Byculla to Bangkok

by S. Hussain Zaidi

She stopped visiting Ashwin in jail though his daughter Winky and her governess continued to visit him. His old father Maruti, his sister Alka and her husband Suresh all found time to see him in jail; the only one who remained too busy to meet him was Neeta. Ashwin could not come to terms with his wife’s apparent heartlessness.

  At the same time, the gang members seemed to be on the verge of rebellion; they were financially constrained, and Ekka and Lali were furious with Neeta Naik. They had been the main shooters in the Sunit Khatau killing and had quite a reputation in the underworld, but Neeta defied even them because she was assured of her cop boyfriend’s protection.

  Ashwin was desperate to meet Neeta and talk to her. But the only way he could think of enticing her to Delhi to meet him was under the pretext of philanthropy. He asked his driver Nilesh Mukherjee, whose brother Amit had been arrested along with Ashwin at the West Bengal border, to tell Neeta that she should distribute clothes to the Tihar jail staff as an act of charity. When Nilesh conveyed this message to Neeta, she refused point blank, saying she had no time or money for such niceties.

  By this time, news had trickled out that Ashwin was likely to distribute clothes in Tihar. The situation was quickly turning into an embarrassment for him. When Nilesh conveyed Neeta’s refusal, Ashwin asked him to request her to sell the Delhi property to raise money. But when Nilesh approached Neeta again, she told him off , exclaiming, ‘I will not give a paisa to Ashwin!’ Her furious rant was overheard by other gang members who were present at the time.

  The mafia was afraid of Neeta’s reach and clout. She had direct access to Matoshree – so much so that she was considered to be a high-risk individual and was provided round-the-clock security. That Ziman – who had been assigned to her – belonged to Narayan Rane’s security detail demonstrated her importance and stature in the party hierarchy.

  Neeta refused to fear Ashwin’s threats or the menace of his gang members. She was arrogant with them and even chided them publicly. Some of the boys had grown up in front of her. They had seen her enter her house as a coy bride, in that very building. They had looked up to her as the matriarch of the gang, and she was addressed as ‘vahini’, the respectful title given to a brother’s wife. She had responded to them with equal affection and compassion.

  But she was not the same Neeta vahini any more.

  On 14 November 2000, Neeta Naik, the feisty woman who had entered the limelight only to save her husband from the wrath of the Mumbai police, finally met a gruesome end. Neeta’s daylight murder was shocking for many reasons. She was an influential Shiv Sena corporator and the wife of Ashwin Naik. The cops could not imagine a rival gang bumping off Ashwin Naik’s wife and getting away with it, and their suspicions were heightened by the eyewitness accounts of the neighbours. They immediately went to Tihar to question Ashwin, who flatly denied his involvement in her murder, though he expressed his doubts regarding Lali and Ekka.

  Several months later, the police were yet to make a breakthrough in the case. Finally, after five months, they managed to arrest Bhalekar in Lalbaug, on 4 April 2001. Nilesh Mukherjee was arrested in Faridabad, Haryana, on 24 May. They managed to arrest the main shooter, Ekka, on 10 September, in Parel.

  The crime branch booked all of them under MCOCA and also charged Ashwin Naik with conspiracy in the case. However, the Delhi judge refused to hand him over to the Mumbai police as he was undergoing trial in a narcotics case. His trial was separated from the rest of the accused and the Mumbai police had to wait for his custody until the Delhi police had finished with him.

  In a statement given to the Mumbai police in December 2000, Ashwin had candidly expressed his resentment over Neeta’s affair, though he claimed he never wanted to kill her, only her boyfriend Ziman. Despite his denials, he was booked for conspiracy in the case.

  Before Dawood Ibrahim came into the picture, there was a tacit understanding in the mafia that women were not to be killed. When Dawood’s men brutally stabbed Sapna Didi, a spunky woman who had decided to avenge her husband Mehmood Kalia’s killing by Dawood, they rewrote the rules. In the new order of things, the mafia became debased and savage with women. The only women who managed to avoid drawing attention to themselves were those who were perceived to be silent and unseeing. Among the Maharashtrian gangsters, the first instance of a gangster killing his wife was reported in 1995 when Dubai-based gangster and Dawood’s aide Anil Parab got his wife, Neha Patharia, killed by his shooters in Mumbai.

  Parab, in his confessional statement to the Mumbai police after his deportation from Dubai in April 2003, explained the motive for killing his wife.

  A Maharashtrian, Parab had married Neha, a Kutchi Gujarati, against the wishes of her father Premji Patharia, who lived in Ghatkopar, in 1989. They did not have a house of their own, and Parab lived in a Juhu flat given to him by Chhota Rajan. This flat was also shared by other gangsters. Unhappy in the relationship, in the very first year of their marriage, Neha picked up her husband’s .9mm pistol and shot herself in the chest. Parab was in absolute shock – and panic. He could foresee spending his entire life in prison for a crime he had not committed. The police would have no qualms about nailing him. In desperation, he contacted his mentor Rajan in Dubai, who suggested taking Neha to a nursing home near Shreyas Talkies in Ghatkopar. The doctors at the nursing home treated her without informing the police about the incident. Parab immediately left for Dubai. Later, when Neha had recovered fully, her parents packed her off to Dubai. The couple resumed their intermittent squabbling there.

  In three years, Neha gave birth to three daughters. According to Parab’s statement, Neha used the children as bait and began punishing the daughters when the couple fought. She would brand the young girls with a hot iron or leave them in a tub full of hot water. He managed to rescue them each time at the last minute but he had to maintain vigil at all hours to save his children from her psychotic behaviour. He decided to send her back to Mumbai.

  She returned in March 1995 – for her last rites. It is alleged that two of Parab’s henchmen, Rajan Kabkoti and Dilip Jadhav, received Neha at the airport and took her to an office in Vakola. There, she was asked to make a call to her husband in Dubai. While she was on the phone, Parab informed her casually that she had timed out her life. Even before a startled Neha could register what Parab was saying, Kabkoti hit her on the head with a heavy object. Parab could hear Neha screaming. She was killed and her body was dumped near the Kalina university campus in Santacruz.

  The Marathi daily Saamna could not resist adding a twist to the story. It suggested yet another angle, of a love triangle. The paper speculated that Parab, who had married Neha for love, had killed her because he suspected that she was having an affair with Dawood’s brother Noora. But Parab, in his confessional statement to the police, staunchly denied the Saamna story and claimed that Neha was killed only because of her cruelty to her daughters.

  Within a year of his deportation to India, Anil Parab managed to get himself acquitted by the sessions court in 2004. The court said the police evidence was weak and also acquitted four others who were charged with the murder.

  Parab was subsequently convicted in the 1984 Hansraj Shah attempt-to-murder case: he had slipped into the metropolitan courtroom in a rickshaw driver’s garb and tried to open fire. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. For more than a decade now, he has been part of the growing tribe of men who have made Maharashtra’s prisons their home.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Rajan’s Revenge

  Rajan was incarcerated in his hospital bed. His abdomen was heavily bandaged, and a saline drip was connected to a vein in his arm. The oxygen mask had been removed after the doctors found that he could breathe normally. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling; despite his body being immobile and confined to the hospital bed, his mind was racing.

  It had been a couple of weeks since the near fatal attack on his life at his residence, Charan Court, in Sukhumvit Soi, Bangkok. The date, 15 September 2000, was etched in his memory. It was
the day he was reborn. Four men had stormed into his supposedly secure flat and sprayed bullets at him indiscriminately. The eight men, two of whom were Thai nationals, were dressed in jet black suits and leather jackets. They were carrying a large cake and had pushed past the Thai security guard after knocking him down.

  Rajan’s aide, Rohit Verma, answered the doorbell – and froze with fear. Even for a man who had snuffed out several lives in one decade with his trademark hammer and a long-barrelled .45 pistol, staring at death at such close and striking range must have been terrifying. But he didn’t have time to register anything else, as a volley of bullets almost threw him across the room with their force. Verma’s wife Sangeeta, standing nearby, was also injured in the firing. Rajan, who was in the bedroom, lost no time in figuring out the reason for the commotion. He locked himself in the room while men fired at the latch lock, trying to break the door open. They didn’t succeed but a stray bullet managed to penetrate the door at last, and pierced Rajan’s abdomen.

  Rajan realized that if he remained holed up in the room, he would be a sitting duck. Sooner or later, the assailants would break down the door and liquidate him. He took a calculated risk and jumped out of the window of the first floor. He landed hard on his feet, fracturing his ankle, and bleeding and injured, he dove behind some bushes and hid himself.

  The shooters eventually managed to break down the door but did not find Rajan. There were bloodstains in the room and on the window, which led them to believe that he had escaped, but by then, enough shots had been fired to draw the attention of the Thai police. The assailants gave up the search and escaped.

  This attack on Rajan was part of the ongoing tussle with Dawood Ibrahim, initiated by Shakeel. They had parted ways seven years ago, but the friends-turned-foes were still after each other’s blood.

  Rajan could not get over the fact that Shakeel’s men had managed to trace him to Bangkok, zero in on Rohit’s home and breach the security so easily. It was divine decree that he had survived, despite coming so close to death. Now he wanted revenge. He wanted to kill Dawood, Shakeel and whoever had squealed on his whereabouts.

  Rajan called his most trusted aide, Santosh Shetty, to the hospital.

  ‘I want him dead,’ he told him.

  Santosh was one of the smartest minds in Mumbai’s gangland. Well-built, handsome and fluent in English, Santosh could have been mistaken for the head honcho of a blue-chip company, if not a film star. But here he was, playing Man Friday to Rajan. He had been associated with Rajan for more than a decade now, and had major connections in Dubai. There were several cases of drugs, extortion and complicity in major crimes pending against him.

  At the time of the attack, Santosh’s priority was to extricate Rajan from the clutches of the Thai and Indian police. As Rajan was severely wounded and immobile, this was quite an arduous task.

  However, Rajan was insistent on setting the wheels of vengeance in motion at once, before he left the hospital. He wanted his enemies to know that he was capable of taking revenge even if he was not hundred per cent fit.

  ‘We will locate him,’ Santosh assured Rajan. He found out that barely half a dozen people knew about Rajan’s location – and this core group included himself and Rajan’s family. The only other person was Rajan’s Mumbai-based hotelier friend, Vinod Shetty, who owned Paris Bar in Goregaon, in partnership with Satish Hegde.

  But Santosh did not want to punish Shetty merely on suspicion. Santosh himself belonged to the Bunt community of the Shettys, and he knew that the community network extended far and wide – any false move could prove counter-productive. He first had to establish Shetty’s treason. After quietly working on the man’s circle of friends and connections, Santosh stumbled onto some shocking information.

  The hotelier had shifted loyalties from Rajan to his friend Sharad (Anna) Shetty in Dubai. Santosh could not discover what Vinod got in return for selling out Rajan to Sharad Anna, who had been harbouring a grudge against Rajan for more than a decade now. Sharad had in turn passed on the information to Shakeel in Pakistan, who moved in for the kill and organized the attack within a few weeks.

  Rajan was enraged at this betrayal by his old friend whom he had trusted implicitly. He could barely stand because of his abdominal injury, but he was so angry that he actually got up from his bed and ordered a hit on Vinod Shetty.

  Ironically, the man who was to lure Vinod was also a Shetty. Right from the beginning, the Shettys of Mumbai, who ran restaurants and beer bars where women danced through the night, had been close to Chhota Rajan. Fakira Shetty had been with Rajan for more than a decade. He had started his career as a dacoit and was famous for looting unheard of amounts from bank vans with the help of his friend D.K. Rao.

  Jaggu Fakira Shetty telephoned Vinod and told him that Rajan had called and given him instructions about transferring funds to a particular account and also about handing over cash to some people in Mumbai. Could they meet at a safe place outside Mumbai? They decided to rendezvous at a beer bar in Panvel.

  Vinod had absolutely no clue that he had been exposed. He continued to believe that he was in the good books of Rajan, and he thought he should continue to do his bidding for some time longer – until Shakeel got lucky the next time.

  On 2 November 2000, barely a month and a half after the attempt on Rajan’s life, Vinod Shetty, along with his partner Satish Hegde and a business associate, Shankar Iyer, left for Panvel. They were driven by Shaikh Shakeel. Vinod and his friends met Fakira Shetty and his two friends at Titan bar in Panvel. They all got drunk to the gills. Then Fakira got into his car and asked Vinod to follow him. Vinod did as he was told, a little anxious, but keen to not antagonize Rajan’s messenger.

  Fakira reached an intersection near Uran-Panvel Road and halted his car near Chinchpada village. Vinod was becoming increasingly nervous. He refused to step out of his car alone. His partner Hegde then walked with him to the spot where Fakira was standing with his back towards them. As they came closer, Fakira turned and opened fire. Hegde leapt for safety and dived into a gutter, while Vinod was riddled with bullets.

  Shankar Iyer and Vinod’s driver were also shot dead. Their bodies were later recovered by the Kalamboli police from an isolated spot. Hegde survived to tell the tale, hiding in the chaos, but the police failed to arrest the shooters for years after the incident.

  The triple murder shocked the mafia, but they were quick to see Rajan’s hand in the killings.

  Rajan now wanted to kill Sharad Shetty. But Santosh managed to convince him that killing someone in Dubai was a far more complex task than in Mumbai. And first, Rajan needed to get out of the clutches of the Thai and Indian police.

  The Mumbai police wanted to get Rajan extradited to Mumbai for his involvement in the Panvel triple murder. But Rajan decided to pay heed to Santosh’s advice: escape from Bangkok.

  On 24 November, Rajan was found missing from his hospital bed. Two ropes, along with mountaineering accessories, were found hanging from the window. Who had helped Rajan escape? Was the rope simply a ruse? The Thai police felt that it would have been virtually impossible for an injured and overweight Rajan to climb down the ropes, even with professional help.

  Several years after the incident, after Santosh Shetty had been extradited from Thailand, he revealed the details of Rajan’s escape and his role in it.

  In his statement to the crime branch, which he also discussed with the media later, he said that the Thai military had aided Rajan’s escape from Bangkok. Santosh and his aide, Bharat Nepali, got the Thai police team and the hospital watchman sozzled and, for good measure, also spiked their drinks with sedatives. Then came the master stroke. They managed to get Rajan into a military vehicle with some army officers in it. The military personnel then transported Rajan to the Cambodian border. From the Cambodian border, Rajan was airlifted in a chopper by a governor of Cambodia, who took him to a safe hideout in Siem Reap. His connections in high places had certainly paid off.

  After the initi
al furore in the media had subsided, Rajan flew to the Iranian capital with a new identity. In Tehran, Santosh got the don a caretaker who happened to be a Muslim widow.

  One room in the flat they shared was occupied by Bunty Pandey, Bharat Nepali and Santosh, and the other was left to Rajan and the nurse. The woman nursed Rajan and took care of him and somewhere along the way, he fell in love with her. Santosh claimed in his statement that she had become pregnant and delivered a boy. (Rajan is said to have gifted a flat to the woman sometime later.)

  When Rajan was well again, he decided to take on the mastermind behind his attempted murder: Sharad Shetty.

  After his split from Dawood, Rajan had tried to woo Shetty to his side. He had a good hold in the cricket-betting syndicates and he felt he could bolster his fortunes with Shetty on his side. But Sharad Shetty, also known as Sharad Anna, had never liked Rajan. Whenever Rajan made overtures to him to join the gang, Sharad snubbed him, and as soon as an opportunity came to help eliminate Rajan, he had acted. Rajan was, however, mystified by the attempt on his life. There was no direct enmity between them, just cold vibes. But now that Shetty had came close to killing him, he was not to be spared.

  Rajan, along with Santosh, managed to send four of his men to Dubai and ensured that they got weapons. The four shooters were Karan Singh, Manoj Kotian, Vimal Kumar and a Nepali called Amar Bam.

  They conducted a methodical recce of Sharad Shetty’s movements and trailed him for a week. Shetty was an astute businessman. He had been with Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai for several years and had invested wisely in a chain of hotels and restaurants, including the Rami group of hotels. He was often spotted lounging at the elite India Club in Oud Metha.

  The team of stalkers found that Shetty was most vulnerable while he was at this posh club. Manoj Kotian was from Bangalore and could speak Kannada, so he became the one to meet and befriend Shetty casually in the club, posing as an Indian businessman.