Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to crime beat early and add free on Amazon music included with Prime.

January 1st, 2009 was a particularly cold day in Calgary, with temperatures dipping to minus 30 degrees Celsius.

The Bolsa Vietnamese restaurant was open for customers wanting to celebrate the start of a new year.

Just before 4 that afternoon, chaos broke out. Two masked gunmen entered the restaurant and opened fire.

Three people were killed in the hail of bullets.

He was a complete innocent victim. Wrong place, wrong time.

He didn't deserve it. He didn't deserve to be treated like that, to be chased down and to go through those last moments that way.

I'm Nancy Hicks, a senior crime reporter for Global News. Today, on Crime Beat, I share the story of a group of friends who turned on each other, unleashing deadly consequences which turned into an all-out war.

This is The Crossfire.

To write this episode, I went back through the archives of several decades of work for Global News. I found dozens of stories.

In fact, I've likely done more stories on this case than any other in my entire career.

I remember covering the arrests and court appearances of key players in the case only to end up reporting on their murders.

We knew if somebody got shot or murdered, we knew there was going to be another shooting with them in the next 12-24 hours.

That's Mike Schute, a veteran detective with the Calgary Police homicide unit.

I introduced you to him in season 4 of Crime Beat. He's an officer with extensive experience in forensic interviews,

crisis negotiations, and he's also a long-time gang investigator. And this case has consumed a large part of his career.

This isn't a 40-hour work week. This is seven days a week and significant hours all day into the nights. It's quite a bit.

But I think it's a police officer. You know, when we're able to go back and solve some of the most difficult homicides or have an impact on that, it's what your legacy.

As a cop, I look at it and I say, what is your legacy? And for me, working with gangs and organized crime and having the impact on one group became what my legacy is.

The fatal shooting that I described at the start of this episode was the result of a feud that began nearly a decade earlier.

You'd probably go back into $98.99. At that point in time, both these groups were one cohesive group of individuals, group of males that were involved in a small-time drug dealing.

A lot of the guys knew each other from high school or either went to same school together or they were in the same community area growing up in the same areas. They were at one point mostly friends.

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