Mafia Queens of Mumbai

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  After spending two years in jail, Sujata was finally released on a bail bond of Rs 1 lakh on 12 September 2007, as the police failed to prove the charges against her. Since then, the police has been working towards presenting a watertight case against her; she, on her part, has roped in a battery of professional lawyers to defend her.

  In 2008, Sujata requested permission from the court to travel to Hong Kong and Singapore to help get her daughter Anita admitted to a foreign university, and also to defreeze her bank account to fund her daughter’s education. Both her demands were opposed by the Enforcement Directorate as they saw it as an attempt by her to flee the country and stay with Rajan. The ED stated that the investigation against Sujata under the Money Laundering Act was in its final stage, hence her application was rejected.

  For now Sujata is lying low in order to avoid any further confrontation with the law. However, she continues to enjoy the privilege of being Tilak Nagar’s Nani. And as long as she can do so, neither she nor her husband has much to worry about.

  PADMA POOJARY

  Question: What does an educated, crafty and ambitious woman with dreams of possessing a fortune of billions do if she ends up marrying a small-time thug with no identity of his own?

  Answer: She uses her skills to shape her husband into a hardened gangster who ends up breathing fear into the moneyed class of the very city where he first began as a nobody, only a decade ago...

  A middle-class Sikh by birth, Padma Poojary, nee Khanna, first met Ravi when she was studying at a co-educational convent school in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri. Both Padma and Ravi went to the same school in the Sahar Airport Colony.

  Ravi, originally from Mangalore in Karnataka, soon dropped out of school. From the very beginning, he was drawn to the world of crime and the underworld. After initially working as a small-time criminal, he rose through the ranks of the underworld when he killed his opponent Bala Zake. Later, in the mid ’90s, he went on to join self-proclaimed patriotic don Chhota Rajan’s gang. Rajan, Dawood Ibrahim’s aide-turned-enemy, was at the time trying to establish a strong base in Mumbai’s crime scene. It was around this time that Ravi got married to his long-time girlfriend and childhood sweetheart Padma.

  Padma only learned about Ravi’s criminal activity after marrying him. She had two options: either to leave him or live with the fact that her husband was a goon. Lured by the possibility of immense wealth, she chose the latter, not really understanding, perhaps, the pitfalls of being married to a criminal.

  Ravi served as Rajan’s foot-soldier in Mumbai, starting off with executing the don’s day-to-day orders. At Rajan’s behest, he would extort money from hoteliers and other businessmen in Mumbai. In the years that followed, Poojary became one of Rajan’s favourite protégés, travelling to Dubai and Southeast Asia to carry out his boss’ jobs. Padma kept a low profile and continued to live with their children in a rented flat in the Sher-e-Punjab colony of Andheri in Mumbai.

  Though Padma supposedly handled Ravi’s extortion money while he was away, the police, for a long time, was oblivious to this ‘housewife-cum-banker’. Perhaps the fact that she lived in a rented flat in the unremarkable and non-descript suburb of Andheri is one reason why the police didn’t consider that she might be involved in his business.

  During this time, Padma converted from Sikhism to Christianity and had her children baptised. The reason for this change of faith is still unknown.

  By early 2000, Ravi had become one of Rajan’s closest aides. However, barring the fact that he belonged to Rajan’s gang, he did not have any extraordinary achievements or credentials that he could call his own. For a man who had always wanted to carve a niche for himself in the underworld, the realisation that he was a mere cog in the Rajan machinery was very disturbing.

  According to police sources, it was during this time that Padma advised Ravi to deviate from the Rajan gang and start his own enterprise. She also allegedly suggested that he look at Bollywood and the business classes—the real mine of wealth. Following his wife’s advice, Ravi left the Rajan gang and recruited men from Mumbai to work for him, even as he continued to operate from Southeast Asia. Extortion calls began to be made to bigwigs in the city. In 2006, Poojary’s men opened fire at Bollywood director Mahesh Bhatt’s office, after he refused to give in to Ravi’s extortion demands. Poojary also tried to extort Rs 50 crore from Bollywood actress Karisma Kapoor’s Delhi-based businessman husband Sanjay Kapur.

  Padma shrewdly kept away from the gang’s activities and escaped police scrutiny with consummate ease. Padma finally had her first brush with the law for obtaining a passport on the basis of a forged ration-card and school-leaving certificate in 1995. The matter concerning the submission of fake documents by Padma only came to light as late as 2005, a good ten years later, when she sent her passport for renewal and applied for her children’s passports. The passport authorities grew suspicious while scrutinising her passport forms and immediately tipped off the Mumbai police’s Crime Branch. The Crime Branch, on conducting inquires, learned that not only were the documents submitted for Padma’s children’s passport applications fake, but those submitted by her to procure a passport in 1995 had also been forged.

  Padma had used the passport to travel to several countries in Africa and the Middle East. The police suspected that, during her course of travel, she had met her absconding husband, who had taken refuge in a foreign country. Her passport was seized and she was arrested on 4 October 2005. Padma was only released on bail some thirty days later. Her lawyer Shyam Keswani repeatedly denied her role in handling her husband’s financial affairs. ‘There is no truth in the police’s claims,’ he insisted. The police, too, did not have any evidence to book her for assisting Ravi in his activities.

  However, following her arrest and bail, she came under police scrutiny. With her phone lines tapped and her whereabouts monitored by the police, Padma was left with no option but to flee the country. According to the police, Padma escaped from India via the Nepal border after acquiring a new fake passport. The police only managed to arrest the person who planned her escape.

  The Maharashtra police had issued an Interpol Red Corner Notice against Padma. The International Criminal Police Organisation, or Interpol as it is commonly known, spans 186 countries and assists national police in apprehending criminals. A Red Corner Notice is an indicator (in the form of a red flag) that pops up on the attendant’s monitor if the person tries to check in at an airport, informing the attendant that this person is wanted. However, despite Interpol’s backing, the police could not track Padma down and even five years after her escape, her location remains a mystery. The police believes that she is living with her husband and has narrowed down the location of her hideout to somewhere in South Africa.

  Though Padma’s criminal record is relatively less riddled with riminal activities as compared with Sujata Nikhalje, the wife of Chhota Rajan, she is the only wife of a Hindu gangster to have been portrayed on celluloid. A B-grade Bollywood film called World Cupp 2011, which released in early 2010, portrayed Padma Poojary as a hardcore drinker and the queen of cricket betting rackets, who bribed police authorities and government officials. The director of the film was later threatened by Ravi for portraying his wife in a negative light.

  Padma’s story cannot quite carry a ‘The End’ card, since it’s impossible to predict the kind of designs Padma has drawn up for the future as chief architect of Ravi’s gang’s criminal activities.

  Question: Where can an educated, crafty and ambitious woman with dreams of possessing a fortune of billions go if she ends up marrying a small-time thug with no identity of his own?

  Answer: Anywhere she wants.

  As far as the police is concerned, the chase is still on.

  *MCOCA is a stringent law promulgated by the Maharashtra government in 1998 after the abrogation of the TADA. Since they did not have any firm law with which to fight organised crime, the state government formulated this law. Later, the Gujarat and Delhi gov
ernments used the same law to control criminal gangs.

  INTRODUCTION

  A

  moll is often inadequately described as a ‘gangster’s girl’. For the average Indian who has grown up on a diet of Bollywood action potboilers, the first image the word ‘moll’ conjures up is that of a fair-skinned, scantily-clad woman blessed with a perfect physique with a penchant for imported liquor and cigarettes. She sways in nightclubs with the same grace and élan with which she sashays through the hearts of men. Her gambling habits at ritzy casinos are the stuff of legend, while she plays mischief-maker on demand at the insistence of her gangster boss.

  However, reel life, as it does with most occupations, only serves to exaggerate the real. The gangster’s girl in Mumbai’s underworld is nothing like her depiction in cinema. She is, in fact, more brains than beauty, and certainly doesn’t dance in clubs or sip on liquor all day.

  The most prominent examples of molls in Mumbai’s underworld are the tech-savvy Mrs Paul and the rotund beautician Rubina Siraj Sayyed, who were wooed by Dawood Ibrahim’s Man Friday Chhota Shakeel. While Dawood’s weakness is Bollywood bombshells, Shakeel’s choices have been rather different—ordinary, even unattractive. But behind his choices lay an agenda. With most of his aides behind bars, Karachi-based Shakeel needed women who were less prone to scrutiny, to supervise the activities of his gang in Mumbai. And so he roped in the ambitious wives and female relatives of his most trusted aides to work for him. They took instructions from him on the phone or over the internet and carried out all tasks as spelled out to them.

  However, Shakeel, who was normally a hard taskmaster, believed in sugar-coated conversations to motivate his women to work better. More often than not, these telephone sessions strayed into mushy, flirtatious repartee. It is this charisma that won Shakeel resourceful aides in women who, after being hypnotised by his flirtatious ways, often channelised all their energies to become efficient coordinators of the gang. Mrs Paul and Rubina belonged to this league.

  MRS PAUL

  If one were to rely solely on stereotypes, the name ‘Mrs Paul’ is most likely to evoke the image of a sixty-something Catholic woman with a polite demeanour. Dressed, possibly, in floral print summer dresses in pastel shades, she’d be the one narrating tales of her village somewhere in Goa to children, shopkeepers and fisherwomen alike. The only time this woman would be known to lose her temper would be when the fisherwoman overcharged her for her favourite tiger prawns.

  If the police, intelligence agencies and informants used codenames for the purpose of furthering investigations, Mumbai’s mafiosi, by coming up with misleading codenames, used them to throw a spanner or two in the police’s works. One such red herring was Chhota Shakeel’s business-cum-love interest, code-named ‘Mrs Paul’. This particular Mrs Paul was in fact a twenty-eight-year-old tech-savvy, short and fair Muslim woman whose real name was Shameem Mirza Beg. She was the wife of Shakeel’s most loyal lieutenant, Arif Beg.

  Arif was doing time in the Kolhapur jail for his involvement in half-a-dozen killings, aiding in the escape of assassin Feroz Konkani in 1998 and single-handedly triggering the second round of communal riots in 1992-93 in Mumbai. He had introduced his wife to Shakeel much before his arrest, and had promised the don her full support in his absence. A little after Arif s arrest, Shameem started working for Shakeel under her uniquely deceptive code-name, Mrs Paul. The rationale behind giving her a Christian name was to send the police on a wild goose chase in search of a Christian woman, thereby keeping Shameem out of harm’s way.

  In next to no time, the Net-savvy, undergraduate woman was spending quality time with Shakeel on the phone and internet chat rooms.

  The Crime Branch was tipped off about Mrs Paul in 2001. Phone lines were immediately tapped and their email ids hacked. Although it was some time before the police managed to work out who this Mrs Paul was, the virtual love affair that was carrying on between her and the don was soon exposed. For over a year the police tracked the conversations, in which Karachi-based Shakeel wooed Mumbai-based Mrs Paul, both sharing filmy-style love notes and photographs over the internet (Shakeel from handsomelovely@hotmail.com and Shameem from shams143@yahoo.com).

  Excerpts from the 11 October 2001 conversation:

  Shakeel: Jaaneman, woh Nashik mein kapde aur saaman ki list email kar di hai. (Darling, I have emailed the list of clothes and items needed in Nashik.)

  Shameem: Cyber café mein jaakar dekh loongi. (I will go and have a look at a cyber café

  (After some more business talk, the conversation turns romantic)

  Shakeel: Jaaneman, mujhe tumhari bahut yaad aa rahi hain, tumhare aane ka intezaar hain. (Darling, I think of you a lot these days, I am waiting for you to come here.)

  Shameem: Joan, main bhi aapko bahut yaad karti hoon. (Darling, even I miss you a lot.)

  Shakeel: I love you.

  Shameem: I love you, too.

  Through these conversations, the Mumbai police realised that Mrs Paul used three different cell phone numbers to communicate with Shakeel. The recordings exposed her role in Shakeel’s business: she sent him hawala money, coordinated with his lawyers, and took care of the needs of his men lodged in various jails across the country. The phone recordings also revealed that Mrs Paul managed and supervised all of Chhota Shakeel’s activities in Mumbai.

  Mrs Paul was arrested in March 2002 under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) and chargesheeted three months later. The chargesheet, comprising excerpts of the couple’s phone conversations, read more like lines from a modern-day Romeo and Juliet or Laila-Majnu.

  Most of the conversations were carried out in the kind of whispers and muffled voices that are usually used by teenage lovers desperate to keep their love a secret from others. According to the police, she would usually speak to Shakeel from inside the bathroom of her house until late at night, to avoid confrontation with her in-laws, with whom she lived.

  Even though their relationship was so unusual—the two didn’t meet each other at all during this time—issues of jealousy and complaints about distance, as seen in other relationships, ate into theirs too. For instance, in a phone conversation between the two on 8 January 2002, the Crime Branch learnt that Shakeel’s wife had just delivered a son, something that upset Mrs Paul.

  Excerpts from the 8 January 2002 conversation:

  Shakeel: Jaaneman tabiyat kaisi hai? (Darling, how are you?)

  Shameem: Men chhodiye, aapka baccha kaisa hain? (Forget about me, how is your son?)

  Shakeel: Bahut mannato he baad paida hua hai, uski fikar toh karni padegi. (He was born after a lot of prayers. I have to be bothered about him.)

  Shameem: Uski fikar main aap meri fikar chhod denge? (Does this mean that you will forget about me?)

  Shakeel: Nahin jaaneman, uski jagah aur hai aur tumhari aur. (No darling, both you and he hold different positions in my life.)

  The cyber-savvy police also hacked into both Shameem and Shakeel’s email accounts. Here, they found more love notes. In an email dated 12 March 2002, just before Shameem’s arrest, Shakeel wrote her some lines picked up from a Bollywood film song.

  Excerpts from the email:

  Tujhko sunne ko dil chahta hain/ Tujhko milne ko dil chahta hain/ Teri jo ek jhalak aa jaaye nazar/ Tujh par marjaaoon yeh dil chaahta hain. (My heart wishes to listen to your voice / My heart wishes to meet you / I wish to get a glimpse of you / My heart wishes to die for you.)

  Yaad tum bahut aati hon/ Taklif ka lamha hain/ Tumhaari awaaz sunne ko dil chahta hain. (I think of you a lot / It is a very painful period for me / My heart wishes to listen to your voice.)

  The police surmised that Shakeel must have written this letter when Shameem had failed to establish contact with him for a long period.

  Ironically, when the police hacked into Shameem’s email account, they learnt that this average-looking woman was extremely fickle in love. If being the wife of a gangster and girlfriend to a don wasn’t enough, Shameem also engaged in
other romantic liaisons. According to the police, she had a bunch of admirers, including a Parvez Batki who wrote to her from pbatki@hotmail.com. Initially the police suspected that it was Shakeel using a different ID, because the sender signed off as ‘tumhara paagal premi’ (your mad lover), but Shameem averred that he was not Shakeel but one of her many admirers.

  While the process of decoding an identity over time is usually nerve-wracking, in Mrs Paul’s case, every subsequent conversation with Shakeel left the police more amused than confused.

  RUBINA SIRAJ SAYYED

  The Pathan hurled a plate of food at the face of the woman in front of her and bellowed, ‘I don’t want to eat this rice full of stones, roti made of hay and daal with insects in it!’

  Livid, the woman—whose hands and face were covered with rice and watery daal—growled back, ‘Pathan, you are not living in a palace. This is a jail and we only serve this kind of food here. Eat it, or else go to sleep.’

  After the heated exchange, there was a moment of silence. They glared at each other, neither willing to be the first to look away or even blink. Then the jailer, who by now was accustomed to such brashness, tried to regain her lost composure and walked away to clean herself up. The Pathan, annoyed at how the jailer had dismissed the complaint, stormed out of the pantry area, hurling abuse and threatening the jailer with a court notice.

  The Pathan being referred to in this confrontation was in fact not the tall, burly man one might have expected from the name, but a huge, uncouth, brusque woman in her late thirties. She had earned this sobriquet by virtue of being oversized and stocky. Intriguingly, despite her appearance, she was also addressed as ‘heroine’ by her fellow jail mates.