The Decibel - Hells Angels, an Iranian drug lord and an alleged murder plot

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

A U.S. federal indictment is unsealed and within it are explosive allegations. According to court documents released this week, an assassination plot was constructed between a drug lord, two Canadian Hells Angels members and Iran’s armed forces – aimed at silencing Iranian dissidents living in the U.S.The Globe’s U.S. correspondent Adrian Morrow explains what is known about the case, the people allegedly involved and how it all fits into foreign interference and extraterritorial killings.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Earlier this week, a U.S. federal indictment was unsealed, revealing that two Canadians are accused of being involved in an assassination plot. The plan involved an Iranian drug lord recruiting two Canadian Hells Angels to kill Iranians living in Maryland, an order that, allegedly, came from the government of Iran. Adrian Morrow is a U.S. correspondent for The Globe. He joins us to explain what we know about this plot, the people accused in it, and how this incident fits into bigger questions about foreign interference.

I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Adrian, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Mainika. So there is a lot to this story, but let's just begin with, you know, what exactly did the U.S. authorities reveal this past Monday? What they basically revealed was that an Iranian drug lord named Najee Zendashti is accused of running a international assassination kidnapping ring on behalf of the Iranian government. And so this guy Zendashti, you know, for a long time has been kind of known or accused of being a sort of high volume international drug smuggler. And what the US is now saying is that the government of Iran, in order to carry out some of these assassinations and kidnappings and tortures of

dissidents in other countries, kind of subcontracted this workout to Zendashdi, presumably because they wanted to have a couple steps of remove or some sort of plausible deniability that they were doing this. And then what prosecutors are alleging he did is that in the case of a couple of Iranians in Maryland, in the US, that the Iranian government wanted to go after, Sadashdi subcontracted a hit job on them to a couple of Canadians, one of whom is a member of the Hells Angels, another is a Hells Angels associate, and that he essentially conspired with them to carry out a hit. Okay. When was this alleged to have happened, Adrian? We're talking about this potential hit, but what is the timeline here?

It's December 2020 to March of 2021, and they essentially have communications through an encrypted messaging app that these three guys allegedly used to plan this hit, and they have messages that basically span that four-month period. Okay. And we should, I guess, be clear here. These people, though, that we're talking about, they weren't actually killed, right? This hit actually didn't happen? That's correct. The indictment doesn't specify exactly why the hit didn't happen. There was a U.S. prosecutor who said that the plot was thwarted before it was able to be carried out,

but did not clarify exactly why that was or how the plot was thwarted. Okay. So Adrian, let's talk about some of the main people named in this indictment then. It sounds like there's kind of three key players we should talk about. So let's go through the three of them, starting with Zendashdi. Who is he? So Zendashdi has been known for years as an international drug kingpin. He's been suspected of smuggling heroin between Turkey, Iran, and some other, you know, locations around the Middle East. He's had at least one incident where his 19-year-old daughter was killed by a rival drug cartel some years ago. He reportedly has a previous Canadian connection that a Vancouver Sun some years ago unearthed information about a plot where he hired a couple of Canadian hitmen to kill

a rival drug lord in Dubai. And then those two Canadian hitmen later turned out dead in British Columbia. So this is a guy who, you know, for years has been apparently sort of known as an international drug kingpin. And what the U.S. is alleging now is that he, on top of this, has some sort of deal with the Iranian government where they used him or use his services to organize these international assassination kidnapping plots. And in addition to the indictment, the U.S. Treasury Department listed a number of previous cases in which they accused Zendashdi and his network of carrying out assassinations, kidnappings, and tortures in, I think, at least five different countries,

including the Netherlands, Iraq, Turkey. They say that Sindhasti has been connected to, or that his network has been connected to, at least one previous murder in Canada. They don't say what that murder was. And so it's unclear whether that's a reference to the Vancouver Sun's reporting that he had hired these Canadian hitmen who later turned up dead, or whether he actually carried out some sort of political assassination in Canada on behalf of the Iranian government, which if true would be absolutely explosive. But I asked the Treasury Department who made that allegation the other day and they never replied. Okay. And so it sounds like then he was actually subcontracting out stuff to these two Canadians.

So who are they and what do we know about them? Yeah, so the first person that Zendoshdi is accused of speaking with is a guy named Damian Ryan, who is a full-patch member of the Hells Angels and has a lengthy history of criminal accusations in Canada. He's originally from Vancouver, later relocated to Ontario. He's believed to be a full-patch member of a Hells Angels chapter in Ontario, as well as one in Greece. And he's also, police have said previously that he's a member of the Wolf Pack, which is a sort of criminal alliance between a number of different Canadian organized crime figures implicated in trafficking drugs from Mexico to Canada. You know, Mr. Ryan himself was accused in 2022 of being part of a large international drug smuggling ring that was trafficking fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine between Colombia, Mexico, Canada, with connections to Greece as well. He was charged a second time in 2023 after police raided his house in Ottawa and allegedly found dozens of illegal guns.

So he's currently in pretrial custody in Manitoba, waiting to go on trial over a bevy of basically organized crime, drug smuggling and illegal gun charges in Canada. And then the second Canadian is someone named Pearson. Who is he? Adam Pearson is believed to be an associate of the Hells Angels. And he killed a guy in Alberta, in Grand Prairie, Alberta, in 2019, fled from police and was illegally living in Minneapolis for a period of time, including when he was allegedly contracted by Damian Ryan to be involved in this murder plot in Maryland. He was subsequently tracked down by the FBI and arrested in Minneapolis. He was extradited to Canada, and he pleaded guilty last year to manslaughter. And he's currently serving an eight-year prison sentence in Alberta. I guess, do we know, Adrian, how Zendashdi came into contact with the Canadians? Like, how they met?

Not clear. I mean, you can see overlaps in what Mr. Zendoshny was, you know, was doing as a drug lord and what Mr. Ryan is accused of having done. They're both accused of having run these kind of large international drug trafficking networks. You know, Mr. Ryan has a connection to Greece and lived there for a period of time, which is not obviously not very far from Turkey, where Mr. Zendoshny has been based in the past. So our set of potential connections, the Vancouver Sun, you know, which has done a lot of reporting about Mr. Ryan over the years, has tied him with a number of Iranian-Canadian men who are wanted in different murders

and other kind of crimes in the lower mainland. But the prosecutors in the U.S. have not said exactly how they, you know, how they allegedly connected. And the indictment actually quoted some of the messages between the men. They were using an encrypted app. So what do we know about this app, Adrian, and also what they were saying to each other? So the app, which is called Sky ECC, was owned by a company called Sky Global that was based in vancouver um and sky global was actually shut down in march of 2021 because prosecutors in the us and authorities in europe i'm accused of being a front for organized crime and it was essentially a super secure app where you had to buy some sort of special

secondary phone that would just run this app and would allow you to sort of communicate anonymously um you know via this app you know the company was was based was based out of Vancouver and was shut down eventually because authorities in both the US and Europe thought that it was solely set up to be used for purposes such as what allegedly happened here, where people would use it in order to plan crimes. On this app, there was essentially a negotiation where Zendoshdi agreed to pay $350,000 U.S. plus $20,000 worth of expenses in order for this hit to occur. You know, allegedly, Ryan agreed to that. And then there was a whole sort of back and forth between, you know, allegedly between Ryan and Pearson, where they talked about, you know, how to do the assassination. And according to the US indictment, what they essentially said was that they were going to put together three or four, you know, gunmen to go to Maryland and do

this hit. And they talked about how it would have to be overkill, that it would have to send a message, and that in order to do that, the assassins were going to have to, you know, shoot at least one of the dissidents, you know, multiple times in the head. Pearson is alleged to have said in this app that they needed to erase his head from his torso as a way of sending a message with the assassination. And again, this assassination didn't actually happen. And it sounds like we don't really know why it didn't happen. Yeah, that's correct. One prosecutor did say the other day that it was thwarted somehow before it was carried

out. A couple of possibilities, if you read between the lines. One is that Sky Global, which hosted this app that was allegedly being used to plan the hit, was shut down in March 2021, around the same time that the timeline ends in the indictment. So that could be just an indication that all of the police evidence in this comes from this app. And that once the app was shut down, the police had in this comes from this app and that once the app was shut down, the police had no further visibility into what the communications were. It could very well be that in the app getting shut down, in U.S. prosecutors laying charges against the CEO of Sky Global, you know, they got access to what was being said, you know,

on this network and that that was sort of what led them to foil this alleged plot. You know, also, we know that Pearson was arrested by the FBI on an outstanding warrant from Canada while he was living illegally in Minneapolis. So it's also possible that police kind of came into the plot that way by arresting him and then discovering other information that led them to uncover what was allegedly happening here. We don't know for certain, but those seem to be a couple of possibilities. Yeah. But I guess help me understand here, Adrian, because, you know, the two Canadian men that we were talking about, they're both in prison right now.

Zendashdi is in Iran. So I guess tangibly, what does this indictment actually mean? Highly unlikely that Zendashdi is going to actually be put on trial by the U.S. over this, unless he does something, you know, like transits through a country that has an extradition trial by the U.S. over this, unless he does something, you know, like transits through a country that has an extradition treaty with the U.S. and somebody is able to sort of track him down that way. You know, as long as he stays in Iran, and as long as Iran continues to have a government that's, you know, completely hostile to the United States, it's very unlikely that he would face extradition from Iran. In the case of Ryan and

Pearson, because they're both in the Canadian justice system, Canada and the U.S. have an extradition treaty, which gets used frequently. Currently, both Ryan and Pearson are before the Canadian legal system. Pearson in prison in Alberta, and Ryan in pretrial custody in Manitoba. What will essentially have to happen is that those two will have to finish up their dealings with with Canadian legal system. And then at that point, they could face extradition to the US to be tried here. So in the case of Pearson, that would mean once he finishes his eight-year prison sentence in Alberta, he could then be extradited to the US. In the case of Ryan, he'll have to finish his trials in Manitoba and Ontario. And then if he's acquitted, would potentially face extradition then, or if he's convicted, would serve his sentence in Canada first, and then could

potentially be extradited to the US. So it could be a few years before there's any trial, you know, here in the States. But we don't know at this point, you know, exactly when that'll be or how long that'll take. We'll be back in a minute. So, Adrian, why would Iran want to target people like this in the U.S.? It's unclear exactly because the identities of the potential targets in this case have not been released. But there are some different possibilities. I mean, one might be if these people were Iranian dissidents who were, you know, criticizing the government of Iran abroad, you know, their government of Iran might have wanted to kill them to send a message to other dissidents to basically, you know, to stop criticizing the Iranian government or to say

leaving Iran and fleeing to a Western country is not enough to protect you sort of as a way of showing strength. We don't know 100 percent because we don't know exactly who the people were that were targeted. But you can certainly sort of speculate on a couple of reasons why an authoritarian regime like Iran's would want to silence people who've defected. So this is an example of a killing being planned in one country to supposed to be carried out in another. So this is an extraterritorial killing, essentially, right, Adrian? Like, what, you know, any country would regard this as a breach of sovereignty to have any country, you know, including a country that's hostile to it, as Iran, as the United States, you know, allegedly order killings to happen on the territory of another country. Of course, this reminds me of the conversations that we've been having, especially a few months ago about the killing of a Sikh activist in British Columbia, Hardeep Singh Nidger, right? So I wonder, does this current situation, does that

differ from the situation in BC? It's similar in terms of what's alleged to have happened here. The notion that you basically have a foreign government is alleged to have ordered up the killing of somebody that they don't like in another country. What makes it a little bit different is the broader context in the sense that the killing of Mr. Nijer in British Columbia created this whole sort of diplomatic problem for the Canadian government because, you know, Canada and India, both democratic countries, both have, you know, a long history together. And Canada has always sort of wanted to have a good relationship with India. And so I think that that was sort of a lot of the complication there, that there was this whole

sort of question of how do you try to hold a country accountable when you believe that they've done something like this, while at the same time continuing to keep up your sort of good diplomatic relations with them. In some ways with Iran, it's actually less complicated because the U.S. and Iran have no relationship. I mean, it's very clear that Iran is run by a theocratic authoritarian government, you know, that has no real relationship with the United States and which the U.S. has long seen as an enemy and vice versa. And so in a sense, there isn't really anything to kind of be compromised here. This diplomatic question is interesting, though, because as you say, you know, if the U.S. and Iran don't really have a relationship, I guess that makes me kind of wonder, though, what that

means for the U.S. with a situation like this. So politically speaking, I mean, yeah, what do these allegations mean for the U.S.? And I guess what situation does it put President Joe Biden in? It raises a lot of questions about security. I'm sure that the U.S. government would argue that this shows that they have pretty good security in the sense that this never actually came to pass, that whatever was allegedly going on here, the U.S. government discovered it and put a stop to it before it could happen. So they might argue that their system is working as it should. And of course, it just contributes even more to the adversarial enemy relationship that the U.S. has with the Iranian government.

You know, we're already seeing that play out in so many different ways with, of course, Houthi rebels backed by Iran shooting rockets at ships in the Red Sea. Three U.S. soldiers were killed at a base in Jordan this past weekend by another Iranian backed militia. You know, Joe Biden is under a lot of pressure to respond in those attacks. Biden is in this very sort of difficult spot of on one hand, wanting to respond in order to deter militias and deter Iran from doing this sort of thing. But he's also very much attempting not to escalate the fighting that's already happening in the Middle East into a full fledged war between the US and Iran. Yeah, yeah. So there's it sounds like there's a few geopolitics at play here that he's trying to kind of weigh and think about. And I guess we should mention too, though, because of course, a little while ago, the U.S. was trying to work with Iran,

right? I'm thinking about like the deal with Iran that Obama was working on. I guess, you know, can we talk a little bit about that? Because it seems like that has kind of, in a way, maybe taken away the incentive for the two countries to work together. Yeah, that's right. So during the Obama administration, there was a deal between the U.S. and Iran and European countries where the West was going to lift some sanctions on Iran and sort of help them uncripple their economy in exchange for Iran not developing nuclear weapons. When Donald Trump came into office, he said, this a terrible deal and he tore it up. And so it's possible that Iran concluded at that point that they weren't likely to really get anything further out of this attempt at dealing with the United States. And so perhaps they've concluded that because they have nothing to lose, they might as well

just do whatever they want, you know, vis-a-vis the United States. And they don't really have any disincentive from planning these kinds of assassinations and kidnappings. Adrian, I also want to ask you about Canada, because there were two Canadians involved in all of this. So how is the news of this indictment being playing out here? What Melissa Lansman, the deputy leader of the Conservative Party, said the other day was that this is further reason for the Canadian government to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity, which so far the Canadian government has been reluctant to do. They've designated part of the Guards Corps that does foreign operations as a terrorist entity,

but not the entire Guards Corps, because they've essentially argued that because there's universal military service in Iran, that trying to sanction everybody who's been part of those armed forces as a terrorist would be a necessarily wide dragnet and would catch a bunch of people who haven't actually done anything. But the U.S. government has designated the entire Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist entity. And at least one Iranian-Canadian social justice activist has estimated that there are about 700 people in Canada who are agents of the Iranian government in some capacity.

And so the argument from the Conservatives is that Canada needs to get more serious about that, that anybody who's potentially working for the government in Tehran could be spying on or intimidating or threatening Iranian dissidents in Canada. And so the Canadian government has to do a better job of protecting those people and pushing back against the possibility of malign influence from the Iranian government. And the Conservative Party this week put in a request formally to include Iran in the inquiry into foreign interference, which is already looking at China and India. And of course, we're talking about foreign interference as well right

now, because the inquiry into foreign interference in Canada just got underway at the end of January. So I guess, Adrian, before I let you go, I want to ask you kind of big picture, like, how does this story that we're talking about, how does it fit into larger conversations that we're having right now about foreign interference in Canada? I think it shows you just how potentially widespread it is, you know, that it's not just a question of foreign interference from China, which is how, you know, a lot of this conversation got started. It's not just a question of foreign interference from India, which is what Justin Trudeau, you know, last year raised with the accusation that the Indian government is behind

assassinations and attempted assassinations in Canada and the US. But you've now got yet another country that you can add to the list. And we knew that there had been accusations from within the Iranian-Canadian community that there were agents of influence working for the Iranian government in Canada. Those accusations go back years. But this, I think, kind of shines a harsher spotlight on that. And I think it's the sort of thing that's going to become, is already, I think, a major political issue and probably will become even more so. Adrian, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Michal Stein produced this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.