Huge Indian Organized Crime Bust—and Cognitive Bias
There’s a named cognitive bias quietly running your threat analysis — the representativeness heuristic. You decide whether something fits a category (“is this a real criminal organization?” “is this a foreign intelligence operation?”) by how closely it matches the prototype in your head. Decades of film built that prototype for you, and this month handed us the perfect case to test it.
A major organized-crime boss was charged in a sweeping U.S. racketeering action — 37 people, a network across India, the United States, and Canada, run from a prison cell. If you pictured a Sicilian in pinstripes, that’s strike one: the boss is Lawrence Bishnoi, and the enterprise is Indian. Strike two is the same reflex applied to spies — when we imagine brazen foreign intelligence operating on U.S. and Canadian soil, we default to Russia or China. Yet this February a defendant pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to a plot to kill an American in Manhattan that prosecutors say was directed by an official of India’s intelligence service, and Canada’s national police have publicly accused agents of the Indian government in a killing on Canadian soil (India denies it). Same bias, two targets. The discipline is one habit: judge the enterprise by what it does — the money, the reach, the record — not by whether it matches the picture in your head.
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
U.S. Department of Justice — “Operation Hard Ball” indictment (Lawrence Bishnoi transnational organized-crime enterprise), unsealed July 2026
U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York — United States v. Nikhil Gupta, guilty plea February 13, 2026 (murder-for-hire plot against a U.S. citizen; co-defendant Vikash Yadav, an Indian government employee at the Cabinet Secretariat, which houses the Research & Analysis Wing)
Royal Canadian Mounted Police — public statements alleging agents of the Indian government in the homicide of Hardeep Singh Nijjar (Surrey, B.C., June 18, 2023); Government of India denial
CBC News; Reuters; WION — July 2026 reporting (Operation Hard Ball; Sidhu Moose Wala homicide, May 2022; Salman Khan threats cited in the indictment)
