Fabian Dawson and Ethan Baron (Vancouver Province) – A long-serving Vancouver police veteran and a Delta firearms-training company are at the centre of an RCMP investigation into the trafficking of guns, some of which are believed to be ending up in the hands of B.C. gangs.
The secretive criminal probe involves the sale of decommissioned guns — easily reassembled and gunsmithed back into working order — to Lower Mainland gangsters, a police source told The Province.
Gordon Bader, a 30-year veteran of the Vancouver police, now retired, is an instructor at Silvercore Advanced Training Systems, site of a recent police raid.
His son, Travis, is Silvercore’s chief operating officer.
Gordon Bader, a former Emergency Response Team sniper, is also a firearms instructor at the Justice Institute of B.C., where municipal cops are trained.
He is also a gunsmith for the Vancouver Police Museum.
Vancouver lawyer Ian Donaldson, who is representing Travis Bader and Silvercore, said Gordon Bader and another person named in a warrant are the targets of the investigation. “It’s not Travis, and it’s not Silvercore,” Donaldson said.
He confirmed, however, that Travis was arrested over the May long weekend, then released without being charged.
He dismissed allegations of Silvercore’s involvement in gun sales to gangsters as “rubbish.” The company has provided him with substantial documentation showing it ran its business legally, with all the appropriate permits and licences, he said.
Donaldson said police raided Silvercore only because Gordon Bader was “on the paperwork” for the company. Silvercore’s clients include law-enforcement agencies and private security companies, Donaldson said.
A police source told The Province that a warrant was served on May 16 at Silvercore, on Vantage Way in Delta, where “many weapons were seized.” Police believe dozens of decommissioned guns have found their way into the hands of B.C.’s gangsters, the source said.
“These recycled weapons and their disassembled parts are one of the major reasons why there are so many guns and shootings in the Lower Mainland,” he said.
The ongoing police investigation is quite secretive and only a handful of officers in the Lower Mainland have access to the whole file. The related court files are sealed.
Another source referred to the case as a “gemstone file,” indicating that the investigation involves “one of their own.”
One source familiar with the raid on Silvercore said the investigation has connections to the May 9 killing of Jonathan Alex Barber, 23, who was shot dead while driving a Porsche Cayenne SUV in the 7000-block Kingsway in Burnaby. A 17-year-old female friend was wounded in the attack.
One gun used in the attack is thought to be a decommissioned AK-47 assault rifle.
According to police investigators, Barber was reportedly delivering the armoured SUV, fitted with secret compartments, to a well-known organized-crime family in the Fraser Valley.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is struggling to deal with the gang violence now at play in the Lower Mainland, has 31 murders on its books for 2008, including that of Barber. Officers have yet to make an arrest.
Another of the decommissioned guns in the ongoing investigation has been tracked to a notorious member of the Fraser Valley-centred UN gang, who has been arrested several times.
Surrey RCMP spokesman Sgt. Roger Morrow confirmed Silvercore is under investigation.
“We are trying to determine if there is any criminal involvement or if this is an administration issue dealing with firearms,” Morrow said. He refused further comment.
Gordon Bader and Silvercore have been on the police radar for several years now, police sources confirmed.
The company and its principals are mentioned in an investigation of two guns seized at the south terminal of the Vancouver International Airport. The Walther semi-automatic pistols were from Germany.
Another case involves an incident in Lillooet, the details of which could not be confirmed.
Silvercore advertises a service to take in guns from the public.
“For a nominal fee, Silvercore will come to your home or any location where you have old firearms that need to be removed for destruction,” its website says.
“We will take care of all the required permits to remove the firearms and either deactivate or destroy them so they cannot harm family or friends.”
Gordon Bader is a past director of the Responsible Firearms Owners Coalition of B.C., an anti-gun-control lobby. In October 2006, the Surrey Leader newspaper published a letter to the editor from Gordon Bader, in which he attacked gun control.
“Perhaps we should concentrate on enforcing our present laws and punishing the criminal,” Bader wrote.
“Taking away guns will do nothing.”
Police sources said Gordon Bader is well known in law-enforcement circles because of his three-decade stint with Vancouver police and the now-defunct Organized Crime Agency of B.C.
A Silvercore blog said Travis Bader “started his firearms training at the age of four, under the close supervision of his father, Gordon.”
He went on to shoot competitively as a preteen, joined the army cadets and became a shooting-range officer for the Department of National Defence, the blog said.
You’re pissing up the wrong tree. I was a student of Travis Bader’s and I’ve taken a few of his courses. He is an honourable man and I have a lot of respect for him and his family. A lot of this sounds like a smear campaign. I don’t know Travis well enough to call him up and ask for his side of the story(I’m guessing he probably feels like s**t about this as it’s a huge black mark on his good reputation and he probably won’t want to talk about it). But, Travis, if you’re reading this: those people who you’ve helped over the years support you and I for one will stand by you. You are a good man, and honest man, and you don’t deserve to have your reputation smeared like this. Don’t let the f**kers get you down! Sal M.
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