Did tweet from Raptors game lead to his murder?
It was impossible not to notice Sukhvir (Sukh) Singh Deo as he lambasted officials from his courtside seat at a Raptors’ playoff game so loudly and energetically that he stole focus from LeBron James, the greatest star in basketball.
The Oakville trucking executive laughed as he was finally ejected from the Scotiabank Arena during the May 23, 2016, home playoff game with Cleveland.
Despite the high-octane heckling, James scored 29 points.
The Raptors managed a 105-99 victory, led by 35 points from Kyle Lowry.
Deo celebrated the day by posting a TV screenshot of his ejection online on Twitter.
It wasn’t the type of thing you’d expect from someone who might have been wise to stay low-key.
Deo, 34, had recently moved east from the Greater Vancouver area, where he had plenty of enemies eager to kill him, as well as law enforcement officials looking to nail him with drug trafficking charges.
Deo was connected to the Wolfpack Alliance, a group of multi-ethnic, mostly young and internet-savvy criminals from across Canada who were suspected by police of bringing massive amounts of cocaine in from Mexico.
That brought them plenty of heat from rivals, and charges of drug trafficking and proceeds of crime for Deo in Halton Region.
Two weeks after the basketball game excitement, on June 7, 2016, Deo was approached by two men in construction vests — one green and one orange — who pumped at least 14 bullets into the driver side window of his white Range Rover just before 3 p.m. behind a condo complex on Cowbell Lane, just east of the busy intersection of Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue East.
Then the killers fled in a black Honda Civic.
Deo, who was in the driver’s seat, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Hitmen wearing construction attire seemed to be a calling card for both rivals and the emerging world of the Wolfpack in the GTA.
A Wolfpack hitman who was also wearing a construction vest shot Johnny Raposo, 35, to death on the patio of a popular Little Italy café on College Street in 2012.
Deo, a married father, had moved to the GTA from Vancouver in 2013 and ran a trucking firm with another man.
He was well known to Vancouver police at the time of the murder.
His younger brother Harjit had a higher profile with authorities, after he was sentenced to seven years in prison and hit with a lifetime weapons ban for a 2005 gangland kidnapping in B.C. In that case, Harjit Deo was paid $2,000 to allow kidnappers to hold a victim in their parents’ garage, where the hostage was bound, blindfolded, beaten and threatened at gunpoint.
“The victim was kidnapped apparently because it was thought he was responsible for some missing drugs,” the parole board noted in 2010. “The victim was held in various locations for three days while negotiations took place with the victim’s brother to trade drugs and money for the victim. The exchange of the victim for the ransom was made at a local theatre that police had under surveillance. Once the victim was released, the police followed the vehicles involved in the exchange, to your parents’ home where police surrounded the home and took eight persons into custody…”
The board continued: “You seem to be drawn to the power, excitement and perceived benefits associated with criminal activity.”
Harjit Deo was granted full parole in January 2010 but it was suspended on Feb. 8, 2013, after police reported that he was believed to have been “involved in activity involving drugs, weapons, and associates involved in the drug trade.”
In Vancouver, Sukh Deo was associated with the Independent Soldiers, one of 160 or so gangs in the Lower Mainland.
The Independent Soldiers were aligned with the Wolfpack, along with some members of the Hells Angels and Red Scorpion gangs.
Sukh Deo’s associates included Larry Amero and James Riach, both of whom were original Wolfpack members.
Amero, also a Hells Angel, and Riach, also an Independent Soldier, were targeted along with Red Scorpion leader Jon Bacon in an August 2011 shooting outside a Kelowna, B.C. resort.
Bacon was killed when gunmen sprayed his white Porsche Cayenne, while Amero was seriously wounded and Riach escaped with minor injuries. A woman who was also in the Porsche was paralyzed.
That attack explained why some Wolfpack members moved out of B.C. in a hurry.
Amero settled for a time in a luxury condo in Montreal.
Riach moved to the Philippines, where he was sentenced to life in prison in 2018 in for his role in a drug-trafficking organization that police said was connected to a Mexican cartel.
Sukh Deo headed to the GTA. Others from the Wolfpack continue to move here, as the gang is connected more through the internet than face-to-face meetings to stay in touch.
Sukh Deo’s murder made headlines in India in the “Hindustan Times,” which ran the headline, “Gangster shot dead in Canada.”
The murder remains unsolved.