The United Nations (UN) is a criminal gang that originated in the area of Vancouver, British Columbia.
History
Formation The UN gang was formed in Abbotsford in 1997 by a group of high-school friends from around the Fraser Valley. The founder of the gang was Clayton Roueche, a white Canadian who grew up surrounded by Vietnamese-Canadians and Lao-Canadians. Roueche came to develop an Asian fetish as he was described as spending much of his time in Abbotsford's Vietnamtown where he loved: "the fortunetellers he'd find there, grainy bootlegged kung-fu movies and Vietnamese girls". A Korean-Canadian said of him: "Clay was never white. Maybe he was born white, but his soul was never White." After graduating from high school in 1993, Roueche worked in a variety of sales jobs and opened a restaurant which soon failed.
James Coulter, the best friend of Roueche recalled: "It started slowly. I started using E-ecstasy-just to stay awake and stay balanced because when you take ecstasy and you drink, it sort of counterbalances, you don't get high from ecstasy and you don't get drunk from drinking. But as soon as the ecstasy wears off, you are super, super drunk. Then I just started using crack, just for an extra high. Maybe it was take the stress away, I don't know." Coulter had moved to Abbotsford in 1996, was working in a warehouse and spent most of his free time in nightclubs and raves. Coulter stated: "I started hanging out with kids with nice cars. And you know, they would go to the gym in the day, and that really conflicted with my warehouse hours. And they had a couple of jobs here or there for me, and they would say, 'Hey do you want to learn how to grow marijuana?' Do a week of work, and you'll get a couple of grand". Coulter started to work as a petty drug dealer and in January 1997 he first met Roueche in a rave in Chilliwack. Roueche had connections with various Asian organized crime figures in Vancouver via the family of his Lao-Canadian girlfriend, and sold drugs at prices considerably lower than those allowed by the Hells Angels, which made him popular with Coulter and his associates. Coulter and Roueche started selling drugs together to pay for their drug habits.
Roueche began to work for a Vietnamese organized crime figure known as Vu. What began as a loose-knit group of Abbotsford thugs linked to Asian organized crime grew quickly over the years. They began a profitable drug-running enterprise involving helicopters flying across the US-Canada border trading much sought after British Columbian cannabis for cocaine to be sold in Canada. The United Nations gang was founded on 25 May 1997. Roueche discovered that the Kootenays region was where most of the marijuana in British Columbia was grown and starting in 1997 began to export marijuana to the United States. The B.C Bud strain of marijuana is very popular in the United States, becoming the United Nations gang's principal source of revenue. The journalist Jerry Langton wrote about the B.C. Bud strain: "It was so prized, so valued, that in some places, it was actually bartered kilo-for-kilo with cocaine, a feat unimaginable with any other strain of marijuana". In 2005, it was estimated that there were 22,000 marijuana grow-ops in British Columbia An article in Forbes magazine estimated in the same year that the total harvested marijuana crop in British Columbia was worth US$7 billion, making the then illegal marijuana industry into one of British Columbia's major industries. Besides the United States, the major markets for the B.C. Bud strain are Australia and Japan. The demand abroad for B.C. Bud and the other superior strains was such that the vast majority of the best marijuana in British Columbia was exported with the inferior strains being sold locally. With his new wealth, Roueche married his Lao-Canadian girlfriend and purchased an expensive house. The name United Nations was coined at a party hosted by Roueche in Richmond when somebody commented upon the racially diverse crowd by saying: "What the fuck is this, a United Nations meeting?" The name, United Nations (UN), alludes to the various ethnic origins of the members. The gang consists primarily of Canadians of European, East Asian, First Nations, and Persian background.
Growth The dominant organized crime group in British Columbia as in much of the rest of Canada are the Hells Angels, who only accept whites, and as such the United Nations gang attracted non-white members, usually second-generation Vietnamese-Canadians and Lao-Canadians. In 2000, the United Nations gang were involved in a notably bloody brawl with the Hells Angels at the Animals nightclub in Abbotsford, which gave the gang stature in the underworld after beating up the Angels. A group of white Hells Angels supporters wearing "Support 81" T-shirts arrived and began to bully the Asian patrons of the club, several of whom were members of the UN gang. Coulter recalled: "I remember back in the day, everyone and their dog used to be afraid of anyone who had a Hells Angels support shirt, and you would tread lightly, you would tiptoe around these people, and we were just a bunch of kids and thought, you don't have to be afraid of these people. Right? You don't want to be bullied around. Numbers rule. We had a lot of numbers". As the Hells Angels supporters left following a call to the police, they warned the UN members that they were "dead" as they promised to return to the Animals nightclub the next weekend.
The next weekend, the Hells Angels supporters together with a number of actual Hells Angels arrived at the Animals nightclub. Coulter remembered: "I'll never forget. There was the big fight inside. It lasted maybe five minutes. Then everyone started running outside. I remember I came out the front doors and there were probably about five or six different fights happening out on the street and I seen an Abbotsford police officer pull up and he gets out of his car and he's on his walkie-talkie and he's like, 'There's H.A! There are fights everywhere!" It as like he had never seen anything like this before. Nor had I. That was one of the bigger fights I had ever been in". A group of 70 United Nations members fought and expelled 30 Hells Angels from the Animals nightclub, which was perceived as "theirs".
Roueche borrowed much from Asian culture for his gang. Roueche took aspects of bushido ("the way of the warrior"), the fierce code of the Japanese samurai, as the basis of the gang's philosophy, using the motto "Honor, loyalty, respect". All the members of the gang are expected to have the phrase "honor, loyalty, respect" tattooed on themselves in Chinese characters and their uniforms were hoodies covered with images of tigers and Asian dragons together with the phrase "honor, loyalty, respect" in Chinese characters. Coulter stated in an interview: "I liked honor, loyalty and respect. I thought those were good virtues. You honor your family, you respect others-you treat others the way you wanted to be treated". Roueche was obsessed with "eastern mysticism", and incorporated rituals based upon eastern mysticism into his gang's ideology. Members were expected to learn mixed martial arts, especially Thai kickboxing and Japanese jujitsu. Initiation ceremonies were based on those of the Chinese triads under which new members would walk under "The Mountain of Knives" as an archway of swords were named to swear eternal loyalty to the "36 Oaths" of the gang and drinking a bowl of rooster's blood. A senior member was a dai lo (Cantonese for "big brother") who would supervise the other members who were given much freedom to operate as they pleased. The gang initially avoided the rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian structure of traditional organized crime groups like the Mafia and outlaw biker clubs such as the Hells Angels.
The members of the UN gang like other gangsters in the Lower Mainland tended to come from middle-class families with loving parents, which was not the norm with the rest of Canada where the gangsters tended to come from working-class families and broken homes. Coulter was somewhat unusual in the UN gang in coming from an impoverished, broken home where both his parents were heroin addicts and bank robbers. Coulter served as the gang's enforcer or "mediator" as he called it. Coulter used steroids and working out at local gym to bulk up to 220 pounds to improve his ability to beat up other people. Coulter described the gang: "You go to a club with 20, 30, 40 guys, and as soon as you get there, you give hugs to everyone. It is like a family, right? And that is something I never had. I never had a family. So that was my family".
The UN gang pioneered an alternative sense of style and recognition that became prominent in Vancouver, BC up until the end of the early 2010s. Many UN members would "cloak" themselves by wearing high-end, expensive, and luxury brands based on California surf-trends, biker brands, and accessories that would not typically be assumed as what a gangster would wear. Many youth imitated this style before the end of around 2012. Common items included murses, high-end active wear, designer jeans, baseball caps, sandals and name brand belts. This has become a well-known sense of gangster appearance in BC due to the United Nations. Roueche stated that on the streets "recognition is power," and sought to promote the UN gang fashion style as a statement of the gang's power.
Starting in 2001, the UN gang started what the media called "dial-a-dope" lines. Low-level UN gang members would visit clubs and bars handing out cards with a name and a telephone numbers for prepaid cell phones, which were changed on an average of 3–4 weeks. Those who called the numbers would be answered by an associate who took the order for drugs and had the drugs delivered to the customer who paid cash when the deliverymen arrived. The "dial-a-dope lines" were very effective and had been widely copied by 2003. The deliverymen was usually the only ones exposed to be robbed by rival drug dealers or being arrested by the police. Langton noted that the "fanatic loyalty" Roueche promoted in his gang led for very few deliverymen to turn Crown's evidence and testify against his employers if they were arrested. Initially, the UN gang smuggled marijuana into the United States via trucks, but after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 led to American border security being increased, the UN gang switched over to helicopters to fly over the undefended 49th parallel. Unlike drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine, where even small quantities can be sold for a premium price, marijuana needed to be smuggled in bulk to make it profitable. The UN gang formed ties with American organized crime groups and become one of the main sources of marijuana in Los Angeles and Chicago.