never charged in the Surrey Six file.

Matthew Campbell, described in press accounts as a senior Red Scorpions figure, was stabbed to death at the Abbotsford Auto Mall on 2 January 2014. Jimi Sandhu was charged with second-degree murder; the Crown stayed the charge, and he was free by early 2015 — never convicted of anything in Campbell’s death. Sandhu was deported to India in 2016 for serious criminality, and was himself shot dead at a resort in Phuket, Thailand, on 4 February 2022. A Canadian, Matthew Dupre, pleaded guilty in a Thai court to killing him.

Konaam Shirzad, named in trial testimony and press accounts as a founding member, was shot dead near his home in Kamloops on the evening of 21 September 2017.

Michael Le completed his sentence years ago. Dennis Karbovanec passed his 15-year parole-ineligibility mark in 2024; this publication found no reliable public record of his current custody or parole status, and states that as an absence rather than guessing. Cody Haevischer, as of 27 August 2026, is the last man standing in court — and he lost.

Where the Name Sits Today

The honest answer is: mostly in the past tense, and nobody official will quite say so.

The organisation that existed in 2007 — Le’s structure, the Bacons’ leadership layer, the dial-a-dope network — has no visible present-day equivalent. Its founders are dead, imprisoned-and-released, or retired from view. Its successor generation died in the Wolfpack-Dhak war or migrated into the newer Lower Mainland groups that CFSEU-B.C. now names in its releases. Press accounts still describe the Red Scorpions as extant at reduced capacity, and the name still appears in B.C. gang-landscape reporting as one of the brands young dealers claim.

What we could not find is any organisation-level prosecution, any police release treating the Red Scorpions as a current operating structure, or any named current leadership — and we say that as a finding about the record, not proof the name is dead. Gangs in British Columbia have a way of being declared finished and then reappearing on an indictment.

Agencies on the File