Two Stockton men were among those arrested by federal agents as part of a massive crackdown on organized crime operations based in India and operating across the globe.
Gurlal Singh, 22, and Sahibdeep Singh, 24, are alleged members of a criminal gang based in the Punjab region of India. They are charged with racketeering, drug and gun smuggling, and extortion in one of three separate court cases.
Altogether, the law enforcement efforts have resulted in 24 arrests in the U.S. and abroad; 10 other people are still being sought, said Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California. Some are in custody, while others are still on the run, Essayli announced this week during a news conference in Los Angeles.
In California alone, 11 people were arrested, including Gurlal Singh and Sahibdeep Singh. The Singh name is common among Punjabis; authorities gave no indication whether any of those indicted are related.
In Stockton and San Joaquin County, the massive sweep also included the execution of 23 search warrants.
The searches and arrests mark the culmination of a yearslong investigation called “Operation Hard Ball” that targeted different India-based organized crime units.
The “coordinated operation strikes at the heart of three brutal transnational organizations that have terrorized families, exploited communities, and stolen lives through ruthless acts of violence in the U.S. and abroad,” Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said in a statement Tuesday.
Authorities allege that Gurlal Singh and Sahibdeep Singh are members of the Jaggu Bhagwanpuria crime syndicate. Its members have committed or threatened to commit “murder, kidnappings, assaults, and extortion to create a climate of fear,” the indictment states.
The gang found recruits by preying on young, impoverished youths in India, prosecutors say. Anyone found disloyal could count on seeing family members harmed or killed in retribution, according to the federal complaints. Members were sent abroad from India using visas for foreign students or foreign workers, officials said.
Gurlal Singh, who prosecutors say is in the U.S. illegally, is accused of taking part in a plot to frame a family in India for a slaying in which none were actually involved. Authorities say he threatened the family and then gave their names to a corrupt law enforcement officer in India’s Punjab state to falsely implicate them in the homicide. The corrupt official tried to extort the family over the case, the indictment states.
Both Gurlal Singh and Sahibdeep Singh are accused of attempting to sell illegal automatic weapons and grenades in July 2025. Sahibdeep Singh is also implicated in efforts to sell cocaine and heroin.
Gurlal Singh and others were also accused of using social media to take credit for criminal acts, including murder, “to enhance the Bhagwanpuria OCG’s reputation for extreme violence and encourage victim compliance with extortion schemes,” according to the indictment.
Bhagwanpuria’s syndicate is also linked to the prime defendant in another of the cases announced this week, authorities said. In that indictment, Laurence Bishoi is accused of being the head of an organized crime ring that engaged in political assassinations and other killings, as well as shootings, kidnappings, maimings and assaults.
Federal officials say Bishnoi, 33, portrayed himself as a pious patriot, but was actually directing far-flung criminal operations, including murder-for-hire plots; the trafficking of cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin in the U.S.; and human smuggling.
Bishoi was indicted, along with others, on federal charges of racketeering, conspiracy to interfere with commerce through extortion and drug dealing.
To obtain narcotics to sell, the Bishnoi gang would steal drugs from other criminal organizations, prosecutors say. The profits from the illicit global operations would then be flown back to India.
One of the crimes Bishnoi was linked to involved a hit on a prominent Punjabi religious and political leader in Canada in November 2023.
Bishnoi is accused of providing three assassins with a photo of the target — identified in the indictment only by the initials “H.S.N.” Days later, Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar was fatally shot as he walked out of a temple in Surrey, British Columbia, in Canada. The assassins are not named in the complaint.
The following November, the gang was implicated in the shooting of an Indian actor and singer in Vancouver, B.C. Bishnoi’s gang took credit for that shooting, authorities said, warning in a Facebook post written in Punjabi: “No one can save you from us.”