Better Call Deepak

From early on, Deepak Paradkar was profoundly uninterested in his dad’s way of life. His father, Balwant, was born in October of 1930, in a village in India, to a Hindu mother who died four days after giving birth. On her deathbed, she begged the nurse—a missionary from Ohio—to adopt him as her own. The nurse complied, bringing Balwant to North Carolina with her and raising him as a Christian.

In time, Balwant became a missionary too. He returned to India to complete a master’s of divinity at the University of Mumbai and to spread the gospel in the newly independent country. On a trip to Sweden, Balwant—now a family man, with a wife and two kids, Deepak and Jyoti—met the Reverend J. Berkley Reynolds, a celebrated fundamentalist in the United Church of Canada. Reynolds was so impressed with Balwant’s intellect and charisma that he ­sponsored his application to immigrate to Canada. The family settled in Toronto in 1971, when Deepak was seven years old.

In their adopted country, the Paradkars modelled Christian humility. Balwant’s wife taught children with special needs. Balwant earned a doctorate of theology at the University of Toronto and became a Presbyterian minister. He dressed neatly but never conspicuously. Inspired by Albert Einstein, he kept a closet full of near-identical grey suits so he wouldn’t waste energy deciding what to wear. Balwant’s favourite poem was Alfred Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” about a doomed military offensive in the Crimean War, during which British cavalrymen were mowed down by Russian artillery. The story is a paean to selflessness: the soldiers give everything they’ve got, including their lives, with no expectation of success or glory.

Related: Becoming El Jefe—The story of Ryan Wedding, Canada’s Olympic snowboarder turned ruthless drug lord

Deepak didn’t care for his dad’s values. Forget valour and self-sacrifice, forget Tennyson. As a student at George S. Henry Academy, a public high school in North York, Paradkar idolized Napoleon Bonaparte—an outsider who, through sheer gall and tactical genius, became one of the richest, most powerful men in Europe. A diminutive adolescent, Paradkar envisioned a glorious future for himself, with expensive suits, fast cars and a palatial home.

He began chasing that dream at the University of Toronto, where he enrolled in a bachelor’s of science. While there, he started dating his future wife, Mandy, a student at Havergal College. Later, Paradkar enrolled in a master’s of science program at U of T, but he soon decamped for law school at the University of Windsor, a surer path to financial success. In 1994, he got a job at Fogler, Rubinoff LLP, where he practised civil litigation, including medical malpractice and personal injury. Shortly after he started, he blew 10 per cent of his annual income on a Rolex Submariner, a divers’ watch worn mostly by rich people who don’t dive.

Related: The Law Society of Ontario has begun proceedings to suspend Deepak Paradkar’s licence

After two years at Fogler, Paradkar quit to launch his own criminal defence practice, a surprising move for a man chasing luxury. Life as a junior associate at an established firm isn’t exactly glamorous—the work is tedious, the hours are punishing and you’re at the bottom of the pecking order—but it’s reliable. If you can keep your head down and endure the drudgery, you’ll have a good shot at eventually making partner and joining the 10 per cent, if not the one. A career in criminal law is a dicier proposition. Lawyers are only as rich as their clients. And while some white-collar defendants can pour millions into their lawyers’ bank accounts, most are a down-and-out bunch—bicycles thieves, petty drug dealers, drunks who get into bar fights.

But Paradkar had a plan. After striking out on his own, he started ruthlessly monetizing his practice. Although he’d been raised in Scarborough, he set up shop in Brampton, home to Canada’s largest South Asian community, where his background might give him a leg up. Brampton and the surrounding municipalities have mostly earned their reputation as middle-class bedroom suburbs, but they have pockets of extreme wealth. Like any city, they also have their share of criminals: money launderers, organized car thieves, long-haul truck drivers carrying drugs in secret compartments.

These were the clients Paradkar would court. While most criminal lawyers gladly accept legal aid payments, Paradkar considered poor clients to be off brand and the work beneath him. To reinforce this message, he dressed conspicuously, flaunting his Thom Browne suits, Swiss watches and designer shoes, and he talked tough, emulating the clients he aimed to represent.

There’s a tension at the heart of criminal advocacy: defence lawyers swear an oath to scrupulously uphold the law, then spend their days defending alleged lawbreakers. They’re expected to be unimpeachable in their personal conduct, but some of their clients think the law is for suckers. Occasionally, they find themselves representing truly horrible people. If an unrepentant murderer or gang member goes free because of a clever argument they made in court, they’ve done their job well.

Most criminal advocates, though, will maintain that their work is an integral part of the justice system. And indeed, they have a principled, big-picture argument behind them. The state is wealthy and powerful, with vast resources at its disposal. By punching holes in the prosecution’s case, criminal lawyers provide an essential counterbalance, ensuring that everyone is granted the presumption of innocence. In a free country, this is noble work.

Related: GTA lawyer Deepak Paradkar has asked for 24/7 house arrest secured by $5 million

While marketing themselves to criminals is part of the job, some advocates end up blurring professional boundaries in the hopes of ingratiating themselves to desirable clients. For example, Toronto’s Ken Murray, who represented serial killer Paul Bernardo, withheld for 17 months video tapes of Bernardo sexually abusing and torturing his victims. Once found, the tapes incriminated Bernardo at trial. Or there’s New York’s Michael Cohen, who violated campaign-finance laws and lied to Congress in order to protect Donald Trump, his long-time patron. The consequences were mixed: Murray faced no legal or professional penalties for his actions, though his reputation was tarnished. Cohen went to prison for his crimes.

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Paradkar drove his Lamborghini right up to the courthouse steps, blasting NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” on the stereo

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Scrupulous criminal lawyers don’t get close with their clients or socialize with them outside of work. If that happens, they might forget where professional duty begins and ends. But Paradkar never cared much for boundaries. According to some of his former colleagues, he visited defendants, unbidden, in court or in prison to pitch his services directly, sometimes passing business cards through jailhouse bars. Old-school lawyers find these tactics distasteful—if you have a sterling professional reputation, they reason, you needn’t resort to gauche ­salesmanship—but Paradkar’s audacity worked wonders for his career.

In his early days, it netted him mid-tier clients: an American fraudster on the lam in Canada, a Jaguar-driving party boy who got busted after showing off his illegal handgun in a strip-club parking lot. Quickly, though, Paradkar graduated to a wealthier tier. He defended a drug trafficker from Stoney Creek caught with $70,000 worth of heroin and a Jamaican bobsledder—a member of the legendary Olympic team depicted in the film Cool Runnings—who had flown from Panama to Toronto with a kilogram of cocaine in his luggage.

Paradkar could home in, sharklike, on the weakest link in the Crown’s evidence. In the bobsledder’s case, there was no use denying that the man had brought drugs into Canada: agents at Pearson had found the contraband in his suitcase. But had the man known what he was doing? In court, Paradkar argued that the cocaine had been planted by one of his client’s friends. He created reasonable doubt, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. It was the kind of victory lawyers live for.

Related: Prosecutors want Deepak Paradkar’s bail conditions overturned

As his career took off, Paradkar began imitating the flashy, braggadocious lifestyle of his most illustrious clientele. He boasted to low-paid courthouse workers about the expensive vacations he’d taken with his wife and two daughters. He drove flashy cars—a Hummer, a yellow Lamborghini, a borrowed Rolls-Royce—right up to the courthouse steps, blasting NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” on the stereo. And he invited clients to visit his home, a château-style mansion in Thornhill with an indoor pool and a library of books on military history.

The optics were unbecoming of the profession. “He had two Maseratis, which are not the kind of vehicles that real car aficionados buy,” a fellow criminal defence lawyer told me. “I don’t think he cared about automotive technology. For him, cars were like jewellery.” Broadcast journalist Alex Pierson, who has covered criminal trials for CityTV and Global News, remembers Paradkar as the loudest dresser she’s ever encountered. “I love Louboutins,” she says. “But I’d never wear the ones he wore. He had a knack for picking out the shiniest, flashiest shoes imaginable. He just seemed desperate to be noticed.”

Paradkar’s big break came in 2013, when he was hired by Dellen Millard, the 27-year-old heir of an aviation-company fortune. Millard had the word “ambition” tattooed on his wrist and liked to brag that, as a teen, he’d become the youngest person in history to fly both a fixed-wing plane and a helicopter on the same day. In May of 2013, Millard and a friend, Mark Smich, responded to a Kijiji ad for a pickup truck posted by a man named Tim Bosma. They’d never met Bosma before, but during the test drive, they shot him dead, then burned his body in a portable livestock incinerator that Millard called “the eliminator.” Bosma’s disappearance made headlines across the region. Police put out a description of the suspects, including a note about Millard’s tattoo. Millard was arrested on May 11. Three days later, the police found Bosma’s charred remains.

Millard retained Paradkar to represent him, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lawyer on the rise. “A high-profile case like that can elevate you and your reputation,” says Ari Goldkind, a criminal lawyer who works in Brampton. Even if you end up losing in court, the mere fact of having been hired can bolster your public profile. Conveniently, a string of breaking stories kept Millard’s and Paradkar’s names in the news. Word got out that the police were interested in other people Millard had known: Laura Babcock, a woman he had been sleeping with who had gone missing in July of 2012, and his father, Wayne, who had died, supposedly by suicide, in November of that same year. The public was riveted. The Bosma murder, it seemed, was not a one-off act but possibly the latest homicide by a sadistic serial killer.

Related: Is there a connection between Ryan Wedding and Project South?

Paradkar lapped up the free publicity. He invited the Toronto Star to tour his house, much as he’d done in the past for clients. In the interview, he noted that, after Bosma’s disappearance, he’d prayed for the man and his family. But, he clarified, empathy for the victim wouldn’t prevent him from aggressively defending the alleged killer. Paradkar also bragged about his “Napoleonic” approach to advocacy. “I treat trials like wars,” he declared.

While Millard sat in a Hamilton jail awaiting trial, police began investigating Christina Noudga, one of Millard’s girlfriends, for helping him dispose of the incinerator and the pickup truck. To prevent the couple from colluding to obstruct justice, the court prohibited Millard from contacting Noudga. He nevertheless wrote to her obsessively from his cell. The letters make for compelling reading. They’re sometimes hubristic (Millard talks about his superior manners relative to those of his fellow prisoners) and sometimes paranoid (he claims that the prison psychologist is trying to manipulate him into committing suicide). At other times, the letters are bizarre. He sent Noudga a poem composed in the “medieval” style of Byron and Shakespeare: “Bring’th my day in court, Ring’th with truth will what I say in retort. Free’d I shall be.”

Millard’s main purpose in writing, though, was to convince Noudga to help him cover his tracks. In one letter, he feeds her a convoluted story to tell the cops, ostensibly to raise doubts about his guilt. In another, he asks her to lean on a fellow witness in the hopes of “bringing [him] back to my side.” When the cops eventually charged Noudga for her role in the Bosma murder plot, they searched her bedroom and discovered the letters, including some that Millard had told her to destroy.

There was clear evidence that Millard had violated a no-contact order in an attempt at witness tampering. But he couldn’t have simply mailed the letters: prison staff review all outgoing mail. He must have had an accomplice. After her arrest, Noudga told the cops that she had gotten the letters from Millard’s mother, who had gotten them from Paradkar, one of the few jailhouse visitors permitted to speak to Millard without a glass partition. Several letters, moreover, were stored in envelopes with Paradkar’s name on them, written in what looked like Millard’s handwriting. Of course, items can be smuggled out of prison by guards or fellow inmates, and neither Noudga’s statement nor the inclusion of Paradkar’s name on the envelopes proved that he was the guilty party. But the evidence was compelling enough that the lead investigator in the Millard case wanted to question Paradkar.

Paradkar declined, citing attorney-client privilege, at which point the cops reluctantly shut the letter-smuggling investigation down. The apparent indiscretion over the letters was gravely serious—if proven, it would potentially get a lawyer disbarred or even imprisoned—but nobody was formally charged. Afterward, Paradkar’s colleague, Ravin Pillay, took over Millard’s defence. In public, Paradkar implied that he had backed out because Millard could no longer afford his fees. But a court document written by M. A. Code, a Toronto judge, suggests that Paradkar’s actual reason for stepping aside was the obvious one: “Mr. Paradkar agreed to withdraw, as he appeared to be the only counsel who could be implicated in the transporting of the Millard/Noudga letters out of the jail.” (Noudga would ultimately plead guilty to obstructing justice. Millard and Smich were convicted of the murders of both Bosma and Babcock, and Millard received an additional conviction for murdering his father.)

The public, meanwhile, knew nothing about the letter-smuggling drama, which remained under a publication ban until 2017. In that time, Paradkar parlayed his name recognition into a wildly lucrative career. He landed some other high-profile clients, including a suspect in a vicious Brampton abduction and home invasion and a young man named Karim Baratov who had worked with a team of hackers—allegedly backed by the Kremlin—to compromise 500 million Yahoo email accounts. Increasingly, Paradkar’s clients were linked to drug trafficking. To read the court files from this period in his career is to enter a world of phone-tapping operations, clandestine meetings on dead-end streets, and bags of fentanyl and crystal meth.

Paradkar leaned into his new public identity. On Instagram, under the handle “cocaine_lawyer,” he posted eye-popping pictures with outrageous captions. In one, he’s standing in the hallway of a Brampton courthouse flashing what looks like a gang sign alongside a client who just got bail. Another post depicts handguns, clips and rounds of ammunition, all of them bagged and numbered like courtroom exhibits. “100 kilos of K,” the caption reads, “4 kilos of cocaine, 5 guns Uzi, glock - NOT GUILTY!!” The intended message was clear: My client was caught with tons of incriminating evidence, but my brilliant defence got him off. Another post appears to offer guidance to would-be drug traffickers: “Best advice for all my clients and those who are gangstas, trust no one including your right hand. In every drug case I’ve done there is always a rat responsible for taking you down and you won’t see it coming.” Yet another image depicts Paradkar’s beloved yellow-and-black Lamborghini, its scissor doors raised at 45-degree angles. The caption: “Cocaine pays lol !!!”

As gangsters flocked to Paradkar, some peers started quietly backing away. Lawyers who had once dined with him or invited him to their homes now limited their interactions to polite, cursory greetings in the courthouse hallways. News reports on the Millard letters scandal, although belated and inconclusive, damaged Paradkar’s status among colleagues. So did an incident in 2017, when the Law Society of Ontario called Paradkar in for a “regulatory meeting” over his Instagram antics, which they said undermined the ­integrity of the profession. Paradkar deleted his most sensational posts.

A few colleagues began to notice a gap between Paradkar’s marketing and his performance. Paradkar sold himself as a happy warrior eager for the long, grinding battle of a criminal trial. He did take on those kinds of cases, but he often seemed most interested in the shortest and sweetest of legal proceedings: bail hearings. Of course, bails are a huge part of any criminal lawyer’s workload. Compared with trials, they’re easy. The evidentiary standards are low, and the system is usually weighted in favour of the accused, who are, after all, legally innocent. But some of Paradkar’s colleagues say that he leveraged his reputation to charge rates far higher than those of his peers. If a client ran out of money, he’d drop them, and they would have to scramble to find someone else to defend them on the cheap.

Paradkar slowed down only when his health forced him to. He received a diagnosis for type-two diabetes in 2010 and underwent a heart stent operation in 2015. In 2018, doctors found a 99 per cent blockage in his left anterior descending artery—the so-called widow maker artery—necessitating quadruple bypass surgery, which left him with chronic hypertension. Following the operation, Paradkar was bedridden for months, with his wife, Mandy, as his primary caregiver.

Sometime after 2020, Paradkar began working for a man who would soon become the most famous fugitive in the country: Ryan Wedding, the former snowboarder who had represented Canada at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. After his Olympic debut, Wedding had gone rogue, cultivating massive amounts of cannabis in BC before graduating to cocaine trafficking. In 2015, he fled Canada and began living in Mexico under the protection of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel. There, the FBI says, he built a billion-dollar drug-smuggling network responsible for most of the cocaine coming into Canada. He also allegedly cultivated an army of contract killers who could eliminate rivals anywhere on earth.

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The FBI says Paradkar was so deeply enmeshed in wedding’s schemes that he was basically one of his henchmen

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In late 2024, a California court indicted Wedding and 15 of his associates on charges that included murder and conspiracy to traffic cocaine. (American officials often step in to investigate and prosecute foreign drug smugglers, particularly if the contraband has passed through US territory.) Most of the suspects were captured, but Wedding remained at large. In 2025, the FBI added his name to its 10 Most Wanted list and offered a $15-­million reward to anyone who could help find him.

There was nothing inherently sketchy about Paradkar working for Wedding. Narco kingpins have a right to counsel too, and Wedding had legitimate legal needs. He might, for instance, have had questions about the status of his case, or he might have wished to contribute funds to his peers’ legal defences. If, in the course of his work, Paradkar somehow discovered Wedding’s whereabouts, he would be obligated, as a condition of his professional licence, to keep that information to himself, withholding it even from law enforcement. With sufficient caution, therefore, Paradkar could assist Wedding without becoming a party to his crimes.

Today, the US Department of Justice alleges that Paradkar didn’t even try to walk that line. In February of 2025, the FBI began working with a cooperating witness embedded in the Wedding organization. Based on this information, the FBI made an explosive accusation: Paradkar was so deeply enmeshed in Wedding’s schemes that he was basically one of the drug lord’s henchmen. The FBI says it collected other evidence that seemed to back up the witness’s claims, including phone calls the bureau surreptitiously recorded and encrypted text messages extracted from the cellphone of Andrew Clark, Wedding’s top lieutenant, who had been captured and extradited to the US.

Related: Ryan Wedding was arrested in Mexico

The DOJ alleges that Paradkar was handling Wedding’s many HR needs. To keep up his sprawling drug empire, Wedding would have been constantly recruiting: money launderers, middle managers, contract killers, drivers. Because of his legal work, Paradkar had connections among Brampton truckers, some of whom were doing double duty as drug runners. The DOJ says that Paradkar was enlisting these truckers to work as couriers for Wedding and keeping records of their names and identities. In other words, he was managing both Wedding’s recruitment program and his employment rolls.

On September 27, 2024, for instance, Clark allegedly sent Wedding a series of text messages about a trucker they had hired. “Deepak meeting him tomorrow for all his identity stuff,” one message supposedly read. The next day, Clark apparently texted Wedding again: “Deepak says client for 20 years solid guy.” Clark later added, “I said if it works out [we’ll] get him a sick watch.”

Worse still, the DOJ alleges that Paradkar was helping Wedding suss out snitches in his midst. When one of Wedding’s associates got arrested, the DOJ claims, Paradkar would hire a lawyer for them whose real job was to gather intel for the boss: if the person decided to cooperate with law enforcement, the lawyer would feed this information back to Wedding. In other instances, the DOJ contends, Paradkar played the role of helpful lawyer himself. He’d chat on the phone with associates about their plans to work with the cops while letting Wedding secretly listen in.

In court documents, the DOJ goes into detail about an incident on October 1, 2024, in Arkansas. That day, cops stopped and searched two trucks on the interstate and discovered a combined 521 kilos of cocaine, which they say belonged to the Wedding organization and was destined for Canada. In a situation like this, Wedding would have an obvious interest in knowing what happened to the drivers. Were they arrested and detained? Were they planning to give evidence against him in exchange for leniency?

Wedding couldn’t get answers from his hideout in Mexico, so he’d need another strategy. The DOJ claims to have a text message, sent from Clark to Wedding, that provides a possible hint as to what this strategy was: “Deepak on it.” That same day, Clark set up a three-way chat with Paradkar and a man who went by the alias Champion. The purpose was to discuss the events in Arkansas. Paradkar apparently told the group that he would investigate the missing drivers. In his alleged words, he was “on with the cops.”

Later in the chat, Paradkar allegedly texted that he had spoken to the driver in custody, with Clark listening in on the call. Both Clark and Champion seemed worried that the drivers would cooperate with law enforcement, and Champion recommended that Clark have the drivers killed. At this point, according to the DOJ, Paradkar piped up, instructing the guys to “clear this convo” and “set up [a] separate group for you.” He then added, “Only lawyer stuff for me.” What he seemed to be saying was, If you’re planning to murder the guys I helped you locate, keep me off the thread. Even if he exited the chat, as the DOJ claims, Paradkar isn’t necessarily off the hook. Attorney-client privilege has major exceptions. If a lawyer learns that a client is planning to kill someone, it goes out the window: the lawyer must report the impending crime.

Much of the DOJ’s case, though, will likely hinge on the exact wording and context of Paradkar’s communications. They haven’t released all of their evidence. For some of the accusations, it’s unclear whether they have documentary proof (actual text messages or phone recordings) or only a witness’s recollection. For example, in the fall of 2024, Wedding learned that a former member of his organization, Jonathan Acebedo-­Garcia, had agreed to testify against him at a future trial. The DOJ says that Wedding sought Paradkar’s counsel on the matter and Paradkar advised that, if Acebedo-­Garcia were killed, Wedding’s legal troubles would go away. This claim is the most damning one in the case file, but the DOJ has not revealed what Paradkar’s exact words were. If he merely said that the case rested on Acebedo-­Garcia’s testimony, then he would be well within his rights—lawyers make statements like that all the time. But, if Paradkar told Wedding that eliminating Acebedo-­Garcia would solve his legal problems, he would have committed a truly outrageous crime and brazenly incriminated himself. Until the DOJ shows its hand, it’s hard to know how significant its evidence is.

However, one fact is undisputed: on January 31, 2025, Acebedo-Garcia was having lunch at a restaurant in Medellín, Colombia, when an assassin shot him five times in the head before fleeing on the back of a motorbike. The State of California was mere months away from trying Wedding in absentia, and Acebedo-Garcia’s death forced it to postpone the case. More than a year later, it still hasn’t gone to trial.

In late October of 2025, the DOJ sent a request to the Attorney General of Canada demanding that Paradkar be arrested and extradited to stand trial in California. On November 18, the RCMP picked up Paradkar at his home and brought him to the Toronto South Detention Centre, a notoriously brutal jail. Having glamorized the criminal life, Paradkar now found himself facing its many dangers and indignities. Afraid for his safety, he begged prison staff to place him in protective custody. They put him instead in the super-max unit, where the most dangerous inmates are housed. At all hours, cold air blew from a vent into his cell. Paradkar says that the guards denied his request for a blanket, leaving him shivering beneath a thin bedsheet. To manage his diabetes and hypertension, Paradkar relies on a battery of medications delivered at specific times of day. Regular blood samples must be taken too. He claims that at no point during his stint in remand were these medical necessities delivered on time, and occasionally they were forgotten completely, leaving Paradkar to quietly panic as his heart raced and his blood sugar spiked. On Paradkar’s third day in remand, a guard forced him to leave his cell and join the other inmates on the range. That day, ­Paradkar says, a brawl broke out, with 30 inmates slashing one another with shanks. Eventually, guards burst in and pepper-sprayed everyone. Paradkar was hauled back to his cell, his eyes stinging and his lungs spasming. The next day, he was transferred to the Toronto East Detention Centre, where conditions are only marginally better than at Toronto South.

On December 10, Paradkar showed up yet again in bail court, but for the first time in his life, he was a client. To defend himself, Paradkar had retained Ravin Pillay, his colleague who had taken over the Millard case. During the three-day hearing, Crown attorneys Heather Graham and Milica Potrebic argued that releasing Paradkar was a risk the state couldn’t afford. Graham ventured that Paradkar could draw on his criminal connections to abscond to Mexico and live like Wedding, under the Sinaloa Cartel’s patronage. She further argued that the charges against Paradkar were so serious that granting him bail would bring the justice system itself into disrepute. The judge, Peter Bawden, was skeptical. At age 62, was Paradkar really going to abandon his wife and kids to live out his autumn years as a fugitive in Mexico? And who would take care of his complex medical needs? Ryan Wedding?

Under oath, Mandy, who had agreed to act as her husband’s surety, promised to take away all of Paradkar’s electronic devices and change every password in the house. She also pledged that, on rare occasions when Paradkar needed to make a phone call, she would stay in the room with him. How much troublemaking, Pillay asked, could Paradkar really get up to under Mandy’s watchful eye? Plus, Pillay argued, a conditional release wasn’t the nuclear option that Graham made it out to be. In Canada, alleged accomplices to murder and drug trafficking have gotten bail before. The justice system has survived.

In his decision, handed down two days before Christmas, Bawden conceded most of Pillay’s points. Yet Paradkar’s alleged deeds were heinous, and they were compounded by his status as a lawyer, someone who is supposed to model moral rectitude. In this respect, a lawyer’s crimes are worse than everyone else’s. Bawden released Paradkar on a $5.25-million bail, but he acknowledged that the decision had been a close call. “Mr. Paradkar,” he said, “prove me right. Okay?”

“I will, Your Honour,” Paradkar replied.

Paradkar continues to maintain his innocence. As he awaits his extradition hearing, his Thornhill mansion has become his prison and Mandy his warden. He surrendered his passport, wears a GPS-enabled ankle monitor and leaves the house only for necessary trips, like medical appointments, with Mandy by his side. When Mandy goes out alone, she has pledged to monitor his activities via surveillance cameras and motion sensors. The court has placed a lien on the house, and Paradkar has no access to electronic devices except when he needs to make an essential call or send out an essential email. If he breaches these conditions, even momentarily—for instance, by going out for a walk alone—he’ll lose everything: his freedom, his home, his $5.25 million.

The Crown, meanwhile, appealed the judge’s bail decision and is now trying to have Paradkar sent back to remand. On April 1, at a hearing at the Court of Appeal in Toronto, prosecutor Heather Graham made her case. Paradkar was so conspicuously wealthy, Graham argued, that his spending clearly exceeded his upper-middle-class earnings. A possible explanation for this discrepancy, she said, was that Paradkar had long been getting paid under the table by criminal associates like Wedding, and that Mandy, as her husband’s accountant, should have known all about this shady activity. Graham’s point was that the justice system can’t rely on Mandy to keep Parakdar in line, that she was either oblivious to her husband’s alleged misdeeds or an accomplice to them, neither of which make her a trustworthy surety. Pillay countered that this argument rests on speculation about the Parakdars’ finances, not hard evidence, and shouldn’t carry legal weight. At press time, the appeal judge had not yet decided whether to overturn Bawden’s bail decision.

In response to multiple requests for an interview with Paradkar, Pillay sent me an email pointing out that the DOJ’s case rests almost entirely on the word of a single cooperating witness. “The material disclosed thus far indicates that this witness participated in at least one murder, potentially more, and has been entrenched in serious criminality,” wrote Pillay. These types of witnesses, he says, are often motivated by the possibility of immunity or reduced charges—all of which raises serious credibility concerns. Pillay added that the material disclosed by the DOJ so far does not include any intercepted communications or wiretaps that implicate Paradkar in the charges. Pillay says he intends to mount a vigorous defence.

Paradkar, for his part, seems profoundly friendless. Because Mandy has a history of colon cancer, the original bail agreement included a backup surety who could step in if she became seriously ill. Instead of another family member or a close friend, the job went to a cousin of Mandy’s who lives an hour and a half away and hasn’t seen Paradkar in four years.

While reporting this piece, I reached out to Brampton lawyers who were known to be close with Paradkar. Some ignored my emails. One sent me a brief response attesting vaguely to Paradkar’s brilliance and integrity but declining my request for an interview. One colleague, Alison Craig, a Toronto criminal lawyer who doesn’t know Paradkar well, raised explicit doubts about the DOJ’s case. She pointed out that the evidence in the DOJ’s documents mostly consists of brief snippets from phone or text conversations, which seem incriminating on first glance. But context is everything: a mere fragment of a conversation tells you little about the conversation itself. Craig, too, is concerned about relying heavily on the testimony of a witness who was likely a drug trafficker himself.

Even if the evidence against Paradkar is thin, the DOJ has an incentive to move forward with the prosecution. Back in November, when the US indicted Paradkar, the FBI was secretly closing in on Wedding. They captured him in Mexico City on January 22 and flew him to Los Angeles. Now, unless Wedding changes course and pleads guilty, they’ll have to go to trial. During his association with Wedding, Paradkar has surely come across incriminating evidence. If he agrees to cooperate in exchange for leniency, he could probably help with the case. It’s not unheard of for a lawyer to flip on their client when facing charges themselves. In 2024, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis took a plea deal in a case of election interference in Arizona. She agreed to cooperate with the prosecution in their case against the other defendants, including Trump himself, in exchange for her charges being dropped. Of course, one hopes that the DOJ wouldn’t knowingly pursue a weak prosecution just to bully a lawyer into submission. But events elsewhere in the US haven’t exactly inspired confidence: this is the same DOJ that brought spurious charges against perceived Trump opponents like New York attorney general Letitia James and Arizona senator Mark Kelly.

While Paradkar’s friends were unwilling even to take a phone call to defend his reputation, his competitors and acquaintances, it seems, had unlimited time for me. They are not as inclined to sympathy. The Millard letters scandal, the ridiculous Instagram account, the sycophantic relationship with drug traffickers—to some of them, these episodes tell you everything you need to know about the kind of person Deepak Paradkar is.

Paradkar’s colleagues like taking shots at him. They described him to me as a braggart, a hypocrite and, pettiest of all, a lousy student of French history. Despite all his chatter about Napoleon, they said, Paradkar tended to skip over the events of Waterloo, in 1815, when the general was humiliated by a powerful foreign army and forced to live out the rest of his life in squalid exile, thousands of miles from the empire he’d built. When life was going well, Paradkar seemed disinclined to contemplate the desperate final chapter of his hero’s story. He has plenty of time to reflect on it now.

This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.