An Ontario man who admitted to participating in two ‘sham’ marriages to help Indian women immigrate to Canada in return for services and cash has failed in his efforts to prove he’s married to the mother of his three children.

Amratpal Singh Sidhu asked Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice for a declaration that he’s legally married to Amandeep Kaur. She was looking for a judge to say the opposite.

“He openly admitted to participating in two ‘sham’ marriages, for financial gain and in an effort to dupe Canadian immigration authorities,” Justice Frances Wood wrote in a recent decision from the family court division.

“For many years, he declared himself single for income tax purposes and, when transferring real estate, declared that he was not a spouse, which allowed him to transfer the properties without (Amandeep Kaur’s) consent.”

Neither party divulged why it matters if they’re married or not.

“But, as (Sidhu) has made a claim for equalization in his application, this court infers that the importance relates to that claim – if the parties are not legally (married), he has no equalization claim,” Wood said.

An “equalization claim” is a legal process in Canadian family law where spouses seek a fair division of the property and debts accumulated during their marriage.

The court heard Sidhu and Kaur met while they were both working at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

“Both were residents of Ontario,” said the judge. “They agreed to travel to India to get married. The wedding plans were made while the parties were in Ontario, and they then travelled together from Ontario to India shortly before the ceremony.”

Both of them agree “that they participated in a traditional marriage ceremony in India on December 4, 1997,” said the decision.

Shortly after that Sidhu “travelled to a nearby town … where he participated in what he refers to as a ‘sham’ marriage ceremony,” it said.

Sidhu testified that “in exchange for care being provided to his ailing mother, he participated in this fake wedding to assist the ‘bride,’ Karamjit Kaur, in immigrating to Canada.”

Sidhu and Karamjit Kaur divorced in Ontario in January 2001, said the decision, dated Nov. 12.

“Despite (Sidhu’s) characterization of the second marriage as a ‘sham’, the fact is that it has been formally recognized in Ontario whereas there is no formal recognition nor registration of the parties’ alleged marriage either in Ontario or India,” Wood said.

“The parties agree that polygamous marriages are not permitted pursuant to the Hindu Marriage Act. (Sidhu) cannot, therefore, have been married to both (Amandeep Kaur) and Karamjit Kaur.”

Sidhu travelled to India again in 2022 “where he participated in yet another allegedly ‘sham’ marriage, once again with the aim of assisting the ‘bride’ in immigrating to Canada. This marriage was to Harjit Kaur. According to (Sidhu) Canadian authorities were not persuaded of the validity of the marriage and Harjit Kaur never did immigrate to Canada. There is a marriage certificate evidencing this marriage,” said the decision.

“Much was made by the parties as to whose idea the 2022 ‘sham’ marriage was. (Sidhu) insisted that Harjit Kaur is (Amandeep Kaur’s) cousin, and that (Amandeep Kaur) had been promised $40,000 to assist in the immigration process. He testified that (Amandeep Kaur and their child) were present at the ‘marriage’ ceremony. (Amandeep Kaur) denied this.”

On “several occasions” between 2000 and 2017 Sidhu “described himself as single and common-law on Income Tax filings and when transferring real property,” said the decision.

Amandeep Kaur “described herself as married in her 2018 Income Tax Return, but as single in the other returns available to the court.”

She “made some attempt to demonstrate that the relationship was ‘on and off’ to argue that they did not live together ‘as a married couple’ but does not deny that the parties lived together for at least some periods of time following the marriage,” said the decision.

“They have three children together. It is not necessary to determine that the parties lived together continuously from 1997 until their final separation.”

Sidhu alleges Amandeep Kaur “deliberately claimed that she was single and insisted that he do the same, to maximize her entitlement to certain tax benefits and credits. He testified that he declared himself single on income tax and real estate documents at (Amandeep Kaur’s) insistence.”

The judge had concerns about the credibility of both parties.

“Neither may rely on their own fraud to bolster their own position with respect to the validity of the marriage,” Wood said.

“Where the court is left in serious doubt as to the credibility of either party, it must have resort to any uncontroverted evidence. Undisputed documentary evidence is particularly helpful.”

When they returned to Canada in 1997, “both declared themselves single to different authorities,” said the judge.

“At no time did either obtain any sort of formal documentation recording their marriage.”

And “significantly,” Sidhu “married Karamjit Kaur immediately after the ceremony with” Amandeep Kaur, Wood said, noting “that marriage has been considered to be valid by an Ontario court when it granted a divorce, a process in which (Sidhu) participated. Since polygamy is not permitted in India, (Sidhu) cannot have been married to both (Amandeep Kaur) and Karamjit Kaur. Whether the second marriage was entered into for immigration purposes or not, that is the marriage that (Sidhu) chose to have formally recognized.”

The judge noted “a valid marriage certificate has been produced” for when Sidhu “married yet again” to Harjit Kaur.

Even if Amandeep Kaur “was an active participant” in that wedding, that doesn’t help Sidhu’s case, Wood said. “Rather, it bolsters the conclusion that both understood they were not legally married.”

The judge found that “neither party entered into the December 4, 1997 marriage with the intention that the marriage would be considered legally valid in Ontario.”

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It was 3:26 in the morning when a long-haul tractor trailer loaded with steel bars pulled up on the U.S. side of the Blue Water Bridge at the southern end of Lake Huron, connecting Ontario and Michigan.

The driver, Iqbal Singh Virk, an owner-operator of the truck based in Brampton, Ont., lowered his window to speak with U.S. Customs officers monitoring overnight traffic on Aug. 28, 2024. In the passenger seat was Ranjit Singh Rowal, who shared the driving.

Virk answered their questions: No, they didn’t they have guns, drugs, or cash over $5,000 with them; no one had given them anything to bring across; they were both Indian citizens with permanent resident status in Canada.

Experienced drivers, it must have seemed routine until Virk was told to pull his truck over for inspection. Less than 10 minutes after they had rolled up at the border, a Rapiscan X-ray system was crawling over their truck.

It’s a system that penetrates steel and it spotted what the drivers hoped it wouldn’t.

At the rear of their trailer was an anomaly — a long, thin compartment above the trailer’s Ontario licence plate that wouldn’t normally be there. Officers were soon pulling bricks wrapped together in cellophane out from that hole, stacking them on the loading bay floor. They counted 115 bricks weighing slightly more than 124 kilos. An officer estimated that if it is high-grade cocaine it would be worth close to US$4 million.

That evidence left little room for the truckers to maneuver.

As they waited in jail over the next few months, the case ballooned into something that would soon burst into clanging news coverage.

Some 3,700 kilometres along the highways Virk and Rowal had just driven, in Los Angeles, U.S. authorities had been investigating a huge international criminal enterprise. That violent and prolific cartel, authorities claimed, was headed by Ryan Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder for Team Canada. Wedding, born in Thunder Bay, Ont., was named the mastermind behind a deluge of cocaine flowing from Colombia to California and then to Canada, from a safe space in Mexico.

Two months after the border arrests of Virk and Rowal, an indictment was unsealed with Wedding’s name at the top — alongside his nicknames of “Giant” and “El Jefe,” Spanish for the boss — followed by 15 others. Ten of them were Canadian citizens or residents. The allegations called them organizers, traffickers, hitmen, transportation gurus and wheelmen. Last week the FBI called Wedding a modern-day Pablo Escobar and El Chapo Guzman, two of history’s most notorious drug lords.

The last two names on that indictment are Virk and Rowal.

While their role among the alarming accounts of murders and mega-loads seems small, the details of their cases, which have now been proven in court through guilty pleas — the first for any of the Canadians caught in the probe — shows them as an important piece of a jigsaw that knitted a transportation network in Canada to a narco cartel abroad, and reveals how the organizations generated huge amounts of money.

Evidence presented in court while Virk and Rowal tried to quickly settle their cases says that international narcos had negotiated a haulage deal with a network of Indo-Canadian trucking firms and drivers based in Brampton, Ont., northwest of Toronto.

A dispatcher sent by the narcos would meet various drivers of Canada-bound commercial trucks at meeting spots in and around Los Angeles and hand over bricks of pressed cocaine. The drivers would hide the bricks in their trucks and then drive northeast into Canada, where the drugs were distributed by others.

The trucks were also hauling legitimate cargo to camouflage the trips and they got lost in the constant back-and-forth at some of the world’s busiest commercial border points. Members of the cooperating networks used serial numbers from U.S. one-dollar bills, swapped over encrypted communications, as passcodes to identify each other at their rendezvous.

Sometimes it went more smoothly than others.

In early April 2024, Virk — now 65 years old — agreed to collect a load of cocaine in California from the narcos and haul it back when next bringing in a load of regular cargo.

Virk and Rowal, who co-owned a tractor-trailer, drove into the United States on April 28, 2024, and headed for Los Angeles. They pulled the truck into a rest stop on May 3, 2024, and waited for the drugs to be delivered. A dispatcher for the narco said two large deliveries were coming. That was a problem because their compartment could only fit about 250 kilos.

It became an argument at the highest level. Authorities allege that Wedding, through encrypted messaging, asked for a discount on the transportation cost — $150,000 instead of the $220,000 previously agreed. The transport boss in Canada refused the lower price. Wedding allegedly refused to pay full freight for a load 30 per cent smaller and the deal was scrapped after a standoff.

Nobody involved in the deals knew it at the time, but it turns out that the bosses weren’t arranging the deal directly with each other. The FBI had infiltrated the operation and inserted a confidential source as a go-between.

That infiltration helps explain why, three months later, Virk and Rowal were stopped at the border bridge when next trying to cross back into Canada. Their load that day was later found to be split between cocaine and heroin, court records say.

When both men were arrested, through a Punjabi interpreter, Virk told officers he had been a truck driver for seven years and routinely crossed the border, sometimes weekly, but didn’t admit to the drugs. Rowal wouldn’t say anything at all.

They were both arrested on drug charges and detained. They were transferred to California to face courts on the wider allegations.

On Aug. 5, Rowal signed a plea agreement with prosecutors. He agreed to plead guilty to two charges: conspiracy to distribute cocaine and possession with intent to distribute cocaine. Virk signed a similar agreement 10 days later.

They agreed they conspired with two or more people to distribute cocaine, knew they were carrying drugs and knew it was destined for further distribution. Their replacement charge informations for their plea were stripped of co-conspirator names, notably Wedding’s.

Their plea deals said the maximum penalty they faced was life imprisonment but their guilty pleas would lower that. They agreed to forfeit all property involved in the crime, including the truck.

Both men are citizens of India and travelled on an Indian passport who immigrated to Canada where they attained permanent resident status.

After his guilty plea but before his sentencing, Rowal’s lawyers asked the judge to order the return of his passport, Ontario health card, driver’s licence, cell phone and rings he was wearing. His lawyer said he needed the items to prepare for his departure from the United States. His lawyers had hopes that would happen soon, as they argued for Rowal to be sentenced to time already served and released.

One of his lawyers, Haley Huntley urged that his sentencing move quickly, saying Rowal placed “profound emotional and psychological importance” on wrapping it up and was counting “how many squares on the calendar” there were before sentencing.

“He has been planning for this day as one of the most important in his life, and he is eager for his sentencing to go forward as planned,” Huntley told the judge.

By that point, Rowal had been in jail for 449 days.

The night before sentencing, prosecutors filed a document in court saying they had talked to the RCMP about Rowal’s status in Canada and were told that as a non-citizen permanent resident in Canada he would be considered inadmissible to the country after his conviction for serious criminality and sent for an admissibility hearing. A removal order against him was the likely outcome, they said the RCMP told them, leading to removal to India.

His lawyer lambasted prosecutors for it.

“The government then prepared and filed a public document, giving this useless information to the whole world. The government lawyers are supposed to pursue justice; they should not aim to inflict as much pain as possible, and unnecessary pain, on disenfranchised and indigent defendants.”

In court, Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett accepted Rowal’s guilty plea and sentenced him to 37 months in prison. She recommended the U.S. Bureau of Prisons place him in a facility close to Canada, an hour’s drive from the border.

Virk, who also goes by the name Mark, pleaded guilty as well, in September, but his sentencing hearing has been delayed. It is now scheduled for March.

Lawyers for the two could not be reached for comment prior to publication deadline.

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