The Alberta government says it won't revamp its court system to get federal funding for 17 judges dedicated to hearing family court cases.

Ottawa now says that $10.9 million a year set aside for those Alberta family court judges is off the table and will be spent in superior court appointments across the country.

"It's profoundly disappointing that they offered those with a number of conditions attached to them," Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery said in an interview Wednesday. "Those conditions simply do not work here in Alberta."

Amery said the province and the federal government agree Alberta's superior court, the Court of King's Bench, needs more judges. However, the United Conservative Party government isn't willing to remodel family courts to get the funding, he said.

Family law is a mix of provincial and federal statutes, which means some Canadians must navigate both provincial and superior courts when disputes arise.

Superior courts with federally-appointed judges have exclusive jurisdiction to hear divorce cases and property issues. Common-law couples can head to the Alberta Court of Justice and appear before provincially-appointed judges. Both courts can hear matters of child support, access and custody.

Unified family courts are a one-stop shop for the public and lawyers. Proponents, including Edmonton family lawyer Jim Bird, say they're convenient, have a consistent set of rules and include judges who specialize in family matters.

A 2009 federal government evaluation of the unified courts, which operate in seven provinces, found they were more likely to offer out-of-court resolutions, could more efficiently resolve some issues, and gave judges more opportunities to collaborate on complex cases.

Bird said unified courts are more accessible for people representing themselves or receiving limited legal help.

The federal government first offered to fund 17 unified family court judge positions in Alberta in 2018, Amery's press secretary, Chinenye Anokwuru said in an email Thursday.

She said Ottawa never put a dollar figure on the offer and that Alberta's court system would have had to pay for courtroom space and support staff.

Alberta declined the offer in March 2020 after the province decided to work within the existing court structure, she said. Publicly, at that time, the government said the unified family court project was suspended.

Amery said the Alberta Court of Justice is effectively handling most cases and would have been cut out of the process.

"Ottawa, once again, as usual, is imposing the Ottawa-knows-best philosophy, and that simply won't work here in this province," he said.

The province has instead introduced a family justice strategy by hiring more staff for "pre-court services" in Edmonton, Calgary and Red Deer. The province hope it can divert more families from court hearings by requiring most cases to try mediation first, offering other alternative dispute resolution options, and funding family court counsellors.

Lawyers disappointed by move

Federal budget documents, released Tuesday, say the money allocated for the Alberta judges will be redistributed to appoint superior court judges across the country where they are most needed.

The federal ministries of finance and justice did not answer CBC News' questions by publication time. It's unclear whether Alberta will get any new federally-appointed judges.

Bird is among lawyers disappointed by the decisions. He said his clients who need to get before a judge to resolve conflicts are waiting months to get court dates.

It's detrimental to children and parents when heart-wrenching, high-stress family court matters drag on, he said.

Alberta previously had a plan to adopt a unified family court system by 2020, and Bird said he doesn't understand why that changed.

"The blaming doesn't help the regular person or lawyers either way," he said of the federal-provincial political impasse.

Canadian Bar Association Alberta branch president Kyle Kawanami said he is also disappointed the province won't accept dedicated family court judges.

"It's not good news," Kawanami said, adding that he hopes the province will be open to revisiting the idea later.

Not only would a unified family court be easier to navigate, but it would free up other judges to focus on criminal, civil and commercial cases, which would improve overall court access, Kawanami said.

He said he hopes the province's family justice strategy will accomplish some of the efficiencies lawyers are looking for.

NDP justice critic Irfan Sabir said the decision is another move by the UCP government to under-resource Alberta courts. The Opposition supports the unified model.

"The lawyer organizations have been asking for it. Child advocates have been asking for it. Family law practitioners have been asking for it. Everybody was asking for it," Sabir said on Thursday. "But for this government, it's more important to pick fights with the federal government than to do the right thing."

Alexander Vinogradsky's Facebook posts share puns, poke fun at Gen Z and show off a trip to Tokyo Disneyland last year. In others, he is smiling or highlighting damaged cars in need of a tow.

But beneath the cheerful faces and overseas vacations, a constant menace lingered in Vinogradsky's life: as a kingpin in the Toronto area's tow truck underworld, he was a marked man. 

Before he was gunned down March 28 outside a north-end Toronto plaza, he owned Paramount Towing, one of four outfits allegedly locked in a deadly turf war that prompted a major police crackdown in 2019 and 2020. The investigation prompted dozens of arrests — Vinogradsky's included.

And though he was never charged in any murder plots, investigators had information the tow truck boss ordered hits on at least two perceived rivals in late 2018, according to court decisions that have not previously been reported on. One of those men survived a drive-by shooting while the other, Soheil "Cadi" Rafipour, was shot dead that Christmas Eve. 

"The owner of Paramount Towing was identified as Alex Vinogradsky and the confidential information received suggested that the murder of Mr. Rafipour had been ordered by Mr. Vinogradsky," an Ontario Superior Court judge wrote in a trial-related ruling published in January, recounting the steps police took to investigate the crime.  

Two men — one of whom worked for Paramount Towing, according to evidence presented at their pre-trial hearings — were convicted this past December for the Christmas Eve slaying.

Whether he knew it or not, Vinogradsky appeared to have stepped into a hornet's nest. According to court records obtained by CBC News, both of the targets in those 2018 shootings were associates of a Toronto resident named Girolamo Commisso — the nephew of Cosimo Commisso, a man long alleged to be a senior Mafia figure in the Greater Toronto Area. 

Police have not named any suspects or made any arrests in Vinogradsky's killing.

WATCH | Police reveal links between towing industry, organized crime: 

The first of the two shootings allegedly ordered by Vinogradsky targeted a man named Sergei Manukian. He and Rafipour had ambitions to start a competing tow truck business in the GTA with the goal of bringing in more clients to Manukian's existing physical rehabilitation clinic — namely, the people in the wrecked cars they would be towing, a judge said investigators had learned. 

Manukian was sitting outside his clinic — barely a block from the Toronto plaza where Vinogradsky would be killed six years later — in the driver's seat of a black Jeep, smoking a cigarette and chatting with a friend named Jonathan Salazar-Blanco in the passenger seat. Two men in a grey sedan drove up and fired 21 bullets at them. The sedan then tried to speed away, but crashed into a nearby dumpster.

Neither man was injured; Manukian chased after one of the attackers and managed to subdue him. He was charged in relation to this incident and a video presented in court shows him repeatedly striking and wrestling a man to the ground. He was later convicted of assault and given an absolute discharge.

The day after the drive-by shooting, Salazar-Blanco told police, he flew to his native Costa Rica because he was afraid for his life. He told them he bought a last-minute ticket with money from friends, including Girolamo Commisso and their associate Alex Yizhak. 

Coincidentally, they had just learned that Vinogradsky was possibly also in or travelling to Costa Rica.

Commisso, Yizhak and Salazar-Blanco then began to make arrangements that would lead to police charging them with conspiring to murder Vinogradsky. 

All three were acquitted of the charges. But phone messages between the three men, obtained by police through search warrants connected to the Project Kraken investigation that included corruption in the towing industry, suggest there was no love lost between them and the Paramount Towing chief. 

Shortly after Salazar-Blanco landed in Liberia, Costa Rica, he messaged Commisso on WhatsApp about an apparent plan to get a gun. 

A police officer who investigated the case would later file a sworn statement saying that he believed "maquina" — Spanish for "machine" — was slang for a gun. 

"I believe Salazar-Blanco is speaking about obtaining a cheap and smaller caliber firearm to keep noise down while firing it," he wrote.

There was no evidence Commisso ever sent any of the money discussed in the texts.

In messages a few minutes later, Salazar-Blanco tells Commisso from the airport: "Im here and not leaving," and "Ill do it with my bare hands if i have to."

And then just over an hour later: "I got it bro if he comes by here hes mine." Commisso replied: "let's hope u can get the exact flight."

Salazar-Blanco was simultaneously also texting with Yizhak. 

A few hours later, Salazar-Blanco messaged a photo of his hand cradling a loaded revolver. 

"It's on ma [N-word]," he wrote. 

However, Salazar-Blanco never found Vinogradsky in Costa Rica. According to further text exchanges filed in court, the men appear to have learned he was actually in Miami.

Salazar-Blanco was acquitted of conspiracy to commit murder in February 2022 when a judge ruled that while she had no reasonable doubt that there "was a conspiracy to find and kill Mr. Vinogradsky," it wasn't clear that Salazar-Blanco had a true intention to be a part of it based on the phone messages and his police interrogation. He could have been bluffing, the judge said.

The WhatsApp messages were never before the court at Commisso and Yizhak's brief trial in June 2022 because both men were immediately acquitted after the Crown announced its case couldn't go forward without its key witness, Salazar-Blanco. He had been personally subpoenaed but was unlikely to attend to testify, a prosecutor said. 

"It really would give it too much credit to say there was a weak case against both men," said defence lawyer Greg Lafontaine, who represented Yizhak at trial and both defendants at their preliminary hearing. 

"There was absolutely no case of guilt at all."

Reached earlier this week, Commisso said he had no comment. Salazar-Blanco did not reply to a request for comment sent through his former lawyer.

2019 drive-by shooting

It wasn't the last time Vinogradsky was targeted. 

In spring 2020, he was swept up in the police crackdown on the Greater Toronto Area's tow truck turf wars and faced charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit arson and a number of organized-crime offences. 

He brought a court application to have his home address redacted from evidence that would be disclosed to the 50-plus defendants, as previously reported in the Toronto Star. 

That application revealed that in December 2018, Toronto-area police had warned him they had information that his life was in danger. Soon after, Vinogradsky and his family moved to a different home. 

In April 2019, he went back to his former home and those threats became a reality.

While he was parked outside, the 2020 ruling on his application noted, another vehicle drove past and a man in the front passenger seat began firing a handgun at him. He drove away with the other car in pursuit, a man still firing at him.

A bullet hit him under his left armpit, the ruling said, but the injury was minor. 

In a statement he gave to police after the incident, Vinogradsky said he felt like "a dead man with money on [his] head," but wouldn't say who he thought was responsible, telling officers, "I have to think about my street cred." 

In June 2020, multiple cars and trucks were set on fire outside one of Vinogradsky's businesses.

LISTEN | Arson, fraud and murder in the tow truck industry:

The charges against Vinogradsky were dropped in 2022 when prosecutors decided they couldn't meet their obligation to disclose all relevant evidence to the defence without compromising the identity of one or more confidential police informants.   

Vinogradsky went back to work running Paramount Towing, posting a photo of a damaged car on Facebook as recently as Feb. 22 — five weeks before his death — with the comment "Another day on the job" and his company's phone number.

Reached by CBC News last week, a member of Vinogradsky's immediate family said they had "nothing to add right now." 

After arresting Vinogradsky and more than 50 others in 2020 amid the tow truck turf wars, police announced that they were dismantling "four distinct criminal organizations." They said, "We expect the extreme level of violence we have seen in our community to diminish." 

But the industry is still reeling.

Just last month, two masked people doused a tow truck in liquid and set it on fire at a strip mall in Richmond Hill, Ont. 

The week before, A Action Towing and Recovery, a company based in Burlington, Ont., said three of its trucks were set ablaze overnight. Those incidents followed a rash of apparent tow truck arsons in the Greater Toronto Area last summer and fall.  

A Action Towing's owner, Doug Murray, told CBC News that there's been a significant drop in violent incidents between tow truck operators in some areas, but in others violence can persist. 

"As long as guys are fighting for the tow and chasing for the tow, there's going to be people angry with each other."