In the 1970s, the Bombay mafia’s ambitions were not far-reaching and were yet to take proper shape. Their fiefdom began and ended with their lanes and adjacent lanes and some intersections. The J.J. Hospital intersection, which is not a huge or expansive area, had several by-lanes and mohallas. Interestingly, every by-lane had a dada whose writ ran large in the area. Bashu Dada ruled the roost in Teli Mohalla, where he had his gym, baithak (gathering place) and his residence. Dawood Ibrahim’s father, Ibrahim Havildar, too had a house in this small, narrow lane and Dawood was born in one such cramped house measuring barely 100 sq. ft. That’s how Ibrahim Bhai and Bashu Dada knew each other and were apparently friends. The Kaskar clan later moved to Temkar Mohalla, which is adjacent to Teli Mohalla.
Hassu Maharaj threw his weight around in Khanda Mohalla, which was also known as Hujra Mohalla. Then there was Chowki Mohalla, so called because of a police chowki at the end of the street; this was unclaimed territory.
A little further away was Siddhi Mohalla, which housed over 2000 families belonging to an ethnic African race. They made India their home for 500 years ago when the Portuguese brought them here as slaves. They are Sufi Muslims. The leader of the Siddhis, as this tribe is called, was a local toughie called Kareem Siddhi, a lookalike of the Ugandan despot Idi Amin—and he was referred to by this name by the local cops and everybody else. Those were the days when Idi Amin’s atrocities against his own people was in the news. Kareem Siddhi, of course, loved the moniker and began dressing up in military uniform to keep up the facade.
Every Friday, after the Jumma prayers, Kareem Siddhi used to don the military uniform with his black shades, trying to look every inch like Idi Amin. And then he would stand on a platform and give fiery speeches to an audience comprised mainly of his acolytes and some of his community members. The common Siddhis raised their hands to hail him and encouraged him the way the Nazis raised their hands to support the leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler. As long as Kareem Siddhi was alive, no gangster, mafia don or policeman dared to cross swords with him. The Idi Amin of Mumbai ruled in his small fiefdom unchallenged. The Siddhis were never attracted to radical Islam by the Salafis or the Tablighis, who were gradually making inroads into Dongri. The Siddhis remained liberal Sufi followers and adhered to the discipline staunchly. They subsequently set up dargahs of Sufi saints in the area. After Kareem Siddhi’s death, there were no more Idi Amins. Slowly the Siddhi population too migrated to Arab countries for greener pastures. Presently there are barely fifty Siddhi families residing in Siddhi Mohalla. They stayed behind to keep company with their patron saint.
Beyond the Siddhi Mohalla was Jail Road South, considered to be the stronghold of Abdul Rahim Khan and his sons, while his brother Abdul Karim Khan, alias Karim Lala, ruled the Grant Road area of Baida Gully. Karim Lala also called the shots in his brother’s area and vice versa.
Beyond Grant Road and Novelty Cinema was Bombay’s red-light area, comprising Kamathipura, Foras Road and Playhouse, mispronounced as ‘Pila House’. These areas were ruled by a local dada called Shahid, who had his baithak in Arab Galli.
In fact, the gangs had few means of relieving people of their hard-earned money. The red-light area had only two kinds of income for the underworld dadas. The most despicable source of making money was living off the income earned through the physical exploitation of women who were forced into prostitution. It worked through the local network of prostitutes, marketed by pimps and the gharwali (the brothel’s female manager) who had reached her position after growing old and spending decades in the flesh trade. The gharwalis and pimps collected cash in the morning from the helpless prostitutes and gave it to Haji Umar, who was the head of all the pimps and was pejoratively referred to as ‘Bhadvon ka Boss’, meaning the ‘chief of pimps’. Umar used to make thousands of rupees every night, and would keep bringing girls from the northern and southern Indian states as per the demand. At the time, Umar ruled the red-light area with an iron fist. Not much is known about Umar except that his mother, Ayesha, was a ragpicker-turned-sex worker. Ayesha had turned out to be quite popular in the area and lived with a local pimp who supplied girls to top politicians in the state. Umar had been brought up by the pimp, who had promoted him to take charge of the Kamathipura area. Umar was also a homosexual and often sodomized his own sex workers before inducting them in the trade.
Within these pinjaras (birdcages) and red-light-area lanes were a series of seedy cinemas, which included Taj Talkies, Shalimar, Nishad, Super Talkies and Royal Talkies. Those were the days when movie tickets were sold in advance and people stood in serpentine queues to get tickets for the advance show of their favourite matinee idol. At times, when a film was considered a blockbuster, people would stand in a queue for over forty-eight hours to get tickets through advance booking. The prices were steep but tickets were readily bought by those willing to pay for it. It was the time when the blockbuster Bobby was released, marking Dimple Kapadia’s debut, at the beginning of 1973, which was followed by Amitabh Bachchan’s watershed movie Zanjeer, released a few months after Bobby. However, Dimple’s bikini act in Bobby drew a far bigger crowd than Jaya Bhaduri’s well-draped character in Zanjeer. There were endless queues for Bobby, which remained unabated for months.
Shahid of Arab Galli saw an opportunity in these huge queues and invented the ‘chaar anna scheme’. If someone was in queue and wanted to jump his position and progress by ten people ahead of him, then he would have to shell out chaar anna (25 paise). Similarly, if he wanted to bypass 100 other people before him, he would have to shell out Rs 2.50, which was the cost of a movie ticket in those days. Incidentally, the Bachchan starrer Zanjeer did not have as many chaar-anna takers.
Umar did not like Shahid encroaching on his turf and making money through just any means. He wanted to muscle him out, but Karim Lala, who lived next door, intervened and publicly humiliated the pimp. ‘O Umar harami ka bachcha, tum bhadwagiri karo, usko phillum dekhne do (O you bastard Umar, you focus on pimping; let Shahid watch movies).’ Umar was infuriated by this and could not defy Karim Khan, who was the biggest muscle in those days and had the financial support of Haji Mastan and an ally in Varadarajan Mudaliar. Since Mastan and the other Muslim dons in the area sought respectability by making a religious pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca and thus used the prefix of Haji before their names (Haji Mastan), Umar too followed suit and decided to rechristen himself as Haji Umar, so that people would stop referring to him as ‘Bhadwa Umar’ or ‘Bhadve Ki Aulad’ (‘Umar the pimp’ or ‘son of a pimp’).
Shahid was emboldened by Karim Lala’s support and devised a new way of mocking Umar, not to mention making a quick buck. The debauched Arabs from Saudi Arabia had begun making business trips to Bombay. Shahid began supplying young girls to these Arabs in five-star hotels for Rs 1000. For a virgin, the price was Rs 5000. The trade was crudely christened as ‘ribbon-cutting ceremony’, a euphemism for deflowering virgins.
This business became quite popular with the Arabs and Shahid began making a lot of money. Umar watched helplessly as it was his trade, but since it was not conducted in his territory, he could not do anything. Shahid modified the trade and decided to sell the girls to these Arabs in the guise of marriage. He exploited the poverty of Indian Muslims and persuaded them to marry off their teenage girls to the Arab sheikhs in return for money that they desperately needed.
The Arabs were more than happy with this aspect of prostitution, seeing as they were able to get young virgin girls for a throwaway price of Rs 10,000. One could see sixty-year-olds marrying several twelve-year-olds. Shahid had also begun to import young girls from Hyderabad to sell them off to the Arabs. This went largely unnoticed by the government until the 1991 incident in which eleven-year-old Hyderabad resident Ameena Begum, who had been married off to an old Arab, was rescued by a courageous flight attendant Amrita Ahluwalia from an Indian Airlines flight. Despite the incident-making headlines, the business continued for a long time. Numerous such hoax marria
ges were conducted by pseudo qazis (priest) in the Dongri area until Umar decided that he had to take over the business from Shahid through some ruse.
Those who were not into the flesh trade or the black market decided to operate gambling dens (through matka gambling) but none could touch the business of bootlegging as Varadarajan had monopolized it so much that from Dharavi to Dahanu and on the central railway line until Dombivli, he had the sole authority to brew and distribute liquor.
Every turf was thus demarcated and restricted to a particular mafia group. Until the Pathan gang—led by Amirzada–Alamzeb, went on a rampage, opposed only by a twenty-year-old Dawood, who boasted a band of loyalists—none of the gangsters ever thought of consolidating their hold over the entire south Bombay area.
It was against this backdrop that Khalid aspired to think big and transact on gargantuan scales. Khalid laughed at the chaar-anna scheme and disapproved of the flesh trade. After moving on to gold smuggling from landing silver bricks, Khalid was ready to go to the next level—diamond smuggling.
While Khalid was happy with gold smuggling, he was in a mood to multiply his profits. He wanted something that would pose the least amount of trouble with the authorities and something with minimum complications. Gold could not be carried on flights as the vigilance therein was too much, whereas diamonds could be easily smuggled in through airports. Diamonds worth several lakhs could be easily kept in the pocket, hidden in the underwear or camouflaged in other accessories. The diamonds, depending on the number of carats and the cut, could make a minimum margin of over 200 per cent and could be easily sold in the Surat or Ahmedabad diamond markets, if not in Opera House or Zaveri Bazaar in Bombay.
Khalid threw the idea to Bashu, who was initially hesitant because of the bigger investment he would have to make and the consequent risks involved in the new business, but Khalid managed to convince him and left for Dubai.
Abdul Wahab Galadari was quite pleased with Khalid’s dedication to the business and was quick to observe that so far they had not suffered any losses. He decided to give Khalid a chance with diamond smuggling. Galadari displayed an immense amount of implicit trust and handed him diamonds worth over Rs 3 lakh. This was also a litmus test for Khalid about whether he could evade the customs officers successfully and make a decent revenue from the diamonds.
Khalid was aware of the perils of the business. He decided to play smart and indulge in the systematic diversion of the authorities, as was the case with industrial espionage. Khalid carried a gold biscuit with him, stashed in the space meant for a camera roll. Those were the days when pictures were taken on a reel and not stored on a hard disk. To let the law enforcers notice the smaller folly, allow him to pay the fine after looking sorry and distract them from the bigger scam—this was the age-old tactic employed by all kinds of diamond smugglers and traders.
When Khalid reached Bombay, he hesitated and then walked towards a customs officer and declared that he was carrying a gold biscuit. The customs officer glared at him and then made him pay a duty of Rs 25,000 on it. The customs officer reprimanded him for carrying gold, which Khalid explained was for his would-be bride. Khalid was lightly frisked but no attention was paid to his shoes, in which the diamonds were hidden in the heels.
Normally, the whole airport episode and the diamond venture should have enthused Bashu. But when Khalid came back and triumphantly narrated the story to him, he only received a withered look. That was the last nail in the coffin of his friendship with Bashu.
15
The Bashu–Khalid Split
Several burly, dour, poker-faced men had surrounded the building from all sides. They were sturdy and strongly built men who seemed to mean business. That July morning, nobody in their right minds would have messed with them.
These grim-faced men did not have any weapons on them but they compensated for it with their menace. Curious onlookers maintained a safe distance lest they fell foul of them. A few policemen, sporting their trademark antique SLR .303 guns, were also scattered about. When the entire area was properly secured, one of the men, who clearly seemed to be in charge, summoned two hefty men and issued instructions to them. He asked them to go upstairs with a few uniformed policemen carrying weapons.
Time seemed to stand still for those holding fort downstairs around the building. They were alert and prepared for any showdown. Interminable seconds passed before the team that went upstairs returned and joined their teammates for a short conclave. From their animated discussion and the fact that they had returned empty-handed, the onlookers surmised that the poor sod whom they had gone to pick up had probably flown the coop.
A nervous Khalid stood unobtrusively in a corner opposite the building, watching with trepidation the developments unfolding in this Bombay Central building on the busy Bellasis Road in south Bombay. He realized that his habit of eating an early brunch had saved him from being a sitting duck for those who had come hunting for him. At the time, he was not aware that the men who had come for him were the sleuths of the DRI accompanied by a posse of policemen.
He thanked his stars for his habit of always playing it safe. He never discussed his habits, eating spots and the location of his house with anybody. His personal life and his idiosyncrasies were nobody’s business.
Earlier the same day, around late morning, he had gone to a restaurant bang opposite his residence for a hearty breakfast of keema, tandoori roti and several eggs. As he was paying at the counter, the cashier, who knew him well, remarked, ‘Aaj aapki building pe CID ki raid giri lagti hai (Looks like the building you live in has been raided by the CID today).’ Khalid’s heartbeat quickened and his eyes reflected a momentary rush of fear. For a man who wanted to join the police force, being a fugitive on the run from the law did not come to him naturally. Playing hide-and-seek with the enforcement agencies had changed his psychology. But, of course, he was aware that since his foray into smuggling, he had crossed the Rubicon.
Before the cashier could catch his eyes again, Khalid had managed to quickly mask his emotions. He smiled and shrugged nonchalantly as he took the change. But once outside the restaurant, Khalid could not contain himself. He darted between groups of people to see the spectacle for himself. Across the road, around Patel Mansion, where he lived on the first floor, the place was swarming with both plain-clothes and uniformed police officers.
How did the police discover him? Who squealed on him? He had kept his residence a closely guarded secret. Only a few from the inner sanctum knew his address. Bashu had come visiting only once. Khalid’s life was not an open book; even though rival gangs had sniffed out his success, nobody knew his modus operandi.
Did he unwittingly cross swords with somebody that brought the police to his doorstep? Barring the Rashid Taxi–stabbing episode, which was summarily dismissed after Dawood’s chicanery, Khalid was not involved in any serious offence.
The whole operation was seemingly called off after a brief discussion and the men had begun to disperse. However, Khalid was curious and his gaze began following the leader of the group, who walked towards a parked jeep and began talking to a man. The man that he was talking to came out of the jeep and stood next to him on the curb, smoking a cigarette. Khalid’s heart fell to his stomach. The officer was talking to Bashu! Khalid was stunned. Was Bashu in league with the police and the CID? Did Bashu lead them to Khalid’s house? Was he the snitch? The realization that Bashu had probably squealed on him hit Khalid with the force of an unstoppable steam engine. He staggered backwards in shock.
‘Impossible. Impossible,’ he kept muttering under his breath.
How did he miss this? Bashu’s equation with him had never been the same since the time he had come back from Dubai after striking a deal with the Galadari brothers. Their relationship was further strained after Khalid received the green signal from the Galadari brothers for smuggling diamonds into India.
It had been very obtuse of Khalid to have missed the signs. Bashu had been very reserved with him for a wh
ile now. He had taken to replying in monosyllables and he seemed to be always preoccupied. He wouldn’t meet Khalid’s eyes during conversations, and when he did, they were expressionless. As he saw Bashu confabulating with the raiding party’s leader that day, Khalid finally realized that another chapter in his life was over.
It had all started when a batch of diamonds sent by a diamond merchant from Bombay had been stolen. It was being transported through the unofficial courier network of boys called ‘the Angadias’, when they were robbed en route to Surat. A police complaint was filed by the diamond merchant. Incidentally, Bashu and Khalid also did business with the same diamond merchant. One thing led to another during the investigation and the police landed up at Bashu’s door. Bashu realized that this was the best way to save himself and make Khalid the scapegoat. Bashu blamed the whole smuggling business on Khalid. India’s premier anti-smuggling agency, the DRI, which is part of the Central excise and customs administration, also got involved and teamed up with the DRI to reach Khalid.
Around the same time, the DRI had seized unaccounted diamonds worth Rs 5 crore from an Angadia boy bound for Surat. The trail of investigation led the DRI to the diamond-market headquarters at Bombay’s Opera House and subsequently to a mob boss from Dongri. They connected the diamonds seized from one Jignesh Dave of Radhesyam Angadia Services to Bashu Dada in Teli Mohalla.
The Angadias of Mumbai are a unique lot. They are men who work for diamond traders and jewellers and are generally very trustworthy. They wear a long jhabba with a pocket, while some prefer to carry a jhola. Diamonds worth millions of rupees are carried from Mumbai to Surat and elsewhere by these men. They look inconspicuous and blend in with the crowd. They are generally very reliable but not prone to conversations if you travel with them in trains, usually long-distance ones. They are known to be very discreet. Generally diamond and bullion traders from Bhuleshwar, Pydhonie, Kalbadevi, Dhobi Talao and Dalal Street in south Mumbai use them to transport important documents, gold, diamonds and wads of cash.
Dawood's Mentor Page 11