A Toronto Police Officer Is Dead, a Toronto Jail Official Was Marked for Murder, a Hells Angel Was Indicted as Tehran's Hired Gun: Inside Canada's State-Cartel Violence Marketplace

OP-ED: From the raid that killed Constable Marc Pinizzotto to the cartel bounty on former MPP Goldie Ghamari, Canada lacks the laws — and the will — to counter state and cartel convergence.

Const. Marc Pinizzotto is pictured here with his wife and children. (TPS)

TORONTO – At 5:40 in the morning on June 11, heavily armed tactical officers breached a fourth-floor unit at 15 Martha Eaton Way, a high-rise in the city’s northwest that has been marked by gang gunfire for decades. They were executing one of several search warrants tied to a series of shootings across the city — including the March 10 attack on the United States consulate, an incident American prosecutors allege was directed from abroad by a commander of an Iranian proxy militia. Within moments, Constable Marc Pinizzotto, a 43-year-old tactical veteran and father, was shot dead. A 19-year-old resident, Nicholas Bennett, was struck multiple times by return fire and will be charged with first-degree murder. A second 19-year-old, Zara Jabbi, wanted in connection with the consulate shooting, remains at large.

The Martha Eaton tower, like the similar tenements of the nearby Jane and Finch corridor, resembles a Chicago or Los Angeles of the north, with numerous “Crip” sets of teenage shooters and street dealers moving cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamine for brokers whose supply lines ultimately trace to the networks exposed in Toronto Police’s Project Brisa, which focused on the North American distribution pipeline of Ryan Wedding and his Mexican cartel suppliers.

To understand what perished with Constable Pinizzotto, it helps to separate what is known from what is not — because the gap between the two is where Canada’s most dangerous national security problem now lives.

Here is what is known.

A federal criminal complaint unsealed in Manhattan alleges that the consulate shooting, and an attack on a Toronto synagogue, were claimed by Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old commander of Kata’ib Hizballah, the Iraqi militia that operates as a proxy of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Captured on a wiretap ten days after gunmen fired on the consulate, Al-Saadi boasted that “our people” carried out that attack and the strike on a Toronto synagogue that he strangely called “the Knesset.”

The complaint alleges that since the opening of the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran in late February, his network directed or promoted at least 18 attacks across Europe and two in Canada — and that it did so not through sleeper cells of ideological loyalists, but through a procurement system that any logistics manager would recognize.

Attacks were financed through currency exchange houses — an economy of Iranian underground banking and sanctions evasion tied to Middle Eastern, Mexican and Chinese criminal networks, which The Bureau has documented well for three years now — with refunds built in if the violence failed to materialize.

“If you send the Mafia, they can pick a place of their choosing,” Al-Saadi explained to a source reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “If they hit, then that’s good, but if they don’t, then I get my money back. This is how the deal is.” He attempted to hire what he believed was a Mexican cartel operative to burn synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Arizona.

Here is what is not known.

Canadian authorities have not stated that the young men targeted in the Martha Eaton Way raids are connected to Al-Saadi’s network. But they, along with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and likely Canadian intelligence officials, have been working with the FBI — and U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, a former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has taken a close personal interest in the case.

What The Bureau, Canadian investigators, and at least one other news organization have established instead is a local milieu. The Globe and Mail, citing a source with knowledge of the investigation, reported that the raid connects to a wider probe of a shooters-for-hire network — one allegedly responsible not only for the consulate attack but for gunfire directed at the properties of a waste-management giant, at tow-truck businesses, and at private homes.

That milieu is easily recognizable to anyone who follows crime in Toronto, where underage shooters — often including murderers whom police are legally barred from naming — have become the sicarios of the north.

Police associations across Canada have repeatedly warned that the country’s youth justice laws are being used as shields by serious organized crime in this shooters-for-rent market.

The Martha Eaton building itself sits in territory long contested by Crip-affiliated street gangs, and its recent history is a chronicle of juvenile gun violence: last August, eight-year-old JahVai Roy was killed in his bed by stray rounds fired toward the building’s playground, and three teenagers were charged with first-degree murder. The suspects charged in two of the March synagogue shootings are 18 and 17 years old.

There is, as of today, no proven chain of command running from Tehran to the fourth floor of 15 Martha Eaton Way. What there is, on the face of the American complaint and the Canadian charge sheets, is something more disturbing — a marketplace.

Teenage shooters who will fire on a rival fentanyl dealer, a synagogue, a consulate, a tow truck, or a child’s bedroom window with equal ease — for whoever is paying — brokered through layers designed so the shooter never knows the client. In an economy like that, the foreign sponsor is the last thing Canadian investigators can prosecute, if they find it at all.

And it is not an isolated discovery. Over the past six months, Canadian court filings have surfaced the same architecture again and again, with different clients at the top.

Consider Project South, the Toronto police corruption investigation that authorities describe as among the gravest in modern Canadian history.

At its center is Brian Da Costa, an alleged Toronto trafficker facing 16 charges, whose network is accused of bribing serving Toronto police officers and conspiring to murder a senior corrections official at the Toronto South Detention Centre — reportedly because that official was too effective at keeping drugs out of the facility. Police initially disclosed only obliquely that it was a fentanyl, cocaine, marijuana and meth distribution network with serious international ties.

As The Bureau later reported, court filings now place Gurpreet Singh on Da Costa’s no-contact list. Singh is the alleged Indo-Canadian trucking operative indicted in the United States as a key cross-border smuggler for Ryan Wedding, the former Olympian turned Sinaloa Cartel heavyweight whose organization, American prosecutors allege, moved hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into Canada, ordered the Medellín assassination of a federal witness, paid a Brampton lawyer roughly $1 million to penetrate Canadian police investigations, and bribed Canadian officials. Singh has been held since October 2024 at Toronto South — the same jail Da Costa’s network allegedly sought to supply, and whose drug-blocking official it allegedly sought to kill. A second supervisor at the facility, who according to the Toronto Star oversaw the unit housing Singh and visited his cell with unusual frequency, has had her seized devices searched under warrant in the same probe; she has not been charged.

Then consider the case that fuses the two threat streams — cartel and state — into a single Canadian defendant.

In 2024, federal prosecutors in Minnesota unsealed an indictment charging Damion Patrick John Ryan, a full-patch Hells Angels member from British Columbia, with conspiring in a murder-for-hire plot against an Iranian defector and his companion living in Maryland. The client was the network of Naji Sharifi Zindashti, a drug lord American and British officials say carries out assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents on behalf of Iranian intelligence. The negotiations ran over an encrypted phone service built by a defunct Vancouver company. A Canadian biker, recruited by Tehran’s outsourced killers, to silence refugees on American soil: the contract model of Al-Saadi’s money-exchange terrorism, three years early, with a Canadian gang as the vendor.

And if there were any doubt that this model has matured into a direct threat against Canadian public figures, the United States Department of Justice removed it in March. As The Bureau reported exclusively, American prosecutors announced the court-authorized seizure of four websites operated by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, dismantling a regime-run cyber and psychological operations network that issued a $250,000 bounty directing the Jalisco New Generation Cartel — an organization Canada itself designated as a terrorist entity in February 2025 — to behead former Ontario legislator Goldie Ghamari at her Ottawa home. The supporting affidavit, filed by the FBI in Maryland, states that the cartel had already been given the home addresses of its targets when the bounty was issued. An Iranian intelligence ministry, contracting a Mexican cartel, to execute a Canadian politician in Canada’s capital: every layer of the marketplace, assembled in a single American court filing.

The annual public report of CSIS, published in March, names the Iranian-linked group behind the operation — the Handala Hack Team — but only in connection with the doxxing of a Canadian journalist, omitting any mention of the cartel bounty on a Canadian politician, even as the same report warns in the abstract that hostile states “sometimes hire organized crime groups or proxies” to project their reach into Canada. The same month, pressed by CTV News on whether foreign-directed activity poses a public safety threat, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme answered: “what we have in our holdings is we have people that are intimidating people, harassing people, but connecting the dots to a foreign entity, regardless of the country, we don’t have that.”

Lay these cases side by side and the pattern is unmistakable.

Mexican cartels and Iranian proxies are not merely drawing on the same Canadian service economy — encrypted communications, trucking and logistics cells, corrupt insiders, compromised professionals, and a deep bench of young shooters in neighborhoods the state has effectively ceded — they are, in the Ghamari case, contracting one another inside it. And the violence is climbing the institutional ladder. A jail official marked for assassination. Police officers on a trafficker’s payroll. Now a tactical officer killed serving a warrant in a terrorism-linked probe, two days after an Ontario Provincial Police constable died on duty.

Against this, the response of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has been inadequate where it has been visible at all.

Ottawa’s signature effort against the antisemitic violence of recent months has amounted to statements of condemnation while three synagogues absorbed gunfire within a single week in March and a proxy commander in Iraq bragged about hitting “the Knesset” in Toronto.

There is still no Canadian equivalent of the American federal racketeering statute — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — that allows prosecutors to charge an enterprise rather than chase its disposable triggermen one teenager at a time. There is no legal architecture that treats a money-exchange business for terrorism, a cartel’s police-corruption budget, and a biker gang’s murder contract for a foreign intelligence service as what they are: the operations of continuing criminal enterprises whose leadership, financing, and facilitators can be prosecuted as such.

It is not that Canadian institutions are blind.

In Senate testimony in May, a senator asked the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI whether Washington was concerned with fentanyl moving in from the northern border.

The drug agency’s administrator answered that “we’re keeping our eye on Canada,” and said his agency proposes to open two more offices in this country in 2027. Then FBI Director Kash Patel went further. “What we’ve also focused on, at least at the FBI, is working with our Canadian partners on the production capabilities that the drug traffickers have moved up to the north of our border,” he testified. “And we’ve had some success there working with our Canadian partners because the drug traffickers got smart with the securitization of the southern border and moved it up there. So we’re tackling that with our CSIS partners.”

Note what the director of the world’s premier federal police force said, almost in passing. The Canadian partner he named on cartel production migrating north was not the RCMP. It was Canada’s spy service — the same agency whose annual report would not connect an Iranian-tasked cartel bounty to the politician it targeted, and which, characteristically, has declined to confirm to The Bureau whether it is investigating Mexican cartels in Canada at all. The intelligence picture exists, and Canada’s closest ally is describing it under oath in open session. What does not exist is the legal machinery to act on it, the candor to tell Canadians about it, and the political will to build both.

It seems likely that CSIS — with Canadian justice officials now facing death threats, or dying — has a very good understanding of these increasingly lethal threat networks, and no capacity to act on it. The probable reality, if Canada's past is a fair guide, is that classified assessments of this dire convergence are flowing upward to the office of Prime Minister Mark Carney — and that, as a decade of warrant delays, shelved warnings, and commission findings would predict, the only result will be deadly inaction, while Canada's sovereignty and safety erode.

Constable Pinizzotto went through a door in a building where an eight-year-old boy was killed in his bed ten months earlier, in a city where a jail official survived a hit allegedly arranged with help from inside his own justice system, in a country where a Hells Angel took a contract from Tehran and a former provincial politician learned from an American court filing — not a Canadian one — that a cartel had her home address and a price on her head. The marketplace that connects those facts is open for business, and its clients — cartel and state alike — have learned that in Canada, the price of violence is low and the prosecution of enterprises is rare. Until Parliament changes that calculation, Canada remains, as The Bureau has reported citing former U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence official David Luna, a “safe zone” for the worst threat networks in the world.