Testimony heard in British Columbia’s Cullen Commission has highlighted corruption at the highest levels with former BC gaming minister Rich Coleman and several high ranking members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) being described as “mafia-like.”
That description came during a secretly-recorded conversation between former Solicitor-General Kash Heed and former RCMP officer Fred Pinnock, who was former commander of the RCMP’s illegal gaming unit. These men engaged in three recorded conversations in 2009 that Pinnock secretly recorded. That was the same year the illegal gaming unit was disbanded.
The recorded conversations followed public statements by Heed that undercut Pinnock’s own statements that organized crime and money laundering were running amok in the province’s casinos. Heed, said Pinnock, told him that Coleman had allowed this to happen without interference.
The commission was created to explore this corruption. Heed and others tried to keep the tapes from being admitted in evidence, but commissioner Auston Cullen allowed to be used as “indirect support” for Pinnock’s testimony.
Coleman called the transcripts of the conversations, “scurrilous gossip” and said they were “unfounded” and “inaccurate.”
Coleman denies ignoring wrongdoing at the province’s casinos and has said he won’t comment until he testifies in 2021. He argued that the conversations’ transcripts should not be released until then.
Heed is recorded saying that some of those chosen to head up investigations of money laundering were themselves responsible for doing what they could to hinder RCMP policing of the casinos.
Heed describes phoning Attorney General David Eby and attacking him for his choice of an independent reviewer. That reviewer, he said, “was part of that decision-making … (redacted) were part of the decision-making, were puppets for Coleman, to pull Pinnock’s illegal gaming unit.”
