Morrisroe moved to secret location after daughter tells of nightmare gangland experience
Neal Hall,The Vancouver Sun
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The father of a feisty young Richmond woman who claims to have infiltrated a group of Vancouver gangsters and tape-recorded conversations for police was moved from a Fraser Valley prison early Wednesday.
Sid Morrisroe, 63, was moved from the minimum-security Ferndale Institution in Mission, where he had served 14 years of a life sentence for the 1984 murder of Penthouse nightclub owner Joe Phillipone.
Ferndale assistant warden Myron Tokarek would not say why Morrisroe has been relocated, nor which facility he is in now.
Tami Morrisroe's claims that she worked undercover for RCMP surfaced in media reports Wednesday, and may be the reason prison authorities moved her father.
Police sources confirmed Wednesday that Tami, 26, has entered the witness protection program with her young children and common-law husband and now is living with a new identity and police protection.
In an interview with a Vancouver Sun reporter last year, she said she had spent months counting millions in drug money for Vancouver mobsters, handled the murder weapon used in an Abbotsford contract killing that left five dead and tape-recorded a gangster about his life dealing drugs and carrying out contract killings.
She said she did it all to spring her father from prison for a murder he has always maintained he did not commit.
Tami Morrisroe is expected to hold a news conference later this week, under heavy police protection, to tell how she infiltrated the criminal organization and how she gathered information she says proves her father was framed by the underworld for the Phillipone killing.
She is also expected to testify as the Crown's star witness in a number of murder trials stemming from her undercover operation, although police said Wednesday no arrests have been made in those cases as yet.
Last Sept. 16, Morrisroe told the Sun reporter she feared for her life if anyone discovered she was working for the mob while cooperating with police.
The meeting took place at an outside table at the Lotus Eaters cafe at the corner of Seventh and Hemlock, across the street from Pacific Press building.
She asked the reporter not to discuss her story with anyone until she was in the witness protection program.
There was another chilling reason why she wanted to talk.
"I'm telling you in case anything happens to me," she said. She smiled nervously. "I'm in deep."
She said what she hadn't even told her husband, Claudio, about what she was doing.
"They gave me the gun used in the Abbotsford murders," she explained of the gangsters she was working for. "I got a call and was told to get rid of it. I told them I threw it off a bridge. But I gave it to the RCMP last Friday."
Morrisroe spent more than an hour detailing her knowledge of a string of contract murders she said were committed by her bosses.
The Abbotsford murders on Sept. 11, 1996 , she said, were contract killings over a big unpaid debt. A woman named Sonto Graves, 57, and her husband Raymond, 71, were supposed to have their throats slit.
"It's supposed to send a message," she said.
But Graves' son, David, was at the family home when the killers arrived, so he was killed too. Then another couple -- Daryl and Theresa Klassen, both 30 -- pulled up unexpectedly. The contract killers took them to a farm outbuilding and shot them, then returned to Montreal, Morrisroe added.
After the murders, she said, she was given the murder weapon for protection -- her boss planned to attend a meeting with some major drug dealers. Then she got the call telling her to get rid of it.
She said she gave the weapon to police along with a tape of a phone conversation with a man named Saul -- one of the gangsters -- who openly discussed "taking care of business," which to him was drugs and murder, she said.
She said she also had insider knowledge about a double murder in Burnaby -- Eugene Uyeyama, 35, and his wife Michele, 30, were strangled in their exclusive home shortly before Christmas 1995. The house was set on fire to cover the killer's tracks.
Morrisroe said at the time she had been meeting with members of the Vancouver RCMP proceeds-of-crime section. They usually met at the Delta Hotel in Richmond.
The gang had also asked her to claim $600,000 seized at the border -- it had been destined for the U.S. to buy cocaine, she said.
The gang included Italians and Asians connected to the Cali cartel in Colombia, Morrisroe added, and they killed people who ripped them off.
That's what they did to former skier Terry Watts, 41, who ended up dead last August. He was found in the trunk of a car in Chinatown. He had been shot.
Morrisroe said Watts owed the organization $500,000 and had skipped town.
"They lured him back and killed him," she said.
At that point in the interview, an Asian man in a car pulled up across the street. He stayed sitting inside his car.
Morrisroe said she wasn't concerned about being watched.
"If they saw me talking to you, they know I talk to the press about my dad."
Since she was 20, Morrisroe had been a tireless campaigner for her father's release.
Last year, Justice Minister Allan Rock turned down her father's request for release under Section 649 of the Criminal Code, which provides for a review of cases in which a miscarriage of justice is claimed.
Morrisroe claimed one gangster told her her father had been set up to take the fall for the Phillipone murder. When justice department officials interviewed the man, she said, he denied making the statement to Morrisroe.
Solicitor-General Herb Gray also turned down her father's application for clemency for health reasons -- he had collapsed several times in prison.
Morrisroe said her desire to find out the truth about her father's case prompted her to join the underworld organization.
"They totally trust me," she said of the gangsters. "I count all the money. There's a $2.4 million [cocaine] purchase Friday."
At the end of the Sept. 16 meeting, the reporter walked her to her car parked beside the Pacific Press building.
"I might not see you again," she said before getting in her car and driving away.
Vancouver RCMP Sergeant Peter Montague said Wednesday he couldn't comment on Morrisroe's story.
"The only thing I have been authorized to say is to neither confirm nor deny she is in the [witness protection] program," he said. But he asked The Sun not to run her photograph.
Tami Morrisroe reportedly went on to marry a key player in the gang as part of her subterfuge and plans to have the marriage annulled.
At the press conference later this week, she is expected to try again to have Rock and Gray take a second look at her father's case, based on the new information she says she has uncovered, including a tape-recorded admission that he was framed.
The RCMP refused to divulge information about the planned press conference.
"It has nothing to do with the RCMP," Montague said.
Calls to other senior officers were referred to Vancouver RCMP Inspector Gary Bass of the major crime section, who did not return The Sun's calls.
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