Indo-Canadian organized crime


Indo-Canadian organized crime groups are based in Canada and predominantly of Indian origin. Collectively, these groups are the third major homegrown organized crime problem in Canada, next to the outlaw motorcycle clubs and Native American criminal organizations. Annual police report ranked them third in terms of sophistication and strength in British Columbia, only behind the aforementioned biker gangs and Asian criminal organizations such as the Triads and Vietnamese drug clans.

History

Many of the young men involved today come from second and third-generation backgrounds. These individuals were involved in petty street crimes, older and more calculated criminals from the community quickly saw opportunities to make a profit of the situation.
Often using clan-based connections in their homeland Punjab mainly in rural parts, organized criminals from there were able to build criminal empires making use of young street gangs. Unfortunately Punjabi-Canadian gang violence is still on a high, recorded that from 2006 to 2014, 34 South Asians had been murdered by gang violence making up for 21.3% of gang deaths in British Columbia. Rivals post rap songs advocating murder. Four months after allegedly committing his second murder, a young Surrey man posted a rap tribute to slain Brothers Keepers founder Gavinder Grewal online. Under his rapper name T-Sav, Tyrel Nguyen Quesnelle boasted that he would both die and kill for the late gang leader. "They took GG from us, realest trapper ever living. I swear we riding out for you till they all ain't living," his song, titled "My Life", goes. "I caught my first body when you was in school... Brothers Keepers, that's a life contract, little n***a." Police say the songs advocating violence and revenge and boasting about murder and drug trafficking are ramping up tensions in an already volatile gang landscape. And the Brothers Keepers aren’t the only ones calling out their enemies musically. After his release from a B.C. jail last fall, a rapper calling himself Lolo Lanski posted his song Dedman to SoundCloud and YouTube. It had over 80,000 downloads as of this week. The anti-Brothers Keepers song describes Grewal being shot inside his penthouse home—noting that the killer “sent lead to his head” and that the violence was part of “trying to put a BK on TV." Bizarrely, the song includes an audio excerpt of the recorded 911 call made by Grewal’s brother Manbir inside the suite after the BK boss was killed. While rap is a new development in the current conflict between the Brothers Keepers and rivals in both the Kang group and the United Nations gang, police in B.C. have seen the overlap between rap and gang culture before.

Activities

The main trade of the Punjabi-Canadian crime groups is the trafficking of heroin. Punjabi-Canadian crime bosses use their family connections in Punjab to bring in the drug. Punjabi-Canadian crime groups widened the reach of their activities and delved criminal areas such as extortion, kidnapping, money laundering and above all contract killing. Organized gangs from the community have infiltrated the local transportation business, setting up connections with Mexican drug cartels and using truck drivers to smuggle cocaine and hashish from Mexico into the United States and Canada.
Drug dealing powerd contract Killing with high rates $50,000-100,000 in Canada due to the high profits earned and new rivals trying to steal profits, this leds to more people getting involved and tricks the federal from getting individual rather then the network of gang.

Gangs

Most Indo-Canadian gangs in Ontario and Alberta are either clans controlled by one family with friends and relatives associated with the group, small groups involved in petty crimes or networks of truck drivers involved in cross-border drug smuggling. The largest organized Indo-Canadian gang presence is in British Columbia.
The largest gangs are: