REAL SCOOP: Former UN gangster tells youth to stay away from gangs

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Ibrahim Ali reached out to me while still in prison for a fatal 2017 hit-and-run crash that left a Burnaby woman dead. He said he wanted to tell his story when he was out – both the bad, including his lengthy criminal history while in the UN, and the good – the fact he helped police solve a murder.

Here’s my story and the link to a video of the interview

Former UN recruit warns of the perils of gang life; Dealing at 16, prison at 18 – ‘It’s a cycle that it’s really hard to break from’

Vancouver Sun
Sat Apr 17 2021
Page: A10
Section: City
Byline: Kim Bolan
Source: Vancouver Sun
Ibrahim Ali had been in Millhaven prison for only nine days in June 2019 when he was jumped in the showers and stabbed.

He had no idea who the other inmates were who attacked him.

But they knew who he was – a former United Nations gang member who had helped police solve a murder.

“They said that I was a rat and I was a goof and that I’m not accepted in their prison and to go back to where I’m from,” Ali recalled recently. “I thought I wasn’t going to make it out of the shower alive.”

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Word travels fast in the federal prison system where Ali, now 30, spent most of the last 12 years.

“It’s a small world and it’s a smaller world in prison.”

He escaped his attackers that day but has a large gouge out of one of his heavily tattooed arms.

He also has questions about how he ended up in an unsecured unit in the Ontario prison despite assurances that he would be safe if he co-operated with police in B.C.

Recently released, Ali reached out to The Vancouver Sun primarily to warn young people to steer clear of the terrible choice he made as a teen to join the notorious gang founded by drug smuggler and money launderer Clay Roueche.

“I think it’s important that the new generation – the younger generation – understand that … being a gangster or being involved in that kind of lifestyle isn’t really what the hype is all about,” Ali said. “Hopefully, through sharing my story, we can help some other kids make some better choices growing up.”

But he also wanted to talk about how he was treated by RCMP officers from the Witness Protection Program and left to fend for himself inside a maximum-security prison.

“Yeah, I don’t feel like I was treated fairly,” he said. “Every day in that jail, I was thinking I was going to die because of me coming forward.”

Ali filed a civil lawsuit against Correctional Service Canada over the violence he experienced at Millhaven and a month earlier at Matsqui Institution, when he was assaulted by a rival gang member on a special “Collaborators of Justice” unit.

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“The defendant failed to implement appropriate policies and procedures to ensure Mr. Ali was at all material times reasonably safe while incarcerated,” a statement of claim filed last August said.

“The defendant Canada engaged in cruel and unusual treatment by failing to take reasonable steps to ensure Mr. Ali’s safety from the Matsqui attack, failing to provide any or any appropriate health care following the Matsqui attack, failing to take reasonable steps to ensure his safety from the Millhaven attack, failing to provide any or any appropriate health care following the Millhaven attack, and holding Mr. Ali in segregation.”

The federal government has denied the allegations and contradicted details of Ali’s accounts of both attacks in its statement of defence filed in March.

Ali’s Ontario lawyer, Jeffrey Hartman, said this week that he has not received important evidence that he requested from the Correctional Service, including video of the assaults.

“The Correctional Service and the Department of Justice have benefited from using COVID as a reason to stall litigation and distance people like Mr. Ali from justice,” Hartman said. “This is a strategic political and legal choice considering that a lot of operations have adapted to our new reality. And it’s sad because people tend to hold a certain view of Canada as a beacon of justice and fairness. That view can’t be maintained when you know CSC.”

He said the federal government “is not in any rush to take responsibility for the prisoners it harms.”

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Ali has just finished his second federal sentence – 4.5 years for dangerous driving causing death and failure to stop at an accident.

He told The Sun he pleaded guilty to both counts because he felt horrible for causing the March 9, 2015 crash that killed a 26-yearold Burnaby woman.

The popular young woman, whose family asked that she not be identified by name in this story, was just blocks from her home when the Range Rover that Ali was driving ran a red light and smashed into her Toyota at Moscrop and Willingdon.

During his December 2016 sentencing hearing in Vancouver provincial court, he apologized to her devastated family.

Afterward, he says he just couldn’t get over what he had done.

“I felt like shit. And it really messed me up in the head,” Ali said. “And all that was weighing heavily on me.”

He wanted to change. And he wanted to make amends. So he approached Vancouver police investigators about an unsolved murder that he had information about.

Details of his involvement in the murder case are covered by a publication ban.

“I felt bad for a family who had lost their son. And I felt that me coming forward and bringing closure to another family would make me feel all right as a person inside for taking (another person’s) life. So I did come forward and help the VPD get a conviction.”

By going to police, he was breaking the rules of the gang he had joined as a 16-year-old.

That was hard, Ali admitted. “At the same time, you know, I always tell myself, I’m grateful to be alive and I’m here every day. (My victim’s) not here,” he said. “All I can do moving forward is keep doing good for other people. And that outweighed all this gang rules and bullshit.”

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Ali said he has no problem with how Vancouver police dealt with him.

But afterward, he met with RCMP officers who promised support through the Witness Protection Program.

“They told me they would do something for me and showed me a contract, then to only take it away from me,” he said.

At first things were going fine in prison – where he was held on the special unit. But he got caught using cannabis, contrary to prison rules.

“I was smoking weed on the unit.

And I’ve been smoking weed my whole bit. That’s how I get by. I suffer from PTSD, anxiety. I have a medical marijuana licence out here to smoke weed,” he said.

He says he was told by the RCMP “that if I couldn’t follow the rules of a unit in an institution, I wouldn’t be able to follow their rules on the street,” Ali said. “Mind you, I never did anything to jeopardize any case. … After they get what they want out of you, they kind of just like kick you to the curb.”

RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival said in a general statement that “a witness may only go into the program after they finish serving their sentence.”

While in prison, their security is the responsibility of corrections officials, Percival said.

“Protectees who are admitted to the program sign a protection agreement which clearly explains their responsibility to abide by several obligations. Protectees who fail to follow these obligations are served a security breach notice. If the security breach is significantly serious or if a protectee has multiple security breaches, the process may be initiated to have them non-voluntarily terminated from the program.”

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Ali said he “thought the police would accommodate a safe place for me to do my time. But as soon as I got to Millhaven, they’re not in the picture. It was only after the assault that I was placed in a more suitable range.”

Vancouver lawyer Aseem Dosanjh, who helped Ali after he ran into problems with police over his co-operation, said there are “significant improvements that can be made to the overall structure and system of how individual witnesses and informants come forward.”

“Having had an opportunity to work with him in the latter stages of the process, learning of his co-operation and efforts to assist as well as his efforts to get assistance, you get a glimpse into aspects of the process,” Dosanjh said. “Many investigations today need the assistance of some of the previously ‘bad guys’who now may want to do the right thing and share helpful information.”

He said there should be a better process “developed, codified, and entrenched into our criminal justice system such that an important witness who wants to come forward would already know many of the protections available to them and know they can get access to good legal counsel to help ensure they are adequately protected.”

It’s not like the movies, at least not here in Canada, Dosanjh said.

“This isn’t Goodfellas. People don’t just get a new life, a house, car and an abundance of financial support,” he said. “If we have better systems in place, we would likely see more co-operation forthcoming from those that can provide the helpful information.”

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Despite his negative experience in prison, Ali doesn’t expect sympathy from the public. He knows he has wreaked a lot of havoc on the Lower Mainland since the mid-2000s.

Born in Turkey in November 1990, he came with his family to Canada as refugees in 1992 and settled in Burnaby. He was a teen when his dad “left to Kurdistan to get married and kind of left us high and dry,” Ali said.

He looked up to some older guys who were also Kurdish refugees and “were making some wrong choices that later influenced me.”

Ali doesn’t want to name those who lured him in. “They were associated with the UN and I kind of got dragged in that way. And not having a father and dropping out of high school at Grade 10, I just started working on … Hastings.”

Ali helped run a dial-a-dope line selling drugs to addicts in the Downtown Eastside.

Being so young, he was nervous, but “trying to be cool and fit in around older people.”

“Sometimes you don’t want to do things, but you have to do things either because of the people that are around you or (because) you want to fit in or be cool,” Ali said. “I’ve seen a lot of things that I wouldn’t want anyone to see or be involved in.”

Because some of the others involved were relatives, “it helped me move up in the ranks a lot faster than somebody that didn’t have any family.”

And he was making money. “You’re 14, 15, 16 years old, and when you’re going out there and making three, four or $500 a day, that’s a lot of money for a teenager. And with money comes a lot of trouble, too, because it opens the doors to do other things.”

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The first time he got arrested, he was just 14 or 15.

“I think it was an assault on Hastings for beating somebody that owed some money,” Ali recalled.

He pleaded guilty, but the charges and convictions kept coming.

“It’s a cycle that it’s really hard to break from.”

Ali’s criminal history has been documented in several court proceedings – the assault conviction in 2007, uttering threats, failure to comply with court-ordered conditions three times, possession for the purpose of trafficking and possession of a restricted firearm with ammunition.

It got worst in December 2008 when Ali, barely 18, and three others forced their way into an east Vancouver basement suite with a loaded semi-automatic to rob a man they thought would be there. He wasn’t.

But his roommate was there and was assaulted and confined.

Ali and his associates were caught three blocks away after crashing their vehicle. He didn’t know at the time that police had been listening to their conversations on wiretaps related to a bigger investigation into the UN.

He was convicted on several counts and sentenced to 6½ years minus credit for time served.

While in North Fraser Pretrial jail in January 2012, Ali learned that his cousin Sal Sahbaz had been gunned down in Mexico.

“I seen him on the news where he had got shot. And I was on the top bunk and I almost fell down. I didn’t want to believe it,” Ali said.

“Despite what anybody has to say about him, he is a really good guy. He had a really good heart, man. And if it wasn’t for Sal, none of the UN guys would be who they are. He’s one of the founders of UN – him and Clay Roueche.”

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Even the violent slaying of his cousin was not enough to change Ali back then.

“It was rough coming into prison and being 18 years old and trying to fend for yourself – survival of the fittest,” he said.

As the years passed he often asked himself what he was doing with his life.

“I had intentions on changing my ways and you know not wanting to continue with this lifestyle. But I must admit it is hard, because in there, in prison, you’re surrounded by criminals. And all they talk about is criminal activity.”

He was also being held on units with other UN gangsters.

“As the years were going by, I started to realize there’s only two ways out of this game – in a cell or dead,” he said.

After he was released, he still didn’t make a clean break. But he bought a tanning salon in an effort “to be legit.”

“I still had one foot in both worlds,” he said. “I was still involved in things that I shouldn’t be involved in. … I was still hanging around and talking to people I shouldn’t be. And that was my biggest downfall.”

In the days before he caused the fatal car crash, his family members could see that he was spiralling out of control. They told him to chill out.

“We feel that you’re going die or somebody’s going to die if you don’t sit down,” his mother told him. And she was right.

Three days later, just after 11:30 p.m., he was driving down Willingdon and arguing with his passenger. He had no licence and had written a fraudulent cheque for the Range Rover.

He blew through the red light at Moscrop and T-boned his victim’s car. She died instantly.

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And then he took off, checking into a motel that night where he arranged for a new car and stolen plates. He was arrested in Creston days later.

“I didn’t know that (she) died until the next day. I was too selfish – for my own personal gain – to leave the scene,” he said.

Ali hopes that he will be able to work with troubled youth by sharing his cautionary tale. After getting out of prison last month, Ali visited the accident spot for the first time. It was the fifth anniversary of the crash.

He laid some flowers. He doesn’t know if his victim’s family will ever forgive him. The family declined to comment for this story.

“I don’t know what’s in their minds and in their hearts. But I hope one day they could forgive me and look past the accident and see who I am today. I am no longer the same person as I was before.”