Who is the Canadian blogger who accepted ‘significant' money from fugitive Ryan Wedding?
CBC
A Canadian crime blogger accused of helping fugitive Ryan Wedding set up the killing of an FBI informant told CBC News earlier this year he was given “a significant amount of money” to stay silent on the case.
Gursewak Singh Bal, of Mississauga, Ont., is now facing multiple charges in the United States, including conspiracy to commit murder in connection with a continuing criminal enterprise.
Bal, 31, was named in the sprawling federal grand jury indictment unsealed on Wednesday, as the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI announced further arrests in connection with Wedding’s alleged transnational drug-smuggling network.
According to the indictment, Bal ran the “Canadian urban news outlet” known as the Dirty News. Before the site was taken down at the request of U.S. authorities this week, it routinely featured descriptions and photos of crime scenes and profiles of crime figures.
U.S. prosecutors accuse Bal of accepting a $10,000 payment from a Wedding associate to post a photo of a key FBI witness “so that enterprise members and associates could locate and kill” him.
The indictment also alleges that Bal agreed to keep quiet about Wedding — a former Team Canada Olympic snowboarder now listed as one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives — and his network’s second-in-command, fellow Canadian Andrew Clark.
U.S. and Canadian authorities accuse Wedding of running a $1-billion US criminal enterprise that uses transport trucks to routinely ship tonnes of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl across North America.
A CBC News reporter contacted the Dirty News in June after the site’s X account — which has also been taken down — posted a short video showing stacks of Canadian $20 and $50 bills and a bottle of champagne, with the caption: “Ryan James Wedding aka SnowBoarder pays his TPs really well.”
“TP” is the acronym used in U.S. court documents to refer to Canadian drug transportation networks — in other words, the truckers paid to smuggle cocaine.
“There’s a reason why it’s so easy for [SnowBoarder] to employ new drivers and truckers,” the social media post said.
The person operating the email account for the Dirty News told CBC News in June: “Long story short, we got a significant amount of money from [SnowBoarder] and his guys to keep quiet about a few things.”
“Turns out that he ended up becoming the biggest thing on the news, and therefore we were essentially allowed to publish whatever.... Still been quiet about it all. But we will be posting our story this week, and it’s basically just a transcript of the conversation we had with his team.”
The story was never published.
Instead, Bal is now considered a “member and associate of the Wedding Criminal Enterprise,” according to the indictment.
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