Photo: Police photo

Cory Vallee

A convicted assassin frequently visited Kelowna, according to his recently-published first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder guilty verdict.

Cory Vallee was found guilty earlier this month for the February 2009 contract killing of Red Scorpion gangster Kevin LeClair, along with conspiracy to kill the Bacon brothers and their associates.

Throughout the 16-month trial, the Crown proved Vallee was hired as a hitman by the UN gang sometime around early 2008, and helped gather intelligence in the hunt for several rival gang members.

Vallee was brought into the U.N gang fold as their battle with the Red Scorpions and the Bacon brothers intensified. 

LeClair, gunned down by Vallee outside a Langley mall on Feb. 6, 2009, was a former member of the UN, but he had left to join the Bacon brothers. He was known in UN circles as “Traitor” and was considered a high risk due to his knowledge of the inner workings of his former gang.

The court heard in trial that Vallee was paid $50,000 for the LeClair hit.

A price of $300,000 was put on the heads of the Bacon brothers, as "it was hard to kill them," according to testimony from a former UN member

Justice Janice Dillon's recently-published decision outlines the UN gang's expansion through the 2000s, growing their drug supply lines throughout the Lower Mainland, B.C.'s Interior and into Calgary, the United States and Mexico.

“By 2006, the UN was organizing large shipments of marihuana and money by land and air to the United States in return for large shipments of cocaine from Mexico,” Justice Dillon wrote. “There were also return shipments of guns.”

A former UN gang boss, who ended up becoming a Crown witness in the case against Vallee, said he supplied cocaine to the Interior from 2007 to 2009, making up to $500,000 per year, until the quality of cocaine began to diminish.

Vallee, meanwhile, said in 2008 that he regularly travelled to Kelowna. In April 2008 he was in Kelowna for the wedding of his friend and UN gang member Duane Meyer. Meyer was killed in Abbotsford less than a month after the wedding. The Red Scorpions were believed to be responsible for Meyer's death, one of the many back and forth murders between the two groups that had begun in 2006.

Jonathan Bacon, killed outside Kelowna's Delta Grand Hotel in August 2011, was another casualty of the gang war.

In several police intercepts of UN members in April 2008, one gang associate was overheard discussing having sent Vallee to an area believed to be the Okanagan in the past, and that “they love him up there.”

It was also heard in trial that Vallee did a drug-related “collection” in Kelowna sometime in the spring or summer of 2009, followed by a shipment of ecstasy to Calgary the following fall.

Vallee was ultimately found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder charges on June 1. First-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years. He's scheduled to be sentenced on the conspiracy charge June 28.