When 46-year-old Manteca resident Jagninder Singh Boparai met a man at a Manteca Starbucks in February he thought he was meeting with a hitman that would accept money for a contract killing. 

As it turns out, according to the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, it was an FBI agent tasked with foiling the plot.

The details of the Boparai’s arrest – one of three men taken into custody by authorities in the crime – were unsealed this week by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California and detail an alleged plan where Boparai and two other men met with the alleged hitman and initially offered $6,000 in exchange for physically assaulting the person identified in documents as Victim 1.

The two other men that were also arrested were identified as 45-year-old Ramesh Kumar Birla Jr. of Dublin, and 49-year-old Shaminderjit Singh Sandhu of Tracy.

Authorities claim that Boparai provided the informant with a $1,000 down payment for the assault as a sort of audition for more serious crimes. After a period of time passed, the informant brought Boparai staged photos of Victim 1 laying on the ground covered in dirt, bruises, and blood – sparking a conversation about more prospective jobs including robbing a local business and making a different person “disappear.”

The “disappearance” included a $10,000 payment – the upfront portion of the total cost not disclosed in the release from federal prosecutors – and quickly involved the participation of the other two defendants. According to court documents, Sandhu provided the address of Victim 2 – the person to be presumably killed – to the informant and then made two phone calls to Birla asking for the potential victim’s Facebook profile picture which was relayed to Boparai and passed on to the informant.

A meeting occurred on March 24 in Manteca where Sandhu and Birla met with the confidential informant in a Starbucks parking lot in Manteca where both men allegedly instructed the informant to kill Victim 2 and take their remains to Mexico in a suitcase.

All three men were taken into custody on March 31 and remain in federal custody at this time.

The case represents a collaborative effort between the Federal Bureau of Investigation with assistance from the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Highway Patrol, the Ceres Police Department, the Dublin Police Department, the Lathrop Police Department, the Modesto Police Department, the Tracy Police Department, the Turlock Police Department, the San Joaquin and Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Offices, the San Joaquin County Probation Office, the Stanislaus County District Attorney’s Office Department of Investigations, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Adrian T. Kinsella is prosecuting the case.

To contact Bulletin reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.