A B.C. gangster — and witness to the Surrey Six murder case — comes clean

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

A B.C. gangster — and witness to the Surrey Six murder case — comes clean

Anton Hooites-Meursing is a former gang member who helped police in the Surrey Six murder case April 25, 2010

Anton Hooites-Meursing a former member of the Red Scorpions gang who pleaded guilty today (Tuesday) in New Westminster Supreme Court to first-degree murder in connection with a 2001 Surrey slaying and a 2003 Abbotsford murder. Here he is shown in 2007.

Photograph by: Obtained by the Vancouver Sun

Walking down Rio de Janeiro’s famous Ipanema Beach last year, Anton Hooites-Meursing had an epiphany.

He had already helped police in the notorious Surrey Six murder investigation. But he had not made the final decision to be a cooperating Crown witness until that moment, enjoying the breathtaking view of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the pristine sand and the gorgeous women.

“I was overcome with what had been in my mind for some time, and that was the end of hypocrisy as I knew it, and as I had been living it for what was my entire adult life,” he explained in a recent e-mail.

“I could not return to Canada and just start new as if I was free to just forget the past ... I decided fully to ‘do the right thing,’ and ‘come clean,’ disclosing what is a near-lifetime of criminality and gangsterism.”

He concluded he would testify as a key witness in the biggest gangland case in B.C. history.

Can a man who admits a role in killing five and terrorizing scores more people in 20 years as a hardcore gangster truly show remorse? Can he find the redemption he seeks?

Over the last 10 months, Anton sent me dozens of e-mails that offer glimpses into his dangerous world and the motivations behind his decision to turn on his crime family.

These messages, which he agreed could be published, trace his story from a troubled childhood, to Los Angeles gang life and finally to drug trafficking, torture and murder across the Lower Mainland. Then to the life-changing walk on a Brazilian beach that led to a guilty plea for two counts of first-degree murder earlier this month in a high-security New Westminster courtroom. He will be in prison at least until 2035, when he is 64 years old.

Anton Brad Kornelius Hooites-Meursing was born in March 29, 1971 in Calgary, the second of three sons. His parents moved the kids around a lot – first to Australia, where his mother was from, and later to L.A., where his dad had a successful construction businesses.

But the marriage was troubled. His mom suffered from schizophrenia, he testified at an earlier trial in January 2006. She was also brutalized by his father. Neighbours would call police, who came and went. His parents split when he was about eight.

He told The Sun that he arrived home from school one day “to a note saying that I should call my father at one of the above numbers, as she was no longer able to be our mother.”

“I stayed with my mom ’til I was 11 ... she had a nervous breakdown, and she couldn’t take care of us so we went to a foster home. And after the foster home, we went to friends of my dad’s, and eventually, my dad ended up taking us,” Anton told B.C. Supreme Court.

He and his younger sibling moved in with their dad, who was remarried and living in Beverly Hills.

There was a lot of tension. Anton was not allowed to mention his mother. He said his dad resented the intrusion of his rambunctious young sons.

Then his father got in trouble with the U.S. taxman and lost everything. The family moved from a life of comfort to poverty in Long Beach, Calif., bordering on Compton – the violent, gang-riddled suburb south of Los Angeles that would later become a Canadian nickname for Anton.

“We went from one extreme to the other,” he said.

He quit school in Grade 9. He started jacking cars with friends. He sold a little dope. Before long, he was indoctrinated into a local street gang.

“I had no love or anything close at home, but rather was hated by my family and dad especially,” he said. “So it was, as I look back, a natural seeking out acceptance and love which was mine to be had joining ... a Mexican gang.”

He moved in with his best friend at age 17. One day returning home from a store, he watched rival gangsters shoot up the house. His roommate was killed. “I guess they basically ambushed him.”

Anton moved back in with his dad, who was working hard to rebuild his business and bought the family a house in Compton.

He furthered his criminal education during what Anton describes as a “decade of gladiator school in the Los Angeles County Jail system, which for anybody that is white is a total nightmare.”

Law-breaking earned him more than jail time – he was deported to Canada on January 3, 1999, even though he hadn’t lived in this country since early childhood.

A drug-fuelled monster

He spent his first night in a hostel near Vancouver’s Pigeon Park — “in the ghetto my first day here.”

But he wanted a different life, a straight life. He wanted to earn money to support a girlfriend he left behind in California.

He did data entry for the B.C. Automobile Association, which was updating its computers in advance of the millennium over Y2K fears. He got a second job at Home Depot and an apartment in New Westminster.

He took a course to become a car salesman and get a more lucrative job.

Anton testified in court in 2006 that he went to work for a Jim Pattison car dealership in the spring of 1999. “My first full month, I tied their all-time record of units sold.”

Despite his criminal record, he drove to L.A. to visit his girlfriend. She let him know she would not be joining him in Canada. He was devastated, returning to Vancouver hopeless and suicidal.

Instead of getting help, “I gave up and got back into gangster life and mentality. I went 100 miles per hour into drug/gangster lifestyle.”

And he had all the right connections for success – people in L.A. willing to pay big bucks for B.C. bud.

“I brokered deals for them,” he admitted.

Those bucks let him go clubbing and buy ecstasy to mask his depression.

“I basically just pretended like my problems didn’t exist, right?”

Very soon he was on the radar of law enforcement in B.C.

Anton does not minimize his involvement in organized crime. He talks about the huge profits, the guns, the cash, the highrise apartments with leather furniture and top-of-the-line electronics, the brutality — kidnappings, torture, executions.

And the drugs – the ones he sold and the ones he took. Steroids, ecstasy, percocets and eventually OxyContin, to which he quickly got addicted, like so many of the men involved in the local gang scene. Photographs of him during this period show a muscle-bound, tattooed beast with wild eyes.

He had a reputation for toughness and an ability to neutralize enemies “both in dark parking lots, and in the middle of the mall or some restaurant.”

“It is so very true the high number of people that I have physically disarmed, taking their gun from them,” he wrote. “There were periods of time that I would run into many people and come up with three or four guns per month — plus of course, the Breitling Aviator watches.”

Over his decade in B.C., Anton was linked at various times to the Hells Angels, the Independent Soldiers, the Red Scorpions and the Bacon brothers, and even to members of the rival United Nations gang.

He has now admitted to unspeakable acts of violence that ripped apart families.

Last week, a B.C. Supreme Court judge heard how Anton and another man grabbed Randy McLeod from a Surrey parking lot on June 12, 2001. They tied him up, punched him, robbed him of his drugs and $10,000 cash, then decided to kill the 22-year-old as they sat in a rental van on Zero Avenue on the Surrey-Langley border. Anton pulled a black nylon strap out of a gym bag, placed it around McLeod’s neck and squeezed the life out of him.

Laura McLeod sat with her family listening to the horrific details of her brother’s murder.

“We were devastated and sickened to hear of Randy’s final moments, how this big monster overpowered him, kidnapped him, and then discussed whether to kill him or not. It was disgusting,” Laura said this week.

No one in her family believes Anton’s claim of remorse.

“We each have our own thoughts of what his motivation to confess was. Perhaps his life was in serious danger, or maybe he knew he was serving 25 years no matter what,” she said.

“We will all have nightmares for the rest of our lives thinking about it. We were deprived of not being able to hold him, hug and kiss him one last time. They just threw him away. That will also haunt all of us.”

A month after the McLeod strangulation, Anton’s name surfaced in the slaying in Fullerton, Calif., of Burnaby bodybuilder Joe Bralic, who was down south with two drug traffickers. His B.C. friends blamed Anton for his demise. The case remains unsolved.

Fullerton Police Sgt. Mike Chlebowski confirmed this week that Anton remains “a person of interest.”

“We did send an investigator up there to talk to him after the murder,” Chlebowski said.

He believes Anton was Bralic’s criminal associate and may have knowledge about those responsible for the brutal slaying, but Chlebowski said Anton was not in California when Bralic was killed.

Anton does admit to stabbing a UN associate to death the following year in a bar fight outside Abbotsford’s Luxor nightclub on Dec. 22, 2002.

Tit-for-tat violence ensued – Anton’s buddy was shot in March in retaliation for the stabbing. Then Anton and friends plotted the murder of 19-year-old Bobby Rehal, who had boasted of advance knowledge of the March shooting.

Rehal’s family was also weeping in court last week as they listened to details of how the teenager’s murder was executed. Anton drove the getaway car.

Just six months after Rehal’s shooting, Anton gunned down his own crime boss, Jean Lahn, in front of a Burnaby strip mall.

Lahn, who was earning $25,000 a month running drug lines across Metro Vancouver and in Kelowna, had grown increasingly paranoid and violent, Anton said. Worried about rip-offs and rivals, Lahn had his junkie henchmen torture members of the crew suspected of disloyalty.

Karma and fate

Anton walked in on the aftermath of a brutal assault on one of his closest friends.

“Jean brought me to a house and it turned out that this guy was being tortured. He was tied or taped to a chair and his face/head was the size of a pumpkin,” Anton wrote. “I was in total shock ... in all of my life, throughout some of the most dangerous times in L.A. and all of my experiences with gangs, I had never seen anybody tortured, let alone a close friend, by friends.”

Lahn wanted to kill the associate. Anton says he talked him out of it, but feared Lahn after that, even tattooing the boss’s name on his arm to convince him of his subservience.

The tortured associate later recounted the beating in B.C. Supreme Court when Anton was on trial in 2006 for killing Lahn. Anton said the Lahn shooting was an act of self-preservation. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The judge stayed the murder count at a second trial, but a third trial was ordered only to have the charge stayed again last week.

Anton had spent three years in North Fraser Pretrial, where he cemented many of his criminal relationships.

He was incarcerated with the Adiwal twins, Peter and Mike, who would later plead guilty to a violent gangland kidnapping. And he met members of the Red Scorpions, with whom he would hook up after his release in December 2006.

Of all the gangsters he has known, the only one he praises is Peter Adiwal, who is still recovering from a near-fatal shooting in Burnaby last year.

Anton thought of the twins, who are suspects in other murders, as loving sons to their mother and extremely loyal friends.

He described the Adiwals seeing “a pigeon get attacked by an owl or some other larger bird.”

“They didn’t hesitate, but instead, took the poor bird inside and basically, the bird took their home to be a hospice and was living there for some time, totally tame, and would stand on the mom’s head or Pete/Mike’s shoulder,” Anton said. “Then, after a few weeks, the bird left, never to return.”

He and Peter talked for hours about spirituality, karma and fate.

Anton knew there were hits out on him. There always had been. And his name had been connected to the Surrey Six case. During one of their talks, Peter Adiwal pointed out to him that if he were killed, his name would remain connected to the Surrey Six and provide a convenient “reasonable doubt” defence for anyone subsequently charged.

The thought devastated Anton.

“If I were to be clipped by one of oh so many enemies, how convenient, for the reasonable doubt for any jury,” he said. “ My blood was boiling, because worse than even being murdered, was the idea that my legacy, and the main thing that my name will forever be linked to was the Surrey Six.”

He stressed that Adiwal did not suggest he talk to police.

In fact, Anton thinks the Adiwals and their associates would now hate him for becoming a “rat.”

But he knew what he had to do.

“More important than anything that I can think of was the justice for the families of the Surrey Six and especially those two families who were so completely innocent.”

He was thinking about Eileen Mohan, whose son Chris was on his way to a basketball game when he got dragged down the hallway of the 15th floor of the Balmoral Tower on October 19, 2007 to be executed by strangers. And he was thinking about Ed Schellenberg who was on the same floor servicing fireplaces when he got caught in the slaughter with Chris, Corey Lal, the target of the hit, his brother Mike and gang associates Eddie Narong and Ryan Bartolomeo.

“I have to believe that God is shining down on Eileen Mohan for her tireless work,” Anton said of Mohan’s campaign for justice. “I am just so completely sad for the Mohans and for the Schellenbergs. Surely, God is s shining down on their families, after what has been a living hell of having to sit by and just wait for the justice system to kick in.”

So he turned to the people he had hated most in life — the police.

“I approached the police completely on my own, without any threat, prompting, or pressure by police or Crown,” he said.

He wrote a note, jumped into his black Mercedes and went trolling for the gang squad, driving up and down Robson, Granville, Broadway and Main.

He couldn’t find the Gang Task Force anywhere. So he drove past the Vancouver Police station and found two unmarked cars with uniformed cops inside.

“I jumped out and handed the note to one of the police,” Anton said.

He asked to talk to two cops he had despised for years – one a biker specialist and the other a homicide detective.

“They proved to be honourable and thus, it was with them that I began the process and officially became a rat.”

Anton turned in his gun to police as a show of good faith. The next day he pulled his Mercedes into the parking lot beneath his Coal Harbour apartment tower. The stereo blared as he parked the car and went around to the other side to grab the groceries from Urban Fare.

A sound caught his ear that he didn’t recognize as a gunshot until he heard the shell casing hit the concrete floor.

He says he turned to face a would-be assassin firing from 10 feet away. Anton ran.

“Anybody with the minimal confidence and/or experience would have hit me and killed me,” he said.

Credit karma.

It has not been easy. His withdrawal from oxy took months. There was the isolation and loneliness, the depression and self-loathing.

Once off drugs, he was left with his tortured soul.

“I have always suffered inside, feelings of guilt that I have always tried to just push down and away, but always to no avail,” he said.

He found God, but is still not sure he will earn forgiveness.

“I believe that I must do all and everything that is in my power and purview to do the right thing, to do acts and efforts to show and shine in the light of Jesus and the Grace that is from God,” Anton said. “I have much doubt and much worry as to whether God ultimately will forgive me.”

He would not disclose anything in the e-mails about how he has helped police, saying that he did not want to jeopardize the integrity of the Surrey Six investigation or the eventual trial.

Finding family in Brazil

Anton worked with police for an extended period. And then he left B.C., moving east to study French in Montreal. He met some Brazilian exchange students, who invited him to visit their country.

He took them up on their offer last year. The journey was life-altering.

He started working with Rio’s street children and got to know families living in dire poverty.

“Even in prison, I will be living in better conditions,” he said.

He bought a taxi for the patriarch of one family and a spot outside a high-end hotel.

“Now he is earning a very decent living, with the prospect of buying an apartment big enough for him, his wife, their daughter, and his wife’s two other children from a previous marriage.”

That family adopted him during his months in Brazil.

“It is this commitment, this love, and the love that they showed me, and spoiled me, that made me go the distance, to do the right thing,” he said, adding that they are “the family that I myself never really had.”

He bought the kids iPods for Christmas and recently visited, knowing it was his last trip before his guilty pleas.

He says he has never been healthier. Clean and fit. He dropped more than 100 pounds since his approach to police and cringes when he sees online detractors still calling him Fat Anton. He looks like a typical tourist in his recent photos in Rio and sailing off the coast of Mexico.

For a while, he thought he could just make amends for his evil crimes by staying in Brazil and helping those less fortunate.

“But I was wrong, as I had to face my demons, my past, and disclose here in Canada what was and is the sum-total of my life, the near 20 years in the game, 10 of which, spent here in the Lower Mainland preying on drug-dealers, and other gangsters,” Anton said.

He believes he deserves the mandatory life sentence he got last week, with no hope of parole for 25 years.

“I had a debt of honour to be paid to society, and if it meant that I will end up being sent away for good, then so be it.”

Eileen Mohan, mother of an innocent Surrey Six victim, believes in redemption and that Anton can find it.

“It is really something that a person who has done a very horrible crime is trying to turn his life around and admit his guilt,” she said this week. “I think it is really remarkable for him to do what he is doing – not just because he is going to be a key witness in the Surrey Six trial. No one can bring a life back, but he is being very remorseful and you can feel that from the bottom of his heart, he is trying to make amends.”

Anton’s former lawyer Jim Heller, who got him off twice in the Lahn slaying, was shocked to hear the news of two guilty pleas.

“It hit me by surprise. I was coming out of court on a break and I noticed it on my iPhone and it really amazed me. But then, reflecting back on my contact with him over the many years, and especially in recent years, it was apparent that he always spoke in terms of becoming a better human being,” Heller said. “There is no play here. Anton has apparently made what he thinks is the greatest sacrifice he can on the altar of conscience and personal responsibility.”

One of Anton’s last e-mails to The Sun was written on March 29 — his 39th birthday and his last night in Rio.

“It is 4:30 in the morning here in Ipanema and there was a great electrical storm to enjoy my last night here in this wonderful and marvellous city,” he said.

He was ready to come back and do what needed to be done.

“I am the absolute worst witness [for the defence] in that I cannot be threatened. I cannot be intimidated. My memory is so clear and so eager to do the right and righteous thing. A new path, a new life – even if it is behind bars. I will be free. Free for the first time in my life/think