After a largely fruitless, eight-year slog through the courts, the B.C. government has performed a U-turn in its bid for the forfeiture of three Hells Angels clubhouses.

And the abrupt move means provincial taxpayers will be footing some of the legal bills for the notorious motorcycle gang.

The provincial Civil Forfeiture Office is now arguing that the biker gang’s clubhouses will likely be used to commit future crimes, not that they’ve been used to commit crimes in the past.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Barry Davies on Wednesday gave his stamp of approval to that change of tactics, and agreed to combine the government’s claims against Hells Angels chapters in Nanaimo, Kelowna and Vancouver’s East End into a single trial.

“It is a paradigm shift,” said Phil Tawtel, executive director of the Civil Forfeiture Office. “It’s putting in a different emphasis. It’s putting what was in the background in the foreground and putting what was in the foreground into the background.”

Since the first claim was filed against the Nanaimo chapter in 2007, Tawtel’s office has been repeatedly stymied in its attempts to bring the cases to trial. Government lawyers had advanced claims of past crimes committed by Hells Angels members including extortion and murder, but the judge found those allegations to be lacking in sufficient detail.

The province’s change in strategy means all of those allegations have been thrown out in favour of the future crimes argument.

“It’s no guarantee of success,” Tawtel acknowledged.

But he added that he was pleased with the judge’s approval of the new approach: “It allows us to plead and argue and go to trial with the case we want to go with.”

The major pivot means a financial hit for the province.

Justice Davies has ordered the forfeiture office to pay some of the legal costs incurred by the Hells Angels chapters so far, writing that “the appropriate remedy is one that compensates the defendants for their costs unnecessarily incurred in defending now-abandoned allegations of past unlawful activity.”

Those costs have yet to be tallied.

The judge also expressed some frustration with the long, drawn-out court proceedings to date. This decision marked the province’s fifth amendment of its claims against the Nanaimo chapter.

“The consequence of all of those ongoing pleadings issues as well as other interlocutory issues is that substantive resolution … is not now much closer than it was almost eight years ago when the litigation was commenced,” Davies wrote.

The lawyer representing the Hells Angels, Joe Arvay, said he was still studying the judge’s decision and not prepared to comment.

Arvay has also filed counterclaims arguing that the Civil Forfeiture Act is unconstitutional. Those arguments will now be heard along with the claims for forfeiture.

Even with this change in direction, the province will still have a tough time proving its case against the Hells Angels, according to Rob Gordon, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University.

“You’re still faced with the problem of determining … on the balance of probabilities whether somebody or some group is going to engage in criminal activity,” he said.

“I don’t see that they’re out of the bog at this point.”

Gordon added that the public should be concerned about how far the B.C. government has strayed from what he called the “gold standard” of civil forfeiture: seizing someone’s property after they have been convicted in a criminal court.

“To be saying that we’re going to seize the property because we think you might end up engaging in crime is a really nasty slippery slope,” he said.

No date has been set for the case to go to trial.

blindsay@vancouversun.com

Twitter.com/bethanylindsay