The Lawrence Bishnoi gang purportedly wrote to police in Abbotsford, B.C., directly last summer, claiming to have more than 1,000 foot soldiers in Canada ready to carry out extortions, according to a police witness who testified at an immigration hearing Thursday.
Const. Kevin St. Louis with the Edmonton Police Service told an Immigration and Refugee Board member overseeing a hearing for a suspected member of the gang that the letter spoke to the scale and hierarchy of a criminal organization operating across Canada.
“This specific letter outlined their criminal organization where they talked about having upwards of 1,000 individuals who are willing to carry out these shootings on behalf of the group,” St. Louis testified.
“It also alluded to how every business needs to pay their tax.”
‘A fracture in the group’
St. Louis was giving evidence at an admissibility hearing for Jashandeep Singh, an Indian national who Edmonton police identified last summer as part of what has turned into a sprawling investigation into an extortion network operating in Ontario, Alberta and B.C.
Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship wants to deport Singh for organized criminality.
As primary investigating officer for Project Garter — also known as Project Al-Extortion — St. Louis spoke at length about fractures among the extortionists, their modus operandi and the structure of their organization.
St. Louis told the tribunal that police initially believed the main perpetrators were members of the global gang Lawrence Bishnoi has been running from prison in India, a group the federal government listed as a terrorist entity last year.
“As the investigation continued we believe there was a fracture in the group,” St. Louis testified.
“This ultimately resulted in several different groups carrying out the same type of crime.”
Regardless of gang affiliation, the detective said the extortionists have been targeting wealthy South Asian business owners by either demands for money followed by shootings where individuals refuse to pay, or shootings followed by demands for cash.
Movement of suspects, vehicles, weapons
As far as leadership is concerned, St. Louis said three names have emerged through WhatsApp texts and phone calls: Lawrence Bishnoi; Bishnoi’s former ally and now-enemy Goldy Brar; and “an individual identified as Jora Sidhu.”
“Jora Sidhu was identified as a male that’s involved in organized crime under the Lawrence Bishnoi gang,” St. Louis told the hearing.
“He was ultimately identified via his voice by the RCMP national co-ordination centre. And he was the one that was making the WhatsApp phone calls.”
St. Louis’ testimony is the first time Jora Sidhu’s name has emerged in official proceedings connected with Canadian extortion cases.
According to Indian media reports, a close Bishnoi associate by the same name, also known as Sippa, had his throat slit in Dubai in December in a killing credited to a rival gangster.
St. Louis said the people carrying out violent acts in Canada are at the bottom of a pyramid that sees them paid “a very small financial gain.”
“I think a lot of them look at it as being part of an organization or group,” he told the immigration hearing.
“Every individual that we’ve identified during this investigation … is a temporary foreign worker or on a student visa and relatively new to Canada.”
In addition to extortion, St. Louis said suspects have been involved in insurance fraud and false reports about allegedly stolen vehicles that are used to commit crimes before being found burnt on the side of the road.
He said suspects, weapons and vehicles move constantly from province to province. But he said the extortion demands in each jurisdiction are very similar and in some cases appear to originate from the same virtually untraceable international WhatsApp numbers.
“We’ve seen the same firearm used in occurrences in Ontario, Alberta, as well as British Columbia,” he said.
“It makes it very challenging. The pace at which these firearms are being moved between different provinces makes it very difficult to seize and locate these firearms.”
Links to a shooting in Edmonton
Thursday’s hearing was held virtually, with St. Louis testifying from a boardroom in Edmonton.
Wearing a black turban and a black Balenciaga T-shirt, Jashandeep Singh watched the proceedings from a computer in what appeared to be a bedroom. Two stuffed animals sat on a bookshelf over his right shoulder.
His name emerged during an investigation into a mid-level player in the gang named Arshdeep Singh, who was deported to India after admitting to organized criminality earlier this year.
CBC News has reported extensively on Arshdeep Singh’s admissibility hearing, which revealed his ties to arsons and shootings in Ontario, Alberta and B.C.
Following the CBC’s reporting on the links between Arshdeep Singh and another extortion suspect named Sukhnaaz Singh Sandhu, the CBSA identified the deportation of both men as proof of expanded efforts to disrupt national extortion networks.
St. Louis said investigators were tracking Arshdeep Singh at the time social media video emerged of him shooting a pink-handled firearm into the air on a gravel road in Edmonton last August.
He said police went to the site afterward and recovered shell casings that were later found to match those discovered after a shooting months earlier at Kap’s Cafe in Surrey.
Police searched Jashandeep Singh’s home and seized his phones as they targeted the addresses and alleged associates who Arshdeep Singh had been in contact with in the hours after he was seen shooting the weapon in Edmonton.
According to St. Louis, Jashandeep Singh lived at one of those homes and was later seen in videos holding the gun, at one point pointing it at the head of another individual.
The weapon was never recovered. Police believe Arshdeep Singh left it with Jashandeep Singh who gave the gun and a number of other firearms to a female associate hours before his home was raided.
‘The sense of the larger picture’
In cross-examination, St. Louis admitted that despite social media and video evidence showing his acquaintance with other suspects, there is no direct evidence tying Jashandeep Singh to any specific extortions and shootings.
He said Jashandeep Singh has not been charged with any crimes at this point, but said doing so would trigger disclosure in criminal court that could jeopardize other criminal investigations.
“We are still receiving a significant amount of information from police with other police services,” St. Louis said.
“This investigation, in the sense of the larger picture, is still ongoing across the country.”
In an email to CBC News, the Abbotsford Police Department (AbbyPD) confirmed the receipt of the letter from the Bishnoi gang last August.
“Details of this letter were shared with our law enforcement partners engaged in combatting the extortion crisis across Canada,” said Abbotsford police spokesperson Sgt. Paul Walker.
“Detectives working in our internal AbbyPD extortion task force (Operation Community Shield) began to investigate the origin of this letter and the contents spoken about within.”
The standard to determine immigration inadmissibility is reasonable grounds to believe, which is less than the balance of probabilities required in civil court and a much less demanding standard than the beyond a reasonable doubt required for a criminal conviction.
Jashandeep Singh is expected to testify on his own behalf on Friday.
