Another Metro gangster gunned down in Mexico
For the third time this year, a Metro Vancouver gangster has been shot to death in Mexico.
Jodh Singh Manj, 31, was gunned down after leaving a gym in a commercial complex in the Mexico City neighbourhood of Santa Fe.
He was getting into a vehicle in the building ’s parking lot with his wife when masked gunmen opened fire about 1:30 p.m. local time Wednesday. His Colombian wife was not injured.
Manj, who grew up on Vancouver’s South Slope, is a member of the United Nations gang and had been spending long periods of time in Mexico for years.
Police sources say he maintained links with Mexican cartels to broker bulk cocaine shipments to Canada that would then be sold by the gang. He was also a suspect in the 2012 murder in Port Moody of Independent Soldier gangster Randy Naicker, although Manj was never charged.
Police also say Manj’s violent demise in Mexico is likely an indication that B.C.’s bloody gang war between the United Nations gang and the Wolf Pack gang coalition has spilled over into that country.
The Wolf Pack was formed in 2010 by some Hells Angels, some Independent Soldiers members and some Red Scorpion gangsters.
On Aug. 24, Wolf Pack associate and former Metro Vancouver resident Nabil Alkhalil was shot to death in a wealthy suburb of Mexico City. His brother Robby remains in pretrial custody in B.C. charged with the 2012 murder of high-profile gangster Sandip Duhre.
And a week earlier, on Aug. 17, West Vancouver’s Guiseppe Bugge, who police call a Hells Angels associate, was fatally shot in Guadalajara. Manj’s murder could have been in retaliation for those of Alkhalil and Bugge, both described as “targets of the UN,” Postmedia sources said Thursday.
One high-profile Hells Angel was posting gleeful comments on his Instagram Wednesday believed to be referencing Manj’s murder.
Sgt. Brenda Winpenny, of the anti-gang Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, said Manj’s death shows that those caught in the violent gang lifestyle can’t escape it by fleeing Canada.
“There have been multiple murders of gang members, many of them high profile, in Mexico over the years and recently,” Winpenny said Thursday. “Gang members who think they can hide out in foreign countries are naive to think they will be able to escape the ramifications of their negative decisions and actions.”
VPD Supt. Mike Porteous said police have been aware of Manj for more than a decade. He said he was “always in conflicts with other gang figures, involved in violence across Greater Vancouver, the South Slope, drugs, most of the gamut of any kind of gang-related crime.”
Until last year, Manj was facing charges of conspiracy to import and distribute methamphetamine, ecstasy and pseudoephedrine in Oregon, California, Washington and Canada. The U.S. attorney in Portland alleged Manj had conspired with several others to smuggle ecstasy and pseudoephedrine from Canada into the U.S., then transport methamphetamine north to the Pacific Northwest and into B.C. from 2008 to 2010.
In 2009, Manj was intercepted by U.S. agents talking on the phone to the head of a drug-trafficking organization about selling him 15,000 ecstasy pills.
According to U.S. court documents, the charges against Manj were dismissed in February 2017 because the “defendant has not been apprehended, his whereabouts are unknown, and it would be difficult to locate the witnesses and exhibits necessary for successful prosecution of this case.”