How police informant Agent 66 helped put Vancouver Hells Angel Damion Ryan on trial
His recording of a Montreal meeting with one of Canada's "most prolific organized crime members" resulted in 22 arrests and the biggest drug seizure in Manitoba's history
Ever since Vancouver Hells Angel Damion Ryan escaped death at the hands of a burqa-clad gunman who tried to shoot him in the head at a YVR food court, he’s been leery about meeting strangers.
As Ryan sat at a table that day in 2015, the cloaked gunman approached, aimed at Ryan’s skull and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed.
From then on, anyone seeking to meet him was even more carefully vetted.
In 2022, however, the outlaw biker, who moved in elite criminal circles around the globe, trafficking in guns, narcotics, and allegedly managing contract killings for Iranian drug lords, agreed to meet a veteran Winnipeg drug dealer in a Montreal restaurant.
It was a big mistake.
That dealer, now known as Agent 66, was a police informant wearing a wire. Agent 66 and his RCMP handlers had worked for more than a year to land a face-to-face discussion with Ryan to buy drugs and ensure their trafficking operation was officially sanctioned.
Now Ryan, charged as a major player in the largest drug bust in Manitoba’s history, has his back to the wall in a six-week Winnipeg trial. The court has already heard four days of testimony from Agent 66, whose identity is protected and who has been paid at least $900,000 for his work.
The trial is providing a unique perspective on the global reach of Canada’s criminal networks, their senior players, and how the narcotics supply chain operates. Ryan’s trial confirms that what illicit drugs enter the country, who sells them and where they are sold are decisions made by a relatively small number of individuals far removed from street dealing or even superlab operations.
The investigation, which stretched from Winnipeg to Colombia, Greece and the United States, involved multiple police agencies and touched on the operations of five criminal networks, including the Hells Angels.
Ryan, 44, is charged with conspiring to sell cocaine, meth and fentanyl for the benefit or under the direction of the Wolf Pack Alliance, one of Canada’s top criminal networks at the heart of the illegal drug trade.
If convicted, he will face a long sentence and another trial, this time in the United States, where he is alleged to have conspired with Iranian drug lord Naji Zindashti to organize the contract killing of an Iranian dissident and another man in Maryland. Ryan’s fee for the killing was to be $350,000, and he claimed to have a crew of four ready to do the job.
Described by police as “likely one of the most prolific organized crime members” in Canada, Ryan grew up in East Vancouver’s Skeena Terrace before rising through the ranks of the Angels to the elite Nomads club, the Wolfpack Alliance and then on to full patch HA membership in clubs in Greece and Croatia. (Kim Bolan, of the Vancouver Sun, summarized Ryan’s long criminal career in this 2024 article.)
When he was arrested in 2022, he was living in an Ottawa home formerly owned by Hisham Alkhalil, brother of Rabih Alkhalil, the infamous convicted murderer who broke out of North Fraser Pretrial Centre in 2022, just weeks before his conviction in a second murder case. Rabih Alkahlil was recently arrested in Qatar after an international hunt.
Ryan has seen it all, but now seems rattled. He has fired two lawyers, and lost a third who quit due to “health issues.” He is now representing himself with the assistance of a court-appointed lawyer, who was working hard last week to undermine Agent 66’s testimony and portray Ryan as some kind of hapless go-between.
The evidence gathered by Agent 66 at the Montreal meeting in December 2021 triggered a wave of 22 arrests, including three British Columbians, as well as the largest drug seizure in Manitoba’s history: 110 kilograms of cocaine, 40 kilograms of methamphetamine, three kilograms of fentanyl, 500 grams of MDMA, 14 hand guns, five assault rifles and $445,000 in cash.
The police investigation, named Project Divergent, began in 2018 after an RCMP crime analyst in Manitoba noted some distinctive patterns in the importation of drugs through Winnipeg.
Police realized they had stumbled on an international operation that involved large volumes of Mexican cartel drugs coming from either Mexico itself or Colombia, which were then being distributed across the country.
In 2020, police were able to recruit Agent 66, a veteran Winnipeg dealer from the age of 12, who had just been released from prison. Agent 66 testified he became a police informant after he was robbed of $368,000 he had painstakingly accumulated as his ticket out of the drug business.
Under RCMP supervision, Agent 66 reached out to Andre Steele, a convicted trafficker still in prison, to infiltrate the narcotics operation and identify its senior players. Steele, who was also arrested along with Ryan in the 2022 sweep, agreed to make the connection for a fee of $10,000.
Initially, Agent 66 sought a fee of about $600,000 from the RCMP for his efforts, but when he learned his target was Ryan, he raised his price. Ultimately, the RCMP agreed to pay about $900,000.
Agent 66 kept careful notes, recorded phone calls and received encoded messages on cell phones provided by the RCMP. Throughout 2021, he communicated with Steele, who was still in prison, to buy drugs from Ryan’s operation and to speak to Ryan himself.
It was essential to see Ryan, Agent 66 told Steele, “for his blessing, so I don’t fucking get taxed” for dealing in someone else’s territory. As he put it on another occasion, “I just want a message from Big Buddy saying we are good to go, that he is vouching for you and we are solid.”
Agent 66’s efforts suffered a setback in August 2021 when a Vancouver dealer, apparently close to Ryan, died of an overdose before a purchase could close. When Agent 66 proposed to travel to Vancouver to the funeral to see Ryan personally, Steele firmly shut him down, saying, “I don’t want you to communicate with him,” and “I am the insulation between him and getting in trouble.”
(The dealer was Ezra Beau Sametz, who had been the target of civil forfeiture proceedings in Vancouver before his death.)
Agent 66 skipped the funeral but was able to negotiate two major deals during the following weeks with Denis Ivziku, Ryan’s brother-in-law, who was charged in the Winnipeg sweep but has not been arrested.
Agent 66’s persistence finally paid off with a Montreal meeting in December of that year with a man he has identified as Ryan. After some small talk -- “I have a new baby keeping me up,” Ryan complained – Agent 66 proposed to buy cocaine directly from Toronto for distribution in Winnipeg. Ryan indicated he could also provide contraband cigarettes and guns.
Prosecutors say the exchanges with Ryan and Ivziku resulted in the delivery of five kilograms of cocaine to Agent 66 in January, 2022. Ryan was arrested in the February sweep that followed. The US indictment came in 2024.
An inside informant is a police investigator’s most precious asset. They are increasingly rare. It is not a job for the faint of heart.
With his testimony last week, Agent 66 can consider his job done and get on with his new life. His testimony may serve to put Damion Ryan behind bars for a very long time, but it has already laid bare once more the international networks driving the toxic drug crisis, networks with people like Vancouver’s Ryan in charge.
Information in this article has been drawn from the reporting of Dean Pritchard, at the Winnipeg Free Press, Bryce Hoye of CBC Winnipeg, and Kim Bolan, of the Vancouver Sun.
The classic account of how police informant Dany Kane helped Quebec police deal a body blow to the Hells Angels in that province in the 1990s is the Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada, by Julian Sher and William Marsden, published in 2004. Sadly, little has changed.