Slain tow truck kingpin had a target on his back for years, court documents show

Alexander Vinogradsky's Facebook posts share puns, poke fun at Gen Z and show off a trip to Tokyo Disneyland last year. In others, he is smiling or highlighting damaged cars in need of a tow.

But beneath the cheerful faces and overseas vacations, a constant menace lingered in Vinogradsky's life: as a kingpin in the Toronto area's tow truck underworld, he was a marked man. 

Before he was gunned down March 28 outside a north-end Toronto plaza, he owned Paramount Towing, one of four outfits allegedly locked in a deadly turf war that prompted a major police crackdown in 2019 and 2020. The investigation prompted dozens of arrests — Vinogradsky's included.

And though he was never charged in any murder plots, investigators had information the tow truck boss ordered hits on at least two perceived rivals in late 2018, according to court decisions that have not previously been reported on. One of those men survived a drive-by shooting while the other, Soheil "Cadi" Rafipour, was shot dead that Christmas Eve. 

"The owner of Paramount Towing was identified as Alex Vinogradsky and the confidential information received suggested that the murder of Mr. Rafipour had been ordered by Mr. Vinogradsky," an Ontario Superior Court judge wrote in a trial-related ruling published in January, recounting the steps police took to investigate the crime.  

Two men — one of whom worked for Paramount Towing, according to evidence presented at their pre-trial hearings — were convicted this past December for the Christmas Eve slaying.

Whether he knew it or not, Vinogradsky appeared to have stepped into a hornet's nest. According to court records obtained by CBC News, both of the targets in those 2018 shootings were associates of a Toronto resident named Girolamo Commisso — the nephew of Cosimo Commisso, a man long alleged to be a senior Mafia figure in the Greater Toronto Area. 

Police have not named any suspects or made any arrests in Vinogradsky's killing.

The first of the two shootings allegedly ordered by Vinogradsky targeted a man named Sergei Manukian. He and Rafipour had ambitions to start a competing tow truck business in the GTA with the goal of bringing in more clients to Manukian's existing physical rehabilitation clinic — namely, the people in the wrecked cars they would be towing, a judge said investigators had learned. 

Manukian was sitting outside his clinic — barely a block from the Toronto plaza where Vinogradsky would be killed six years later — in the driver's seat of a black Jeep, smoking a cigarette and chatting with a friend named Jonathan Salazar-Blanco in the passenger seat. Two men in a grey sedan drove up and fired 21 bullets at them. The sedan then tried to speed away, but crashed into a nearby dumpster.

Neither man was injured; Manukian chased after one of the attackers and managed to subdue him. He was charged in relation to this incident and a video presented in court shows him repeatedly striking and wrestling a man to the ground. He was later convicted of assault and given an absolute discharge.

The day after the drive-by shooting, Salazar-Blanco told police, he flew to his native Costa Rica because he was afraid for his life. He told them he bought a last-minute ticket with money from friends, including Girolamo Commisso and their associate Alex Yizhak. 

Coincidentally, they had just learned that Vinogradsky was possibly also in or travelling to Costa Rica.

Commisso, Yizhak and Salazar-Blanco then began to make arrangements that would lead to police charging them with conspiring to murder Vinogradsky.