A lawyer who previously represented a man now trying to withdraw his guilty pleas in a drug case, alleging he was forced to enter them by a Winnipeg police officer who threatened him at gunpoint, says he never heard anything about that story.

The lawyer was called to testify Thursday. His former client, an admitted drug trafficker, told court Wednesday that Elston Bostock and another trafficker told him they would kill him and dump his body in the river because they feared he was going to implicate them during his prosecution.

“Did he mention anything at all [that] happened to him on the Saturday before he entered guilty pleas?” Crown attorney Matthew Sinclair asked the lawyer Thursday during direct examination before Court of King’s Bench Justice Jeffrey Harris.

“No. If [he] had suggested to us that he was entering the guilty plea because he was being coerced, forced, threatened or anything of that nature, we would have taken other steps. That’s not what happened,” the lawyer replied.

Court heard the man waived the responsibility to adhere to lawyer-client privilege so he could testify in the hearing, where the man is seeking to withdraw his pleas on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Both men’s names, along with a number of other people who testified or were mentioned in court, are under a publication ban.

Bostock, a veteran constable, was sentenced to seven years in prison in January and removed from the Winnipeg Police Service after he admitted to a long list of crimes involving corruption and selling drugs.

The man trying to withdraw his guilty pleas told court Wednesday he came to Canada as an international student and ended up becoming addicted to gambling and owing money to drug traffickers, who forced him to work for them.

An agreed statement of facts read in court when the man entered the guilty pleas said he sold drugs to an undercover officer several times before being arrested in 2023. He was later arrested on new drug charges last year, a day after pleading guilty in the first case.

On Thursday, the man’s former lawyer said his then-client didn’t say he was being forced to sell drugs at any point before he pleaded guilty. The lawyer also said the first time the man brought up Bostock by name was in August 2025, a few weeks after the now-disgraced officer’s highly publicized re-arrest. 

The lawyer said that at the time, he contacted the prosecutor in charge of the Bostock case, looking for evidence to support the man’s claims the officer had called him multiple times and threatened him. The prosecutor said he had no recollection of ever coming across his client’s name in the Bostock evidence and assured him that “if there was any suggestion of any extortion,” Bostock would have been charged with that, too, the lawyer testified.

“If we were misled by the Crowns regarding what’s in those conversations, then so be it. But we took what we felt were the appropriate steps to try and protect [him],” the defence lawyer said.

The lawyer said the man later changed his story on Bostock’s alleged threats, saying it was only two phone calls and that both came from blocked numbers.

The lawyer, who said he stopped representing the man by October 2025, also testified the man’s story changed a number of times throughout the drug-trafficking case he represented him in, when the evidence didn’t support his explanations. The lawyer also disputed several claims the man made in a sworn affidavit submitted as part of the bid to withdraw his guilty pleas.

Those claims included that the man told the lawyer multiple times he was being forced to sell drugs, that a drug trafficker the man said he feared and was being forced to work for paid for the lawyer’s fees, and that that man attended many of their meetings to discuss the case.

The man at the centre of the case appeared upset in court during much of his-former lawyer’s testimony Thursday, often shaking his head, looking at the ceiling or whispering to his current lawyers with a wide-eyed expression on his face.

‘They are very powerful’

Court heard earlier Thursday from one of the man’s childhood friends, who testified remotely from his home country with the help of a translator that he never knew his friend to be involved with drugs, gambling or lying before he came to Canada.

Audio from the man’s RCMP interview after he was arrested in 2025 — which was the first time the lawyer who testified said he heard a suggestion the man was being threatened or forced to sell drugs — was played Thursday.

In that interview, the man expressed fear the people he worked for were going to harm him or his family and told the officer interviewing him that the traffickers said “they never got caught because they are very powerful, ’cause of their link to the cops.”

“Dirty cops piss me off. Like, you have no idea,” the officer said. “So, if [the trafficker’s] saying that he’s got cops in his pocket, I want to know who they are.”

The man also told the officer he was worried police were going to kill him once he was taken into custody.

“No one’s going to kill you here,” the officer replied, to which the man said he’d heard of that happening.

“In other countries,” the officer said. “Not this one. OK?”

The hearing for the man trying to withdraw his pleas is expected to continue at a later date.