The Wolfpack Alliance

The Wolfpack is the most consequential name in modern Canadian gang reporting that no court has ever formally recognized. It has no charter, no patch and no membership roll. What it has is a set of men who worked together, a war whose casualties are still being counted, and a paper trail of convictions running from a Kelowna parking lot to a Toronto coffee shop to a cell in Doha.

What the Wolfpack Is — and Isn’t

The term entered public use through Vancouver Sun crime reporting, which described it as a coalition drawing on three existing groups rather than a new organization replacing them: some Hells Angels, some Red Scorpions, some Independent Soldiers. That framing has held up. It is also the reason the name resists precision.

Members of the Hells Angels are permitted side ventures. The Wolfpack functioned as one. It was a working arrangement between men with existing patches and existing crews, built to move product and, after August 2011, to settle scores. Nobody has produced a membership list because there was never a list to produce.

This matters for how the name should be used. A conviction can establish that two men conspired to kill a third. It does not establish that an organization called the Wolfpack ordered it. Police and journalists have applied the label far more broadly than any court has, and this file keeps those two registers separate throughout.

Origins and the War That Followed

The alliance took shape around 2010 in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. Within months it was at war with the group run by Sandip Duhre and the Dhak brothers — a conflict that reporting traces to the October 2010 killing of Gurmit Singh Dhak in a Burnaby mall parking lot, and that has never been fully accounted for in court.

What is documented is the sequence of bodies. Between 2010 and 2013 the Lower Mainland absorbed a run of targeted killings attributed to this conflict, on both sides. Most of them produced no charges. The ones that did are the spine of this file.

Kelowna, August 14, 2011

Amero, Bacon and Riach were leaving the Delta Grand Hotel in Kelowna in a white Porsche Cayenne when masked gunmen opened fire in the middle of a summer afternoon. Bacon was killed. Amero was seriously wounded. Leah Hadden-Watts, a passenger, was left paralyzed after her vertebrae were shattered; the court later heard this left her with permanent disabilities and a reduced life expectancy. Lyndsay Black was also injured. Riach escaped unhurt.

Three men were arrested in February 2013 and eventually pleaded guilty under a plea agreement that ended a case the Crown described as marred by delays and legal challenges. In May 2018, Jason McBride was sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 18 years for second-degree murder, plus a concurrent 15 years for the attempted murders. Michael Jones and Jujhar Khun-Khun each received 18 years for conspiracy to commit murder, with eight years’ credit for time served.

Kelowna is the hinge. Everything the name Wolfpack has come to mean in Canadian crime coverage follows from that afternoon.

The Retaliation and the Vancouver Prosecution

Sandip Duhre was shot dead in the restaurant at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre on January 17, 2012 — the city’s first homicide of that year, in a hotel full of athletes during an Olympic qualifying tournament. Sukhveer "Sukh" Dhak was killed outside the Executive Hotel in Burnaby in November 2012.

In August 2022, after a lengthy trial, a jury convicted Amero on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder covering both killings. Alkhalil was convicted of first-degree murder in the Duhre killing and of conspiracy in the Dhak killing. Alkhalil was tried in absentia — he had escaped custody a month before the verdict.

Project Divergent and the Supply Chain

The alliance’s drug-distribution side surfaced most clearly in Project Divergent, an RCMP investigation begun in 2018 that dismantled a supply chain running from British Columbia to Manitoba and reaching Colombia, Greece and the United States. Twenty-two people were charged. The seizures totalled roughly $70 million and included 110 kilograms of cocaine, 41.4 kilograms of methamphetamine, three kilograms of fentanyl, 14 handguns and five assault-style rifles.

Damion Ryan was among those swept up. So, on paper, was Denis Ivziku — who instead disappeared in early 2022 as the arrests were executed, and stayed gone for four years. At Manitoba court proceedings, prosecutors detailed intercepted communications identifying Ivziku, operating under the alias "Menace," as Ryan’s brother-in-law and trusted subordinate. He was located in Cancún in May 2026 and arrested by the Mexican Navy on an INTERPOL Red Notice, acting on RCMP intelligence.

Project Divergent is the clearest documented instance of the commercial function the alliance is alleged to have served. It is also a reminder that the network outlived its B.C. base: the charges spanned four provinces and three other countries.

Timeline

Where the Principals Stand

The Ontario Extension

The Wolfpack’s reach east is the part of the story most often overstated. What can be said is that men associated with the alliance turned up in the Greater Toronto Area — Alkhalil convicted in the Raposo killing, Deo shot dead at Yonge and Eglinton, Ryan operating out of the now-disbanded Ontario Nomads chapter. Reporting has placed some of that activity in the context of a broader conflict with established GTA crime groups.

What cannot be said is that a single organization directed it. The eastern activity is better read as the same network of relationships continuing to function after its B.C. base was dismantled, than as an alliance expanding under central command.

Established vs. Alleged

Investigating Agencies

Related Coverage

Gangland Files has tracked the Wolfpack across several files: the Damion Ryan status file, the capture of Denis Ivziku in Mexico, and the historic drug bust linking Hells Angels, Mexican cartels and the alliance. Background on the constituent groups is in the Hells Angels Canada, Red Scorpions and Alkhalil Brothers profiles.

Standing of This File