True Patriot Love - May 06, 2026


Sam Cooper on Organized Crime Networks in Canada [TPL Excerpt]

Are Millions Suddenly Canadians？ ft. Ravi Jain Canada’s Immigration Mess Is About to Get Worse ft. Phil Mooney & Nir Rosenberg

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

153.66

Word count

1,746

Sentence count

29

People

Also mentioned:
More Ryan Weddings Justin Trudeau Jean Chrétien Ryan Wedding Francois Philippe Champagne Willful Blindness David Lane Schwinnigan

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we dive deep into the case of former Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wojciechowshek, who was convicted of drug dealing in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. We discuss his story, the connections that led him to the drug trade, and how he got into the hands of transnational drug cartels.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 jumping into the the ryan wedding iranian piece yeah my assessment and i'm working more and more
00:00:06.400 on writing about ryan wedding and what his case means to canada my strong assessment is that
00:00:15.280 you know he was in his athletic career in his snowboarding uh he very likely sort of got into
00:00:21.680 the marijuana culture in british columbia in his high school days you know he was uh obviously an
00:00:28.640 amazingly talented athlete but he was also a bc boy and and you know it's not not not a big stretch
00:00:36.640 for snowboarders to be involved in the marijuana culture and as he sort of started to phase out of
00:00:43.440 his athletic career uh you know after appearing in the olympics maybe even before he did get into
00:00:52.320 marijuana dealing he went to jail and when he was in jail uh at that point he had dabbled i believe
00:01:00.080 in cocaine he got you know he got done down in the united states which is the worst thing for
00:01:05.200 a canadian drug deal to happen because it's pretty difficult for them to get caught in canada while
00:01:11.120 in jail somehow someone hooked him up with an iranian canadian woman in toronto and there's
00:01:18.880 all kinds of court reporting on this woman's involvement in a case that had a brutal sort of
00:01:28.080 extortion uh you know major underground banking related to iranian uh transborder
00:01:38.320 money laundering systems which are very similar to the chinese underground banking systems that
00:01:43.920 i've detailed this is the way that money can move across borders without going through a bank you
00:01:50.160 know drug cash can be scattered all over the world and you just need people at a high level in in
00:01:56.480 sort of an iranian or chinese network to make arrangements for different people to sort of
00:02:02.320 adjust uh debits and credits and what that means is you know if i've uh dealt some drugs from
00:02:08.880 vancouver down to los angeles i can very easily through underground iranian networks make my
00:02:15.440 money collected you know wherever the drugs are sold and move it back to where i want it and then 0.98
00:02:21.760 get it laundered into a bank so this woman uh involved in a case the the one case that i know 0.96
00:02:31.120 it's very it doesn't even mention ryan wedding but the people involved in the violence in that case 0.99
00:02:37.680 would would just look like your standard you know wannabe up-and-coming biker gang members
00:02:46.080 or in the in in british columbia the gangs are called the united nations or the red scorpions
00:02:52.640 or the independent soldiers these are sort of uh you know the street gangs of they will look
00:02:59.440 like young canadian hockey players they and some of them are uh they're the ones that are moving
00:03:05.920 a lot of drugs in canada there's something like 700 gangs across the country now this is what this
00:03:11.920 is the type of social networks that ryan wedding came up in but until he makes that connection with
00:03:18.400 that iranian canadian woman uh you know in jail he doesn't get up into those upper echelons of being
00:03:26.720 a cartel operator and that speaks to you know what i know that it's the mexican cartels working hand
00:03:34.880 in hand with actors from hezbollah actors from the irgc the iranian guards and uh above them
00:03:44.160 sometimes even at an insulated distance the ccp members so that's what i say why you know 0.52
00:03:52.160 ryan wedding is obviously a hell of a smart guy a hell of a tough guy apparently brutal you know and 0.73
00:03:59.440 and unafraid to use violence, lethal, but he wouldn't be where he was without making those 0.70
00:04:05.300 connections with the Iranian and Mexican people that take him up to that level. And I'll go a 0.72
00:04:10.080 little further. There's some people that, you know, from policing and intelligence that I talk to
00:04:16.380 that at the end of the day say people like Ryan Wedding, they're a dime a dozen. And, you know,
00:04:23.080 being a hulking sort of uh you know caucasian guy from uh british colombia with an athletic
00:04:30.120 background sure looks like a pretty good front for a mexican cartel with iranian state actors
00:04:36.280 aligned to it so there's a lot of bikers in canada that are tough guys and wealthy guys now 0.80
00:04:42.600 but they they wouldn't they're not transnational actors without those mexican iranian chinese
00:04:48.360 connections wow um there's a there's a lot to unpack there but that's that's way deeper than
00:04:57.320 anything i've seen in the canadian media by any legacy or other or other news source so that's
00:05:02.920 that's pretty wild and it's gonna keep it's gonna keep us entertained for a while on unpacking all
00:05:07.640 that as this thing rolls on um sort of just pivoting briefly here off off topic like have
00:05:13.480 you ever considered writing a script or a movie or this this might be the most interesting story
00:05:20.200 in canadian sort of recent history like this is absolutely almost to the point of being
00:05:24.360 unbelievable the connections that are being made here and then this so this lady is his or it was
00:05:29.240 his ex-wife that he was connected to via connections in uh during serving time he was
00:05:34.680 serving time in canada in a canadian jail when this happened he was in a texas jail uh and uh
00:05:41.880 it was valentine's day and again i i give credit where credit's due i say i'm the leader on this
00:05:47.480 file but the cbc has done a few good reports i think they picked up on you know how i strongly
00:05:55.320 asserted that ryan was connected to hezbollah at the end of the day and that's what made him
00:05:59.960 important uh you know as i reported he was running drugs through margarita island which is part of
00:06:07.400 the the maduro narco state operation you know which is part of the sinaloa operation which is
00:06:13.960 part of the government of sinaloa operation as we now know the recent indictment so what i'm saying
00:06:19.800 is there's no ryan wedding without corruption at the highest levels of latin american governments
00:06:26.520 and for all we know probably a few people corrupted in in canada too we already know
00:06:32.200 Ryan Wedding's case involves, as I say, running cocaine through Margarita Island, which is just
00:06:38.040 off the coast of Venezuela, along with Hezbollah actors in that area for the Sinaloa cartel and 0.78
00:06:45.080 running it up into the port of Halifax, where his network corrupted individuals connected to the 0.88
00:06:51.480 Canadian Navy. So yeah, there's corruption in Canada. But, you know, your question, have I
00:07:00.100 thought about writing more about this. I'll tell you, I'm
00:07:04.840 strongly thinking and I probably okay, I'll spill the beans. I'm
00:07:10.060 working on a book that's a natural evolution from willful
00:07:13.280 blindness of 2021. And it's looking at Ryan Wedding. And
00:07:19.360 it won't be a surprise for people when they actually read
00:07:22.100 it that as I say, I mean, the preconditions for for a Ryan
00:07:27.640 wedding yeah he may be one in a million but he doesn't exist unless for example
00:07:36.840 Justin Trudeau takes away the Mexican visa requirement and creates a loophole
00:07:42.360 back in 2016. You know something that one of my U.S. former government colleagues David Luna has
00:07:49.400 pointed to in a major report you know speaking to the Ryan wedding networks and how the bikers have
00:07:55.400 become, you know, the functional operational arm of the Mexican cartels along with sophisticated
00:08:01.640 Iranian actors and the CCP upstream. So yeah, I mean, sometimes I scramble around in my brain 0.97
00:08:09.120 to answer your question, and I gotta admit, I'm probably delving into those files that I'm
00:08:14.640 already working on and writing as we speak. I don't know the title of this book, or even if
00:08:20.060 I've lined up, maybe I'll publish it myself through the Bureau because I've got enough of a
00:08:27.360 platform now. And so I'll put that writing together between two physical covers and
00:08:32.820 it'll be the story of how Canada has created the conditions for Ryan Wedding and more.
00:08:41.480 More Ryan Weddings are out there. Thank you for bringing up the Trudeau piece. I was probably
00:08:48.460 going to get there eventually but that um the visa requirement being dropped by trudeau all these uh
00:08:53.800 the corruption of senior officials like you said the canadian navy the halifax piece uh the pnp
00:08:59.740 scandal and pei just this list just goes on and on and on of almost endless people being bought
00:09:06.680 off policy changes being greased by who knows like how much of this can be it can any of it be a
00:09:13.680 coincidence or like i'm not saying that justin trudeau did this to enable organized crime in
00:09:17.900 Canada, but like, there's pieces in this puzzle that all seem to point to everybody being on the
00:09:23.140 same page. It's hard to imagine 37 coincidences in a row eventually becomes a pattern of
00:09:29.320 intelligence. Yeah, that's what I'm that's where I am in my mind. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned
00:09:34.620 that the Prince Edward Island's immigrant investor program, because the people involved in that,
00:09:41.760 you know, to fill in the blanks for people that don't know the story, you know, my book,
00:09:47.380 Willful Blindness was how about partly how Jean Chrétien in his era, you know, opened up a whole
00:09:55.080 stream for people that turned out to be, you know, Chinese organized crime or government adjacent
00:10:04.060 people, super wealthy people from Asia that would, you know, drop a lot of investment in the
00:10:11.300 Schwinnigan riding of Jean Chrétien, or, you know, his, I guess we could call his successor,
00:10:19.040 Francois Champagne. These people and related law firms in Quebec were a big part of the Quebec
00:10:29.480 Immigrant Investor Program, and that was shut down as a fraud. Untold number of gangsters from
00:10:37.420 China, Hong Kong, Taiwan got in and set up. And a lot of them ended up in Vancouver and Toronto,
00:10:44.460 some in Quebec. And when Quebec's program was shut down and Canada's was revealed to be a
00:10:51.260 fraud and winnowed down, PEI was picked up in the very same sort of flood of high level Chinese 0.81
00:10:59.020 tycoons. Some of them may not be criminal. Some of them very likely are. But they were run through 0.97
00:11:07.100 the story is like a little motel there was dozens of people that you know set up their
00:11:13.900 their business address or some sort of residential id for their landing as an immigrant through a
00:11:21.020 a little motel.