BURST
When alleged international drug kingpin Opinder Singh Sian tried to get his purported bride into Canada a decade ago, the immigration appeal board ruled it was a sham marriage.
The biggest red flag to adjudicator Tim Crowhurst was that the wife, Sukhjeet Kaur Gill, didn’t even know Sian had been seriously injured in a 2008 gangland shooting in Surrey. Or that he had a criminal record.
“This background is particularly relevant to this appeal because the applicant was not aware of the appellant’s criminal history, nor the shooting, nor his work experience at the time of marriage. The panel finds that this is very important information that would be expected to be shared by two persons entering into a genuine relationship,” Crowhurst said in January 2015, rejecting Sian’s appeal to get Gill from India to Canada.
Sian is now facing charges in the U.S. that he was the North American leader of an international drug smuggling organization, moving huge amounts of methamphetamine and fentanyl precursors around the globe.
At one point during the three-year-long investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Sian allegedly told a confidential source that he worked with “Irish organized crime, specifically, the Kinahan family, Italian organized crime and other Canadian organized crime groups.”
He also boasted about his contacts in drug cartels in Mexico and South America.
The Kinahan gang started in Dublin in the 1990s, but is now headquartered in Dubai. It has close ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. Links to Iran and Hezbollah surfaced during a 2023 cocaine smuggling investigation into the Kinahans.
Sian is expected to next appear in a U.S. courtroom July 21. The DEA investigation stretched from Ankara, Turkey, to Australia, with confidential sources and undercover agents on the ground in several countries.
The RCMP’s liaison officer in Ankara collaborated with the Americans throughout their probe, strategizing on how to infiltrate the global drug trafficking network and leveraging intelligence from B.C. federal policing investigators.
Postmedia News has learned that Sian has links to the Brothers Keepers gang, which started in B.C. about a decade ago. But he wasn’t a member.
The BK is affiliated with both the Hells Angels and the Wolfpack gang coalition — both of which have well-documented international networks.
So how could Sian have risen from relative obscurity in B.C. to become the significant player identified in the DEA’s case?
Mike Porteous, a retired Vancouver police superintendent, said Sian isn’t the first B.C. gangster to made his mark internationally in the drug trade. Others like fugitives Ryan Wedding and Robby Alkhalil have also networked on the world stage.
Any B.C. gangster “that has the attributes to actually be successful — intelligence, relationship-building, connections … they can rise,” Porteous said.
It isn’t so much their criminal organization’s links as their individual talents, he said.
“Those kinds of people that build those relationships tend to rise within the hierarchy because they have the skill sets to do the bidding of making money in the drug world.”
Once Mexican cartels set up in Canada almost 20 years ago, they saw the opportunity to not only sell their illicit product, but also to remanufacture it and move it overseas from here, Porteous said.
“They needed people to do their bidding within the lucrative markets.”
B.C.’s anti-gang Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit wouldn’t comment on Sian’s involvement with the Brothers Keepers gang. But media officer Cpl. Sarbjit Sangha said in an email that “ we do not have any active investigation on this person.”
Sian’s criminal convictions for c areless use of a firearm and obstruction of a peace officer date to 2007. But he was regularly stopped by police between 2007 and 2010, often in vehicles with other gangsters — some with the Independent Soldiers — one of the three groups that went on to form the Wolfpack.
In March 2009, police executed a search warrant at the family home in Surrey and found cash and drugs. No charges resulted.
His injuries from the August 2008 Surrey shooting that left Gurpreet Sidhu dead were so serious that he received support from the Crime Victim Assistance Program.
Bluesky: @kimbolan.bsky.social