Former BC provincial insurance employee pleads guilty to aiding Justice Institute attacks
Five years after the fact, the British Columbia courts have made another breakthrough in resolving the series of attacks against individuals connected to the province's Justice Institute in 2011 and 2012.
According to police reports, former Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) employee Candy Elaine Rheaume has pleaded guilty to aiding the perpetrators by providing them with illegally accessed information from her workplace.
Those two individuals, Vincent Cheung of Langley and Thurman Taffe of Burnaby, were charged in 2015 for carrying out the attacks. Eighteen of the 23 counts of criminal activity came from Cheung, who orchestrated everything and was finally sentenced to 13-1/2 years of prison last summer.
Rheaume played a crucial—if uninformed—role in the whole operation. Cheung, in partnership with Taffe, had targeted the owners of cars that were parked outside the justice training centre in New Westminster, B.C.—a choice that was influenced by drug-induced paranoia the mentally unstable Cheung was experiencing at the time. Thanks to Rheaume's privileged access to the ICBC database, they were able to use the license plate numbers from the cars to track down personal information about the owners and their families, who were later targeted in shootings and firebombings (by sheer luck, none of the targets were seriously harmed).
However, Cheung and Taffe received the information by way of her friend Aldo Moretti, who had asked her to query local cars and find out if they were connected with the police. It is for that reason, along with a previously clean criminal background, that Rheaume only received a sentence of nine months probation and 40 hours of community service.
The courts only began investigating Rheaume last year after Cheung and Taffe's investigations had concluded. However, the ICBC was aware that one of their own had likely given out private information, and an internal investigation in 2011 resulted in Rheaume being fired—after 25 years of working there—with no severance.