Why is this story worth your time? Well, Goldy Brar is the newest member of the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List.
But who is he? There are few criminals that fascinate me more than Goldy Brar. I have been covering Brar and his erstwhile partner, Lawrence Bishnoi, since 2024.
They have written one of the defining stories of 21st-century criminal expansion.
Brar and Bishnoi came out of the same world of Punjab student politics and gang rivalries, but their paths separated early. Bishnoi was repeatedly jailed in India; Brar left for Canada in 2017 on a student permit. Within a decade, he was one of the most dangerous criminal figures in the country.
Extortion was the core business, but young Indian men, mostly from Punjab, would enter Canada on student and temporary-worker visas carrying out shootings and other violent jobs linked to the wider Bishnoi network.
With Brar in Ontario, and Bishnoi in prison in India, the two men built a unique criminal empire.
Gradually, they expanded. Bishnoi-linked extortion and shootings appeared across British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, while Brar’s alleged operations increasingly reached into the United States. Federal prosecutors now accuse him of helping direct extortion in California, arranging cocaine transport towards Canada and ordering the theft of hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from other traffickers around Los Angeles.
By 2025, their relationship had fractured and the Bishnoi vs. Brar gang war spread across India, Canada, Dubai and California. Now, the FBI sees Brar as having his own network.
So what do we know of Goldy Brar himself?
