TAMI AND THE MOB
By Bob Stall
Province Columnist

Tami Morrisroe will never put vinegar on her chips again. The smell of it terrifies her. It's the smell of impending death. It means that someone is about to be murdered.

Tami, a 26-year-old housewife and mother, formerly of Richmond, has watched fastidious hit men at home in their kitchen using vinegar to clean their bullets, guns and knives.

They do this before heading out to torture and kill people because vinegar erases their fingerprints as thoroughly as its scent imprints in the memory. 

They did this last August, says Tami, before murdering Terry Watts, a former member of Canada's national ski team, and stuffing his body into the trunk of a rental car in Vancouver's Chinatown.

The use of vinegar was one of the household hints Tami picked up last year from killers and cocaine dealers  when she infiltrated the Canadian wing of an international crime cartel and ended up married to the mob before finally making her escape a few months ago. She did it to get her father, Sid Morrisroe, out of jail.

In the process, she cracked eight of B.C.'s most sensational recent murder cases including the massacre of five people in an Abbotsford farmhouse last September, the torture and murder of Burnaby informers Eugene and Michele Uyeyama in December, 1995, and the killing of Terry Watts over an unpaid drug debt.

I can tell Tami Morrisroe's story today because she and her family have been relocated by the RCMP far from the bad guys in British Columbia and legally she's not Tami Morrisroe any more.

She and her family are in the federal Witness Protection Program established by Parliament last summer.

They have new identities unknown to anyone who knew them before. For this reason, none of the photos accompanying these articles show her face or that of her common-law husband Claudio Delazzari. Nor am I disclosing the number, ages or sex of the couple's children.

Tami and her family are  living in a community somewhere in North America, possibly in Canada, blended into work and school among neighbors who have no idea their identities didn't exist before last November. Their lives depend on how normal they seem.

The elaborate subterfuge is vital. In the next few years Tami will be brought back to B.C. under exceptional security to give testimony in several murder and drug trials.

The RCMP, which was given lengthy advance notice by The Province of the  publication of this story, has requested that it contain a plea to other newspapers, magazines and TV stations to refrain from running photos of Tami Morrisroe from now on.

Many news outlets have pictures and film of Tami on file from the days when she was a very public, often-photographed fighter in the cause of her father Sid who she contends is wrongfully in jail _ which is what got her into all this in the first place.

In the trials ahead, Tami Morrisroe will be more than just the star witness. Indeed, the trials will be held almost entirely because of her work. 

She will testify as a housewife-turned-undercover-agent who solved eight of B.C.'s highest-profile murder cases and disabled an international cocaine ring as part of a high-stakes game of chicken she played with police and politicians in a so-far unsuccessful effort to get her father out of jail.

Her story is a twisting tale of fear and loathing, honor and betrayal, ingenuity, stupidity, strife, valor and horror among characters ranging from executives of the multi-billion-dollar Cali cocaine cartel in Columbia, to dope dealers on Skid Row in Vancouver, to the highest levels of the RCMP, Corrections Canada and at least two cabinet minister's offices in Ottawa.

Much of the story I've known since mid-October but couldn't write earlier because premature publication would have tipped alleged murderers to flee arrest and seek to silence Tami. 

But now they're either in custody or under heavy surveillance while Tami and her family are well enough established in their new identities to survive a hunt by mob killers.

It was fear for her life that impelled Tami to become an undercover RCMP agent last August. Before that, she had intended to dip into the underworld only far enough to pick up some information to help free her father.

Sid Morrisroe, 63, is in his 14th year of a life sentence for his role in the 1983 killing of downtown nightclub owner Joe Philliponi, a role which he has always claimed consisted solely of hearing about it in a bar the next day. 

Ironically, it is  because he has so consistently proclaimed his innocence that he would probably have no chance at the "faint-hope" 15-year review  which a majority of convicted killers have successfully used to get out of life/25-year sentences 10 years early. Only those who have confessed and expressed contrition for their crimes have been granted  the early release so far. 

Tami has been an indefatigable, highly-visible crusader for her father since she was 20 years old.

Last year, she says, she was forced to go underground in order to get crucial evidence after Justice Minister Allan Rock "believed a convicted criminal's word over mine" and rejected an appeal for a new trial in her father's case.

The convicted criminal is a relative of the Philliponis who, she said, told her that Sid had been framed but then denied it when confronted by a justice department investigator.

Tami contends that's what killed her father's appeal. "That's how I got discredited. That's what got me really choked. That's what got me going into all this.

"If the department of justice had done its job properly, I wouldn't have had to do it. A 25-year-old woman shouldn't have to go undercover to break a case." 

Tami vowed that the next time the Philliponi relative told her about the murder she would get it on tape. 

She devoted the next year, and, as it has turned out, her identity and those of her husband and children for the rest of their lives, to a strategy that would inveigle the man into repeating the statement. 

To do that, she had to get close to him. She knew she could manage this because he seemed attracted to her. What she didn't know at the beginning of last year was that the guy was a vicious killer and drug lord, and anybody who got close enough to learn the truth could not be allowed to get away.

Tami told me her story in furtive face-to-face interviews last October, November and December when we met several times in Vancouver, transforming her into an odd kind of triple agent, the mob unaware that she was talking to the police, and neither of them  aware that she was talking to me. 

Since then all the facts in these stories have been reluctantly confirmed by two senior RCMP officers in British Columbia.

After Tami and her family were re-located, interviews  continued by telephone from January until yesterday as she called me two or three times a week.

She has call-blocking on her line to prevent tracing. I don't know where she lives and I don't  want to know. 

Tami said she needed one journalist to know every aspect of her situation except for her whereabouts, "to make sure that the truth gets out." 

She said in our first interview, "If anything ever happens to me, I don't want to be remembered as someone involved with organized crime. If a reporter knows the whole story, the RCMP won't be able to keep quiet about why I got into all this." 

Tami Morrisroe is a voluble, volatile, high-energy former secretary in a plumbing company who has turned herself into a remarkably well-versed, para-legal activist with a single passionate cause. For her safety, I won't describe her physically.

She has pestered and petitioned justice ministers from Kim Campbell to Allan Rock, researching and writing a 600-page "brief" on her father's case, flying to Ottawa, chaining herself to a fence outside Rock's office on national television, losing the case on the minister's review, and then last year switching her fight to the National Parole Board and Solicitor General Herb Gray's office where she sought a rare executive clemency hearing on grounds of her father's health.

At the same time, she began to work secretly, undercover for the RCMP.

She fought for a conditional pardon from Gray to free her father from life imprisonment at Ferndale Minimum Security Institution, arguing that only then could he get adequate treatment for his medical problems which include a serious heart condition and a cyst on the brain.

In February she lost that appeal, too. Gray turned down the application and sparked a firestorm response from Tami that culminates this week with her decision to go public.

On Friday she will hold an extraordinary press conference under armed guard in a so-far undisclosed city. She has divulged the location only to Witness Protection officials and RCMP officers who will help get her there. 

She will tell the media that she believes her father to be in mortal danger in a federal institution because she has become the key witness against a highly organized and well-connected group of killers who have sworn to get at her through him. 

Tami says that a deputy leader of the group warned her that, if she ever informs, he will first order her father killed in jail, then her children, and then she will be tortured and killed.

She says RCMP members were "very confident" that Gray, the minister responsible for the federal police force, would use the opportunity of the health clemency appeal to get her father out of danger in the corrections system and then the RCMP could  allow him to  join his family in the Witness Protection Program.

Tami said this "informal understanding" about her father was one of the main reasons she continued to work as an agent for the Mounties last year. The RCMP denies there was any such understanding.

But when Gray decided against Sid Morrisroe's pardon in February, Tami yelled betrayal and double-cross. She did this behind closed doors, upbraiding RCMP officers in telephone calls from the community where they had secretly located her.

She threatened then to go public, telling officers she would call a press conference in mid-February,  which would have alerted the B.C. mobsters that their arrests were imminent.  "If  they lose 20 arrests, it will be the government's fault," she told me at that time.

"I'm not playing games with my father's life. If they protect a family, they have to protect everybody in it. Why should my father be killed? He didn't ask for any of this." 

She withdrew the threat to go public only after a senior RCMP officer agreed to consider a new brief she recently wrote, this one maintaining that her father could be released directly into the Witness Protection Program as an endangered relative of a protectee. 

That request was turned down last month, and then this week both Rock and Gray ignored another written entreaty from her in which she asked that they review her dad's case one more time on the basis of the new evidence that she risked her life to get last year.

She is going public this week because she believes that after the current federal election campaign a returning  Liberal government would not be as sensitive to public opinion as now. She wants her story to be told in the hopes that it will pressure Rock or Gray to find a mechanism to guarantee her father's safety. 

But even if that process involves some form of release of Sid Morrisroe from prison, it would not be absolution of his guilt. 

Which is why she went undercover deep into the underworld last year.....

The idea was to make it look like she'd just had surgery. 

In an office in a West Broadway medical building  in Vancouver last October, a doctor swabbed blotches of purple dye high up on the inside of Tami Morrisroe's thighs.

"And take these," she said, giving Tami a vial of big, blue-green sugar pills obtained by the RCMP from a company in Texas. A label from the pharmacy downstairs said the pills were antibiotics. Both women knew this wasn't true.

Tami smiled weakly, nodded her thanks and left.

When you live undercover, you live in revolving mirrors of secrets and lies and terror. You're whirled into circles that turn illusion into reality into nausea, your world into orbits of ever-widening and narrowing danger. 

The pills and antiseptic dye were Tami's props in an act to deceive one man _ a mob killer who had forced her to marry him the previous month. The pills and dye were to make him believe that she had just undergone an operation for a torn cervix and therefore couldn't have sex with him for six weeks.

Maybe it would work. Maybe he really was as sorry as he said he was about handcuffing and raping her10 days earlier in his Coquitlam house. Maybe not.

The problem with living undercover is that, as deception builds upon deception, the perils multiply and the pressure intensifies more than most people can bear.

After the rape last September, the RCMP told Tami she could stop and take her family directly into the Witness Protection Program. She replied that she had come too far to quit now and she would give it another six weeks....

The saga of Tami and the mob had a prelude in 1993 at Ferndale Minimum Security Institution in the Fraser Valley. Tami was there visiting her father Sid Morrisroe who was serving a life sentence for murder. 

She met an inmate that day who told her that her father had been framed. The inmate was an apparently well-informed tough guy and relative of Vancouver night club owner Joe Philliponi who was shot in 1983 during a robbery which, a jury concluded, was planned by Sid Morrisroe. Yes, the guy could be just trying to impress her, but anything that might help clear her dad had to be checked out.  

When the man got out of jail, Tami stayed in touch with him, meeting him for coffee several times in 1995 at an Oak Street outlet of Starbucks and at the Knight and Day Restaurant on Boundary Road.  

At Starbucks, he always ordered a short coffee with two shots of cinnamon and she had the tall one, cooled by so much cream she could drink it through  a straw, while they talked about her dad's murder case. 

The guy sounded like he really knew about the Philliponi case. His explanation that her father was set up by another relative as a convenient fall guy seemed to make sense. 

She told Justice Minister Allan Rock's office about the informant, but when a justice department investigator interviewed him, he denied saying that Sid had been framed. 

Afterwards, he told an angry Tami that he'd had to lie to authorities because "you can't go against  the family." That's when Tami decided to surreptitiously tape him the next time she got him talking about the Philliponi murder.  

In January, 1996,  in the Knight and Day Restaurant, with her Panasonic microcassette recorder switched on in her pocket, she thought at first she was getting what she needed. But then the guy began talking about murder in general and she knew she'd never again take the chance of having her little tape recorder with her. 

That day it  became chillingly clear that this man wasn't just a wanna-be hood emptily bragging. 

"You could tell this was real. His eyes went so cold and hard as he talked about taking care of business. It was so scary that  I never used that tape recorder again." 

In fact, the guy with whom she'd chatted and pretended to flirt in Starbucks and Knight and Day was one of the international gang's B.C. leaders and one of its most vicious killers.  

For reasons pertaining to his eventual trial, I can't use his real name here. I'll call him "Vincent," after the John Travolta character in Pulp Fiction, his favorite movie. He likes to think he's as cool a guy as the killers in the film, although, said Tami, he's not lovable like Travolta.   

Quite the reverse, she says. "The more I got to know him, the more I hated him. Toward the end, it was hard to have to hold his hand and pretend to be nice to him."   

Like the killers in Pulp Fiction, this Vincent has also had to mop up buckets of blood and gore in the course of doing business.  

Tami told Vince that she needed work to get  money to pay for her father's legal fees. "I wanted to get my foot in the door with these guys. I figured that eventually I'd be able to take whatever I got to the police and ask them to help me get my dad out." 

Vince, unsuspecting, hired her full-time. 

From January to June last year, her  job was to count drug money for the mob. She counted $20, $50 and $100 Canadian bills into $14,000 bundles because Cdn. $14,000 equaled U.S. $10,000.     

Exchanges of these bundles were transacted without question at several foreign exchange kiosques around the Lower Mainland, and then the money was taken to the U.S. in the same cars that brought back cocaine.  

Business hummed along.  

Vince was one of five deputy leaders of a big Vancouver-based, multi-racial drug ring which sent at least one out of  six to 10 custom-adapted cars back and forth across the B.C.-U.S. border every week. They included a Mazda 626, a BMW and a Toyota Camry.

Cut and welded into the floor of each car trunk was a hidden compartment that could only be opened by a lever secreted in the door post on the driver's side. 

Money went south. Cocaine came north and then east. In two ceaseless flows, like venal and arterial systems pumping into and out of the B.C. heart of the operation, the cars came and went through most of 1996.       

Members of the gang always refer to it as "the organization," says Tami. The five deputy leaders  control a  team of about 20 runners. Two of the deputies are from Tonga, the others Italian, Vietnamese and Chinese.  

The five report to one over-all leader whom she hasn't met. He is a representative of the Cali cartel and is believed to be either Columbian or Italian.   

Some of the deputy leaders, now in their early 30s, went to school together in the Lower Mainland and in recent years, said Tami, "they got tired of all the turf wars" and decided to amalgamate. Their intention, she said, was to grab a large chunk of the Vancouver-area drug trade and also govern the traffic to Montreal.  

Senior British Columbia RCMP officers, who have confirmed the facts in this story in the last few months, disputed only Tami's contention that this gang was regularly supplying Montreal drug dealers.   

From her money-counting days, Tami figures the organization made $1-$4 million monthly.  

Tami's personal financial situation also flourished. Her bankbook went "from nothing to $100,000" in a few months.    

"I got my foot in the door only because Vincent liked me and because of who my father was. They thought I'd never go  to the other side."  

But that, she says, was her intention all along and she knew she had better stay alert every moment.  

She didn't have a drop of alcohol from March until a glass of red wine one Sunday night in November, the day after she entered the Witness Protection Program. 

Her abstinence fit in well with her undercover work because when you work for the organization, drinking is discouraged and drug use is forbidden, she said.  

The gang leaders spent a lot of money eating out. Tami remembers one of the deputies picking up a tab for 12 people, which included a $2,500 bottle of cognac, at the Grouse Nest restaurant in North Vancouver in July.

The hoods liked to eat there. Other favorites were the  Keg Caesar's in Vancouver, the Shanghai Bistro on Alberni Street, the Santorini Taverna in Coquitlam, an Italian coffee bar on Commercial Drive and "a lot of Greek restaurants."  

Tami was party to constant conversations about drug deals and killings.  

In addition to the eight murder victims she was able to name to police, she heard Vince talk about "a couple of dozen other people" he personally claimed to have killed. 

She heard Vince and his friends talk about torturing and murdering Eugene and Michele Uyeyama and trying to burn the bodies in their opulent Burnaby home in December, 1995.  

Tami says that Vince told her he gave the orders to kill the Uyeyamas, then headed off to Montreal to establish an alibi. The RCMP doesn't have this Tami-Vincent conversation on tape, but she intends to testify that he told her this.

She heard Vincent talk about the need to kill to enforce discipline. 

"When people's throats are slit, it's a message. The message is, 'Don't fuck with me.' It's the same message when you shoot someone between the eyes."  

She heard him expressing the feeling of power that killing gave him. "I'm God," he said, "and I get to decide whether people live or die."

With special pride he recalled a feeling of omnipotence at one set of murders  as he ignored his bound and gagged victims begging for their lives. Their panic was as clear as their voices were indistinct, muffled through the tape on their mouths. 

She realized that the horror of hearing all this was equaled by the danger of knowing it. She knew she was in too deep.

Last June 28, Canada Customs was warned by the Los Angeles Police Department to watch for a Mazda 626 with B.C. license plates. The police there thought a major  drug purchase had been made by the car's occupants in L.A.  

In fact, Vincent's men had spotted the police surveillance and aborted the transaction. Thus the men were returning with $600,000 in U.S.bills in the trunk compartment instead of cocaine. 

Customs officials didn't know about the lever in the door post, so they tore the back end of the car apart. They found the money and seized it.

Vincent had the bright idea to send Tami to claim the cash from the RCMP. 

He told her to tell the Mounties that the money was hers, that she had made it on the stock market through one of her father's friends in order to fund the legal costs of his case. 

She was told to say she hid the cash in the car because she didn't want justice officials to know how much of a case the Morrisroes could finance. 

It was an unlikely story, but Vincent said that Tami's  high public profile would dissuade the Mounties from picking it apart or withholding the money. 

Tami didn't balk. "You don't say no to these people. When you're directed to do something, you do it. You don't ask any questions. You just do it."  

It was on her way to RCMP headquarters on Vancouver's west side that Tami had to make what she knew was a life-or-death decision: "Do I hand the police that line, or do I tell them the truth?"  

She decided to tell all.       

"I'm sure the police thought I was a wing-nut at first, but as soon as I mentioned the names of the key players, they knew it was really serious. They knew these were dangerous people."

She and the police started meeting in July _ the first few times in public places, then at the Coast Hotel, then at the Delta Hotel in Richmond.    

In August, Tami got her first whiff of the implications of vinegar. "They were cleaning bullets in Vincent's sister's kitchen in Coquitlam." Tami calls Vincent's sister "Cruella de Vil."  

"I said, 'What are you doing?' They said they were going to kill a guy." 

According to Tami, she learned later that these were the preparations for the shooting of former national team skier Terry Watts. Vincent said  that, at the end, Watts was a drug dealer who had taken the organization for about $500,000.

Watts, 41, was shot and his body was discovered in the trunk of a rental car in Chinatown. Vincent got that idea from a movie, too.  

Then came the murders of five people in the Abbotsford farmhouse last September. 

The murders were bloody, nightmarish and extensively reported in the press, although not so extensively that the cops couldn't help noticing that Tami knew much more than she possibly could have learned from newspapers or newscasts.  

"(Vincent) told me detail after detail about what happened in the farmhouse. He said the people there had burned them for a bunch of money, so they had to be dealt with.  

"There were supposed to be just the two marks in the house, but a third person was there when they arrived, so he had to be killed too.    "They used a knife on the first one so as not to alert the others. Then they took care of the other two. Then a truck pulled in with two other people who had come to visit, so they had to be killed, too. 

"Three of them weren't supposed to die. They just  happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."   

Killed were Raymond, 71,  and Sonto Graves, 57, the owners of the farm; David Sangha, 37, Sonto's son from a previous marriage; and Darryl and Theresa Klassen, both 30.   

Whenever Vincent and his friends talked about the Abbotsford massacre after that, they referred to it, almost affectionately, as "Abby."  

Tami gave the RCMP a cassette of a tape she made on her answering machine of a phone conversation with Vincent shortly after the killings.    

It pertained to a semi-automatic weapon that Vincent had initially placed in the trunk of her car because he had wanted her to bring it to an upcoming meeting when there would be a "big deal going down with the Colombians."  

Then he abruptly told her to "get rid of the gun" and he called her to confirm that she'd done it. When she heard his voice, she pushed the record button  on her answering machine.       

"I told him I'd dumped the gun over the Queensborough Bridge. But I didn't. I gave it to the RCMP." 

The tape of that conversation in the second week of September seems to be what convinced the police to get serious about their rookie undercover agent.       

By the end of September, they installed wiretaps on about 30 phones of the organization people and their relatives, as well as  microphones and transmitters on Tami, her car, Vincent's car and the truck of one of his chief adjutants.     

These last two vehicles _ both Mazdas _ Tami personally delivered to the police when the unsuspecting hoods lent them to her on successive days because they knew her vehicle was in for repairs.

From then until yesterday, the RCMP monitored thousands of conversations among the gang's hierarchy and their families.

And from September through November, the police were listening to almost every minute that Tami was with Vincent. (She didn't tell me where on her person the bug was hidden because it's a technique the RCMP wants to use again.)   

Whenever she was with Vincent during that time, 10-12 RCMP officers tailed the pair in six or seven cars and another three or four operatives worked in the monitoring room on Heather Street, listening to conversations transmitted by the bugs and wiretaps. 

The bug on Tami  was a small microphone/transmitter unit that was voice activated and powered by a 29-hour battery which the police changed every day when she arrived for her debriefing at the Delta Hotel.       

Adding to the stress of her secret life was the fact that Tami also kept it a secret from Claudio so that he wouldn't be worried and wouldn't ask her to stop.      

"Working on Dad's case" was her almost daily excuse for the afternoons that usually stretched long into the evenings. Only near the end did she tell Claudio what she'd been through.

The RCMP officers were worried about her safety, hoping they had enough of a net under the tightropes she had to walk to keep her cover story in precarious balance and her relationship with Vince platonic.

Her story had to be constantly modified in accord with Vince's ever-growing affections and impatience.  

"At first I was just a friend. Then I had to say stuff like, 'I'm leaving Claudio,' and 'We'll be together after my dad's case is over.'"  

In September, Vince told Tami he wanted  to marry her, partly because he believed  that a wife couldn't testify against her husband. (He was wrong.) 

When Tami said she didn't want to get married, he said he'd kill her if she didn't. Then he said he'd kill her entire family if she ever tried to leave him.   

Tami is glad the Mounties have this sample of Vince's sweet talk on tape. It's crucial, she says, to her intention to have their subsequent marriage annulled on the grounds that she was under duress.       

The quickie civil wedding of Vincent and Tami took place in front of a justice of the peace, Vincent's sister Cruella and the Chinese gang leader last Sept. 22.       

Because it took place at Cruella's house, police heard it happening but, oddly, they thought it was a christening.   

Even after the  ceremony, Tami thought she could hold Vincent off by insisting, in what she hoped would sound like an old-world, romantic kind of suggestion, that they abstain from sex until after a big church wedding in early 1997.   

That plan didn't work. 

Two days after the civil wedding, but before the police bug on her was in place, Vincent handcuffed Tami to the brass headboard of the queen-sized bed in his Coquitlam house. 

She screamed. He put a pillow over her face. Her screams became those muffled sounds that he said he liked to hear. He raped and sodomized her. 

After that, Tami was  always wired and the Mounties helped her devise the story of a torn cervix that they hoped  would keep Vincent at bay for the last weeks of her assignment.  

The RCMP kept the pressure on, constantly hassling the organization with interrogations and small busts to incite Vincent, his family and cohorts to talk about drugs and the Abbotsford killings. On one occasion, the police came to question Tami because a call for Vincent from the farmhouse site of the massacre had come in on her pager. This gave Tami the opportunity to feign panic and it got Vincent talking about the murders. 

Tami and the police had other tactics, too.   Once, after the investigators questioned Vincent, Tami responded histrionically. 

"I started acting. I cried. I said, 'I've lost my dad and I don't want to lose you, too.'   

"That got him talking, and a lot of names came out right then." 

Whenever Vincent told Tami stories about past killings, police compared them to a list of unsolved murder cases and then told  her what questions to ask the next time.  

Sometimes her police partners reacted instantly, calling her on her cell phone a few seconds after they heard Vince say something about which they wanted more detail.

Tami's phone would ring in the car and she'd answer in front of Vincent. It would be her police handler and she'd pretend that the caller was a friend of hers.

Then she'd hang up, apologize to Vincent for the interruption and continue the conversation about the murder or drug transaction, smoothly working in the question that the police wanted her to ask.

It was a dangerous, nerve-wracking game and she always had to be on maximum alert. And while she was tightly coiled, she had to keep Vincent loose and talkative. 

On a sunny day at the end of September, the two of them went for a walk in Stanley Park surrounded by plain-clothed police officers. 

They stopped and sat on a bench near Lost Lagoon. It was a beautiful fall day and under the changing leaves they had a long soulful conversation in which Vincent did most of the talking and he rhapsodized about his love of killing. The RCMP got it all on tape.

Pointing to the apartment buildings across the lagoon, Vincent told Tami how he normally gained entrance to high-rises to shoot people.  

Typically, he said, he would ring the downstairs bell and announce on the intercom, "Buddy sent me with a present for you."

He'd go in and up the elevator to the apartment. "And then I put a bullet through the guy. And then I walk out the front door."  

"Doesn't it ever bother you?" Tami asked him.   

"No," he said, "it's like an on-off switch in my head."  

There was no switch on Tami's hidden transmitter. It stayed on and the tape reels in the monitoring room continued to turn as Vincent  told of a high-rise assignment to kill "this one mark."  

Only after he was in the man's apartment did he realize that the intended victim's girlfriend and her 10-year-old son were also there. So he killed them, too.

"Why would you kill a child?" Tami asked.  

"Because he could identify us," Vincent said.  

The conversation about murders went on for about an hour and a half in the park that day.

Said Vincent: "Cops kill criminals. Criminals kill criminals. What's the difference? 

"Let's say that someone rapes your daughter. What would you  do to the guy?" 

When Tami agreed that she might indeed wish the man dead, Vincent said, "Well it's the same thing if someone steals from me."

Tami marveled at the mentality of this hood who equated lost money with a raped daughter. 

She asked Vincent how many people he'd killed. "A couple dozen the last two years," he said.  

Says Tami now: "My only regret is that I didn't get the names of all the victims. I wish I was able to. Then I could have put some families' minds at rest."  

Vince also said that he wouldn't hesitate to "put a bullet through a cop." And he gave several more details about the murders in the farmhouse.  

"After the conversation about 'Abby,' I was sick to my stomach because he was so descriptive," said Tami. "It wasn't bragging. It was just that he wanted me to know absolutely everything."   

But Vincent was not the caring, sharing sort.  "If I'd stayed in that relationship much longer," said Tami, "I'd have been beaten black and blue. I could tell by the way he grabbed me. I realized early on never to do anything to piss him off."   

Whenever he talked about killing, Vincent's face changed. "His eyes went cold. They were horrifying. They were the coldest eyes you could ever see. His eyes frightened me, especially knowing that he always packed a gun."    

Tami told him that his eyes scared her when he talked about killing.  

"Well, you wanted to know," he said.  "Well, yeah," she said, "but can't you tell me without doing that thing with the eyes?" 

Tami said that Vincent had "absolutely no sense of humor. But he had a sick, twisted laugh, a too-bad-for-you type of a laugh."  

In November, she bought another two weeks of celibacy by telling Vincent she had developed a cervical infection. She got more blue-green pills with a newly dated label. 

The police kept the heat on.    

Small-time arrests, busts and seizures kept everybody talking and the telephone bugs were as revealing as the one on Tami.   

Toward the end of November, one raid by RCMP personnel, who didn't know about Tami _ snared her, squawking and yelping and furious. To Vincent and friends she looked like a normal middle-class citizen freaking out in an unaccustomed, unjustified encounter with  the law. She would soon use their recollection of that event to her benefit.       

Shortly afterward, the police in the phone room heard conversations that signaled the end of Tami's life with the mob and, indeed, the end of her life as Tami Morrisroe.  

It was Vincent's sister Cruella who closed her down.   

She started to be heard on her phone voicing suspicions about Tami. "I think Tami's sold my brother out," she said  to relatives and then to Vincent himself.   

Partly because he didn't want to believe it and partly because he had seen the police hassling Tami so convincingly, Vincent didn't take his sister's suspicions seriously. 

But the police did.   

Early one Sunday morning  at the end of November, they swooped and scooped Tami, Claudio and their kids into a hotel  and into the Witness Protection Program.  

Police packers blew through the Morrisroe/Delazzari house in
Richmond and moved the family pets into a kennel.  

For a few weeks, Tami and the family stayed secretly in a suite in a downtown hotel. Tami made some calls to Vincent, telling him that she couldn't stand the thought of being busted again, and she was going to move away, cool it with him for a while and concentrate all her efforts on her dad's case.  

Vincent wasn't happy about that, but neither was he suspicious. What she said fit in with her character and her priorities.   

In December, Tami, Claudio and their family were flown to their new lives while the RCMP in the Lower Mainland continued to build their cases and pursue the one over-all leader who ranked above Vincent and the four other deputies.       

Vincent, Cruella & Co. talked less and less about Tami as the new year began and hardly at all during the last couple of months.    

From wherever they were, Tami phoned me periodically from December through yesterday. I never knew where she was.    

One December call was from an interim location where her  family was lodged before being taken to their final destination. She didn't yet know where, but it would be one of four areas  on her short list of preferences. 

The police would make the final choice based on "threat assessments" to make sure there were no "friends of friends of friends" of Vincent living in the same town. 

"I'm always looking over my shoulder here," Tami said in that phone call. "I hope it's not always like this.  

"I feel like I'm in a nightmare. I'm just waiting to wake up. I keep spinning around and asking myself, 'Why did I do this? Why did I put my family in this kind of danger?'"  

Now at their final destination, she is still frightened.  

"Sometimes I'm so scared that I wake Claudio 20 times in a night.  

"The fact is that when they're arrested, or when I go public, they'll know that I'm an informer _ and they always kill informers."  

Does she wish she hadn't got into the whole thing?  

"It's a tad late for second thoughts," she says. "I've made my bed and I sure am lying in it."   

The RCMP have told her they wouldn't have been on to this gang if not for her courage and her work.  

"Morally I know I did the right thing, but my life as Tami Morrisroe is ruined. That life is over...."    

Back in B.C., the police investigation continued through January, February, March and this month.     

Just as the Tami Tapes will be the focus of several trials, they were the first strands in a large spiderweb of investigations.   

The nature of wiretaps is that they continually fork into new wiretaps and spread,  creating new lines of inquiry, all of which must be tracked even as they're spreading.  

And at the end, a co-ordinated mega-bust can be done  only once, and only once all the pieces are in place. Otherwise, you spook the bigger prey which you may never see again.     

It is a lengthy, careful process which the Mounties on Tami's team continued long after her flight from B.C.   

Vincent and the other gang leaders were still at large early this week when  Rock  and Gray ignored Tami's latest appeal.  

It wasn't supposed to be like that. 

Tami thought they had a plan that would get the bad guys into jail and her father out. 

She says she was told "off the record" by two B.C. RCMP members last fall that Vincent and his cohorts would be busted  soon and her father would be released, mainly because of two crucial factors. 

First, she believes she got what she'd gone for. 

There, on the tape she made at the Knight and Day Restaurant was Vincent saying that Sid Morrisroe was "set up" by a member of the Philliponi family to take the hit for Joe's murder. 

And then there was Vincent telling Tami that if she ever turns against him he will kill her father and her children, in that order, before coming after her. 

Because of those statements, Tami says, the  mid-level RCMP officers  with whom she worked were "very convinced" that her father would be moved from prison to join his family in the Witness Protection Program.

That belief, she said, is what kept her working undercover even after the rape. 

A senior RCMP official denies there was any such assurance. On the contrary, he says, there is a signed agreement between Tami and the RCMP which stipulates that the Mounties will not intervene in Sid's case.

Yes, says Tami, such a pact was signed but she insists the Mounties believed that her father would be released by Gray or Rock's intervention, at which point he could be entered  into the Witness Protection Program. 

Despite this crucial disagreement, Tami is enthusiastic in her praise of the RCMP's handling of the multiple investigations surrounding her undercover work.  

In her only specific request about the writing of these stories, she said to me: "Please say in your article that nobody could have more respect for the RCMP than I do."  

A top Mountie says that Tami Morrisroe is "extremely courageous." 

But, in this smoking game of hardball, Tami serves notice that she has one last mean curve in her pitching arsenal.     

She makes it clear that her high regard of the Mounties will mean nothing and all bets will be off if her father isn't transported to safety outside the prison system very soon. 

"If my dad is not moved to safety," she says, "all those murder cases will go out the window because I will not testify.  "If he's not out of jail, I won't testify. I'm not trying to threaten them but this is my family we're talking about."  

Sid Morrisroe is still in prison, but Tami and the rest of her family are out of B.C. where she prays they are beyond the reach of Vincent and his friends.        

Because, today, the killers are realizing for the first time exactly what Tami Morrisroe has done to them.

THE END

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