Government casino regulators linked millions of dollars in suspicious cash taken in by B.C. casinos to a targeted murder in Surrey, according to a report obtained by CTV News.
Gunmen shot 29-year-old Birinder Khangura dead and sprayed the neighbourhood with bullets in September 2014 – a murder that has yet to be solved.
One of those bullets hit the home of Bobi Ganjua, and remains in the window casing some five years later.
Ganjua told CTV News on Wednesday she is lucky that no one in her family was hurt.
"I was scared. It was scary," she said.
Six weeks later, Joe Schalk -- the Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch’s Senior Director -- wrote in a report that it was one of two incidents that has "added to the concern of suspicious cash being brought into B.C. casinos."
The report, obtained through a freedom of information request, has been heavily redacted, and it’s not clear why investigators zeroed in on Khangura’s death, or what the second incident was.
Two months after that report was written, Schalk and a colleague were fired without cause.
The death, and the firings, should have the public very concerned, said former prosecutor Sandy Garossino, who has written about the need for a public inquiry.
"Why were they fired? Were they fired because of this report? This has an appearance of 'shoot the messenger' from the government about concerns being raised about money laundering, loan sharking and organized crime in casinos," she said.
"It’s blood cash. It’s blood money."
That cash Schalk was concerned about added up to hundreds of millions of dollars, allegedly connected to a Richmond underground bank the RCMP believed could launder roughly $220 million a year.
That bank allegedly used the casinos as part of a transnational money laundering scheme that may have washed the profits of the province’s fentanyl epidemic.
It’s not clear whether Khangura had a role in that scheme. His murder remains unsolved, and a relative said she hadn’t heard from police in years. Police say they are still investigating.
The B.C. Lottery Corporation, which licences the province’s casinos, refused to comment on how it responded, if at all, to news of the death and its possible connection to casino cash.
Khangura didn’t have a criminal record and the only court cases CTV News could see involved an excessive speeding ticket with his Dodge Viper. The cases came to a halt when he was killed, records show.
Casinos stopped accepting more than $10,000 in cash after a recommendation from former RCMP commissioner Peter German, which was implemented by the NDP government, in 2017.
Another report by German on money laundering is expected at the end of the month. Tuesday’s federal budget promised millions more for anti-money laundering teams.
But those measures don’t explain what government officials knew and when they knew it, said Garossino. A public inquiry would give a judge subpoena powers to answer unanswered questions and produce documentation, she said.
"When you’ve got law enforcement and regulators ringing alarm bells in an environment with all this cash pouring in, you do something," she said.
"It’s not just the organized crime world where murder is part of doing business. There are communities that suffer from this. It’s also the drug money. The fentanyl. How many bodies have piled up?"
