A reward poster for the arrest of Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder and alleged drug trafficker. Mr. Wedding is accused of orchestrating the assassination of a potential witness in Colombia last year.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Ranjit Rowal, the first Canadian resident to be convicted in the FBI’s probe of Ryan Wedding’s alleged cocaine empire, moved drugs for the organization “under threat and fear,” a United States District Court judge recently found.
In August, three months before the Federal Bureau of Investigation unsealed a bombshell indictment against Mr. Wedding and more than a dozen other alleged accomplices, Mr. Rowal pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to distribute illegal drugs. That included a failed plot, authorities say, to transport 350 kilograms of cocaine on behalf of the Wedding organization.
Mr. Rowal operated an Ontario-based trucking company with Iqbal Singh Virk, who has also pleaded guilty to several drug offences and will be sentenced next year.
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Mr. Wedding, a Canadian ex-Olympic snowboarder, became the focus of a two-year-long probe by the FBI and RCMP in July, 2023. Since then, around 30 individuals allegedly connected to him have been arrested or are being sought under U.S. laws. At least 12 accused have been arrested by police in Canada. Most of them are now fighting extradition.
The U.S. alleges that, in addition to drug trafficking, Mr. Wedding has orchestrated murders, including the assassination of a potential witness in Colombia last year. Authorities say he is currently hiding in Mexico, sheltered by the Sinaloa cartel, and the U.S. Justice Department has promised a US$15-million reward for information leading to his capture.
Mr. Rowal’s sentence was handed down last month. While much of the evidence in the case is sealed, The Globe and Mail obtained a transcript of the November sentencing hearing in which details of the case that were previously shielded from public view were discussed in open court.
The hearing offers new details on how Mr. Wedding’s alleged associates operated – including the use of coercion to conscript drug carriers into service. In one instance, Mr. Rowal, his lawyers asserted, was forced to watch as a fellow truck driver had a gun put to his head in a Canadian truck yard.
The judge in Mr. Rowal’s case accepted that his role in the alleged drug enterprise was minor and that his involvement appeared to be “aberrant” behaviour for a man with no prior criminal record.
Mr. Rowal’s case is just one piece of a massive FBI investigation and was complex because of “discrepancies” in the evidence presented, U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett, of the Central District of California, said in the November hearing.
But one thing about Mr. Rowal’s case, she said, was clear.
“Both the government and the defence seem to agree that threats were part of this case, and that Mr. Rowal was transporting these drugs under threat and fear.”
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Mr. Rowal, who obtained permanent residency in Canada after fleeing religious persecution in India, according to his lawyers, was sentenced to 37 months in a U.S. federal prison, plus two years supervised release. Upon returning to Canada, he will likely be deported to India, according to court documents.
A lawyer for Mr. Rowal declined to comment about the case to The Globe.
Addressing the court directly at the end of his sentencing hearing, the 65-year-old Mr. Rowal apologized for his actions and said he feared the “stigma” of what he’d done would tarnish his family forever.
Mr. Rowal said he was “scared by seeing weapons” and intimidated by threats and “murder scenes” that they showed him.
“I was being sucked into this quicksand from which I could not escape.”
U.S. Attorney-General Pam Bondi, along with U.S. and Canadian officials, outlined in November the charges against Mr. Wedding and his alleged associates.Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press
In May, 2024, Mr. Rowal was under surveillance, the transcript obtained by The Globe shows.
It was around this time that he and Mr. Virk pulled into a truck stop in Ontario, Calif. – a major warehouse and logistics hub named after its early settlers’ Canadian roots.
Court heard that Mr. Virk co-ordinated the trip over text with someone he believed to be a dispatcher with the Wedding enterprise. In fact, the dispatcher, who was not identified by name, was a confidential source working with law enforcement. A lawyer for Mr. Virk declined to comment.
The truck that the two men operated together was meant to pick up more than 300 kilograms of cocaine to transport for Mr. Wedding’s alleged drug empire. Mr. Rowal’s sentencing hearing details the coercion used to conscript them into this effort.
A co-operating witness told authorities that Mr. Rowal and others were threatened in the lead-up to their May drug run.
Meanwhile, defence lawyers said Mr. Rowal witnessed a fellow truck driver have a gun put to their head in a Canadian truck yard by a co-defendant in the Wedding case, who was not identified by name in court. Prosecutors argued that there was no independent corroboration of that account.
A probation officer with the task of calculating sentencing guidelines for Mr. Rowal found that the truck driver was motivated by “fear,” including the threat of “possible harm to his wife,” and was “otherwise unlikely to commit such offences.”
Mr. Virk also received threatening text messages that he shared with Mr. Rowal, extracts of which were contained in a presentencing report.
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Mr. Virk and Mr. Rowal’s May, 2024, drug run ultimately failed: When the men arrived in Southern California, the load they were there to pick up didn’t fit in their truck, the court heard at Mr. Rowal’s sentencing hearing.
Three months later, on Aug. 28 at 3:26 a.m., they rolled into an outbound U.S. customs inspection station at Michigan’s Port Huron Blue Water Bridge, just across from Sarnia, Ont., according to an affidavit from a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations filed in court.
Mr. Virk – who was at the wheel – told customs officers that the truck was loaded up with steel bars. But when the vehicle was escorted to a cargo-inspection station, a heavy-duty X-ray machine picked up anomalies at the back of the trailer. A sniffer dog then alerted officers to the presence of drugs, leading to the discovery of a hidden compartment in the truck containing “multiple bricks of white powder,” the affidavit says.
Officers uncovered millions of dollars worth of drugs: 95 kg of cocaine and 20 kg of heroin.
During Mr. Rowal’s sentencing hearing, lawyers for the government said they had no evidence that the seized cocaine and heroin were related to Mr. Wedding’s drug ring – which traffics “almost exclusively in cocaine,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lyndsi Allsop told the court.
FBI released a new photo of Mr. Wedding in early December.HO/The Canadian Press
This, combined with the failed May drug run for Mr. Wedding’s alleged network, led the government to accuse Mr. Rowal in court of moving drugs for at least two different criminal organizations. Mr. Rowal’s lawyers told the court that there was no evidence for this assertion.
After the August bust, the maroon 2013 Volvo VN truck that the two men were driving was seized by U.S. authorities. By this time, bailiffs in Canada had already been trying to repossess the vehicle for months for failed lease payments, according to a civil lawsuit obtained by The Globe.
In court, defence lawyers described Mr. Rowal as a “respectable, hardworking man who was just trying to make a living driving trucks.”
Mr. Rowal was never paid for the drug runs, his lawyers said. Prosecutors disputed this but provided no evidence of any payments.
Defence lawyers argued that Mr. Rowal’s knowledge of the drug scheme was “closer to deliberate ignorance” because he “never saw the drugs or was told about them.”
Prosecutors asserted that the modifications to Mr. Rowal’s truck indicated that he had some knowledge of what was transpiring, an argument Judge Garnett called “speculative.”
Ultimately, though, Judge Garnett said she accepted “the very, very high likelihood … that Mr. Rowal knew what was going on but was afraid.”
Nonetheless, the large quantity of drugs he ultimately transported would add to the severity of his sentence, she said.
“It goes without saying these crimes are serious, as cocaine and heroin are both dangerous drugs and have a devastating impact on the community.”
Canadian authorities have already advised the U.S. government that Mr. Rowal’s permanent residency will likely be revoked and he will likely be deported to India, according to court documents.
Mr. Rowal’s lawyers called it “an unnecessary and unsolicited advisory opinion on a complex Canadian immigration issue.”
“The government then prepared and filed a public document, giving this useless information to the whole world,” his defence lawyers’ submission said. “The government lawyers are supposed to pursue justice; they should not aim to inflict as much pain as possible.”
As his November sentencing hearing drew to a close, Mr. Rowal addressed the court and reflected on how his entanglement with Mr. Wedding’s alleged network had upended his life: His family was living in fear, and he would soon lose his truck and house.
“This stigma will never be washed off – even after I die.”
With a report from Stephanie Chambers