Charges have been laid against a longtime Hells Angel and an associate after slot machines and other gambling supplies were found inside a Burnaby café.
Francisco Batista Pires, a 62-year-old member of the bikers’ Nomads chapter, and Angelo Giuseppe Freda, 60, each face one count of keeping an illegal gaming house.
The charges stem from a 2022 investigation by the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit into Big Shots Café, in the 3900-block of East Hastings Street, which is owned by Pires.
CFSEU Cpl. Sarbjit Sangha said the agency’s anti-gambling team “conducted a thorough investigation which led to the approval of a search warrant for the café that took place in July 2023.”
At the time 10 people were arrested at Big Shots, while one was taken into custody at his home. Investigators seized four video lottery terminals, three of which were functioning and had money inside, Sangha said.
Poker chips, ledgers, a gaming table, cards, other gambling paraphernalia and $14,000 cash were also seized by police, she said.
Prosecutors approved the charges against Pires and Freda this week. Both have been ordered to appear in court next month.
In November 2020, Pires and three associates were charged with being “found in a common gaming or betting house” after an earlier CFSEU investigation into the same café that began in December 2019.
But the charges were stayed or dropped in October 2021 “after further information was received by the prosecutor with conduct of the file,” B.C. Prosecution spokesman Dan McLaughlin said at the time. “After reviewing this information and the rest of the file materials the prosecutor concluded the charge approval standard could no longer be met.”
The director of civil forfeiture then filed a lawsuit against Pires and Richard Kosterman, the alleged gaming house manager, in April 2022, saying that almost $10,000 and “gaming supplies” seized during a July 2020 search should be forfeited as proceeds of crime. In 2023, some of the cash and equipment was forfeited by consent.
Corporate records indicate that Pires incorporated Big Shots on June 10, 2004, with another man. The second director was replaced by Pires’s fellow Hells Angel Rob Alvarez on Jan. 1, 2005, the records state. Alvarez ceased being a director on Jun 8, 2008, but is still listed with Pires on the Burnaby business licence.
An earlier drug trafficking conviction of Pires was cited in the long-running civil forfeiture case that resulted in three clubhouses being seized by the B.C. government two years ago. One ruling in the case noted that Pires and others had used the East End clubhouse for trafficking on three occasions.
Pires and his fellow Hells Angel, Ronaldo Lising, were convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to traffic cocaine and sentenced to 4½ years in jail. They appealed and lost, first in the B.C. Court of Appeal and in November 2005 in the Supreme Court of Canada.
At their 2001 sentencing, Justice Kenneth Smith found the two men were joint operators of a wholesale cocaine business that supplied two well-known Vancouver strip bars. He said the two bikers were “criminals in the true sense” because they walked down a criminal path “deliberately and for selfish reasons.”
Bluesky: @kimbolan.bsky.social