Dawood's Mentor

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  The kachra peti, or dustbin line, was so fraught with risk, but Dawood was a pioneer and managed to continue smuggling gold successfully through it. The idea was simple: a passenger would carry the gold packet in a chocolate box or a box like that of a tape recorder, radio or similar such items. Just before the green channel (customs clearance), the passenger would slyly drop the box in a dustbin on the way and move towards customs declaration. The passenger would be trailed by an airport employee who would pick up the box, include it in his own belongings and carry it out of the airport when his duty hours ended that day. He would later deliver the box at the instructed address.

  This ‘kachra peti line’ worked very well and Dawood managed to smuggle in small consignments of gold biscuits without any hassles. Despite so many plausible goof-ups, nothing happened and the gold kept coming in. Khalid was mystified at Dawood’s uncanny and consistent streak of success, and his clever work in dodging the authorities.

  Khalid remained restless and perturbed for days at his incessant losses and often spent sleepless nights in search of a solution that remained elusive. Finally, one morning Khalid woke up with clarity. He decided to smuggle in one last shipment of gold from Dubai. This would be the decisive consignment. It would establish whether he should continue working with the Dawood–Pakistani syndicate or find an alternative option. On that day in April 1984 Khalid may have had an epiphany of sorts.

  He again ordered gold from Dubai. As per usual, he organized the jackets and had them loaded with gold biscuits. The launch started from Dubai at a predetermined time. Khalid did not give any details to anyone. It was a closely guarded secret, more fiercely protected even than Chinese codes, which are the most secretive in the world. However, Khalid made it a point to let Dawood know all the details, the vessel’s description, the landing dates and other such relevant information.

  As expected, the boat was accosted by the patrolling boats of the customs department. It was the seventh consignment that had been caught by the DRI sleuths. Khalid’s suspicion was proved right.

  As Dawood sauntered into the office that day, the atmosphere was mournfully grim. Khalid, who had remained awake all night, had made up his mind. He inhaled deeply and with a cold audible sigh said, ‘Dawood, you were right, we should separate. It is better to part as friends than to continue as competitors or rivals.’

  Dawood nodded and kept looking at Khalid, as if searching in his mentor’s eyes for explanations. Khalid shielded his eyes to prevent them from expressing the pain he felt. It was like a raw stab wound. He felt that had Dawood really stabbed him, he would have fared better. This was worse. He had not felt so much pain even after the Bashu episode. The knot in his chest was tightening; he felt like he was choking. But Dawood, his protégé, would never know. Khalid would not reveal his pain to the person who caused it. He wanted to summon a smile but for some reason his facial muscles did not cooperate. The Pathans are a doughty race, I will tide over this too, Khalid thought to himself.

  Years after the incident, Khalid found out how the whole chain of betrayals had played out. He realized that the information leak was the handiwork of a Dubai-based agent by the name of Ibrahim, who was working at the behest of the Pakistani syndicate.

  In the underworld, the separation of erstwhile friends and business associates always ends with bloodshed and violence. Internecine feuds between two former cronies often lead to a battle for supremacy. However, this was the only parting in the Bombay mafia that was amicable and took place without an exchange of a heated word or a foul expletive, leave alone violence.

  Khalid and Dawood’s friendship concluded peacefully. It has been over thirty-five years since they parted ways. And to this day Khalid and Dawood are friends.

  24

  ‘Never Get Caught’

  Khalid was a great teacher, and Dawood, the quick learner that he was, picked up a lot of important lessons from the former. In terms of business, Dawood learnt the ropes of smuggling, mega-scale operations, the ways of legitimatizing illegal income and various other essentials of the smuggling tradecraft. Khalid had also taught him the art of survival in street skirmishes and imbibed in him the techniques of cerebral warfare. This multidimensional training had given Dawood an aura of invincibility. Dawood felt he had learnt all that was to be learnt and could make no mistakes.

  A talented and successful protégé always learns much more than what he is taught by his mentor. Dawood was like a sponge who absorbed the minutest details of Khalid’s instructions and planning. But he focused more on money and less on the finer traits of character. Thus, pristine values like loyalty, self-sacrifice, giving precedence to others and other such lofty morals seemed to be of little or no importance to Dawood. Khalid, who deeply believed in these values, had tried to instil them in his protégé, who chose to pick up only those which served his purpose.

  Psychologists opine that every individual youth or character is actually an offshoot or sum total of his or her childhood. A person can be better understood if the circumstances of his formative years are analysed in the proper perspective. Dawood’s childhood had been one of abject poverty and suffering, of humiliation and bitterness heaped on his family from all quarters. Often all twelve of them, including his parents and siblings, starved and had only one meal a day. Following Head Constable Ibrahim Kaskar’s suspension, things had become even worse for the whole family.

  This fashioned Dawood’s psychology; he saw his mother and father struggling to bring up their large brood. Their struggles and depression shook him from the inside. While the eldest son, Sabir, found solace in poetry and beautiful girls, Dawood remained restless. In subsequent years, Dawood became obsessed with money and the power that came with it. His lust for power and money made him avaricious and insecure. In his quest to dominate and become rich, he forgot an important principle of life—the significance of human ties beyond blood relations.

  People often follow the path of their closest friends. Dawood grew up with Jenabai Daruwali and imbibed lessons in manipulating people around her. Jenabai was a friend of Dawood’s mother, Amina, and was addressed as ‘Maasi’ (aunt) by the whole Kaskar clan. Jenabai was an informer for the Bombay crime branch, who had made a sizeable fortune through bootlegging.

  A snitch leads several complex lives; for survival, people often have to be misled, deceived and used for the bigger objectives in life. Before Dawood began spending time with Khalid, his young mind had already been corrupted by Jenabai and her dubious dealings. Dawood was quick to learn the ropes; he successfully applied all that he was taught in his future ventures, smuggling and politics.

  Jenabai has been extensively profiled in my book Mafia Queens of Mumbai, which details how her clout with the police and ganglords had made her a powerful figure in the underworld. Jenabai taught everyone around her that ‘there are no real friends or real enemies in the world beyond family; everyone is useful and has come into this world for a specific purpose.’

  Since his teenage years, Dawood had befriended people with an ulterior motive and then discarded them once they had served their purpose. Right from the retired ACP Burhan Malgi who had supported Dawood in his school days to other cops who came into his life, all of them were just the means to a particular end. Dawood applied the same fundamentals while dealing with the members of the mafia. From Bashu Dada to Haji Mastan to Karim Lala and other stalwarts of the Bombay underworld, Dawood wanted to topple everyone and reign supreme.

  In fact, the oldies like Karim Lala got so rattled at one point of time by Dawood’s vengeful campaign against the Pathan syndicate that he travelled to the holy city of Mecca to call a truce with Dawood. Karim Lala was close to Ibrahim Kaskar but he could never figure out Dawood. But in Mecca, at the Masjidul Al-Haram, in the precincts of the Holy Kaaba, Karim Lala and Dawood both hugged and cried for a long time and renewed their old bond. It was only after this that Dawood withdrew his onslaught against the Pathans. The underworld still remembers the legendary humiliation of
Haji Mastan and Bashu Dada in public at the hands of Dawood Ibrahim.

  Soon after Dawood’s association with Khalid, his syndicate grew from strength to strength. Dawood learnt the logistics and economics of smuggling. He had accumulated enough wealth and influence that he could have remained contented and retired the way others from his era had done. However, Dawood got locked in a battle of one-upmanship. Every act was a competition for him and everyone was an adversary if they didn’t kowtow to him. People had to come to him through sheer volition or under duress. He also used pressure, politics and chicanery when the need arose.

  Dawood firmly believed that to make an omelette, one needs to break the egg. In Dawood’s universe, if you want to not only survive but marvellously succeed in the underworld, then you must decimate your equals or even those who aspire to be your equals. In fact, Dawood—who has never read Chanakya Neeti and would not know of the world-famous philosopher, economist and jurist’s strategy of saam (suggest), daam (buy), dand (punish) and bhed (disrupt)—believed this aggression would fuel his master plan for success. The idea was simple: break everyone either through money or threats.

  Dawood began the execution of his plan in the most ruthless manner. The foremost weapons that he used were dand and daam. Dawood began punishing his enemies either through his men or through the system. To this end, he began exploiting the weaknesses of his enemies by bribing government officials.

  The systematic elimination of Pathan gangs—comprising Alamzeb, Amirzada, Samad Khan and Mehmood Kalia—meant finishing off every threat in his climb to success. While Amirzada and Samad were killed through hired killers, Alamzeb and Mehmood were killed in dubious police encounters. Mehmood was killed right after his arrival from Dubai outside the car park of Santa Cruz Airport, while Alamzeb was killed by the Baroda Police in Gujarat. Later, Rama Naik, who was ganglord Arun Gawli’s close confidante, was also killed in a police encounter in Chembur.

  It is still debatable whether the Bombay Police and customs officials used Dawood, or whether he used them. The collaboration with government officials made him shrewder and more cunning and skilful in the business of smuggling. Dawood began to worship money and lust for more power. This turned him into a scheming, manipulative and self-centred don, unlike his predecessors.

  Arguably, Dawood would be the only Indian don who took the mafia espionage to a totally different level. Long before phone tapping became a major weapon in the arsenal of the Bombay Police, Dawood exploited the medium to keep tabs on his friends and enemies. According to Dawood’s cronies, the don had paid a substantial amount of money to a few technicians in the telephone exchange to pass on all recorded conversations on the telephone numbers he had wanted monitored. This gave him access to not only their hidden thoughts but also the advance intelligence to pre-empt events and act accordingly. Dawood thus managed to spy on his own men. The corporate czars and politicians of today actually picked this up much, much later.

  Khalid and Dawood were quite close and it was their mutual ambition to make money and succeed that tied them together. However, Khalid and Dawood differed with each other on several issues. Khalid believed in old-school values and a code of honour, while for Dawood it was all about achieving what he had set out to achieve regardless of right or wrong. But the protégé was grateful to Khalid for the big break and the hand-holding. Both of them loved each other too much and, despite their differences, hung on together.

  It was at this point that Khalid began partnering with Galadari, and Dawood aligned with the Pakistani syndicate. Soon the five-man army, which had already been truncated after the death of Sabir, was dissolved. Khalid and Dawood realized that they didn’t want to become foes after such a strong friendship; they decided to amicably part ways. This farewell was so painful for Khalid that he decided to not only quit the syndicate but also the city. He relocated to Dubai and began working with the Galadari family, though he occasionally made trips to Bombay to keep in touch with his family.

  Dawood, though he missed Khalid’s pragmatic solutions, marched on to become the uncrowned king of the Bombay mafia. Now Dawood would never have to think twice or have to consult anyone about his decisions. He launched a new scheme of smuggling called ‘partnership project’. This scheme allowed every investor to invest in any number of jackets in a particular speedboat; so people could invest in five to fifty jackets, depending on their financial capacity.

  In Khalid’s absence, Dawood embarked on a fresh chapter in gold smuggling. His idea was to cram the coffers full, at any cost. The plan was that if twenty people would get together to pool in their resources and order 200 jackets of gold biscuits, then all of them were expected to deposit the money with Dawood as he would be helming the operation coast to coast, right from Dubai and all the way to Bombay. There was a new excitement in the air, even small-time businessmen were hoping to join the big league and become smugglers. The jackets were loaded with gold biscuits in Dubai and the vessel was seemingly en route to Bombay.

  Dawood told everyone that he would land the consignment in a week’s time. However, after the said time passed, he called a meeting of all the investors. The situation seemed grim as Dawood dropped the bad news: ‘Hamara maal (Our goods) . . .’ his voice trailed, ‘Customs ne pakad liya (Has been caught by customs),’ he finished, his voice dropping in decibels.

  A collective sigh of incredulity and denial rose in the room. Expressions like ‘Nahin, bhai (No, bhai)’, ‘Kya baat kar rahe ho (What are you saying)?’ and ‘Ya mere Allah (Oh Allah)!’ filled the air. This was followed by agitated chatter and the whole room erupted like a flea market.

  Dawood remained quiet for a while and then said, ‘Bas karo, mera bhi nuqsan hua hai . . . Business mein nafa nuqsaan toh hota rehta hai . . . Aap sab ghar jaiyye (Please stop, even I have been ruined . . . One experiences profits as well as losses in business . . . All of you please go home),’ Dawood said in his attempts to placate them. No one was happy but they inferred that Dawood was apparently crushed with the loss and that it was better to leave him alone.

  But no one knew the real story. Indian customs officials had received a tip-off about a small boat on its way to Bombay and seized it in Indian territorial waters. However, the boat had only twenty jackets, and neither had they been fully loaded, nor were all of them genuine gold. Some pockets also had counterfeit biscuits, thanks to the Pakistani syndicate’s anticipation of the bust.

  It was, in fact, an elaborate scam that Dawood along with the Pakistani cartel had pulled off with a devious subterfuge. Dawood had taken money from twenty investors, equivalent to 200 jackets, or 2000 kg of gold, which was an enormous amount of money. But if only a small amount of gold was confiscated and the news flashed everywhere, then all the investors could be conveniently told that their share was lost in the seizure. Dawood ended up having to share the spoils of only twenty jackets with the Pakistanis, which is barely 10 per cent of the entire turnover. The rest of the 90 per cent of the unaccounted cash came safely into his kitty, undivided and without any hassles.

  Dawood swindled his investors a few more times using different mechanisms and a variety of ploys. Sometimes, instead of calling them all together, he would call them individually to inform them. After a few such instances, the investors got wiser and then stopped investing money with him altogether.

  The Bombay cabal, which always hated Khalid’s proximity to Dawood and felt jealous about his influence on the young gun, missed Khalid’s presence, strangely. For the first time they realized that Khalid had made dealings transparent and scrupulous. They had never faced betrayal or deception with him.

  Was this the reason that Dawood had wanted to split from Khalid? Did Dawood feel stymied with Khalid’s decision-making and involvement in the business? Khalid was a hurdle for Dawood who desired total domination and unbridled access to money and control over people. Khalid would have played on Dawood’s conscience and not have allowed these kinds of decoy dealings and looting of investors.

 
Khalid brought character to the mafia. His contention was that if smuggling is tijarat (business), then it should be conducted scrupulously and conscientiously. Not that Khalid did not get involved in violent skirmishes, but he ensured that he was never declared wanted by the law. He felt that he should never get in the way of the law in such a way that the cops come at him hammer and tongs. He didn’t want to be a menace for the country.

  Among the lessons Khalid imparted to Dawood that the latter never paid heed to was this: ‘Despite all your failings and dalliances in crime, you can still remain a white-collar smuggler.’

  It was adherence to this principle alone that kept Khalid safe and unharmed at the hands of the law. He kept making trips to Bombay, conducted business on a smaller scale and remained happy. There was never ever a lookout notice issued against him. However, Khalid, who normally had no regrets, nursed one major remorse all his life. He had lost his cool once and acted on an impulse. The incident had shaken him to the core.

  In the meanwhile, the mafia got together in a huddle and began talking among themselves and decided to bring about a reconciliation between Khalid and Dawood. For them, the Khalid–Dawood combine was an expedient arrangement. But even before Dawood could react to such suggestions and overtures, things spiralled out of control for him. Dawood was declared wanted in too many cases and the cops were hot on his heels. He realized that he could not continue to live in Bombay and made a hasty escape from the city in 1986, minutes before the Bombay Police raided his Musafir Khana headquarters on Pakmodia Street in south Bombay.