Byculla to Bangkok

by Hussain Zaidi

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kill Khatau

  ‘Kill Khatau!’ Those two words signed the death warrant for India’s top industrialist, Sunit Chandrakant Khatau.

  Not one to tolerate a slight and keen on avenging the attack on his brother, Amar Naik had assigned the task of killing the tycoon to two of his most trusted aides, Dinesh Mithbaukar and Usman Fakira, and they began making preparations to write the most violent chapter in the city’s history so far. They had roped in a few others and allocated work to them. Now they began to seriously make plans. They decided who the main shooters, the side shooters and the backup team would be. They began arranging for weapons, accessories and other paraphernalia, and monitored Khatau’s daily movements. Places where the murder could be orchestrated were shortlisted and debated, escape routes were discussed.

  Khatau had managed to win everyone over to his side. RMMS, the industrial board, the government, ministers, Gawli and Sachin Ahir – he was feeling invincible. In his celebratory mood, Khatau failed to pay attention to his surroundings. He did not notice the two bikers discreetly following his Mercedes Benz as it left the massive gates of Khatau Mills at Byculla and, after negotiating its way through heavy traffic, moved towards Worli.

  Khatau did not approve of Gawli’s methods and had strongly remonstrated with Sachin when he heard of the deadly attack on Ashwin. But he was effectively silenced when he was told that this was a dirty business, and they did not need his advice on how to conduct it. Khatau was told in no uncertain terms that the manner in which Ashwin had been attacked showed Gawli’s clout. Part of business, they insisted.

  The daylight attack on bigfish Ashwin inside the crowded court premises, while he was in the security cordon of the police, had shocked the cops, the underworld and especially Amar. In the annals of the Mumbai mafia, the attack on Ashwin is billed as a very big one, though he didn’t succumb to it – as big as the killings of Dawood’s brother Sabir Ibrahim, Gawli’s brother Kishore, and Dawood’s brother-in-law Ibrahim Parkar.

  In the dead of night, when no one was watching, Amar used to visit his brother in hospital. Often, he left the place with tears in his eyes. Amar was aware that Ashwin had suffered a great deal since his teenage years, despite zero involvement in his elder brother’s activities. The cops had often dragged him to the police station and detained him for hours, or his rivals had kidnapped him to exert pressure on Amar – yet Ashwin never fought with his brother. Amar loved his brother and was worried about what the disability would do to his psyche. However, knowing Ashwin as he did, he believed that his brother would survive and overcome this setback. What he desperately wanted to do was to finish off the people who had done this to his brother.

  Amar made his first move within two days of the attack on his brother. His first target was Shankarrao Jadhav, who was a sitting duck. Jadhav, a nobody until a few months ago, had not only managed to upstage Haribhau Naik but had gone on to become the president of RMMS, thanks to Amar’s rival, Gawli. As a Gawli acolyte, he deserved to be punished for his association, Amar decided.

  On 20 April 1994, Naik’s men accosted Jadhav’s car near the Eastern Express Highway, just before the Kurla East intersection. Two men on a bike sprayed bullets and hurriedly escaped without checking the result of their actions. Jadhav was injured, but lived to tell the tale. When Amar heard that Jadhav had survived, he was livid. He was fast becoming a laughing stock in the underworld, he fumed. A ganglord who could not even avenge his own brother! Amar had to salvage his pride. It was then that he decided to strike at the core of the problem.

  Amar assembled his team of desperadoes and they began discussing the way forward. He wanted to kill Gawli, an idea that was unanimously approved. But there was a major hitch. Gawli had been booked under TADA and was safely ensconced in Pune’s Yerawada jail. He was rarely brought to the city for court hearings.

  Someone suggested Sachin’s name, but Amar thought he was too insignificant to be scalped. His recent failure with Jadhav had made Amar abrasive; he wanted a big hit that would recompense the attack on Ashwin and, at the same time, cause major damage to Gawli’s gang.

  In a moment of resolve, he decided to eliminate Khatau. ‘Kill Khatau!’ he exclaimed.

  Mithbaukar and Fakira scanned Amar’s face, wondering whether he was blabbering because he was drunk. They had discussed this before, but in passing. Khatau was too big a fish.

  ‘He has no right to live,’ Amar said with finality, sealing the fate of Khatau and giving the final orders to his shooters.

  For more than a week, the gunmen tailed Khatau and studied his movements. Khatau had no police security. Gawli, in his arrogance, had not provided protection to him either. This meant killing Khatau would be a cakewalk.

  Once they were confident of pulling off the killing, three pairs of men on bikes prepared to tail Khatau’s white Mercedes. On 7 May 1994, less than twenty days after the attack on Ashwin Naik, the killers zeroed in on Khatau. When the Mercedes halted at the Mahalaxmi railway station signal, opposite Race Course, the bikers closed in. One halted right across from the car, on the side, and one in front.

  Eyewitnesses recall that the pillion riders on both bikes suddenly raised a sledgehammer, in one synchronized movement, and brought them crashing down on the windscreen and the windows of the car. Even before passers-by could react to what was happening, the two bikers whipped out guns, cleared space amidst the shattered glass to fit the muzzles, and fired several successive rounds. Despite all the commotion, everybody there heard the heart-rending screams of Khatau and his driver.

  One of the bullets ricocheted and hit a biker in his thigh, causing him to fall off his bike. The other hitman and his friend immediately hauled him onto the pillion seat of the bike. The entire action took barely ninety seconds.

  The signal turned green and vehicles began moving. Khatau’s driver showed remarkable presence of mind and revved up the car, speeding towards Nair Hospital. But it was too late. Khatau was declared brought dead on arrival and his body was left at the morgue for the police to take custody of it.

  The killing of a business leader can be extremely damaging for a state government. Other businessmen and traders put pressure on it as they feel the administration has failed them by not keeping the city free of crime. Ministers also dread the prospect of losing the next chunk of donations from industrialists during election campaigns.

  Ordinarily, cases are registered by the local police station and parallel investigations are conducted by the detection wing of the crime branch or the DCB of CID. In this case, too, the Tardeo police station registered a case of murder against unknown assailants. However, the Khatau investigation was taken over by the crime branch on the very first day and scores of cops were pressed into service. All twelve units of the crime branch began working on the case round the clock. Hundreds of witnesses and other people were questioned, but the sleuths failed to make any headway.

  The cops were clueless, except for one fact: one of the assailants had a bullet injury. He would have had to go to some hospital, nursing home or medical centre in the city for treatment. The cops began discreetly scouring hospitals in the vicinity. In four days, they checked more than 200 nursing homes and medical centres across the city, but could not find any sign of the injured gunman.

  In 1994, there were no mobile phones, not even pagers. There was no electronic surveillance, no closed circuit televisions at traffic intersections, nothing that could get them close to their quarry. The only arsenal they had was an old-fashioned human intelligence network (‘humint’, as the American agencies term it), of khabris or informers. They began bribing their informers. All their hopes were pinned on some khabri bringing them information on a platter.

  Finally, the elusive ‘simsim’ opened for the cops – with one little piece of information. One of the hitmen was said to be madly in love with a bargirl in Vashi. (The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had not been born yet and people were yet to hear of the maverick politician R.R
. Patil, who later became the scourge of dance bars in Maharashtra.)

  The cops posted their men in and around the bar at Vashi, waiting for the gangster to show up to see his favourite girl. Days passed but no one came to meet her. The police got tired of the stakeout and fed up of pretending to be rich men throwing money at the girls on the dance floor.

  Then came the breakthrough. The policemen noticed that a waiter was bringing medicines on a daily basis and handing them over to a bargirl when the restaurant closed for the day. The cops immediately turned up at the nearby pharmacy and learned that the medicines included antibiotics, strong painkillers and antiseptics used for the healing of wounds. Jackpot!

  On the seventh night of the stakeout, when the waiter delivered the medicines to the bargirl – a nondescript young woman who took the parcel from him with evident gratitude – the cops exchanged glances. The girl was quietly followed to a nearby one-room apartment and voila – they found their first accused. A heavily bandaged and recuperating Santosh Pagarkar lay sprawled on the bed.

  Pagarkar’s arrest opened the floodgates for arrests, and within a few days, the cops managed to apprehend ten men, including the four shooters from the Amar Naik gang. With almost the entire Naik gang in the net, they were hoping to arrest Amar too, soon. But Amar had fled the country to take refuge in London. His plan had proved costly, and he could take no further risks.

  The ten accused were booked under TADA and the cops hoped for a conviction. But what followed shocked everyone.

  A police dossier, which serves as a record of the entire incident, observes on page 171: ‘However, the accused persons were acquitted by the TADA court as wife (Panna Khatau) of the deceased did not support the prosecution.’

  The non-cooperation of Panna Khatau, the acquittal of all the ten accused in the killing, the failure of the judiciary in Mumbai and the unhindered escape of Amar Naik from the city mystified everyone. The police could not believe all the hard work that had gone into tracing the culprits, arresting them and prosecuting them under TADA had come to nought.

  From his cell in Yerawada jail, Gawli was following the developments with unease. The killing of Khatau had changed equations within the mafia; it had impacted his coffers and the acquittal of the killers was unsettling. That Amar had fled to foreign shores also chafed; Gawli feared that he would turn out to be another Dawood, remote-controlling his kingdom while leading a lavish life in Dubai. It would be difficult to fight such an enemy.

  Gawli had been so close, almost touching distance, to Mammon. But Khatau’s killing had turned out to be Amar’s master stroke.

  One of the aides who first met the ganglord at the mulaqaat in jail and briefed him about the goings-on in the past few weeks said, ‘Daddy just kept repeating one word as he stared into space: “Behanchod!”’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Maharashtrian Mafia’s Anno Domini: 1994-95

  Bal Thackeray, the founder of the right-wing Shiv Sena, had his fair share of idiosyncrasies. He never attended any public or private functions. From 1966 onwards, there was only one thing that he did consistently. He addressed the annual Dussehra rally at the huge Shivaji Park grounds in central Mumbai. Except on a few occasions, he never failed to turn up at the rally, where he raved and ranted at his opposition and exhorted the sons of the soil to rise and fight against ‘south Indians usurping jobs meant for locals’ or shouted his favourite slogan – ‘Muslims go to Pakistan’ – or vented against whoever his hatred was directed against at that point of time. The Shiv Sena’s Dussehra rally gave direction to the Sainiks. (It was much later that Bal Thackeray decided that a daily newspaper espousing his views would reinforce the Shiv Sena’s ideology.)

  For many years, the Dussehra rally was something that not only Maharashtrians but other politicians waited for eagerly. The opposition parties in the state geared up for the next elections after they had listened to Bal Thackeray. Even national parties tuned in to his Dussehra rally. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, everybody talked about it.

  Thackeray’s speeches were infused with rhetoric, vitriol and a dose of advice for the Marathi-speaking populace. He infused the spirit of Marathi pride in them, but in a roundabout manner. He derided them for their lackadaisical approach and exhorted them to be aggressive. His acerbic oratory and caustic speeches made headlines the following day, every time, in all the national dailies. In the era before 24x7 television news, thousands of Maharashtrians assembled at Shivaji Park to listen to Thackeray. Nothing could stop them from listening to their dearest leader. Not a single person budged even if they were pounded by torrential rain or if the sound system went haywire. Pakistanis joked that the rally was the only place in the world where a bomb hoax would not work. From the podium, Thackeray got away with making many a sensational, blasphemous pronouncement.

  Even before the advent of the Shiv Sena mouthpiece, Saamna, on 23 January 1988,Thackeray had used the Dussehra rally to change his party’s colours: from a chauvinistic regional organization to a Hindu nationalist party.

  The year was 1994. The venue, as usual, was Shivaji Park in central Mumbai. The audience – card-carrying members of the Shiv Sena and the common Marathi-speaking populace – numbered more than a massive one hundred thousand. The Shiv Sena had spearheaded one of the worst incidents of communal violence in Mumbai in January 1993, after the demolition the Babri Masjid. The city was still reeling in the aftermath of the serial bomb blasts of March 1993 that followed the communal pogrom. So, when Thackeray declared, ‘If they [Muslims] have Dawood, we [Hindus] have Gawli. These [Amar Naik and Arun Gawli] are aamchi muley [our boys],’ there was thunderous applause even before he had completed his sentence. It was as if the audience approved of Gawli being a challenger to Dawood’s might. Thackeray went on to talk about ‘his’ boys and the plight of the local gangsters, who were being hounded and taken out in selective police encounters or extra-judicial killings.

  From that day onwards, Arun Gawli and Amar Naik were anointed as Mumbai’s answer to Dawood. Political observers wondered why Thackeray did not extend his approval to another Marathi-speaking gangster, Chhota Rajan, who had openly rebelled against Dawood Ibrahim and sought to bring him to his knees – unlike Gawli and Naik, who were busy fighting each other to corner the lion’s share of the spoils.

  Various explanations were proffered for Thackeray’s exclusion of Rajan in his speech. Many said that Thackeray wanted to put an end to the tussle between the two Maharashtrian gangs and unite Naik and Gawli against Dawood’s might.

  Some said he did not mention Chhota Rajan because he was annoyed with him; soon after the serial bomb blasts, Rajan had behaved impertinently with the Sena supremo when the latter had dubbed Dawood a traitor. He had faxed letters to the print media in Mumbai signed with his original name, Rajendra Nikhalje. He had declared that Dawood did not need a certificate from anyone and that Thackeray should focus on politics. Thackeray never forgave Rajan for that jibe. Later, after his split from Dawood, Chhota Rajan tried to make amends. In several interviews, he expressed his profound reverence for Thackeray, but he continued to be cold-shouldered by Matoshree, the official residence of Bal Thackeray in Bandra.

  The year 1994 became unforgettable not just for Thackeray’s speech but for several other reasons. For the Mumbai mafia it came to be regarded as the Anno Domini (the year of our Lord, as it is known in the Julian or Gregorian calendar).

  The Mumbai mafia is a world into itself; it has its own rules, calendars, principles and punishments. Until 1994, the mafia had used Dawood’s escape to Dubai in 1986 as a reference point: ‘While Dawood was still in Mumbai’; ‘After Dawood’s escape to Dubai’. This was also true of the police, lawyers, press reporters, politicians, academicians and whoever else talked about the world of crime. After 1994, the Muslim mafia and Dawood acolytes continued to use his departure as a reference point but other, equally significant signposts came to be recognized, especially amongst the Maharashtrian mafia.

  The serial bomb blasts
in March 1993 across thirteen locations in the city – aimed at landmarks like the Bombay Stock Exchange and Air India Building, several hotels, banks, shopping districts, and even the Shiv Sena’s headquarters – were among the most sensational terrorist attacks in this part of the world. 257 people were killed. Chhota Rajan initially tried to defend his boss, but eventually rebelled against him and walked out. This split the gang straight down the middle and divided the mafia along communal lines for the first time.

  Rajan had found some form of revenge at last. Dawood was no longer seen as a don or a smuggler. He was clearly perceived as a terrorist and an ally of the ISI and Pakistan. This perception was reinforced when he shifted base from Pearl Tower in Deira, Dubai to Clifton in Karachi.

  Dawood was besieged now, it seemed, from all sides. India was demanding his head, Chhota Rajan was crying foul and Arun Gawli was sharpening his knives.

  Back home, it seemed like the desi dons had acquired more muscle. Gawli, who had been cooling his heels in jail since 1992 under TADA, was now accused of masterminding the murder of former legislator Ziauddin Bukhari. Bukhari had once been close to Congress chief minister Sharad Pawar.

  The mystery of Bukhari’s murder was never unravelled, although it was widely rumoured that Gawli’s men had been contracted for the killing. A day before his death, Bukhari had been heard threatening a minister at the Mantralaya. ‘I shall expose you and your links with the mafia,’ he is reported to have thundered, ‘if you fail to fulfil my demands.’ The minister’s face was reportedly impassive. And the fallout came immediately after. Bukhari was found dead near the Byculla fire brigade. Gawli’s men were later arrested under TADA.

  Incidentally, Bukhari was the man who had given birth to the Young Party and made Dawood its ring leader in the early days. Later, Dawood and his brothers had drifted into goondaism and Bukhari dumped the Young Party and joined the Muslim League instead. Gawli’s killing of Bukhari was interpreted as one more strike in his war against the Congress, Sharad Pawar and Dawood, not necessarily in that order. Thankfully, it was not interpreted as a communal attack, despite the fact that Bukhari was a Muslim cleric and the founder of Millat Nagar at Oshiwara in Andheri, a Muslim colony.