There is no evidence if the Karachi nikah ever happened—we don’t know if the couple travelled to Pakistan during the period. However, Salem considers the details of this marriage to be sacrosanct, although Monica does not. Monica, according to a letter she wrote to Salem in jail, believed her wedding took place on 20 November 2001 in Oslo. In fact, all these details worked against Salem and Monica when he was prosecuted in Lisbon. One of the documents that the CBI dug up and presented in court was the one showing Salem’s identity as Ramesh Kumar. Ramesh Kumar had made an application in the German consulate in Dubai, seeking a visa for his wife, Monica Bedi. So, Monica Bedi could not be Sana Malik, wife of Arsalan, nor could she then be Monica, wife of Ramesh Kumar, or Bhopal resident Fauzia Usman. All inconsistencies sealed Salem’s fate in Lisbon.
On 18 September 2002, Salem was thrown into prison, and the Indian authorities were duly notified. Once in prison, Salem obsessed about how they had known he was Abu Salem. Had they been tracking him for some time? And who had ratted on him? Was he caught because he had made a stupid error post the September 11 attacks? As he was making plans to flee the USA, he had asked one of his trusted associates in the country to transfer all his funds to his accounts in Europe. He had, however, failed to factor in Uncle Sam breathing down his neck. Huge money transfers across continents were bound to show up on investigating agencies’ radars. Once, Salem’s lackey in Dubai had told him, ‘Anis bhai ne abhi aapka peechha nahin chhoda hai, bhai.’ (Anis has not stopped chasing you.) The phone call simultaneously made his blood turn to ice and set it aflame. Was it Anis who had given his location to the cops? But there was no way that Anis could have known where he was hiding.
Salem had never liked Monica talking to her friends on a cell phone. He suspected that the intelligence agencies were equipped to track people through mobile phones. Had Monica alerted the authorities because she was tired of living the life of a fugitive? Monica often told Salem that she wanted to go back to India and live like an ordinary person. Salem usually laughed it off. One last suspicion kept nagging Salem’s mind. What if it was Sameera? She was hurt and angry with him. She knew that once he was thrown behind bars, all his money would be hers. The more he thought of this, the more convinced he was that it was Sameera who had betrayed him. She had taken her revenge.
Twenty-Three
The Lisbon Incarceration
ESTABELECIMENTO PRISIONAL DE LISBOA, OR THE EPL, was like a fortress, an architectural marvel actually. The façade is imposing, as if it is intended to crush the spirit of the prisoners who stand in front of the gates, fearfully waiting to enter. But curiously, the main arch with its impressive wrought-iron gates actually opens into the jail’s hospital, right next to the entrance. Famous Indian prisons such as Tihar in New Delhi or Mumbai’s Central Prison pale in comparison to the EPL. The only Indian prison that can compare with its architecture and grandeur is perhaps the Cellular Jail, or Kālā Panī, in the Andaman islands. Kālā Panī is a British-era structure built in 1896 and probably that explains why it shares some similarities with the EPL, which was constructed in 1884.
For those who haven’t seen prisons in real life, the EPL is something like the jails depicted in Hollywood movies such as The Shawshank Redemption or the more recent Sylvester Stallone–Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Escape Plan. It was built for a total of 887 inmates, but is crammed with over 2000 prisoners at any point of time, just like the overcrowded Indian jails. When Salem walked into the prison, he was one of the very few Asians there.
He was kept in the high-security area known as ‘the Pavilion’ because he was facing terror charges. But once inside, he found this jail to be no different from jails he had heard about back home. These cells too were in terrible condition—plaster peeling everywhere, broken windows, inadequate lighting, and old, stinking mattresses. Salem cursed his luck at the sight of such a wretched existence. Life had taken a 180-degree turn for him in the space of a year.
News of his dramatic arrest in Lisbon grabbed headlines in all the local papers and dominated most of the front pages of Mumbai’s newspapers too. The response in India varied from disbelief and scepticism to total celebration. The builder community and Bollywood fraternity heaved a sigh of relief. Some actually threw parties to celebrate. No other underworld character’s downfall had resulted in so much happiness.
Prior to Salem’s arrest in Lisbon, other mafia arrests overseas included Iqbal Mirchi’s detention in London in 1995 and Anis Ibrahim’s detention in Bahrain the same year. Both were subsequently released due to technical complications in their documents. In fact, Salem had himself managed to wriggle out of detention in Dubai soon after the Gulshan Kumar killing in 1997. In 1995, Babloo Srivastava, the kingpin of abduction rackets in Delhi, was successfully extradited from Singapore, but it had been a long time since such a big fish had been caught.
Soon after the arrests, the additional director of the CBI, Vijay Shankar, made a trip to Lisbon to confirm and coordinate with the Portuguese authorities. Having burnt their fingers twice in the past, the CBI was not willing to let go of their wanted man this time. They swung into action and began putting together all the documents and paperwork needed for Salem’s extradition to India. The government was also totally prepared this time. On 13 December 2002, within two months of Salem’s arrest, Omar Abdullah, who was the junior minister in the Ministry of External Affairs, sent a requisition letter for Salem’s and Monica’s extradition from Portugal. Salem’s case was transferred from the Policia Judiciara to the Departamento Central de Investigacao E Accao Penal (DCIAP), or Central Investigation and Penal Action Department, the local counterpart of the CBI in Portugal. This made coordination easier, given that both were apex bodies and nodal agencies for their respective countries.
Salem was now in the vortex of long and tedious extradition proceedings between Portugal and India. India does not have an extradition treaty with Portugal. Among the European countries, France, Germany and Bulgaria are the only ones that have signed such a treaty with India. Portugal, on the other hand, is in disagreement with India’s system of death penalty, having banned state executions as far back as 1867. As a result, the Portuguese government was not keen on entertaining Indian requests for extradition. The DCIAP had also not found Salem guilty of anything that would constitute a major crime in Portugal or warrant his extradition—he was being tried for forgery and falsification of documents. But when the Indian government insisted that Salem was an accused in the serial blasts of 1993, the Portugal government softened its stand and agreed.
However, Portugal was not willing to send Salem back until the Indian government gave firm assurances, in writing, that the Indian courts would neither award the death penalty to Salem nor give him a jail sentence longer than twenty-five years. L.K. Advani, the then deputy prime minister who also held the home ministry portfolio, wrote a letter to Antonio Martins da Cruz, Portugal’s minister for foreign affairs, promising that the Indian state would keep to these terms. The letter was personally signed by L.K. Advani, and not by any bureaucrat or junior minister. This eased the anxiety of the Portuguese government.
Initially, Salem was detained for three months, but his detention was continually extended. After the third extension, the Portuguese court declared its verdict, finding Salem and Monica guilty on several counts of forgery and for the use of forged documents. Salem was held guilty on three counts by the Sixth Penal Court of Lisbon and sentenced to three years in prison. He was given two years for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer on duty. A third year was added for perjury, after his false depositions before a court about being a Pakistani national called Arsalan Mohsin Ali.
Salem had initially stuck to his line of being Arsalan until the Indian government exposed his real identity by producing his fingerprints taken after he was picked up by the D.N. Nagar cops. This amounted to perjury in Portuguese courts. It also undermined Salem’s case and dented his standing with the DCIAP. Until then, the authorities h
ad vociferously supported Salem against the Indian government, especially since he and Monica had obtained Portuguese residential permit through legal means. Under Portuguese law, these terms of imprisonment add up to six years, but the court reduced them to four and a half years. Monica too was convicted of forgery, but the court gave her a lesser sentence of two years as Salem confessed to having acquired the forged documents for her.
Salem tried to make the best of prison life. His cellmate was an Italian drug peddler named Roberto Giovanni who was accused of cocaine trafficking. Salem’s lack of fluency in English turned out to be a major hurdle in communicating with Giovanni, but the two were communicating in sign language, broken English and Salem’s smattering of Portuguese. They got along famously. Roberto showed photographs of his family to Salem, reviving the dormant paternal instinct in the don. Salem started to think about his son Amir, who was more than five years old now. He had not seen him in a very long time and asked his Chicago contacts to get him a photo of the boy. He pasted the photograph on the wall of his cell and would continuously look at it. The image became Salem’s crutch during his periods of loneliness.
Like all high-security prisons, the EPL too forbade any written communication between prisoners. But Monica managed to write letters to Salem and have them smuggled to him. Salem sought solace in Monica’s regular letters, reading them over and over again. If she failed to write to him or the letter was delayed, he would be extremely upset. The letters would go on to reveal an astonishing level of intimacy and love between the two.
Twenty-Four
Love and Longing in Lisbon
SALEM HAD ENJOYED WHAT SOME MIGHT describe as a hyperactive sex life. He is believed to have taken a number of stars and starlets to bed, including a former beauty queen and countless silver-screen aspirants. But it was Monica who completely changed the parameters of physical intimacy for him. It was also Monica who taught him to love.
Alone in jail, it was Monica’s steady flow of highly emotional and sexually explicit letters that kept him going. Monica made these cards by hand, carefully crafting them for occasions such as their anniversary, his birthday or Eid. Each day, prison guards would walk past the cells with a duffel bag full of mail for the inmates. Perhaps it was sixth sense or simply the connection he shared with Monica, but Salem invariably had this feeling of warmth in the pit of his stomach that told him there was a letter or a card for him on a given day.
Monica wrote to her lover in Hindi—we don’t know if this was because Salem’s understanding of English was rudimentary and she had to meet him halfway or whether she was capable of expressing herself better in the language or if Hindi was just a good way to keep her words from the prying eyes of the prison guards. In her letters, Monica spoke of her love for him and remembered the events of their past, both affectionate and amorous, in vivid detail.
The couple spent three wedding anniversaries in jail. During this time they couldn’t see each other for more than half an hour a week. But as time passed, even these brief meetings began to grow less frequent. Monica’s letters which in the early days dripped with love, affection, devotion, desire and lust, over time began to seem extremely colourless, prosaic and, worst of all, distant. In July 2005, Monica wrote her last letter to Salem. They were adrift.
Monica had hit rock bottom with her imprisonment. She had dreamt of becoming a top actress in Bollywood and here she was, reduced to being an accomplice of India’s most wanted ganglord. From hobnobbing with Bollywood stars, she was now rubbing shoulders with hard-core criminals in jail. The young woman felt humiliated, ruined and devastated. The Christian missionaries who visited prisoners converted her to Christianity during this vulnerable moment. Monica found peace in the Bible and a stability she had lost. She stopped greeting Salem with the word ‘Salaam’—something that he loved—and referring to Allah as her God. Salem was totally mystified at her transformation.
When Monica heard about the extradition proceedings, she yearned to return to India, while Salem was fighting the Indian government’s moves tooth and nail. Salem would never understand how the woman who wouldn’t be turned away from him by his temper, his violence or his ill treatment had gone so far away from him in a few years of separation and a jail term.
Twenty-Five
The Journey Back
ONE NOVEMBER AFTERNOON IN 2005, FOUR heavily guarded cars and jeeps with armed commandos on either side made their way towards a massive aircraft that was carrying a very special cargo: Abu Salem and his wife or girlfriend Monica Bedi.
Devendra Pardesi, the deputy superintendent of police of the Special Task Force of the CBI, had handled innumerable tough cases and far tougher criminals. But this case seemed a bit unreal. The man that the Portuguese police was handing over just didn’t fit the bill of one of India’s most dreaded gangsters who had masterminded some of the most gruesome murders in the annals of Mumbai crime.
The occupant of the second car soon stepped out of her vehicle. Dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, Monica Bedi looked more suited to walk down a ramp at a fashion show. With the air of a starlet, she seemed to fit the bill of a gangster’s moll. Unlike Salem, she was not smiling, and apprehension was written clearly across her face, and she clutched at a Bible for dearly life. To Pardesi, it looked like the usual story. A pretty girl with dreams of stardom, falling for the wrong man, spending time in the wrong company, fleeing the country and ending up being extradited home like a criminal.
Pardesi’s boss, Deputy Inspector General Om Prakash Chhatwal, signed on the official documents. Before the ink had even dried, Pardesi approached the nervously smiling man and said, ‘Kyon be? Tu hi Abu Salem hai?’
Salem became a bit wary at this point and his nervousness gave way to raw, unbridled fear: ‘Kya aap Crime Branch se hain?’
The fear was palpable.
‘Nahin, hum CBI se hain,’ came the reply.
To any normal human being, being in CBI custody would be as bad as Crime Branch custody, but Salem became completely relaxed and replied, ‘Phir chalo, saab. Apne watan chalna hai.’
It was not a formal conversation, but since both parties knew the purpose of the meeting, there didn’t seem to be any point in waiting. The motley group now walked towards the Indian Air Force’s massive Russian-made cargo plane waiting for them.
The Indian government had finally managed to extradite Salem and Monica after a protracted legal battle that had lasted over three years and two months. It had registered over seventy-two cases of murder, abduction, attempt to murder and extortion against Salem. But a Portugal court consented to Salem’s prosecution in only nine cases: three passport forgery cases in Lucknow, Hyderabad and Bhopal; three extortion cases in New Delhi; and three cases of the Mumbai Police, including the murder of builder Pradeep Jain, the murder of Manisha Koirala’s secretary Ajit Diwani and the weapons delivery case of the serial blasts of 1993. Ironically, the Mumbai Police was restrained from prosecuting Salem in the Gulshan Kumar case or in the cases involving attacks on other film personalities such as Subhash Ghai, Rajiv Rai and Rakesh Roshan, or in the conspiracy to kill Aamir Khan, Manisha Koirala and Ashutosh Gowariker.
Salem was not happy about going back to India. He knew that his chances of getting out of a Portugal jail in a few years’ time were much better than rotting in Indian jails for God knows how long. However, the Indian government had made this case a prestige issue and this time they were determined not to lose in an international court. They were willing to sign any deal or agree to any term. That’s why they agreed to the Portuguese court even when it rejected sixty-three cases and took up only nine. They just wanted Salem back in India.
The mission to bring Salem back to Mumbai from Lisbon was a clandestine operation, planned to precision. The CBI agents, aware of the possibility of political pressure derailing their plans, had been extra careful. Resisting all sorts of bureaucratic pressures and maintaining secrecy at all levels, finally the CBI had managed to put Salem on a plane to M
umbai. It had to be an Air Force plane, because a civilian aircraft would have been a dead giveaway.
The aircraft was as different as it could be from a civilian aircraft. Never mind tray tables and in-flight meals, the aircraft’s wide body held no interiors. It was like a giant room with metal benches on the sides. Ropes dangled from the ceiling and a mini crane stuck out like a sore thumb at the far end of the cargo hold. A makeshift urinal was all it had in terms of toilet facilities. This was a very different kind of air travel than what Salem was used to.
In the plane, Salem was handcuffed to the side of one of the metal benches, with a thick curtain separating him from his lady love. As he would later find out, those handcuffs were not intended to prevent Salem’s escape; rather they were in place to stop him from harming himself. A suicide while being escorted back to India would have destroyed the CBI and its reputation.
The CBI wanted to handle this whole imbroglio just right and not leave any room for error. Were something to happen to Salem, they would never be able to recover from the scandal. Human rights activists would roast them alive.
‘Saab, mujhe ek baar Monica se milne do na,’ pleaded Salem.
‘Don’t you dare move from where you are,’ said Pardesi gruffly.
The cargo plane was now in the air and Salem was too dejected to look at the country he was leaving behind. The next four hours felt like an eternity; meanwhile, the aircraft landed at Cairo International Airport to be refuelled. Chhatwal and Pardesi saw this as a perfect time to stretch their legs. This courtesy was not extended to Salem. After a two-hour halt, the plane was on its way to Mumbai.
My Name is Abu Salem Page 12