Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  Significantly, Kukreja became the first casualty of the inter-gang rivalry between Dawood and Rajan. Infuriated at Kukreja’s murder, Rajan decided to retaliate.

  13

  Shocking Bollywood

  The five-pound hammer hurled in the air came crashing down, reducing the windshield of a spanking new white Contessa to smithereens. The shattered windscreen and the accompanying deafening noise brought the car to a screeching halt.

  The serene quiet of Perry Cross Road in Bandra West, known as the queen of Mumbai’s suburbs, had been pierced by a few gun-toting men dressed in black. The quartet closed in on the car. One of them nudged at the shattered windscreen; the laminated polyvinyl acrylic sheet gave way easily, giving the gunmen an unhindered view of the people inside.

  They pointed their guns towards a man wearing a black suit, comfortable in the rear seat. After pumping several bullets into him, the killers disappeared from the scene.

  The incident was over in little more than a minute, enacted in full view of the street’s bystanders. Shocked residents peeped out of their balconies. Perry Cross Road residents had never witnessed violence of such an inhuman, gruesome nature before.

  The killers had left behind two things: a hammer and a dead man riddled with thirty bullets. The victim was airline tycoon, Thakiyuddin Wahid, of East West Airlines. Wahid, an entrepreneur from Cochin in Kerala, came from a humble background. Initially, he had established a successful travel agency at Dadar, central Mumbai. Subsequently, in the post liberalisation era of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government, with Dr Manmohan Singh at the helm of the country’s economy, Wahid became the first businessman to launch a private airline and compete with the government-run Indian Airlines and one fledgling airline, Vayudoot.

  But one cruel stroke of fate killed not only the man behind the enterprise but the spirit behind it. Wahid’s killing proved fatal for East West Airlines and its other businesses.

  The high-profile murder pulled Police Commissioner R.D. Tyagi, Joint Commissioner of police, crime, R.S. Sharma and some top politicians to the spot immediately. The hammer lying on the bonnet of the car stumped them; an odd choice as a signature. But the hammer subsequently became the signature of Rohit Verma, Rajan’s ace hitman.

  Within two months, Rajan had decided to avenge the Kukreja killing and had not wasted any time before retaliating. He wanted the opposition to know he was giving it right back to them. Like the others, he had figured out that after every high-profile killing, the cops stepped up their security arrangements and rounded up the usual suspects from their respective gangs; thus ensuring that they beat a hasty retreat from the city. This kind of swooping crackdown was a dampener for the hired mafia killers and they resurfaced only when the police became a little more complacent. Rajan had waited a requisite two months before it was safe to strike and settle scores with Dawood.

  Now, the killings of Kukreja and Wahid had not only shaken Mumbai’s moneyed class but also rattled the top brass of the police force. When the mafia takes to the streets, it is always the Mumbai police who receive unremitting flak both from the public and the nervous politicians. The police tried to say that those killed had some connections with the mafia and that innocent people were not affected by these inter-gang tensions. The state administration and the politicians, however, were intent on proving that the police had failed, dealing a body blow to the law and order system in the state.

  But no one, not the police, nor the administration nor the politicians had any clue of what was to come. They had no idea that what they had witnessed was just a preview.

  The murders of Kukreja and Wahid opened the floodgates to trigger-happy dons and uncontrollable bloodshed. Rajan, Shakeel, Gawli, and now the new entrant Salem had begun ordering the killings of gang loyalists or covert financiers. At times they were also gunned down because they refused to pay up the extortion money that the gangsters demanded. Builders like Manish Shah, Dilip Valecha, and Natwarlal Desai were killed in broad daylight, as were tycoons like Karim Maredia, Vallabh Thakkar, and Sunit Khatau.

  While these killings were feathers in the caps of the warring dons, they also served as a warning bell for those who were dithering over whether they should loosen their purse strings.

  Meanwhile, the list of murders was growing with each day. Months turned to years but there was no letting up. In four years, gang warfare became bloodier and violent. And the dons were safe, keeping their distance as their foot soldiers and loyalists paid with their lives.

  Salem had decided to focus on the film industry, and after the aborted attempts on the lives of filmmakers Subash Ghai and Rajiv Rai, he got Riyaz Siddiqui killed. Shakeel did not want to be left behind and commissioned the killing of filmmaker Mukesh Duggal, claiming that his association with Rajan made him a target. Salem, for his part, set his eyes on a bigger and better target. After three years in Dubai, Salem finally closed in on his biggest quarry.

  Gulshan Kumar was a self-made man. As a son of a humble fruit juice seller on the streets of Daryaganj in New Delhi, Kumar had always aspired to make it big. At the age of 23, he founded the company Super Cassettes in Noida, which marketed cheaply priced audio cassettes. The low cost of the cassettes made Super Cassettes a super success. Subsequently Gulshan Kumar began promoting audio cassettes of Hindu religious songs. With his business flourishing, he ventured into producing video cassettes on Hindu mythology and made every effort to promote Hinduism through his company in India.

  In the late eighties, the film industry was controlled by powerful cartels, which promoted only select artistes. Gulshan, who had slowly managed to gain clout in the music world, introduced fresh new talents like Sonu Nigam, Anuradha Paudwal, and Kumar Sanu. He also brought new actors and directors into the industry. He promoted these new singers through a new brand in Mumbai called the T-Series. T-Series became the most popular brand in entertainment, not just in India but abroad, and Gulshan Kumar was hailed as a music baron with the Midas touch.

  As a devout Hindu, Gulshan Kumar organised a free meal provision every year for the pilgrims of the shrine of Vaishno Devi known as Devi ka Bhandara. Slowly his popularity, wealth, and clout increased manifold; so much so that in 1992–93, he was said to be the highest taxpayer in the country.

  During his hunt for a movie moghul between 1994 and 1997, Salem had thought of two other people: Subhash Ghai and Rajiv Rai. But when his plans failed with both, his shooters being caught both times, he began to focus on Gulshan Kumar. Salem had been threatening Kumar for a long time, demanding money from him, which the latter had adamantly refused to pay. This infuriated Salem to no end, and he soon hatched a master plot to eliminate the music baron.

  On 5 August 1997, after the attack on Rajiv Rai, a reporter from the Indian Express called Salem on his Dubai number and tried to ferret out information from him about the attacks on film personalities.

  Salem said at the time: ‘I never wanted to kill Subhash Ghai or Rajiv Rai, the idea was to only scare them. But watch out next week when my men kill a film personality. This time the idea is not to scare anyone but to warn the entire industry.’

  The reporter immediately hailed a cab for the Crime Branch police headquarters, near Crawford Market. He reproduced the entire conversation to the Crime Branch chief, Ranjit Singh Sharma who took a serious note of the whole episode and personally began calling the crime unit chiefs. Immediately, security was provided to several bigwigs of Bollywood, including Pahlaj Nihalani, who was the head of the Indian Motion Pictures Producers Association (IMPPA) at that time.

  Sharma made one major mistake. He failed to cover Gulshan Kumar. To be fair to Sharma, no one in the police machinery anticipated that he might figure as a target.

  Much later, during their investigations, the cops discovered that Salem had begun to demand 5 lakh rupees from Gulshan Kumar every month. Kumar defiantly told Salem that he would rather d
onate the money to Mata Vaishnodevi’s bhandara (coffer) than to the Dawood gang. A vengeful Salem decided to kill him right in front of a mandir.

  Every morning when Gulshan Kumar started for work, he visited the Jeeteshwar Mahadev Mandir in Andheri to pay obeisance. As a matter of precaution, he had hired a private security guard, who had reported sick for a couple of days. So on 12 August 1997, Salem’s men reported that he was unguarded. Salem immediately instructed them to kill Kumar outside the temple, adding that they should call him from their cellphone when firing so he could hear Gulshan’s screams of agony. As Gulshan Kumar emerged from the temple the killer, known as Raja, opened fire on him. Kumar was hit in his arm and waist and began bleeding profusely.

  He tried to duck for cover and found a public urinal. The killer followed him and pumped some more bullets into him. Gulshan, who was writhing in pain, began to crawl out of the urinal. He spotted a shanty next to the urinal and, desperate to save his life, Gulshan crawled inside it. Blood and life were both slowly leaving him, when a breathless and panting Kumar pleaded with an old woman inhabitant to save him by shutting the door and not allowing the killers inside.

  The old woman, too stunned by the sound of gunshots and the sight of so much blood on this badly wounded man, could not muster enough courage to close the door. The killers, who had all the while kept their cellphone switched on, made sure that Salem could hear everything on the other end. They finally decided to complete their assignment.

  They entered the hut, pumped fifteen bullets into Gulshan Kumar, and left him dead. The whole sordid drama had continued for over 15 to 20 minutes in a busy bylane of Andheri in broad daylight, but none of the bystanders tried to help Gulshan Kumar or sought police help. The story of this rags-to-riches man who had helped countless people, ended with his dying alone, without any succour.

  The cruel and heartless manner in which Kumar was killed shocked the entire nation. Mumbai had witnessed many mafia killings but this one simply surpassed all degrees of cruelty. It was beyond heinous, and Salem’s monstrosity was discussed everywhere from Parliament to pubs.

  The Prime Minister of the coalition government Inder Kumar Gujral reacted to the killing at once. ‘This criminal act is totally out of place in a civilised society and particularly in a city known for its discipline and civic consciousness...’ Gujral said, in the Indian Express. He added how Gulshan Kumar had ‘carved a niche for himself in the world of film music’, concluding that ‘his loss will be mourned by all music-loving people’.

  The film fraternity was frozen with fear following this cold-blooded murder, which was so much worse than anything they had dreamt up in their movies. Director Mahesh Bhatt, who directed the hit film Aashiqui for Kumar, summed it up aptly when he said, ‘When you kill Gulshan Kumar, you kill one of the biggest people in the entertainment industry. By killing Gulshan Kumar they are saying, ‘We are calling the shots,’ and they have proved it... The entire film fraternity is in a state of terror.’

  The Indian Express reporter called Abu Salem again and enquired, ‘Was this the murder you were talking about?’ he asked. But this time the bluster was missing. His own gang members had quartered Salem. From Mumbai to New Delhi and from Delhi to Dubai, the mafia was getting hot under the collar with outrage; such a significant act perpetrated by a relative small-timer, yet to find his feet. The entire Dawood gang was scared with tails between their legs.

  The reporter noticed that Salem was not the same authoritative, confident, boastful don he had been last week. Salem’s tone and tenor was entirely different. He hesitated for a moment before he could speak and when he did, he said something highly incredulous. ‘Yeh murder Lal Krishna Advani ne karvaya hain. [Lal Krishna Advani had commissioned this murder.] Why don’t you call and ask him?’ (Advani was a senior leader of the BJP, the ruling party in the state at the time.)

  Shocked, the reporter could not think of anything to say.

  14

  Peanuts That Proved Costly

  Joint Commissioner of Police Ranjit Singh Sharma, despite his army background and his interactions with international police organisations, was finding it difficult to handle the intense media glare and political pressures following the Gulshan Kumar killing.

  His overly hectic daily routine was such that even his worst detractors were pleased that he was at the helm of the Crime Branch; he was experiencing one of the most turbulent phases of his career.

  His days after the killing comprised a series of calls from the Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra and calls from several ministers from Mantralaya, including Chief Minister Manohar Joshi and Home Minister Gopinath Munde. Sharma also had to give a lot of explanations to several other bigwigs in the state and top leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Each time a heavyweight called Sharma, he offered explanations and provided reasons for not being able to make a breakthrough in apprehending the killers.

  Several days after the music magnate had been gunned down, the Crime Branch, which usually made a big show about getting a lot done, had not been able to produce any tangible results in this investigation. Sharma and his deputy K.L. Prasad were constantly on their toes and worked round-the-clock to make some headway in the killing. But despite all their efforts, there was no progress.

  Normally, after any criminal incident, the police pick up some informants at random. These informants, even if they are unable to provide any vital clues in the ongoing probe, can at least give the cops a line of investigation to follow that may eventually lead to cracking the case.

  All the units of the Crime Branch were working on the brief to tap all their informers and ferret out important information relating to the case. Nizamuddin, who was close to the Abu Salem gang, was picked up. He was detained in the Crime Branch lock-up for days and subjected to intense interrogation, before being let go, but without the cops being any wiser.

  The cops’ failure to stem the escalating law and order situation in the city put immense pressure on the state government. Right-wing political party Shiv Sena’s supremo Bal Thackeray was at his vitriolic best in the editorials that appeared in his party’s mouthpiece Saamana. Every day, he took potshots at the city police and even branded the Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra a scarecrow who had failed to scare anyone.

  But even while the cops were still smarting from Gulshan Kumar’s killing, the mafia struck again and gunned down builder Natwarlal Desai in the business district of Nariman Point, just below Tulsiani Chambers. The high rise is just across the road from the seat of the state government; newspapers screamed the next day: ‘Murder under the nose of Mantralaya!’

  The then Chief Minister Manohar Joshi and Home Minister Gopinath Munde were finding it difficult to put up a brave front continuously. They concluded that the police machinery was seriously failing them. Some heads had to roll if they were to survive. Munde decided that Malhotra was incompetent to lead the police team and so, two weeks after the killing, he was unceremoniously shunted off to the nondescript posting of police housing and welfare. Malhotra’s name will go down in the police record book as the first police chief to have suffered the ignominy of transfer just because of one high-profile killing.

  Among all the police commissionerates in the country, the job of the Mumbai police chief was the most fragile and insecure. The city police chief has to please many bosses and suck up to many power centres to retain his job. Whoever understood the essence of survival managed to stay put longer and whoever failed to impress all bloated egos, had to make a disastrous exit. Malhotra and his predecessor Ramdev Tyagi were both thrown out because they could not win Bhartiya Janata Party leader Munde’s approval.

  Ronald Hyacinth Mendonca was appointed as the police commissioner of the Mumbai police on 28 August, in Malhotra’s place.

  Two weeks since the assassination, the cops had not been able to make any headway in the case, but they also avoided major goof ups: some
respite. Next came the controversial encounter of one Javed Fawda, at Ballard Pier on 28 August, the day Mumbai got its new police chief. Assistant Police Inspector Vasant Dhobale headed this encounter, and soon Dhobale’s men cleverly leaked news of this encounter to some of their friends in print media. ‘Gulshan Kumar’s shooter killed in encounter’, ‘Crime branch hits back in style, guns down Gulshan Kumar’s killer’, read the headlines. The press, especially the Marathi press, went gaga over Dhobale’s perceived gallantry.

  At other times, Deputy Commissioner of Police, K.L. Prasad and his chief, R.S. Sharma would have been in a celebratory mood. But a pall of gloom had descended on the Crime Branch headquarters. The officers brushed aside the queries of the reporters over whether Javed Fawda was the main shooter or the side shooter, with a generic response: ‘We are still investigating’.

  In underworld parlance, the man who pulls the trigger on his victim is the main shooter, while the one who gives cover to the shooter or is merely a sidekick, is known as the side shooter or second shooter, and both are clearly identified as such. The very fact that the cops were so noncommittal about Javed Fawda’s role in the killing meant that there was something extremely fishy going on here.

  As it turned out, Javed Fawda turned out to be the Crime Branch’s nemesis in more ways than they ever fathomed. Javed Fawda was actually Abu Sayama Abu Talib Shaikh, also known as Javed, and as he had a bucktooth, had earned the nickname ‘Fawda’. Unfortunately, he was not the shooter Javed Fawda, just a mere peanut vendor who happened to be known by the same name.

  Javed’s sister Rubina who lived in a slum in Bandra, now called up a storm. She claimed that her brother used to sell peanuts outside the Masjid near Bandra railway station west and had been missing since 26 August. Four men had taken him away on the night of 26 August, following which she had lodged a missing person complaint with the Bandra Police Station.