On Father’s Day last year in Calgary, Tyler Shandro, a former provincial justice minister, contacted the investment banker Sandy Edmonstone after receiving jarring text messages from a number he didn’t recognize.

The two men have known each other for a number of years. A photo shared by the Calgary Health Foundation in 2023 shows them smiling together after Mr. Shandro presented Mr. Edmonstone with a medal recognizing his fundraising for hospitals, nursing homes and community programs.

However, a different set of pictures was about to disrupt Mr. Edmonstone’s life.

The text messages Mr. Shandro received that morning of June 15, 2025, came with blurry photos of a woman facing a curly-haired man, his back to the camera.

“This is your friend Sandy,” the messages said. “If my husband was doing this while I had a baby at home, I’d want to know. When I find his wife’s number, she will get this too.”

Mr. Edmonstone recognized the man in the photos. It was him, with the woman at a restaurant the previous Friday.

The messages got a few things wrong. Mr. Edmonstone has a partner but isn’t married. Their child isn’t an infant. More crucially, someone was falsely accusing him of cheating on his partner.

The pictures marked the opening salvo of what he later described as a drawn-out campaign to sully his reputation.

In the following months, a foul-mouthed political mercenary from Ontario entered the stage. A self-described dirty tricks operator, David Wallace repeatedly attacked Mr. Edmonstone in a series of podcasts, calling him “an adulterous scumbag.”

Mr. Wallace said on the podcasts that he had hired people to scrutinize the banker’s personal life. “I decided that maybe somebody should dig into Mr. Edmonstone,” he said. “So I employed some professionals.”

Mr. Edmonstone was no stranger to high-pressure situations. Now semi-retired from investment banking, he once worked for outfits such as National Bank and Macquarie Capital. He has brokered oil and gas deals, helped debenture holders thwart a takeover bid, waged a proxy fight for control of an energy company.

But this time, he suspected he was being threatened because of his contribution to a civic cause: his recent tenure on the board of Alberta Health Services, or AHS, the authority delivering medical care in the province.

He wasn’t alone. Around the same time, various people, all of whom had raised questions about the contracts AHS awarded to private vendors, were similarly targeted.

AHS’ former chief executive, Athana Mentzelopoulos, set in motion investigations by the RCMP and the provincial Auditor-General after she alleged that officials in Premier Danielle Smith’s government put pressure on her to proceed with contracts for certain suppliers. “Athana, I’m coming for you,” Mr. Wallace said on his podcast. “And before I’m done, every little nugget of your pathetic, fraudster, fake fucking life is going to be on full display.”

Carrie Tait, a Globe and Mail reporter in Calgary, broke several stories about the problems at AHS. Mr. Wallace vilified her on air, she was stalked and secretly photographed, and someone disguised their caller ID to pretend to be dialling from her phone number. After the surveillance on Ms. Tait came to light, The Globe began to investigate the actions against its reporter. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Mr. Edmonstone assembled a team and launched a rare legal strategy to identify who masterminded the smears against him. Both efforts have pulled back the curtain to reveal a cast of video streamers, private investigators and social-media operators working to shape perceptions and bully critics.

Whoever was behind this campaign didn’t rely on the tools that companies and governments traditionally lean on to influence opinions, whether via marketing, interview offers or public engagement. Instead, the tactics consisted of reputational attacks, covert surveillance and veiled threats.

The evidence uncovered by Mr. Edmonstone’s legal actions and The Globe’s reporting have pointed toward the same locus: the Edmonton company MHCare Medical.

The reporter

Ms. Tait first reported in July, 2024, that Alberta cabinet ministers and government officials attended hockey playoff games at a premium arena suite as guests of MHCare’s owner, Sam Mraiche.

AHS paid more than $600-million to companies affiliated with Mr. Mraiche, including a $70-million deal to import Turkish children’s painkillers, which has been criticized as ineffective and costly.

Mr. Mraiche also partly owned two companies negotiating with AHS to operate surgical facilities.

Ms. Tait and her colleague Alanna Smith then reported on the fallout from the government firing Ms. Mentzelopoulos on Jan. 8, 2025, just before she was to meet with the Auditor-General to share her concerns about AHS’ contracts.

Ms. Mentzelopoulos alleged in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit that she was ousted after she wouldn’t wind down an internal probe into procurement practices. The government says it sacked her for failing to implement its agenda.

The RCMP opened an investigation and executed several search warrants, including at MHCare’s headquarters.

As Globe reporters dug into the controversy, Mr. Wallace and another podcaster, James Di Fiore, began to defend MHCare and Mr. Mraiche on their shows.

The pair suggested there was a conspiracy against MHCare and they would expose it.

Mr. Wallace was already known for underhanded tactics. He previously admitted to The Canadian Press that he tried to acquire Alanna Smith’s phone logs when she worked for the Calgary Herald in 2021.

The afternoon of June 28, Ms. Tait was home when three of her contacts reached out to ask if she had been trying to call them. She hadn’t. It was a spoofing attempt: an imposter pretending to be dialling from her number. One person answered, but the line disconnected immediately.

Around the same time, a man identifying himself as Fred Bent, a retired Calgary police detective, contacted Alanna Smith and two other Globe staffers who also reported on MHCare.

He said a law firm had hired him to “look into developments involving Sam Mraiche” and asked whether they could share their insights. He declined to comment when The Globe called to interview him.

The Calgary Stampede, which opened on July 4, would normally be an opportunity for journalists like Ms. Tait to meet political figures on the pancake and receptions circuit. However, the messages from Mr. Bent, the podcasts and the spoofing made Ms. Tait decide to attend only a few events.

As festivities began, an X account called “The Brokedown” mentioned her in a series of posts and threatened to expose her sources.

The evening of July 9, the X account addressed a former political staffer, saying “you must be so exhausted from stampede. Did you get a chance to see @CarrieTait, she didn’t get out much.” The account also mentioned that Ms. Tait’s medication refill was “ready to be picked up.”

In the previous weeks, Ms. Tait had taken a prescription to her pharmacy and lunched with the former political aide at a Mexican restaurant.

Mr. Wallace then chimed in on a podcast, asking if the one-time political aide had met a reporter for tacos.

Ms. Tait was driving to a family reunion that afternoon. When she checked her phone while at a Red Deer gas station, she saw that the X account had posted a picture of her, taken surreptitiously while she met someone at a park. Two days later, it tweeted a photo of her lunching with the former political staffer.

The X account also picked on the former provincial minister Peter Guthrie. He had accepted tickets to Edmonton Oilers games from MHCare but resigned from cabinet to protest the government’s handling of the procurement issue.

The X account chided Mr. Guthrie and his wife, Tracy, saying they ordered tomahawk steaks and special cocktails while MHCare hosted them.

“The Brokedown” also posted a photo of an online receipt from MHCare’s Edmonton Oilers account, showing that Mr. Guthrie had been gifted two tickets.

The Globe asked MHCare how a screengrab of its Oilers account ended up on social media. The medical vendor replied that “no one affiliated with our company has, to our knowledge, ever engaged directly or indirectly” with the anonymous X account.

A lawyer for MHCare told The Globe that the company has never undertaken or endorsed any “unlawful or unethical” conduct.

“Many competing claims have been made in the public arena that have yet to be subject to proper challenge or judicial scrutiny. We would therefore caution against accepting any such assertions at face value,” Scott Hutchison, a partner at the Toronto litigation firm Henein Hutchison Robitaille, said on behalf of MHCare.

The company cannot comment further because the matter is before the courts, he said.

Mr. Wallace denies that he’s connected to the X account or to Mr. Mraiche. He has said on his podcasts that someone tipped him about Ms. Tait’s meeting the former aide at the Mexican restaurant.

Responding to a request for comments from The Globe, Craig Alcock, a lawyer representing Mr. Wallace and Mr. Di Fiore, said that “the content of the podcasts speaks for itself.”

The podcasters

By his own account, Mr. Wallace has a history of chicanery. “I’m a political hitman. I’m paid to destroy people or protect them,” he said on his podcasts.

He has talked openly about his past activities, doing business in Russia or getting hired to locate people and dig into their personal lives. He also mentioned on podcasts that he had spent time in jail, on weekends, because he repeatedly drove without a licence.

In fact, court records compiled by The Globe show that his criminal record in Ontario includes convictions for threatening to cause bodily harm, obstructing a police officer, failing to comply with an undertaking and being at large before the end of his sentence.

He often livestreamed with Mr. Di Fiore, who is based in Ontario, and both have faced defamation suits.

Mr. Wallace has acknowledged that he tried in 2019 to compromise then-Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi with a bribe offer. Mr. Nenshi didn’t take the bait. Instead, Mr. Wallace was sued by two Calgary developers for alleging that they bankrolled the failed plot.

Around the same time, Mr. Di Fiore claimed on his website that another Calgary developer “urinated on items belonging to fixer-turned-whistleblower David Wallace.”

The developer sued Mr. Di Fiore. He wasn’t able to produce a defence and was ordered to pay $56,000 in damages and costs.

Mr. Wallace also didn’t file a defence in his defamation lawsuit. “I’m fresh out of luck,” he wrote in a 2022 e-mail filed in court, explaining that he couldn’t afford a lawyer.

Then, his fortunes changed last year. “Now I’m indemnified and empowered to go after everybody I want to,” he said on Oct. 22, comparing it to a sexual fantasy.

When Ms. Tait began reporting on MHCare last year, he tweeted on May 1 “You are a real journalist. And a damn good and brave one!”

However, by May 20, he argued on his podcast that Mr. Mraiche was treated unfairly because of his Lebanese ancestry.

He livestreamed several times each week about the procurement controversy, either on his own or as a guest on Mr. Di Fiore’s show.

“I’m getting paid. I have three employers. I work for financial interests,” Mr. Wallace said on one podcast. On another episode, he mentioned hiring “several risk management and private detective agencies to get to the bottom of this.”

Though he called himself a journalist, he relied on coarse insults, menacing remarks and allegations with no supporting evidence, followed by dares to sue him.

He disparaged Mr. Guthrie and his wife for accepting MHCare’s hockey tickets, calling the couple “Ticket Boy” and “Tomahawk Tracy,” a reference to steak served at the arena suite.

He called Ms. Mentzelopoulos a “low life” and a “fraudster” and said he would visit her neighbours, friends and relatives. “I’m gonna knock on every door,” he said.

In a court filing, Ms. Mentzelopoulos said she took his words seriously because her family’s addresses had been disclosed on an anonymous X account. The RCMP set up a hazard alert to give priority to 911 calls from her home.

Months before it became public that someone had sent surveillance photos to Mr. Shandro, Mr. Wallace alleged on his podcasts that Mr. Edmonstone committed adultery.

Mr. Wallace said the allegation of infidelity was only a beginning. “That’s just step one,” he said on Oct. 13.

Two days later, he said “I can get a lot stiffer, Edmonstone. And I will. I will.”

He offered $100,000 for tips leading to criminal charges against those he targeted on his podcasts. “If you’ve got the goods on them, sell them to me,” he said on Nov. 9. The livestream ended abruptly when the screen froze, followed by the sound of a flushing toilet.

He tried again the next day. He assumed incorrectly that Mr. Edmonstone is married. “Sandy’s wife, I’m talking to you,” he said. “What better way to get revenge? Turn in Sandy, provide evidence, and then you get the hundred grand.”

As the podcast attacks were unfolding, both Mr. Edmonstone and Ms. Mentzelopoulos complained through their lawyers to the legal team representing AHS.

Mr. Edmonstone said in a court document that he told AHS he was being harassed but he received “no substantive response.”

On Nov. 19, Ms. Mentzelopoulos’s lawyer, Brett Code, sent a letter to counsel for AHS, as well as lawyers acting for the government in her wrongful dismissal suit, complaining that she was “routinely threatened and harassed by a couple of pro-government online podcasters.”

That same day, in the Alberta Legislature, Danielle Smith echoed Mr. Wallace’s jibes. She dismissed a question from Mr. Guthrie with a quip that he had “way too many tomahawk steaks and specialty drinks.”

Mr. Guthrie raised a point of order to object to Ms. Smith using talking points from the podcasts. “I find it astonishing,” he said, “that the Premier would lend credence to an outlet that traffics in harassment and intimidation.”

The following week, Mr. Wallace, wearing media accreditation, attended the annual general meeting of Ms. Smith’s United Conservative Party. Photos from the Premier’s Facebook account included a shot of him walking into the Edmonton venue.

A photojournalist for The Globe took pictures of Mr. Wallace at the event. That weekend, The Globe published an article about Mr. Mraiche and his connections with government officials.

Afterward, Mr. Wallace griped about the paper on Mr. Di Fiore’s Dec. 1 podcast.

He said he had received incriminating tips about Globe journalists and made crude allegations about them without providing any evidence. “We’re coming for you. This is a blood sport and I fucking fully intend to have every one of your heads on my fucking wall,” he said.

The episode was removed within days. On Dec. 5, he moved onto Alberta’s Auditor-General, who is investigating the procurement issue, referring to him as “Doug The Thug Wylie.”

Then, the morning of Dec. 16, Mr. Wallace’s doorbell rang. Four men waited outside.

The banker

The surveillance photos of Mr. Edmonstone were snapped four days after Ms. Mentzelopoulos disclosed in a June 9 court application that she wanted him to be a witness in her lawsuit.

The woman in the photo has not been publicly identified. She is not Mr. Edmonstone’s partner and he denies being unfaithful.

In early July, the anonymous X account called “TheBrokedown” initially used one of the surveillance photos of the woman as its profile picture.

For six months, there was no public reaction from Mr. Edmonstone while Mr. Wallace maligned him online and dared him to sue for defamation.

Mr. Edmonstone was instead quietly planning a counterstrike, using a different legal route.

He declined to be interviewed for this article, but his actions are detailed in court filings.

He saw the July 21 Globe story recounting how Ms. Tait had been tracked and secretly photographed. “The described circumstances felt eerily like my own experiences,” he recalled in a court affidavit.

He said a friend helped check whether the anonymous X account that targeted Ms. Tait was linked to the surveillance against him.

The friend opened X’s password recovery function and entered the username “TheBrokedown” and the phone number that messaged Mr. Shandro. The platform responded by requesting the e-mail associated with the account. This was proof that the account was connected to the surveillance of Mr. Edmonstone because entering a different phone number yielded an error message, the affidavit said.

The affidavit was prepared after Mr. Edmonstone retained Jordan Bierkos, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault.

On his firm’s website, Mr. Bierkos’s biography mentions that he has experience with court-approved enforcement measures known as Anton Piller orders.

Judges can authorize these remedies under exceptional circumstances. Anton Piller orders enable civil parties to conduct a search of someone’s premises without prior notice to preserve records.

Mr. Bierkos went to the judge managing the Mentzelopoulos litigation and argued that there was a “directed and concerted effort” to harass his client, a potential witness in the lawsuit.

Justice Michael Lema issued a restraining order against the podcasters and ordered them to explain why they shouldn’t be found in contempt of court. He also granted an Anton Piller order, which allowed for a search of the podcasters’ homes to seize and copy any electronic record that could identify who it was that directed them.

Mr. Edmonstone retained the private investigations firm of the retired Toronto police detective Tam Bui to locate the podcasters.

They initially thought both podcasters lived in Ontario, so on Nov. 28 Mr. Edmonstone’s legal team got a judge in Ottawa to endorse the search order. However, they couldn’t find Mr. Wallace’s current address.

They stumbled upon a clue while reviewing past podcasts. On a September, 2022, episode, Mr. Wallace stepped outside while he livestreamed, briefly showing a front porch. From those images, the investigators identified a residential development in Gatineau.

Mr. Wallace inadvertently provided corroboration on the Dec. 1 podcast when he mentioned “my home in Quebec.” The investigators staked out the Gatineau location and, on Dec. 9, saw him entering and leaving one of the dwellings.

Mr. Edmonstone’s lawyers then obtained a search order from a Quebec judge on Dec. 12. Four days later, two court-appointed solicitors, a bailiff and a security employee appeared at Mr. Wallace’s doorstep.

Initially, he refused to co-operate, arguing that “he’d been retained by Bryan Ward at Park Law in Alberta to do unspecified work for him,” the solicitors said in their report.

The solicitors spoke on the phone with Mr. Ward. “At times, Mr. Ward indicated that his firm had retained Wallace and Di Fiore on behalf of a ‘third party’ client,” the report said.

Mr. Wallace eventually gave access to his electronic devices. That same day, another team executed the search order at Mr. Di Fiore’s home.

Back in Edmonton, Mr. Bierkos zeroed in on Mr. Wallace’s remarks about working for Mr. Ward. He asked Justice Lema to cite Mr. Ward for contempt of court and order him to disclose on whose behalf he had been acting.

Public records show that Mr. Ward is an Edmonton-area lawyer who has represented Mr. Mraiche in real estate transactions, corporate registrations and court cases.

Mr. Ward didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The electronic records of the podcasters currently remain in the custody of the independent solicitors until the courts decide whether Mr. Edmonstone has grounds to access that information.

Mr. Wallace and Mr. Di Fiore have asked Justice Lema to revoke the Anton Piller order and keep their records private. The judge will hear their application Wednesday.

In a legal brief filed in court, Mr. Alcock, the lawyer for the podcasters, said that the verbal attacks and boasts about digging into Mr. Edmonstone’s life shouldn’t be taken at face value.

The brief said it was wrong to be “relying on comments from the … podcasts for the truth of their contents, rather than for the simple fact that those statements were made.”

The private investigator

During his Sept. 17 podcast, Mr. Wallace had a guest, Tyler Argue, the head of the Calgary risk management firm Westbridge Ventures Canada LP, who spoke about investigating foreign interference in Alberta.

He and Mr. Wallace later expanded on that while pitching a story idea to the media website the Western Standard.

During a Sept. 24 Zoom session, Mr. Wallace and Mr. Argue spoke to Western Standard publisher Derek Fildebrandt and reporter David Wiechnik.

Mr. Argue told them that he had been retained by a law firm representing MHCare and that Mr. Wallace was collaborating with him. “David is on our side now,” he said, adding that Mr. Wallace “was contacted directly by Sam Mraiche, MHCare.”

Mr. Wallace and Mr. Argue said they had discovered that the Alberta separatist campaigner David Parker was colluding with Ms. Tait, and with a former Hezbollah sympathizer, in a plot to fabricate evidence against Mr. Mraiche and overthrow Alberta’s Premier.

In a second Zoom call, on Oct. 7, Mr. Argue was joined by Mr. Ward, the Edmonton-area lawyer, and a health care consultant, Blayne Iskiw.

Mr. Iskiw introduced himself as “one of Sam’s right hands,” while Mr. Ward said he was “general counsel for MHCare, Sam Mraiche.”

The two made no mention of a plot to unseat the Premier. Mr. Ward said they were “interested in getting the true message out.”

The Western Standard eventually published a Jan. 16 article, saying that Mr. Wallace and Mr. Argue never provided evidence to support their claim of a conspiracy.

“We were being used for what appears to be a misinformation campaign. And we don’t take kindly to being fed misinformation,” Mr. Fildebrandt said in an interview with The Globe.

In e-mails responding to questions from The Globe, Mr. Argue confirmed that Mr. Wallace hired him last year to conduct open-source research for a private client – and that he was told by the podcaster they were working for Mr. Mraiche.

In his statement to The Globe, Mr. Argue used a phrase the opposition NDP coined about the procurement controversy: the CorruptCare Scandal.

“Mr. Wallace stated his client was embroiled in the #corruptcare scandal and added that he was helping them by using his podcast as a medium to advance the true narrative of events,” Mr. Argue wrote.

“From time to time, the client was referred to as a law firm, and other times he would mention Mr. Sam Mraiche directly.”

Mr. Argue denies that his firm surveilled Mr. Edmonstone or Ms. Tait. He wouldn’t comment further, explaining that at one point during his retainer, he started reporting to Mr. Ward rather than Mr. Wallace. The lawyer had him sign a non-disclosure agreement, Mr. Argue said.

Mr. Argue said he stopped working for Mr. Ward on Dec. 24 after learning about Mr. Edmonstone’s court application. “Nobody should be harassed or intimidated for their journalistic duties or acting as a witness in any legal matter,” Mr. Argue told The Globe.

Ms. Mentzelopoulos has since applied to join Mr. Edmonstone’s court action to identify who hired the podcasters. “This campaign was designed to punish me for bringing forward whistleblower complaints,” she said in an affidavit.

As for Mr. Wallace, he stated on a Dec. 30 podcast that he looked forward to a legal fight against Mr. Edmonstone. “You invited the devil right into your home,” he said.

The restraining order barred him from making harassing or intimidating comments. That episode and several others were taken down.

No further podcasts have appeared since then.

With reports from Stephanie Chambers