Harsimran Singh spent months organizing what was supposed to be a breakthrough moment for his sport. A Kabaddi world cup. Stockton, Calif. An expected crowd of 15,000 fans.
Then the athletes started pulling out.
Singh, who serves as president of the American Kabaddi Federation, pushed for straight answers. What he pieced together from players and law enforcement contacts was deeply unsettling: someone was working the phones, pressuring athletes to skip the tournament and manipulate its outcome. The callers weren’t random. Many were gang members sitting inside Indian prisons, reaching across the Pacific to threaten players directly.
“The players were very afraid; if they got a call, they didn’t want to go against gangsters. They were unwilling to play because they didn’t want to compromise their own safety and their family’s security,” Singh said.
What happened to Singh’s tournament wasn’t an isolated shakedown. It reflected something broader, a pattern of extortion and violence that’s been hitting Indian and Punjabi Sikh communities across California for years, with particular intensity since 2023.
The mechanics aren’t complicated. A gang associate calls, makes a demand, and sets a deadline. Refuse, and the consequences land on family members, property, or businesses, sometimes in California, sometimes back in India. That cross-border threat structure is the whole point. Victims don’t just worry about themselves. They worry about relatives in Punjab who can’t call 911.
Over 250,000 Sikhs live in California, the largest such concentration in the United States, according to CalMatters reporting on the extortion wave. That population, shaped by decades of immigration from Punjab and neighboring states, has built genuine wealth here. It’s also tightly networked, which cuts both ways. Strong community ties help people thrive. They also give criminal organizations a map of who to call.
California law enforcement has been tracking this for a while. Police in India told CalMatters that criminal networks tend to target “real estate developers, liquor contractors, transporters, and local businessmen,” people who have assets worth extracting. A Haryana organized crime official summed up California’s appeal bluntly: “One of the primary reasons is the large Indian diaspora in California, which provides a degree of anonymity and social cover.”
That anonymity matters. Gang-connected callers can operate from Indian prisons, relay instructions through intermediaries, and collect money through informal transfer networks that don’t trip U.S. wire fraud sensors the same way traditional banking does. Local police can’t easily subpoena a phone in Chandigarh.
The FBI’s Sacramento field office escalated its public warnings in May 2024, asking Central Valley residents with Indian ties to report extortion attempts directly to federal agents. “In recent extortion attempts, subjects demanded a large sum of money and threatened physical violence or death if the demand was not met,” the FBI said. That statement came as agents were already tracking connections between extortion calls and at least two homicides in California linked to diaspora-targeting criminal networks.
By 2026, federal investigators had tied multiple threads to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, which the FBI has classified as a transnational criminal organization. Two suspected Bishnoi members have been linked to killings in California. The gang’s reach into the state isn’t accidental. It’s been built over years, using existing diaspora infrastructure, community trust networks, and the simple fear that comes with knowing your cousin in Amritsar can be reached before you ever finish dialing the cops.
Singh’s tournament experience in 2023 became, for him, a window into how this works at the community level. The sport of Kabaddi carries deep cultural weight for Punjabi Sikhs, and controlling a high-profile international event would give any criminal organization both money and influence. It didn’t work, in part because Singh pressed hard enough that law enforcement got involved. But it showed how far these networks are willing to reach, and how little distance separates a phone call from Punjab and a scared athlete in California’s Central Valley.
The FBI’s ask to the community is straightforward: report it. Don’t absorb the threat quietly.