A Manteca man pleaded guilty in a murder-for-hire plot in which a purported hit man won the contract by submitting a faked photo of a bloody victim.
The three defendants, including a Dublin man, were arrested in March 2023 after allegedly making a down payment to the hired killer — who was an FBI informer, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California.
According to court records, the plot arose out of a dispute concerning the purchase of a Stockton parking lot. The Manteca man — Jagninder Singh Boparai, 48 — met at a Starbucks with the supposed hit man and offered him an audition of sorts for the killing: On a recording of the meeting, Boparai is heard requesting proof of “a good beat-up” of a different victim, the Modesto Bee reported.
At their next meeting, “the confidential informant showed Boparai a staged photo of Victim 1 laying on the ground covered in bruises, dirt, and blood to indicate the assault had occurred,” the federal attorney’s account says. “Boparai said he liked the photo and told the confidential informant that he had two other ‘jobs.’”
The informer was given $10,000 and the intended victim’s photo and address and told to kill the man and take his remains to Mexico in a suitcase, the prosecutor said. The total payment was to be $30,000.
The following week, FBI agents arrested the three men.
The intended victim’s name was not released. The informer has a criminal record, mostly for theft, the Bee reported.
Boparai pleaded guilty on Jan. 23, 2025, to conspiring to use interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire. He is to be sentenced May 8.
The two other men — Ramesh Kumar Birla Jr., 45, of Dublin, and Shaminderjit Singh Sandhu, 51, of Tracy — are next due in court in April, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
The maximum sentence for each is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.