College St. hitman charged in West Coast shootings
Dean Wiwchar and Robby Alkhalil, who are serving life sentences for a 2012 murder in Toronto, are now charged in connection with shootings in Vancouver and Burnaby.
Two men sentenced to life in prison for a gangland slaying in Toronto’s Little Italy have now been charged in connection with a pair of 2012 underworld killings in British Columbia.
Last spring, Dean Michael Wiwchar, 32, and Rahbih (Robby) Alkhalil, 30, were convicted of first-degree murder of the June 2012 shooting death of John Raposo on College St. Their trial heard that Wiwchar was the hitman who killed Raposo.
The new charges relate to the slayings of West Coast gang leaders carried out before and after the Raposo murder.
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Sandip Duhre was shot to death in the busy lobby of the Sheraton Wall Centre in downtown Vancouver in January 2012. Sukh Dhak and his bodyguard Thomas Mantel were gunned down outside a Burnaby hotel in November 2012.
Wiwchar was charged last week with first-degree murder in the Duhre case, and conspiracy to commit murder in the Dhak killing.
Alkhalil and Larry Ronald Amero, 40, were each charged last week with conspiracy to commit murder in the Duhre and Dhak slayings.
Amero, a Hells Angel from Ottawa, was the only one of the accused who wasn’t already behind bars.
Amero is a founder of a criminal organization called the Wolfpack Alliance, which is made up of some Hells Angels and the B.C.-based Red Scorpions and Independent Soldiers.
He narrowly escaped death when he was shot at close range in August 2011 as he sat in a Porsche SUV outside a Kelowna resort with Red Scorpion leader Jonathan Bacon and Independent Soldiers gangster James Riach. Bacon was killed in the attack. Riach was uninjured, but a woman who was also in the SUV was left paralyzed for life.
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Amero was arrested in Ottawa on Thursday and is expected to be brought to Vancouver this week to face the murder conspiracy charges. He had re-established himself in the Ottawa area and made occasional trips to B.C. over the past few months, Vancouver police said.
Raposo, 35, was shot in the head four times at point blank range on the afternoon of June 18, 2012 as he watched a Euro Cup game on a crowded patio at the Sicilian Sidewalk Café on College St. Court heard that Alkhalil contracted Wiwchar to kill him.
In 2004, Wiwchar was part of a gang involved in a robbery spree that included violent attacks on an Oak Ridges McDonald’s and a Richmond Hill Harvey’s restaurant. In both robberies, employees were hit with a bat by masked thieves.
After Wiwchar’s arrest for the Raposo shooting, Wiwchar’s then-lawyer Christopher Avery described him as just a “middle-class kid from Stouffville”.
Peter Edwards is a Toronto-based reporter primarily covering
crime for the Star. Reach him via email: pedwards@thestar.ca
