A United Nations gang associate has pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder gangster Randy Naicker, and has been sentenced to five years in prison.
Sheldon Paine, 28, entered his plea and was sentenced Friday in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.
Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen said the case would normally attract a much more severe sentence but there were “exceptional” circumstances involved. He noted the guilty plea, expressions of remorse from Paine and the accused’s plans to turn his life around.
In an agreed statement of facts read out in court, Crown counsel Gordon Matei said the murder of Naicker, 34, in June 2012 was a “highly sophisticated, coordinated” event that occurred on a busy public street in Port Moody with numerous members of the public exposed.
Paine was in the vicinity when two masked men shot Naicker multiple times at close range near St. Johns and Queens streets, before speeding away in a getaway vehicle.
Matei said Paine’s main role in the murder was to assist his close friend, Michael Jones, a member of the UN gang. Jones said the gang was trying to kill Naicker — a one-time high-ranking member of the Independent Soldiers gang — so Paine made efforts to locate him, the prosecutor said.
Sometime before the shooting, Paine drove Jones to Naicker’s building, where Jones accessed the parkade using a key fob and fixed a tracking device under Naicker’s vehicle, Matei told the judge.
On the day of the shooting, Paine drove Jones to Port Moody and they watched Naicker’s vehicle from a nearby location, Matei said. Paine heard shots fired and then saw the getaway vehicle speed by, with firearms being thrown from the getaway vehicle.
The murder was part of the ongoing gang conflict between the UN and Independent Soldiers, Matei said.
Len Doust, Paine’s lawyer, told the court that after the shooting there were several attempts on his client’s life, so Paine, who was facing unrelated firearms charges at the time, fled to South Africa.
In November 2015, Paine was arrested in a suburb of Johannesburg and agreed to be extradited back to Canada. He returned in June.
Doust told the court that his client, who has no prior criminal record, had ambitions to restore his life and had had no contact with his former gang associates.
“He wants nothing to do with those people,” he said.
Doust said Paine had taken Bible studies in prison and “had found God.” He admitted such submissions are often used as a crutch in sentencing proceedings but in his client’s case, they were genuine and Paine had expressed remorse.
Paine told the court that he wanted to say he was sorry for ever getting involved in the gang lifestyle and taking part in the murder plot.
“I regret it every day. I’ve been trying my best to change my life,” he said.
In a victim impact statement read in court, Naicker’s father, Hemraj Naicker, said: “It’s so hard to find words to describe the pain, anger and despair that I felt from his murder. Randy’s murder has taken everything from me. I am unable to take joy from the simple pleasures of life.”
Cullen said the accused’s crime was part of “an example of a blatant act of extreme violence in the context of a conflict between criminal gangs and carried out in a very public venue where ordinary and uninvolved citizens were put at risk.”
The judge imposed a sentence of seven years in prison, but after giving Paine credit for pre-sentence custody, reduced the sentence to five years.
Jones and two other men are awaiting trial after being charged in the murder of Jonathan Bacon in Kelowna in 2011.
