Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) – A former Mountie called a special police number on July 31, 2007 and claimed to be a homicide detective looking for the address of the notorious Bacon brothers, Surrey Provincial Court heard Tuesday.
Several police witnesses who heard a recording of the call have identified ex-Mountie Rapinder Singh (Rob) Sidhu as the man posing as a member of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, prosecutor Donna Ballyk said as the trial opened.
The caller was given the information, in what both the prosecution and defence agree was a serious breach of security.
Ballyk said the officers each knew Sidhu and had spoken to him many times over the years both on and off the job.
She said the improper call to gain intelligence on the Bacons was made “at the time when there was a lot of gang war activity going on here.”
The former undercover drug officer, who is now 42, is charged with impersonating a police officer.
Sidhu’s lawyer Matt Nathanson said his client is pleading not guilty and would be arguing that it is not his voice in the recorded call to the RCMP’s Operational Communications Centre.
Dispatcher Julie Sanghera, who took the suspect call, listened to it played in court Tuesday.
The caller could be heard identifying himself as “Roberts from IHIT” and later offered up a bogus identification number.
Sanghera, who told the court she was swamped that day, asked the caller if his request was a priority.
“It’s fairly important,” he said.
“I just want to get an address on Jarrod,” the caller said, before Sanghera was forced to put him on hold because of unrelated demands on her time.
She returned to the line and confirmed: “You want to find an address?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Surname Bacon … it should be a Jonathan, James or a Jarrod.”
Sanghera put the caller on hold several times, but eventually gave him an address in the 7500-block of 138th Street and said the mother was now living “up north.”
Sanghera testified that she got suspicious when the caller wanted details on the mother’s address.
“I found it a little bit odd,” she told Judge John Lenaghan.
She then asked the caller for his special ID number and he provided one, which did not match any in the system, she said.
When she asked for his special “call sign,” he hung up the line.
Surrey RCMP Cpl. Curtis Burks testified that he took over the criminal investigation into the call when he came back from vacation on Aug. 7, 2007.
“It was told to me that it could be a former RCMP member named Rob Sidhu,” Burks testified.
He agreed with Nathanson that the call was considered “a serious security breach.”
In fact, the call was made just three months after Jamie Bacon was targeted in a execution attempt outside the family’s Surrey home, an attack police suspected was plotted by the rival United Nations gang. And it came 10 months after Jon was critically wounded in a shooting outside the family’s Abbotsford home.
Burks said police had to go to the Bacons to tell them what happened and that “it was the RCMP’s fault.”
“Their safety could possibly be compromised,” he said.
The Vancouver Sun revealed last year that Sidhu had been associating with criminal organizations since resigning from the RCMP in July 2003 in the midst of an internal investigation.
Burks said he worked to identify the voice on the tape by contacting police who he knew had worked with Sidhu.
But he was adamant he did not give them any advance information about who the suspect was before they heard the recording.
“I didn’t want to taint any evidence they potentially had,” Burks said.
Sidhu, who was wearing a dark suit and had large gold and diamond rings on each hand, took notes through some of the testimony. He is facing another charge laid in March 2010 in a domestic case.
Sidhu, who lives in Abbotsford, pleaded guilty in July 2003 to causing “fear of personal injury” in another domestic case. He also pleaded guilty in 2005 to two counts of fraud over $5,000 and received a 12-month conditional sentence concurrent on both counts.
The trial is expected to conclude Friday.
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