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They were wanted men in India . They reached the United States and Canada on student visas and asylum claims, and from quiet addresses in California and British Columbia they rebuilt the criminal empires they had left behind. American and Canadian police are only now catching up.
In December 2023, a businessman in India picked up a video call and found himself looking at one of the most feared crime bosses in the country. The caller did something strange for a man who had spent years avoiding the law. He let his face be seen. Pay, he told the businessman, or die.
The victim took a screenshot. According to the FBI , that image is now part of the evidence in a federal case being run out of Sacramento , roughly eight thousand miles from the prison cell the caller was sitting in.
The man on the screen was Lawrence Bishnoi. He has been locked up in India for most of the past decade. And yet the people who carry out his orders, the men who place the calls, collect the money and arrange the shootings, are no longer in India at all. A federal indictment unsealed in California in November 2025 puts a number of them in the United States.
This is the part worth sitting with. The threat is not on its way. It has been here for years, and it is growing.
Wrong people in the crosshairs
Washington spends much of its energy talking about illegal immigration. The men at the center of this story do not fit that conversation. They are not laborers who slipped across a border looking for work. They are fugitives wanted in their own country for murder, extortion and drug trafficking, and most of them came in through the front door, on student visas and asylum applications. Once here, they went back to work.
A former DHS officer said that they did not arrive to prey on Americans. Not at first. They came because the United States and Canada were safe ground from which to commit crimes against people back home. From an apartment in the Central Valley or a suburb outside Vancouver, a man can order a killing in India and sleep soundly, knowing that extradition is slow, that an asylum claim can stretch on for years, and that a notice from Indian police will not, by itself, get him arrested.
Then the model grew up. The same crews that terrorized businessmen in Delhi started calling shop owners in Sacramento. The same logistics networks that moved guns and cash began moving cocaine and the chemicals used to make fentanyl. A safe house became a headquarters.
Three governments now describe the same organization in strikingly similar language. The FBI calls it one of India's most wanted criminal networks. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police calls it a transnational criminal organization. Indian police call it a syndicate that reaches across continents. None of them contradict the others. That kind of agreement, across three countries that do not always see eye to eye, is rare.
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The men who fled the law
What follows is drawn from an inter-governmental fugitive list accessed by Newsweek via verified sources in India, across continents, federal indictments, Interpol notices, filings by India's National Investigation Agency, statements from Indian state police, and publically available Canadian government records. Everyone named here is the subject of public charges, a formal designation, or law enforcement action. Allegations remain allegations until a court says otherwise.
Lawrence Bishnoi sits at the center. He is named by India's National Investigation Agency as the head of a crime and terror syndicate, the subject of a federal case in Delhi, and a man facing roughly eighty criminal cases across several Indian states under the country's anti-terror law, its penal code and its arms statutes. From prison, according to the FBI, he runs his operation through encrypted apps, relaying instructions to operatives in the United States. The December 2023 video call is one of the few times he has been tied, on camera, directly to a threat.
Anmol Bishnoi , his younger brother, was for a while the most important figure the network had on American soil. India's investigators say he kept the syndicate running from the United States, sheltered its shooters, and arranged extortion back home from foreign ground. He fled India in 2022 on a forged passport, moving through Dubai and Kenya before settling in California, where his asylum claim was eventually rejected. He faces at least eighteen cases in India, among them the October 2024 murder of the politician Baba Siddique, the shooting outside the actor Salman Khan's home in April 2024, and the 2022 killing of the singer Sidhu Moose Wala. American authorities removed him to India on November 18, 2025. He was arrested the moment he landed.
Goldy Brar , whose given name is Satinderjit Singh, is the man who publicly claimed the Moose Wala killing. India has designated him a terrorist under its anti-terror law, the UAPA, and he is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice. Indian agencies told Newsweek that h…
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