Canada designated the Lawrence Bishnoi criminal network a terrorist entity in September 2025, a sign of how far one Indian gang’s reach now extends beyond its home turf.
The gang’s alleged North American lieutenant, Satinderjeet Singh, known as Goldy Brar, was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list last month, with U.S. authorities offering up to $1 million for information leading to his capture.
Yet Bishnoi himself, 33, remains locked inside a prison in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reportedly directing operations through concealed phones and encrypted messaging apps.
His targets have increasingly centered on Mumbai’s Hindi-language film industry, where a series of shootings, extortion demands, and threats have rattled one of the world’s most commercially powerful entertainment sectors.
Among the most recent incidents, gunmen injured the driver of actor Tiger Shroff in Mumbai, with an audio message subsequently claiming responsibility and warning: “In the entire film industry, whoever works without aligning with us, or works with Salman Khan, will be killed.”
Police have not confirmed the Bishnoi gang’s involvement in that attack, though the pattern fits a broader campaign that has also included shots fired at actor Salman Khan’s apartment and at filmmaker Rohit Shetty’s Mumbai home.
Actor Ranveer Singh reportedly received an extortion demand of nearly $1.1 million, and a cafe owned by comedian Kapil Sharma in Surrey, Canada, was struck by gunfire on three separate occasions.
Former Mumbai Police Commissioner D. Sivanandhan frames the strategy in blunt terms, saying the gang treats the industry like a cash machine: “They are using Bollywood as an ATM. Insert a card and collect your money.”
Sivanandhan notes that unlike the old Mumbai crime syndicates, the Bishnoi network has no historical roots in the city and targets the film world precisely because it is “loaded with money” and represents a “soft underbelly” with limited organized defenses.
Crime journalist S. Hussain Zaidi, author of “Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia,” argues that an unnamed security professional who protects several film stars put it most plainly: “The base material of extortion is: create fear.”
Bishnoi’s personal grievance against Salman Khan dates to 1998, when Khan was accused of killing a blackbuck, an antelope held sacred by the Bishnoi community, and the gangster reportedly vowed revenge.
Journalist Jupinderjit Singh, who authored “Gangs of Punjab,” sees that feud as providing moral cover, arguing that criminals “always try to find something that makes them a moral guardian.”
Singh traces the broader ambition to a power vacuum left by an earlier generation of Mumbai crime bosses, stating plainly: “With Dawood Ibrahim and his counterparts away, there was a vacancy, and Lawrence Bishnoi is trying to exploit that.”
In the 1990s, figures like Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem, and Chhota Shakeel were deeply embedded in Bollywood financing, using film investments to launder profits, and the consequences of non-cooperation were often lethal, including the 1997 murder of T-Series founder Gulshan Kumar and the 2000 shooting of filmmaker Rakesh Roshan.
At the peak of that era in 1998, Sivanandhan says 101 businessmen were shot dead in a single year, roughly one every three days, mostly over unpaid extortion demands, before a crackdown and a 1999 organized crime law broke the gangs’ grip.
Zaidi cautions against overstating the current threat, saying: “I won’t say resurgence, because that would be a bit of an exaggeration,” pointing out that the shift to digital payments has made large cash transactions far harder to conceal.
Bishnoi’s operation differs structurally from its predecessors in another key way: the gang recruits mostly young, economically desperate men online, drawn by what Singh describes as the “lore” surrounding the imprisoned gang leader.
The All India Cine Workers Association President Suresh Shyamlal Gupta has written to Home Minister Amit Shah warning that if the climate of fear persists, leading industry figures may feel compelled to leave Mumbai entirely.
With hundreds of thousands of livelihoods tied to the Mumbai film industry and several prominent stars already tightening their personal security arrangements, the question of whether India’s authorities can contain a gang that operates across continents from behind prison walls grows more pressing by the month.
