Bittersweet Infamy - #35 - Bindy Johal

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Taylor tells Josie about Vancouver's most infamous celebrity gangster. Plus: Chindōgu, the Japanese philosophy of inventing exquisitely useless things.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Happy New Year, Taylor Basso. The same to you. Happy New Year to you as well. 2022. It could be 2021. It could be 2025 for all that my brain can make of the dates, but it's 2022. Yeah, yeah. You know, 2021 was fun, but 2022 is new. Counterpoint, 2021 was not that fun, and 2022 will probably be more of the same. Yeah, probably will. Do you remember last, last new years? It was like, go away 2020. Fuck you.

This is like the new year. We're going to blast your ass out of here. And then it was, and then like the sixth January 6th insurrection happened, and it was like, oh, well, eat my foot now. That was great. Thanks. I'm sick of looking, looking at the old, there's something new on your finger, Josie. Congratulations, Josie, newly engaged to Mitchell, who did our 16th episode on the Twilight Zone X, and he did our interstitial music, and he did the right thing and made an honorable woman out of Josie. Yeah, and made, made Beeman an honorable little, little pooch. Are you getting the papers in to change his last name? No. No, not yet. Not ready to take that step.

Mitchell's interested in Mitchell, Mitchell, though. Oh, yeah. No, there's, there's, you'd get a lot of fun questions from that name. Yeah. Yeah. What's that about being the main one? Yeah, yeah. And then you tell them in the novel to be over, and you'd be like, wow, this is getting long in the tooth, this gag. But I love the idea of taking no offense, kind of a boring name, and then just doubling it, and it's just like, check this out, totally new, refreshed, double it. I agree. I have no, no complaints for me. I think that makes perfect sense.

I think the drummer for Jimi Hendrix was named Mitchell, Mitchell. Second. He, I mean, look where, look where that guy is. He was the drummer for Jimi Hendrix. Yeah, we all know him. I'll love him. It's true. Vancouver boy, Jimmy. That's right. There's that little shriny shoe off of a, by the brick house. So if you've never, if you've never had the, the honor, by the way, of going to a movie with me, so the, I think you should know, I think you should know. Listen, I'll tell you where it's going to the movies, to the cinema. I think you should know is that if you've ever been to a movie with anybody in Vancouver, their favorite thing to do is to point out, you know, the backdrop of

whatever your wheel and whatever the fuck you're watching be like, you know, that was filmed in Vancouver. That's the, it's the wall center right there. You know, whatever it is. That's UBS, that's solder school of business right there in the background, whatever it is. My shtick, because I am a chaotic trickster figure. My shtick is I like to go watch movies like 300 or something where the movie, where the background is either like blatantly CGI or couldn't conceivably have been filmed anywhere near Vancouver and like to go, you know, that's, that's Pacific Center right there in the background. I think I see Strathcorna back there. Yes, right. But you know, little I walked by when they were filming that little craft table out there. Craft guy gave

me a donut. Nice fella. My favorite is seeing Vancouver and car commercials. That happens a lot. Yeah, Vancouver is in car commercials a lot. We're in, we play New York a almost inconceivable number of times. I've seen someone drive from Brooklyn, drive to Brooklyn from like oak and 49th. I'm like, that's, I don't know that you could do that in an hour. The ending of sleepless in Seattle, I think it's sleepless in Seattle. It just like pulls back and it's a view of the city and the credits roll. And it's like, ah, beautiful Seattle. But it's, you look at it and you're like, there's no space needle. Like, what is, what is this bullshit? And it's like, that is Vancouver. It's downtown Vancouver taken from the north so you don't see

the mountains. The mountains are behind it. It's just like, what the fuck? At least Seattle's a little closer than New York. There's a good mini documentary and let me look it up right now so I get the name right. I think it's called Vancouver is Never Itself or Vancouver Never Plays Itself. Yeah, it's a, it's a little nine minute long mini documentary on the YouTube channel, Every Frame a Painting. And they're from Vancouver. Yeah, it's called Vancouver Never Plays Itself. And it's basically the story of all of these movies that Vancouver has been the backdrop in, but it's very rare to find a movie actually set in Vancouver that is not like a self-consciously local Canadian production in the vein of like Meditation Park or something. Oh, Vancouver,

sorry, I've, I've sidetracked us. No, I love it. I love Vancouver. I love talking about it. In the words of Yulia from the Real Host Wives of Vancouver, Vancouver's beauty is one of a kind just like me. Oh, it's true, Taylor. Well, my friend. Yes. As we start off this new year, I mean, you're very wise with your resolutions. I feel like yours is like, I'm going to go collect my mail today. That is my new year's resolution. They're not that, they're not that dire, but they are usually like a step above that. So it'll be something doable. So like, I haven't shot for jeans in a while, like that, that kind of vibe, something that does work. Like I'm not, first of all, I don't want to go get my mail. But make it a resolution. True enough. True enough.

How do you treat your, how do you treat your resos? Oh my god, I shoot way too high and then it depresses me when I've given up in like day two, like write a poem every day. That doesn't know that every day of the year. Yeah. Why would that's, I don't know. What is this fucking Julie and Julia? Like what? I don't know. Yeah. No, I'm trying to, I'm trying to sidestep my way into a rom-com script. I see a poem every day. Slant rhyme. What would the name of that be? Oh god, anyway. No. Maybe some of, some of our listeners out there, you, like me, try to be more productive, more effective with your time. That's your goal in the new year, especially after the holidays, where it just feels like flub time. Nothing really gets done. Classic flub time. I feel like that

was an Eddie Murphy movie, somewhere like that. It got canned. Yeah, yeah, that one didn't make it to the theater. Shot in Vancouver though. Ah, you know, that's English Bay. You can see the barge. Sorry, sorry. Have you heard about this barge? No. We have a barge now. I'm sorry to interrupt. This is important. We have a barge now. What is it doing? During the really wicked windstorm, rainstorm, million, million, million ecological effects storm, a barge came unmoored in English Bay and floated down to the seawall. And it just lives there now. It's been there for like weeks. Have they anchored it? They had someone like tied it to a little rock, which was cute. They put up a sign that said barge chilling beach. Can you, can you get on the barge? Or is it just

like? No, but you can look at it, but it's there. And it's like, I haven't gone down to see it. Maybe that's what I'll do tomorrow. I haven't gone down to see it, but it's supposed to cut quite an imposing figure. This barge that just lives on what was previously like a beautiful seaside, you know, promenade. I love it. That's cool. Yeah. The Vancouver barge. Yeah. Just chilling. It's become sort of like a local meme, you know, like a sinkhole style local meme. Yeah. Yeah. Songs are being written. Cookies are being made that look like the barge. People are tweeting about the barge. It fell outside of the Halloween costume cycle, unfortunately, but what can you do about that? Oh yeah. We're talking about New Year's resolutions.

Yes. Sorry. I busted right into your segment there. No, no, no. With a barge. You busted. I barged right in. And that's fine. That's fine for the wordplay. I'll take it any day. So I've just been thinking about, yeah, trying to be more efficient and effective with my time and getting more out of my hours, out of my days, and how I usually fail at that so bad. And I found this, I guess you could call it like, you could call it a few different things, but maybe like a mindset, a practice, perhaps a meditative practice might fit into this. Practice? Can we go praxis? Let's go praxis. Let's get an X. I like that. There we go.

Get that on the scrabble board. Get your triple bird score in. That's eight points or something. Yeah. Okay. Let's go. And it just poses a different mindset to this like, we must be a fisherman, must be effective kind of New Year's vibes. Taylor, have you heard of chin-dagu? No. I'm going to describe, describe a few chin-dagu invinctions, quote unquote, invinctions, and then I'll kind of give you a sense of what the like official definition is, but I think you could, let's see, let's, I'll describe these and then you try to define this, this mindset, this praxis, if you will. So here are a few quote unquote invinctions. Eyedropper glasses. Now these are to be worn to make your eyedrops more efficient and effective. They're a pair of glasses and in

the center of the glass, it has been affixed to small funnels so that you can drop your. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's okay. The job in your eyes. Yeah. There is a robot that you can wear on your shoulders called the Tomatots. Okay. I missed entirely what that was. It's called the Tomatoton and this robot when you press a button, it will, it has a stack in the back, almost like a, like those orange juice juicers you see in stores. Yeah. But it's filled with tomatoes and it will carefully pluck a tomato from the stack and bring it in front of your face so that you can. I love it. I love it. While you're on the go. I love it. I think it was originally designed for joggers. But I think it can be used across. That makes me want a fucking puke.

I'm not sure why it's tomatoes, but it's definitely like this. It's because I've, I've heard that if you are behind in a race and you eat a tomato, it helps you catch up. We're going to let that silence stay the whole time. Okay. This is, I can wait you out here. I can wait until you laugh at my fucking hilarious tomato joke, whatever. Another Chindagu invention is the back scratcher t-shirt. So on the back of it is a grid and down the X axis, you find A, B, C, D, E, F, G, you find an alphabet. And then on the Y axis, we're looking at one, two, three, four, five, a number. So you can. So like battleship. A little bit like battleship. So when somebody is back there and you ask them to scratch your back, you're not just saying up or down. You're saying

H3. H3, please. No, no, no, I need F8. Oh, yeah. F8. Yeah. And it comes with a little, a little placard that you can hold so that, because you can't see your own back. Of course. So you, you have this placard and you can, you can read it off based on what you're feeling about. Genius. So is the, is the theme here extravagant, overly architected solutions to common problems? Yes. Okay. But another element of it is that in the over complication of this efficient and effective invention, it becomes useless. It's yes. It's like no one wants to walk around for the robot. That's the one. That's so cute. I want, I want that friend. It's pretty cute. And the head is the little tomato. Oh, delightful. And when it drops, when it drops its arms that carry the

little tomato, the little face on the robot also like makes a macination, like its mouth goes up. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Fantastic. Fantastic. I want tomato ton. If, if tomato ton, if you're listening and you want to come on the show and feed us some tomatoes. Oh my gosh. That'd be amazing. Oh, wow. Okay. So, so when, wow. Okay. So whence cometh this? What's it called? Chin-dagu? Chin-dagu. So chin in Japanese, it's a Japanese word. Right. Chin means weird or strange. And dagu means like a tool or appliance device kind of thing. Okay. So weird, weird tool. Delightful. The inventor of it, the inventor of the invention process is named Kenji Kawakami. Okay. He was born in 1946 in Japan. And he studied aeronautical engineering and college until he dropped out

in 1967. Too useful. Too useful. It was just too useful. No, this is, I find this so cool. So he joined a radical student movement that was popular, like many factions across Japan were really popular at this time. And they were all opposing the cultural takeover of the US over Japanese culture and lifestyle elements. And so it was, it was a protest movement. So for those of you who live in the States, because you folks create so much, you really do, you create so much media, you create so much resources. We're just so creative. So creative. So great. There really does become in like in Canada, we have what are called Canadian content laws, which means that very simplified. It means that Canadian broadcasters are both legally required to and incentivized to

showcase artists from Canada. Because if we didn't do stuff like that, then it would literally just be all you guys, because you produce most of the music and most of the, you know. Well, it's yeah, it has the most money behind it. Yeah, exactly. It's yeah. But that created situations when I'd be hanging out with you and other Canadians. And like a jam would come on the radio and everyone would be like, Oh, when I get you all alone, I'm going to take off all your clothes. And you're like, I don't know this. And I would just be sitting in the corner like, what the fuck is this? Like, who's soul decision? What's going on? What happened? Because everybody in the room knows it and is singing it and is like, I remember

this one. And it's Canadian content. I just never heard it because it never hit my little American airwaves. Only some of us make it over there, man. You're, you're, you're Justin Bieber's and your Carly Rae's and the rest of us. I know. The rest of us are just playing festivals in Surrey for free, man. It is what it is. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And so Kawakami, he, I guess it would be like a Japanese content radical movement that he was doing. But in the 70s, the movements, they weren't really cohesive enough. It didn't have much of a, much of a fighting chance, I suppose, if anything, American culture is persistent. And so he starts working as a freelance writer. And he becomes, ironically enough, the writer and editor for Mail Order Life, which is a magazine

where it was designed for housewives who lived too far away from the cities to order, order items that you could only really get in the cities. Like a tomato robot. Like tomato robots. Okay. Yes. And this is where Josie, sorry, Josie was laughing there because I was minding feeding a tomato robot on my shoulder to be clear. I forgot we're in an auditory video. It's a podcast. So he had one issue that had extra pages that needed to be filled. Like the publisher was going to print X amount and he needed to get there. So he filled the last few pages with these made up invinctions because the book was filled with like household chibi sheets.

I love this. I love them. They had absolutely no use. They were lighthearted and everybody loved them. They became a mainstay of the publication. And yeah, that's when he called it Chindagu. He's publishing this, but he's also, they're never for sale. They're never actually it's an entertainment piece. It's a lighthearted parody. Yeah. But he does make the inventions. They don't just, they're not, it's not just like a little mind, you know, a little brain exercise or whatever. Like, I don't know if he made all of them, but he made at least most of them. That's fun. Yeah. Engineers, man. You can't keep a, you can't keep a good engineer down, truly. Yeah. So here's a quote from Kawakami. He says, I think my things show us our stupid obsession

in Japan and America with making life as easy as we can with a new thing. Everyone has the ability to create. We just have to free our imaginations. The problem is that society destroys our ability to think. We have to get this ability back. Okay. Which I really love because it's not, it's not just, I mean, it is a fun exercise and there's humor involved and like there's a lot of creativity happening, but he also is just thinking along these like capitalist lines. And why, like, why do we need, you know, this tiny little device that we spend way too much money on to make our lives easier? And it's just a total comment commentary on all of it to have a robot feed you your tomatoes. And there's, there's some where like, if you invent your

chindago and then you actually use it very often, and it becomes useful, it's no longer a chindago. It has to be in some way useless, which I really appreciate because that means there's a space and there's a time for being useless. I agree. I think I uselessness for its own sake. No, absolutely. It's for its own sake. Yeah, absolutely. I completely I am signed me up to this newsletter. You had me a tomato robot. Like, honestly, tomatoes on the rest of the story, blurs into sound and fury I was in on the tomato robot. And like, you could have told me anything about this man, his politics, what horrible things he used his invention for. And I would have been like, but tomato time. Well, the other beautiful thing is that any proc so you can't sell the

chindago, but they've created some, some like publication books for sale and that kind of thing. And all of the profits that come from any of the chindago art are forwarded to charities. Wow. Also really sweet. This is so on the up and up. I know, I know it totally on the up and up. It's when does that happen? I know, right? What show are you on? Oh, shit. I have to go. Oh, no, I misread the prompt. Oh, yeah. Hogtown, the six or Toronto. Whatever you call it, you can fly nonstop to Toronto on Porter Airlines. When you fly Porter, you'll enjoy free fast Wi-Fi and beer, wine and premium

snacks included with every fare. You'll also love that our planes have no middle seats. Discover why Porter has been Eastern Canada's favorite airline for the last 16 years. Visit flyporter.com. Porter actually enjoy economy. All this talk of New Year's resolutions is very appropriate, Josie, because today's story is a completion of one of my resolutions for some time around this podcast. It's just ridiculous to me that 35 episodes into this show, I have not yet done a story set in Vancouver. So you're getting a little Vancouver special today. Okay. Which may be why in the early going I was so on the Vancouver train. So Josie, today I'm

taking you on a journey through the fast-paced and ultra-violent world of organized crime as experienced and influenced by one man, a man who cuts an almost mythical figure. Have you ever heard the name Bindi Jo Hall? No. That must mean that you didn't grow up in the greater Vancouver Regional District in the 1990s because Bindi Mania was running wild. Okay. All right. Some Canadian content here. We're, listen, give us the grant. We are finally eligible. Let's go. You could not turn on the TV without seeing Bindi Jo Hall, whether he was issuing an on-camera death threat on the evening news, murdering his nemesis in broad daylight, or in the defendant

stock it at the resulting trial, one of the longest and most expensive in Canadian history. Bindi Jo Hall wanted to be the entire fucking conversation and he was. Whoa, dude. Goals. Goals. Set your goals. Those resolutions. Yeah. Make a vision board. Step outside, get it done. This is the story of a man who lived his life like a gangster movie, with all the drama, violence, and bloodshed that entails until he reached the inevitable end credits. This is the Vancouver legend of Bindi Jo Hall. I'm so stoked. I'm so stoked. It's one of these stories full of machismo that I know you love so much. Oh, yeah. Your favorite. So first, to give you a bit of context, you know, we love to set the table. Let's talk about the Punjabi

Sikh diaspora in Western Canada. So as you might expect, Canada's western most province, British Columbia, which adjoins the Pacific Ocean, has seen a large influx of migration from India. For example, I grew up in Suri, which has a 32.4% South Asian population as of the most recent census, many being Punjabi Sikh. And so Sikhism is the religion and Punjabi is the ethnicity to be clear. Punjab is the state in India. To zoom in even further, the area of Suri that I grew up in, Newton, is 58% South Asian, 25% white, 17% other groups, mostly Chinese and Filipino, which maybe explains why the story of Bindi Jo Hall carried so much cultural heft in the time and place that I came up. Right, yeah. The history of the Indo-Canadian diaspora is long

and fraught and full of injustice as much of Canada's immigration history is. Wasn't there a boat that came all the way from India? And maybe this happened again and again. But it came all the way from India and it got to the port of Vancouver. And immigration said, nah, never mind. And they had to turn back and go all the way home. I'm about to tell you about it right now. Shit, yeah! So the boat that Josie just described is called the Komagata Maru. This was the name of the boat. At the turn of the century, Vancouver already has a decades-long history of racist immigration policy and public sentiment directed toward Asian Canadians, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian immigrants.

In 1908, BC passes a law banning South Asian men from voting in provincial elections. And since voter rolls for federal elections are drawn from provincial registries, this precludes them from voting federally as well. Right, okay. The Canadian government also enacts a $200 head tax on Indian immigration and invokes what is called the Continuous Journey Regulation, which requires immigrants to take a continuous journey from their country of origin to Canada. Of course, there are no boats directly from India to Canada. They all stop in in Japan or Hawaii along the way, as you would. Right, yeah. Yeah, restock, refuel, you gotta. That's a long ass haul. Of course. So this basically kills Indian immigration

to Canada. These restrictions come in a year where Canada is otherwise opening its borders to 400,000 new immigrants, mainly Europeans, the highest in Canadian history, like even since. Yeah, back. By comparison, yearly South Asian immigration to Canada will not exceed 80 people annually until the 1940s. Whoa. So in 1914, a Punjabi-Singaporean businessman named Gradit Singh Sandhu challenges these laws by organizing the passage of the Komagata Maru from Shanghai to Vancouver. Okay. This could be its own podcast episode, or two, or three, but trim down. The trim down version is this. The Komagata Maru is a ship containing 346 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus, all British subjects from the Punjab province of India, which arrives,

the ship arrives in Vancouver's Barard Inlet in May 1914 in defiance of the continuous passage law, having stopped at several ports along the way. Yeah. Originally, they were, Sandhu was planning, I think, to organize a nonstop voyage for this, but I, it fell through. It wasn't feasible. We have, yeah, I imagine it would be really hard. Yeah. In addition to all of this, some of the people on board had ties to the Ghadars, which is a movement started by expatriate Indians in North America protesting the British rule of India. And Gradit Singh Sandhu himself also had ties to this group. So in addition to this already, like, incredibly touchy immigration situation, now you've got like these anti-monarchists, anti-imperialists on board.

Right. Yeah. Dope. The arrival of the ship is a huge controversy. Richard McBride, the conservative Premier of BC, categorically refuses to let it dock or let the passengers disembark. Mm-hmm. I played dodgeball at Richard McBride Elementary, by the way, and now every time I go there, I'm like, you son of a bitch. You check a ball at the sign. Yeah. Fuck you, McBride. Dick, Dick McBride. On the mainland, there's much discussion of what to do. The expat community scratches up enough money for a lawyer to take up the case on behalf of one of the passengers. Meanwhile, on the ship, the passengers become restless and overthrow the Japanese captain, taking control of the ship. Oh. They confront the cops by hurling bricks and coal at them.

The Prime Minister is involved. There's undercover spies. It's a whole big thing. Yeah. Eventually, months later, in July 1914, the ship is forced to return to India with only 20 passengers having been admitted to Canada. Whoa. Upon the ship's return to India in September, passengers are arrested by a British gunboat, a riot ensues, and 19 of the passengers are killed. Oh, my God. Most of the passengers are arrested and imprisoned through World War I. With Ranthit Singh Sandhu, the trip's organizer also receiving five years imprisonment. Oh, my gosh. Since then, the incident has loomed large in the histories of both Canada and India,

with many ensuing memorials, governmental apologies, et cetera. There's an on-campus art museum at the school where I teach, and this fall, there was a Toronto-based artist named Reina, Jagdeep Reina, and he takes archival images and sketches them or repurposes them, sometimes embroiders them, collages them, and he took an image of some of the passengers from the ship, and he sketches it out himself, and it's like a charcoal drawing of it. But yeah, it's really, really fascinating to see, I don't know, to see that history that way. Art is important, it turns out. Oh, who knew? Who knew? But it's, yeah, but I, so I had heard like the very cliff notes

that I said earlier about the ship being turned away, but I'm so glad to know the full story. This is so cool. And it also, I've noticed it kind of looms in the retellings of the Bindi Johal story. Like, there's a movie that I watched where this comes up and so on, and I'll talk a little bit about that. So this sets the stage for the next wave of Punjabi immigration to Canada. In 1947, voting restrictions against Asian-Canadians are lifted in the wake of World War II. Basically, everyone came back and was like, yo, we just fought for this country, give us the fucking vote, and they did. Yeah. And in the 60s and 70s, the population of Indian origin immigrants in BC increases by about 20 times. Whoa. So it blows up really quick. A sponsorship program is

also instituted, allowing people to bring family over, and suddenly Vancouver and its environs have a rich, diverse community of Punjabi Sikhs representing different socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities, castes, lines of industry, etc. As it should have been from the beginning. And in fact, British Columbia has the largest Sikh population outside of India. Whoa. I did not know that. I didn't either, but there you go. Drop in Canadian content facts. I like it. And as happens in many large diaspora communities, we see the beginning of organized crime. Specifically, we see a big heroin trade to start. I was just thinking, do you do you have thoughts on diaspora crime? Like, I don't know, you said

that. I'm like, oh, yeah, like Sicilian mafia. Like, oh, well, I think it's, I don't think it's, I don't think that organized crime is unique to diaspora communities at all at all at all. Right. No, yeah. I think it's often a subcultural thing, though, because it's often, it's hush hush, right? So you want the people around you who like, they look like you, they share your beliefs, whether your beliefs are that you're, you know, you grew up on ATVs and you're a white supremacist from the South, or whether your beliefs are that you have family in the Punjab, or whether your beliefs are that your cousin Tony runs this pizza place over here, like whatever it is, right? I think that the insularity of a diaspora community, it contributes

to organized crime. But I don't think that organized crime is exclusively propagated by diaspora communities to be clear. Right. Well, I wonder too, if there's something, you know, you're talking about the, the deep prejudism that's baked into an immigration process. Exactly. Canada or the US, and maybe that fuels some of it too. There's a sense that like, well, fuck the system. Let's fuck this shit. The group that we're going to be looking at today is one that was originally called Los Diablos, and it was a group that initially consisted mostly of members of Spanish speaking communities. Okay. But then the demographics shifted a little, like it was a kind of more multicultural. And then in 1989, in 1989, the Dosange Brothers and

Robbie Candola took over, and it became known as the Punjabi mafia. But the Punjabi mafia was sort of like a loosely affiliate. There was no organization really that was 100% called the Punjabi mafia. It was just a lot of this like, organized crime between individuals who had their own various little in outfits in the Punjabi community, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. No, that, that does, that does. And it's a lot of, specifically, it's a lot of drug dealing, and it's a lot of extortion, money laundering, and contract killing. My fave. All your dear, that's what the three wise men brought to the baby on the day. So true. It's in this context that we meet the star of today's episode.

But Pinder Singh Johal, who goes by Bindi, is born in Punjab, India, on January 17, 1971. When Bindi is four, his family immigrates to Canada. One source has his father as a mill worker and his mother as a secretary. Another describes him as being raised by a single working class mother. Details about his childhood are sketchy, but it seems unremarkable. A teacher, Rob Sendhu, said when he came into grade eight, it didn't seem like he had any problems. Somewhere in high school, though, Sir Charles Tupper, secondary for the curious. Bindi starts having behavioral issues. He's intelligent, but bored, reckless, and aggressive. You hear a lot about, like, breaking windows, vandalism, this sort of thing.

Get that kid medicated. Specifically, part of the legend of Bindi Johal around this period is that he stands up to racist bullying in high school. And I'll talk about that a bit later on, but it's hard to find specific stories. Okay. That's not me saying at all that it didn't happen. I think it likely did happen as someone who went to high school in this part of the world. But in grade 12, Bindi gets called to the vice principal's office for a chat about his attitude. The conversation becomes heated, and Bindi boots this guy in the ball so hard that he needs to be taken to the emergency room. Oh, shit. No good. You can't do that. Also, I haven't heard that expression

boot in the balls, but I... It sounded like this was a proper wind up, and get a little bit of momentum behind it. Maybe a few run-in steps. Yeah, pinpoint accuracy. It sounds like he really kicked this guy's nuts up into his chest. Oh. Yeah. So, Bindi is expelled and given 60 days in jail. Oh, yeah. Assault. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's not great. It's also at Tupper that Bindi met Faisal Dean, who did street-level work for Los Diablos, which is under the command of the dosange brothers. Okay. Ron dosange the brains, and Jimmy dosange the muscle. Right. Yeah. Classic setup. You got your brains, and you got your muscle. What could go wrong? Pinky and the brain. Pinky and the brain. There you go. That was kind of just a smart guy and a dumb guy. Like,

Pinky wasn't really the muscle. He was a bit weak. Yeah. Anyway, through Faisal, Bindi joins Los Diablos distributing narcotics. Said Bindi, quote, I was a small-time drug dealer. Jimmy dosange was a big-time guy. Wherever we went, we got respect because everyone was afraid of him. He was a big shot. And when I was beside him, I was a big shot. Enjoying this new taste of money and power, Bindi throws himself headlong into the lifestyle. He gets really jacked. He acquires all the sickest 90s athleisure fits. Like, I'm seeing his vision board now. Yeah. It's just like pecs and Air Jordans and like Gold's gym tank top, a fanny pack, some sweats. Gold chains on a turtleneck.

Yeah. Bindi, he wouldn't do the turtleneck. He was more of a like, he kind of dressed like the soprano. He would come out in his Adidas track suit, the same one I had when I was seven. I had the Bindi Jo-Hell track suit. But the 90s drip was always immaculate. Okay. Wow. And there's a lot of footage of him. And it's usually him full-on bullying some cameraman being like, you're, get the fuck out of my face or I'll have you killed. Anyway. Anyway, he gets a reputation as a womanizer who has sex with any woman he wants. Eventually he's making $70,000 to $90,000 a week through drug dealing, debt collection, and murder for hire. And mind you, he's not even 20 at this point. So.

Right. And not paying taxes on it. Boom. I don't know what Bindi's tax situation was. It never comes up in this somehow, which is unusual for one of these organized crime stories. But they do get, you got to be real careful about your taxes when this is, when you're, when you're an Al Capone style flashy public gangster, because that is how they get you. That's true. That's how they, they bring you in, throw you the key. In May 1991, when Bindi is 20, Los Diablos undergoes a major shakeup when Jimmy Dossange, one of the organization's leaders in its punishing arm. Uh-huh. The muscle. Pinky.

Good old, good old Pinky. He's arrested for the murder of 25-year-old Colombian Teodoro Salcedo, who is a member of a cartel Los Diablos dealt with while trafficking cocaine. So some coke deal, some coke deal went gnarly. And this guy. Fingerprint got left and. Yes. And here we go. Okay. With Jimmy behind bars, the power structure of Los Diablos is destabilized. So Bindi and Faisal see an opportunity to strike out on their own. They defect from Los Diablos and they start their own outfit,

buying cocaine and bulk and selling it on the streets. The Costco. They just show up to Costco. They have a membership card. It's all good. Usually this would be a death sentence, but with his brother Jimmy behind bars, a powerless Ron Dossange is left to sit there and stew and plot his next move. Ooooooh. Unfortunately, our man Bindi takes a hit with the arrest of Faisal Dean.

Oh no. For, oh wait. Or, oh good. I don't know. You just wait. Look at my roof floor. What's going on? Give me a hero. There's not really any of those in this. Okay, okay. So just, just let it wash over you. You're watching a gangster movie. That's what this is.

Okay, and for everybody listening at home, Taylor is wearing a gnarly shirt. This is Death Wish across the chest. I wore it for this episode. It's really smart. I wore it for this episode. You're clever. You're clever boy. It's the small details man. The devil's always in the details. Los Diablos are always in the details.

In the visual details. I'm about to tell you about a fucking gnarly murder, so we need to bring it down to like a respectful two. Okay. Okay. Okay. Faisal got arrested for the murder of criminal associate Perminder Chana at 9 p.m. on October 12th, 1991.

Perminder got a phone call from Faisal saying he urgently needed to talk to him about a credit card scam they were running. Okay. They met at the ICBC salvage yard where Perminder worked nights. Oh, okay. Send a little touch of local color there for you. I like that. When he arrived, he saw Faisal there along with a guy named Rajinder Benji.

And this is important because Perminder, who was in his 20s, was dating Rajinder's 17-year-old sister, Jazzy. And Rajinder did not like this one bit. No, no, no, no, no. So Faisal held Perminder down and Rajinder stabbed him 53 times. Okay. And that's a lot. And the next morning Perminder Chana's body was found floating in a ditch

with its throat slit and fingers amputated. Okay. If that's not bad enough, four days later Perminder's 17-year-old girlfriend Jazzy Benji jumped to her death from the Patalo Bridge in Surrey, leaving a suicide note that read, when Farmer died, I died. Oh no. So it's this incredibly dramatic, incredibly sad, upsetting story. Romeo and Juliet?

If that's how they, that's how they painted it. That's how they painted it. Yeah, fuck. Faisal brags to his girlfriend about the murder, who informs police the girlfriend. With Faisal behind bars, Bindi sets out to assure his friend's safety by dispatching of any witnesses who may testify against him. Specifically, a guy named Sanjay Narain who is at the ICBC Salavijard on the night of the crime

and whose hobbies include free-basin cocaine and bragging to women about his criminal exploits. Probably a sensitive subject, given how Faisal went down in the first place. Journalist Neil Hall describes the scene thusly, quote, on a December night in 1991, two cars pulled up to a road leading to the top of the Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver. Young men in their early 20s got out and walked along the top of the dam on the Capilano River. They were expecting a drug deal to go down,

but in the distance a shadowy figure appeared. He wore a long trench coat. As he approached, he drew a gun, pointing it at the head of one man in the group, Sanjay Narain. Although police have heard various versions of what happened that night, investigators believe the man in the trench coat was notorious Vancouver gangster, Bindi Jo Hall. Okay, oh wow. Narain's body is later found in the river, having drowned. It seems given the choice between a bullet in the jump,

he took the jump, or someone helped him along. Oooooh. This whole scenario has the desired chilling effect on any forthcoming witnesses. Says writer Samuel Kerr, quote, if a key witness to a crime described as a Romeo and Juliet-style murder-suicide gets thrown to his death off a 300-foot-tall municipal landmark, the public will probably take notice. Yeah, there's a lot of juice.

A lot of juice to drink on that one. That's a gallon jug. People are drinking the gallon jug. The public and the news media have at this point locked on to the absurd drama playing out in the Punjabi mafia with Bindi at its center. They're standing in the fridge drinking, drinking straight. No glass needed. Damn.

While a more prudent gangster and murder suspect might take the opportunity to go into hiding, catch up on their scrapbooking while the heat dies down, not our Bindi. He is loving the spotlight. He's going to all the hottest Vancouver night clubs. The cops can't get anything on him, and so he skates. And he becomes this infamous untouchable celebrity gangster, a man of status, accountable to nobody.

Fuck. Speaking of chilly witnesses, it turns out that all the people who were supposed to come out against Jimmy Dostanj have changed their minds. So Jimmy gets out and the Dostanj brothers are reunited, and they are none too happy with old Bupinder and his antics. No. So Jimmy deals with this in the preferred method of those from the criminal underworld.

He takes out a hit on Bindi Johall. Okay, okay. Unfortunately, Bindi is able to catch wind of this, and he contacts the hit man with a competing offer, a pay you double to kill Jimmy Dostanj instead. Oh, shit. How is this not a movie? It is.

Oh. It is. There's two movies I'll talk to you a bit about later on. Okay, okay. February 25th, 1994, an anonymous alley near Fraser and East 33rd. I know it well. Yeah. There you go.

Enhance, enhance on the map. Enhance, boolean, let's go. Yeah. Our assassin lures Jimmy Dostanj into the alley for a pre-arranged meeting about some stolen electronics. Josie, there are no stolen electronics. Uh-oh. When Jimmy enters the alley, cars pull up outside it to box him in.

Bye-bye, Jimmy Dostanj. Investigators found his still lit cigarette smoldering next to his body. He never saw it coming. Whoa, shit. That's a scene in the movie, right? Part of why I chose the story and why I chose to tell it in this way is it's very cinematic, okay? Yeah.

No, totally. Like, I'm seeing the, like, the blinds and the light, the shadows of the blinds. It's very noir. It's a very noir kind of story. It's like a Punjabi noir. There aren't enough of those. Yeah, yeah. Northwest Punjabi noir.

I love it. So it's at this point that Global News Hour does something absolutely insane and invites Bindi Johal onto their program to share his opinion on what the murder meant. Bindi, mind you, is the very obvious prime suspect at this point. Oh, my God. Do you think they invited him being like, he'll never show, but we'll give it a shot. And then all of a sudden, he's knocking on the studio door. I think they figured out that Bindi equals ratings.

I think that's what it was. Yeah. And he shows up on Global in his sick leather jacket. Not a trench coat, but just a, just a reggae jacket. Okay. Wise man. Probably had to burn the trench coat. Wise man.

And he basically talks shit on Jimmy Dosanj's still worn body the entire time. Quote. And this Jimmy Dosanj, they portrayed him as a hit man, this dad. I mean, I guess he was a very serious person. From what I've seen of him on the street, I personally think he couldn't have hit his way out of a paper bag. Boom. Shit.

The cigarette hasn't even been put out yet. No. So obviously we need to hear Ron Dosanj, the victim's brother's response to this. So the newshounds salivating at the ratings it will bring, dutifully run to Ron's garage, where he issues the most exquisitely Canadian death threats you've ever heard in your life. Bindi, I'm here and I'm bad mouth and you buddy. Okay. If you want to talk about nobody, if, if anybody's a nobody buddy,

maybe that's why your life is worth a loonie on the streets today. I wouldn't shoot you in the back, but I'd do it right face to face square in the forehead. That's, that's me after a couple of drinks. Like I've almost definitely squared up to Josie and been like, your life isn't worth a loonie on the streets. Where I come from, we would have shoved you in a hockey net and stuck you up in the roof. I'm going to go hack a dart. Just go hack a dart.

Hack a dart while we decide to do what, what to do with you. So two weeks later, April 19th, 1994, broad daylight, Rondo Sange, the man you just heard, is driving his truck down Kingsway Vancouver's slantiest street. I forget that. I always get turned around on Kingsway when he hits a red light and a car pulls up next to him and unloads an assault rifle into his truck. An assault rifle? Yeah.

RIP Rondo Sange. Well, not anymore. Shit, dog. So at this point, Bindi finally does something sensible and goes into hiding. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Bindi. The heat from the police, the media, and other vengeful gang members is immense.

One morning, Bindi is feeling uneasy about taking his dog out for a walk. So he approaches his neighbor, a guy named Glenn Olson, and asks him to take the dog out for him. I would be wary if my infamous criminal neighbor asked me to be his body double, but I also understand that you can't really turn down a favor for Bindi Johal when he knows where he live. Also, the dog may have been super cute, too, so, you know? So poor Glenn takes the dog out, the poor dog, out to the park.

He turns a corner and a hit squad opens fire on him. He dies. 24 shell casings from an AK-47 are found at the crime scene. Oh my god. And the dog, the dog, too? I don't like the dog's odds, folks. I'm gonna be frank with you. The next week, news cameras are able to track down Bindi for a brief soundbite that would

become his most infamous quotation, the ultimate Bindi-ism, if you will, because he's got all these lines, right? Yeah. They ask Bindi if his life is in danger, his response. I just want these guys to know you got another thing coming, bitch. I'm still around. Put that on the belt. That's good.

I think he said this to, like, a CBC camera for context. Jesus Christ. So it's all going down, and these gang members are using the news as their platform to, like, issue death threats to another, terrify everybody. Pre-social media. Listen, they didn't have Twitter. Get rid of the social, just keep the media. Bam, there you go.

Vancouver is rattled by these very public, very graphic murders being carried out based on televised death threats in broad daylight, and the cops look like idiots. And now white people are dying. So Mayor Philip Owen organizes a 150-man special unit entirely devoted to building the case against Bindi Johal, and finally, Bindi is arrested. Okay, okay, on what charges? Bindi and five co-defendants are charged in the murders of both Ron and Jimmy Dossange. Okay, okay.

All right, so they feel like they've got something there. Yes, the co-defendants included Bindi's former brother-in-law, Peter Gel, and Peter Benji, who you may remember from the ICBC salvage yard. Yes, I do. Michael Kent-Budai, Ho-Sik Phil Kim, and Sun News Lawl, who would go on to be the husband of one of the Real Housewives of Vancouver. Oh, what? Yeah, he goes by Sonny Mackenzie now, and while his wife, Reiko,

while Reiko was on the show, was married to Sonny Mackenzie, I think they've since split. Oh my goodness. While three of the defendants would be allowed out on $100,000 bail, Bindi was deemed too dangerous to release. The ensuing trial is one of the longest and most expensive in Canadian history, largely due to security costs. Oh, right, yeah. It's also where we meet another key character in this crazy soap opera,

a juror named Gillian Gass, who's fucking great. She is a 40-year-old single mother of two, studying criminal psychology. She's twice divorced, and I got the sense that there's a lot of man drama in the distance, and she's going through a bit of an identity crisis, which has led to her changing her surname to Gass. Quote, Was that on the witness stand? They're like, is your name...

What is your name, Miss Gass? And that was her answer. She's a juror in this trial. Oh, a juror, okay. A juror. She gave that account, I think, to somebody who was writing about her. Said Gass' son, Adam, on his mother's capricious choice of surname. Quote,

Not that many people think it's funny. Tell this is a cautionary tale to Mitchell Mitchell, by the way. I know, right, yeah. Not that many people think it's funny. Don't hold on too hard. On February 27th, 1995, Gillian Gass is summoned to serve on the jury of Regina vs. Johan in co-defendants in courtroom 55, she'll have you know. Oh.

Of the day, Gass says, Quote, I had given considerable thought to my outfit for this event and had settled on a two-piece charcoal-fitted suit. People tell me I have an exotic look, which would hinder my chances of being selected. My decision to choose a business suit downplayed my exotic features and displayed my serious side, or so I thought. After the trial, I found out I was selected as the token Asian, which I'm not, so much for my disguise.

I saw them say this, but ma'am, this is a Wendy's. I know, right, yeah. Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me any of this? So that's Gillian Gass. That's Gillian Gass. The trial begins, and Gillian, from the jury box, is instantly smitten with the eight years younger, Peter Gill,

whom she initially takes for a defense attorney, but who is actually one of the defendants. Oh, no. True love. She's taken by his presence in suave style, so she starts a campaign of incredibly obvious over-the-top physical flirting from the jury box. Like Ramona, singer style, just like...

Dropping pencils. Yes, that kind of like batting eyes, chewing on hair, twirling fingers, twirling in all kinds of places. And Peter Gill happens to be one of the co-defendants who's out on bail. So one day... Okay, right, yeah. Three months into this epic trial, he rolls up to Gillian in the most romantic spot you can think of in McDonald's.

Not a Wendy's. Not a Wendy's. And he basically starts pleading his case to her. He says he's innocent, he's a victim of racial profiling and injustice, and she believes him. Of course, yeah. Sometime after this, they have their first date in Stanley Park. By the barge.

They passionately kiss under an oak tree. She trembles while he holds her. And Josie, for the first time in Canadian history, a juror has sex with an accused murderer while the trial is still before the court. Uh, isn't there a conflict of interest there? It is somehow not illegal, by the way. Oh. I don't know if it is now, but at the time that this happened,

they determined that, like, through some quirk of the law, no one ever thought of this before, I guess. No one thought that a juror might be attracted to a potential murderer. Huh. Loupole! This blossoms into a full-on, secret, romantic affair full of passionate violence and manipulation. At one point, Gill allegedly tried to convince her to find him innocent,

but some of his co-defendants guilty. Oh, shit. Says Gass, quote, You never know. You bang it out. Bang it out. After eight months of evidence and testimony, the jury deliberates for a week.

Gass's fellow juror said she was intimidating and inflexible, demanding acquittal for Gill and his fellow defendants. Added one juror, Deirdre Fitzgibbons, quote, Ultimately, the jury votes unanimously to acquit all six defendants on all counts. Whoa! So before we jump back in with Bindi Johal, let's wrap up the Star Cross Love Story of Gillian Gass and Peter Gill. You mean the other Star Cross Love Story?

Fuck, dude. A lot of Star Cross Love. Riddled, I say. Police get a tip and they spot them dancing together at a club a month after the trial and they launch a surveillance campaign against Gillian, bugging her home and tapping her phone. The probe, which they called Project Elvira. Good one, good one.

Yeah, nice, blah. Revealed the unrelated gossip that Gillian's niece was two-timing ex-file star David DeCovne with legendary Vancouver Canucks right-winger Pavel Brey. Oh, wow. Digging up that dirt, baby. Listen, all the best. David? Oh, that's right. Ex-files was filmed in Vancouver too.

Ex-files was filmed there, Pavel Brey. Those are like, that's 1996 in Vancouver right there. Two-time in David DeCovne with Pavel Brey. That's a Halloween costume. That's a deep cut. So, do you remember Gillian, well, do you remember Bindi Jo Hall? Listen. Yeah, definitely like six degrees, right?

Yeah, yeah. That's a good one. Where are you going? I'm not done explaining my costume. So, Gus and Gill get charged with obstructing justice and the media has a field day casting Gus as Canada's answer to Monica Lewinsky. Oh. This quote from the Toronto Sun gives you an idea of how her coverage played out to say that Gillian gas is vulnerable is accurate but an understatement. While her harshest detractors paint her as a publicity hound who is savoring the spotlight,

the flip side is that her brazen sexuality masks a cry for attention, a deep neediness which cannot be assuaged. Ooh. It's weird though because like I struggle with the coverage of this because on the one hand I have that same reaction. Yeah, yeah. And then on the other I was like, kooky, needy, temptress? Yeah.

Yeah, not far off. Yeah. Yeah. But somebody of course with her own story and her own background that made her decisions that she made. And her own last name. Her own last name that she spent a lot of time thinking about. Right, yeah. Numerology, that out. Yes, exactly. Yes.

No, I think women in the media or the media portraying women is always going to be wrong. Yeah. Gillian and Peter are both found guilty of obstructing justice. Peter gets six years and serves two. Gillian testified against him at the trial. Oh. Gillian herself got 18 months in jail and served three.

Okay. And she was sentenced in courtroom 55. Oh, Gillian, you're not wrong. You are not wrong. So let's talk about the movies that I watched, the fictionalized retellings of this case. Yeah, this is a Vancouver story. Yeah, exactly.

Let's talk about the movies. So both of them are set in Vancouver, happily. Are they filmed there as well? Or do they? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're filmed here. Good.

And one of them is called, is by a director named Bruce McDonald. And it was called The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess. And it specifically takes her point of view. Kind of tells her story, which is really interesting. I like that. It's very of its era. It would have been late 90s, early 2000s. And it feels it with the editing and some of the staging choices

and that sort of thing. But it takes the form of Gillian's on doing an interview with Bobby Tomahawk. And he's this kind of shock jock East Van Guy. And there's this crowd full of people. And it's very, like, stagey and theatrical. No one is quite acting like a real human. It's very artsy, let's say.

Okay. I like that. Not bad. Gives a lot of texture to Gillian, the character, while also acknowledging kind of some of the, you know, some of the ways in which she was responsible for the shit that happened here. A lot of well-placed fives.

I wasn't paying close enough attention, but if they were wise, they would have done. Go back for that, yeah. And then I also watched Deepa Mehta made a movie called Beba Boys. And it's a fictionalized retelling that focuses on a Bindi analog named Jeet Johar and his crew of, like, spiffily dressed. They all wear suits and they're called the Beba Boys

and they terrorize Vancouver. And in this retelling, the Jeet Johar character, rather than this Peter Gill character, the juror falls in love with Jeet Johar and she gets him off and then he, like, keeps her in a penthouse in Yale Town. And it's shot because it's much more dramatized. Yeah, no, sounds it, yeah.

They've collapsed a few storylines and then added more. Yeah, it starts okay. It starts fun because it's a cool story and I was interested. Like, I was along for the ride. I think that the story is, as we've discussed, very cinematic and deserves a worthy film treatment. Beba Boys was only okay. I found the real story more interesting than the movie.

All of this has gone down around Gillian and Peter, for whatever reason. I guess because it's not technically illegal. I don't know. But the dosage murder case is not retried. Oh, what? The verdict remains. The verdict stands.

All six defendants are let loose. Other than Peter Gill who has to be retried for obstruction of justice. Yeah, but that's a different count. That's not a retrial. I don't think it's because he banged the juror. I think it's because he influenced the jury discussions. First, this is also notable as being

the dosage murder case. All of the jury discussions of that were made public because it was evidence in the obstruction of justice case. And that's the first time that's ever happened, either in Canadian history, that jury discussions have been opened up for use in another case.

Whoa. So it's a very superlative case. Russian doll situation here. Yeah. So now that Bindi's been cleared, he's got his oats. He goes right back to partying. He gets right back into crime.

And he goes right back to moving the chess pieces around the board. Okay, okay. And within weeks of his release, there's a stabbing at a strip club, three drive-by shootings, and two nightclub shootings. Bindi is apparently just going into nightclubs

and shooting in the air for no reason to intimidate people. He thinks he's untouchable. So I guess if you're feeling untouchable... Oh, hubris goes... But like, you're telling me Bindi never watched Scarface? Like, come on.

Exactly, yeah. He also assembles a private squadron of high-level assassins. A private army. A private army of high-level assassins, and he calls it the elite. And they murder to suit Bindi's wins. Whoa.

So at this point, Bindi's illegal activities, distribution, auto theft, and extortion are netting him $4 million a year. Oh, that's a lot of loony. In... It's a lot of loonies on the street. A lot of loonies on the streets. In 1996,

one of Bindi's associates buys two kilos of coke from Randy Chan, who is the younger brother of a guy named Raymond Chan, who is a big name in the triad-affiliated Lotus Gang. Yeah. At some point, it emerges that the cocaine is wasted, so Bindi stuffs Randy

into the trunk of his car and drives around Vancouver for 56 hours negotiating the terms of his release. Oh my god. VPD, meanwhile, is shitting bricks about this potential gang war about to break out, so they deploy 70 officers.

Eventually, Randy is released in exchange for five kilos of cocaine. Bindi is arrested for unlawful confinement during which he tells a camera person, I'll beat this one for sure. A little wink at the camera too, maybe? He was that guy that he wanted to seem like a big shot on camera

and he did it well. How old is he at this point? Like 25. Oh my god. So young. Big jacked young Jim Mob dude who just kills anyone he wants. Yeah, nope, don't like him.

Well, Bindi is awaiting trial for this charge. He shares his cell with a guy named Baal Buttar, and they become buds and Bindi ushers him into the elite the squadron of personal assassins he keeps. Right. Baal says, quote, Bindi told me you are going to be the one underneath me.

You listen to me. If you take care of things at your end, I'll be happy with you, brother. If you fuck me over, I'll kill you. Okay, okay, so that was the contract. That was the... And you know, not too many people leave Bindi's contracts. He severs them quite regularly,

but Baal says that the elite killed 25 to 30 people over the next few years and at first the killings fit a strategy to gain power in Vancouver's criminal underworld, but they became increasingly petty and erratic. Mm-hmm.

Buttar says that Bindi justified one of the murders by saying the guy had stolen cash from him, but really Bindi was jealous over a girl. Right, yeah, yeah. Anything and everything could get you in trouble. In 1998 Bindi's erratic behavior and cruelty

and megalomania come to a head when he murders Derek Shankar, a well-liked young criminal associate. The story goes like this. Okay. Baal Batar is out partying with Derek and some others and somebody phones up Bindi to try to get him to come out.

Bindi's not feeling it. He's like La Bifana. So Derek kind of teases him a bit, calls him a baby or something. Like, oh, I'll come out, you baby. Later, everyone goes back to Baal's place and Bindi waiting there. Bindi sees Derek Shankar in the car and he gets in and he orders the car to drive out

to a secluded part of New Westminster, which is a suburb of Vancouver. Baal described the scene to the Vancouver Sun as follows. Quote. All of a sudden I hear a big noise and I turn around and there's Derek Shankar going down. Bindi shot him. Bindi looks at me.

I had my piece. I'm thinking, hey, should I pull my piece on him and I thought, no, that's too quick. I was about to jump in the truck and he says, no, help me dump him in the water. So I chucked him in the water. Derek Shankar, you've got to understand, I've known that guy for a long time. He was from Richmond. He was one of the Richmond boys.

So I saw Bindi kill him. We chucked him in the water. We chucked the gun off the Queensboro Bridge. So this is like, this is a real watershed moment for how Bindi is kind of like perceived within his crew because everybody liked this guy. Everybody had come up with this guy.

He was like a party animal, he was like good nature, da, da, da, da, da. A Richmond boy, yeah. A Richmond boy and he made the mistake of like teasing someone in the most gentle way and he got shot to death for it. And now like what you're saying, everybody in the inner circle

who knows this is like, what the fuck Bindi? Like that could have been, I could have done that or like anybody, like there's just so, that could be me. It's so erratic that it undermines him. From there, the already volatile Bindi becomes even more paranoid

and he has another longtime associate, Roman Mann, who's been around since the Los Diablos days. I think he was one of the people who like went out with Bindi to start the new thing and who one publication describes as Bindi's best friend. He has him killed for attempting to leave the organization. So Roman's like, I'm done, I'm hanging it up,

this is too much and Bindi hasn't killed. Whoa. Sometime later, Bindi and Bal are driving to a nightclub in Surrey when they make an illegal 180 turn on Scott Road, as everybody does

at some point or another, so like no judgment from my end. You know. You don't drive. I've been in the car. I've been in a car. Okay. You've been in a car. I have been in a car.

You know, they were heading down from Scott Road lanes to go to Mirage, slam back some vodka red bulls, take their picture in the silver chair. You know, let's go to the combo to KFC Taco Bell. You do a Yui. Slip a bird and boom. Well, cops pull them over and they usually

unflappable Bindi starts to panic. He's still on probation, I think from this Randy Chan thing. And he tells Bal that he has an illegal weapon in the car. Which Bal notes was very unlike him. Bindi himself almost never carried.

Okay. Bal to take the fall for it so Bindi can salvage his probation. Bal takes the fall and goes to jail. Ah, fuck. December 20th, 1998 1.30 a.m.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm there. Bindi Jo Hall is out dancing with friends at the Palladium nightclub around Richards enjoying the fineries of Vancouver's nightlife when somebody presses a gun behind his right ear and fires. He is killed.

He was 27 when he died. 27 club, boom. There we go. There were 300 witnesses but nobody saw a thing. Oh. Oh. Oh.

That's your... If you're working the bar on the Palladium that night I was looking to the other... I was looking the other way. Never heard of him. If any of these people... I do not have a phone number, please leave me alone. Big time.

For a long time speculation persisted about who put out the hit on Bindi Jo Hall whether it was Raymond Chan or a rival gang member or a disgruntled associate but in the end somebody would come forward with a confession.

Who do you got? Ooh. Is it... Is it Miss Guess? I can't imagine. Is she coming forward? Trying to find a little spotlight again? Nope. In August 2001, Al Boutar

was shot twice in the head at a Vancouver Salon leaving him blind and quadriplegic. Oh, he survived. He survived and so this was a... He says that he was really into bodybuilding and that he was like going in for a leg wax

when they got him which just strikes me as such a to go out. That is... Yeah, and you don't want to go out while you're getting your legs waxed. No. Uh-uh. Caught with your pants down. Literally, it's terrible. After that he claimed he found God and made it a mission to dissuade others

from following the same path he did and part of this meant confessing to a string of long unsolved murders Bindi Jo Hall amongst them. Whoa. Baal says that when Bindi produced a legal weapon in the car in Surrey

he knew that Bindi was going to use it to kill him that night. By taking the fall and going to jail, he had the perfect alibi for Bindi's murder which he ordered the elite to carry out on his behalf from behind bars. Whoa!

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You gotta be playing 4D chess if you want to survive in these streets, man. Oh my God. Five times. If you want your life to be worth a loony on these streets. Holy shit. Said Baal quote, if I hadn't killed him, he would have got me.

I had no choice. And I think that it was specifically watching Derek Shankar get killed where he was like, okay. Yeah, I'm, yeah. I've got to take care of Bindi. Despite this confession no charges were ever laid against Baal Batar or anybody else

for the murder of Bindi Jo Hall. Even VPD were like, it's okay, we'll let that one slide. Yep, no witnesses, what are you going to do? Uh-huh. Batar died of an infection in 2011 at the age of 35. Oh.

I think he was medically in a real bad way after the shooting for a long time. I can imagine it wasn't too easy to live that life. And Bindi too is dead. What's left? What remains? What is his legacy? In doing my research for this episode I came across this paper by Manjit Pabla

framing the twin legacies of Bindi Jo Hall as a folk devil discussed only in hushed tones but also a sympathetic hero for the disenfranchised. Yeah, yeah. And like fashion icon bad boys.

That's for me. On the one hand you've got a conservative immigrant community which seeks to discourage their children from idealizing this criminal and their preferred method is to erase him and pretend he doesn't exist. To speak his name is to glorify him, right?

Yeah, yeah. Make a martyr of him. But as we know taboos often only draw more attention. And then on the other hand and I want to make really clear that I'm drawing some of the reactions

from this kind of Punjabi Sikh immigrant community and like first generation kind of community from this paper and that they more or less line up with my own experiences growing up where Bindi Jo Hall was a thing but of course this isn't the entirety there are many many people

who don't even know who Bindi Jo Hall was he's just some guy from the 90s and I don't think about him like there's a range of opinions on him like on anybody, no communities in Monolith, right? With that said. You also have these like young men who feel erased or emasculated or disenfranchised

who feel stifled by a society's stereotypes of them or their community's expectations or their encounters with racism or whatever. Or all the above. I grew up around a lot of dudes like this. It's a very Surrey story and a very New West and Richmond

and Vancouver kind of story these third culture kids whose experiences don't match those of their parents but who are also marked as different in society and who have to create their identities in that context. For them Bindi Jo Hall could present an appealing roadmap it's power fantasy, right?

Like he's rich, he's famous, he's jacked, he's virile he's eternally young because he died at 27 at 27 the most mythical age that a person can die at he says whatever the fuck he wants and he isn't subordinate to anybody

he's Scarface, right? A secondary school teacher named Simran interviewed in 2016 said quote, every grade 8 kid is talking about Bindi as if he is some hero who defied the police and got killed and his interviews are online and people are looking it up and these grade 6, 7 kids

are always searching them up and bringing him up so one thing I decided is never ever use his name or react to his name huh interesting I feel like my teacher move would be like alright we're going to spend a week on this

and we're going to get to know all the ins and outs and you're going to know everything and some of it is not going to align with what you thought yeah no fair enough that's kind of how I seek to but there's also like different people do things differently and different communities do things differently

it's such a myth the author of this paper Manjipala also points out that much of the lore that depicts Bindi as a hero portrays his actions as being motivated by racism or injustice making his violence necessary or even

righteous of course this isn't necessarily true while Bindi would have doubtless encountered racism in his time as you can imagine like again calling back to my own experiences growing up in like a heavily immigrant community there was a lot of racial tension there right

the vast majority of his crime took place within the Indo-Canadian community and was directed at other members of that community in order to advance his own interests and so you'll get a lot of like I don't know Bindi being like this guy wasn't some hero he introduced drugs to our community

he introduced crime to our community he introduced increased public scrutiny to our community so people are quite hard like no this was a bad dude but perhaps it's not that Bindi was some crusader against injustice

but that white people were intimidated by him says a former gang member Diljit who has connections to Bindi in terms of race it's really interesting in terms of race relations how these things, how does this work and it fucking made a difference fucking white folks

stop fucking around with fucking East Indians after that they were like okay maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut the next time I'm thinking of calling you a slur that's my edit he didn't say slur when we sit down and think about race relations in this country in our community shit we look at people like fucking Bindi and say hey did he do something for our community

did he? like moralism aside put the ethical moral shit let's just deal with power relations interesting huh Bindi Johal may not have directly challenged racism as a prominent part of his story but he challenged dominant

societal ideas about Indo-Canadian men and the identities that were available to them and he took up space in a news cycle otherwise dominated by white faces and that gave him a lot of counter-cultural resonance when he was to use his words still around

and it gives him this mystique now that he's gone independent of the actual particulars of his story right? right no exactly he tilted the stereotype but then of course you have all these other people being like no Bindi Johal was a bully a psychopath

he had antisocial personality disorder insert internet diagnosis here it's a really heated discussion kind of when it not heated but it's a really broad discussion around this person when he comes up yeah a community activist going by Harjeet

I assume that none of these names are real by the way sums up Bindi's legacy and its perils and temptations as follows quote Bindi Johal his name keeps coming up and rightfully so because a lot of youth that contact me are still aware of him like I'll go to high schools 20 years after the fucking guy has been dead

and they're like hey Bindi Johal he's the man he's the man he put us on the map bro he didn't put you on the map he put you on the pavement you're going to live a lifestyle that's going to get you shot or killed woo and that is the wild story

and the complicated legacy of Vancouver's most infamous celebrity gangster Bindi Johal whoop whoop little local flavor little local flavor damn

how much of the story do you did you like know like already had in there because you very little honestly so I knew that Bindi was this very famous celebrity

like he was on the news I will say the name of him he was on the news constantly when I was growing up constantly constantly you couldn't get away from Bindi Johal and so I knew him as this figure and I knew that he an Indo-Canadian gangster and that he had died

in his 20s and he got killed at a nightclub I knew that but other than that one time it was just my brother and I we were playing Mario Party and he was roughing me up really bad like he was really really giving me the gears and I was like calm down Bindi Johal

I'll give you my money and I don't know where it came from but my brother was like Bindi Johal good pull it looked at me with real respect in his eyes and ever since then ever since then I've had like Bindi on the brain I've been like oh yeah

that story was huge that story was massive and yet I feel like there's bizarrely a paucity of online content about it given how huge it was and I think that's down to its age

obviously like random 90s news media it's kind of patchy on how well preserved it's been and so forth but yeah there's still it's one of those ones where in order to get the true sensationalist articles from the time you kind of need to go into

these archives of print stuff that you may or may not have access to so right yeah that makes sense too whoa dude I like this story I feel like I don't know

I feel like maybe I never lived in Vancouver if I didn't know this now you know when I come back to Vancouver I can very earnestly go to you and be like you know all that Bindi Johal stuff they filmed it in Vancouver hahahaha

thanks for tuning in if you want more infamy go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts we usually release new episode every other Sunday and you can also find us on instagram at bittersweetinfamy

and if you liked the show consider subscribing leaving a review or just tell a friend stay sweet the sources I used for this week's episode include I'm Still Around

Bindi Johal Canadian Gangster by Samuel Kerr on Medium January 9th 2014 Criminal Acts 1 the Canadian True Crime Annual by Alan Gold published by Macmillan in 1994 I listened to episode 1 of a 2 part podcast

called Diaspora Gone Wild Bindi Johal on the podcast The Waste Fellows which is hosted by Aliza Janoum I read excerpts from Chapter 5 of Scandal 130 Years of Damnable Deeds in Canada's Lotus Land

by William Rainer I read the Canadian Sex Scandal between a juror and an accused murderer by Meredith Cole on Vice July 20th 2018 a story from the Toronto Sun by Heather Bird originally titled She's Blinded by Passion

posted on her Justice Busters I couldn't get a date for this but it seems to have been contemporary with the coverage of the case I'm guessing 98 Sex, Murder and Audio Tapes by Chris Wood originally published in McClain's Magazine on July 1st 1998

The Legacies of Bindi Johal the Contemporary Folk Devil by Anjit Babla in Religions in 2020 Baal Bhattar agrees to plead guilty in Murder Conspiracy Case written by Kim Bowen published in the Vancouver Sun

June 16th, 2011 I read the Wikipedia article in the Comagatamuru Incident an article on Everybody With Thee on Jim Cher, Jimmy Dosange and an Academic.com article on Gillian Gats I watched two films The Love Crimes of Gillian Gats

by Bruce McDonough and Beba Boys directed by Deepa Mehta In this episode we used audio from a CVC News video hosted by Sahota08 on YouTube and from Global TV footage uploaded by KMJot Our interstitial music is

by Mitchell Mitchell and the song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele Meeting your clients face to face can elevate your business Now you can elevate your business travel too with the TD Aeroplan

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