Two men have been sentenced in a bizarre kidnapping case that involved the attempted robbery of $300,000 cash from a Chinese government official.
It all began after the official, identified only as Mr. Chan, transferred his cash to a money exchange in Richmond.
His contact in Canada — a man who can be identified only by the initials B.L. due to a publication ban — was tasked with collecting the cash and holding it until the official could use it later to gamble.
But B.L. decided he wanted to steal the money and planned a fake kidnapping that was foiled when a bystander spotted suspicious activity in a Richmond parkade.
That’s the conclusion reached by a judge who this week sentenced two men, Donald Stalker and Raymond Truong, for their part in the August 2013 crime.
“To say the facts in this case are unusual is to understate,” B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Wedge said while sentencing Stalker. “They border on the bizarre.”
Stalker, 29, and Truong, 21, went on trial charged with a number of offences including kidnapping, but a jury acquitted them of the most serious charges and instead convicted them of theft.
Stalker was also convicted of possession of a loaded firearm.
B.L. testified that Mr. Chan periodically sent large amounts of money to Canada and then travelled here about three times a year to have B.L. deliver the money to him.
B.L. kept huge amounts of cash in his apartment in Richmond, even when he had his four-year-old son with him.
On the day of the alleged abduction, B.L. was en route to deliver the $300,000 to Mr. Chan. B.L. and his son were rushed by three or four men as they approached his BMW SUV parked in the Westin Wall Centre on Corvette Way. B.L. was handcuffed and put in the back seat of the vehicle with his son.
Stalker drove the vehicle out of the parkade, and then Truong got behind the wheel. A short while later, police stopped the vehicle.
A police officer testified that neither B.L. nor his son looked upset or in any distress. Inside the cargo area of the vehicle, police found the cash in a grocery bag. They also found a semi-automatic pistol. The chamber was not loaded, but a magazine attached to it contained rounds of ammunition.
When police asked B.L. about the money, he became hostile and refused to talk until he had spoken to a lawyer. He told police he’d been robbed.
Police searched his apartment and found it had been ransacked, an event the judge concluded had been staged.
Stalker and Truong both testified, with Truong describing a man he’d met at a party in Richmond whom he identified as Brandon Connelly. He said he later met with Connelly and B.L. to discuss a plan to stage the fake robbery.
The judge said she found Truong, who had no prior criminal record, to be a credible witness.
Stalker, who has an extensive criminal record, testified to basically the same story as Truong.
“A so-called complainant, together with Brandon (Connelly), planned a theft and enlisted Mr. Stalker and Mr. Truong to help,” said the judge. “To paint a convincing picture of a robbery to trick B.L.’s boss, B.L. used his 4 1/2-year-old son as, in the words of defence counsel, a prop.”
ence of Truong and Stalker that the child was never part of the plot. “The Crown’s complainant is a most egregious offender, the one with probably the greatest moral culpability in all of this.”
Wedge said she accepted that the crime was not a dynamic or dangerous situation.
“The scenario was a fiction concocted by the complainant to steal a significant amount of money from his client.”
Stalker was sentenced to 40 months in prison, but after receiving credit for pre-sentence custody, he has 2 1/2 months remaining. Truong received a five-month prison sentence, but will not have any time to serve because he had already spent the equivalent of two years in prison before being released on bail.
“Mr. Truong has accordingly paid a very steep price already for the very bad choice he made,” said the judge.
B.L. is not facing criminal charges.
