Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by Hussain Zaidi

  In 1970, Iyer became the first ever journalist ‘silenced’ by the mafia. (Forty-one years after his killing, the mafia, this time at the behest of Chhota Rajan, according to the police, shot to death noted crime reporter Jyotirmoy Dey in broad daylight in Powai.) The Bombay police got wind of the incident only after everything was over and they were left with nothing but the paperwork. They realised the Pathans were going berserk.

  Around this time, although no one can be sure how and when it started, Hindi movies began a derisive depiction of the Mumbai police. Cops were shown reaching the spot only in the end, after all the action; just to handcuff the criminals or to make the panchnama (the spot report of the crime). There was no way the Pathans could be tamed or controlled and Bollywood was sounding this message loud and clear.

  19

  Mastan’s Masterstroke: The Truce

  In the upmarket Warden Road area in Bombay, the rich live in a different stratosphere. Perched on these once-upon-a-time hills, the elevated stretch from Haji Ali to Napeansea Road curried favour with the then British governor of Mumbai, at his majestic residence at the foot of Malabar Hill. After Independence and the formation of the state of Maharashtra, the governor of Maharashtra then enjoyed the run of the vast expanse of wooded forest facing the sea.

  That a mafia don like Haji Mastan managed to get himself an address in this snooty neighbourhood spoke volumes of his clout in the sixties. The Baitul Suroor bungalow was a modest building, and Mastan also managed to carve a one-room outhouse in glass for himself at the back of the house.

  On a particularly wet evening in July 1980, a group of visitors were seated in the well-furnished drawing room of the bungalow, fitted with purple upholstery. The scene had the look of a cordial afternoon visit, but nothing could deflect the tension in the air. Mastan was pacing around the room puffing away at his trademark 555 imported cigarette. He was clad in his usual attire: sparkling white shirt teamed with white trousers and white shoes. The meeting had been called hastily at the behest of the don himself. He was considered something of a legend having managed to cock a snook at the police and the administration at the time.

  This was not an ordinary assemblage of gangsters. The hackles raised by the presence of two warring factions of the mafia in the same enclosed space electrified the air. This was unheard of in the history of Bombay’s Mafiosi: rival members of the mafia never sat across each other at a table. Even now, it seemed they were ready to fly at each other’s throats.

  For the first time, Haji Mastan had managed to get across to the Pathans and the former underdogs, Dawood-Sabir Ibrahim’s gang, in an attempt to broker peace. Mastan’s friend Karim Lala, considered the chief of the Pathan gang, was present along with Majid Kalia, Hussain Somji, Dilip Aziz, Hanif Mohtaram, and, of course, the ubiquitous Jenabai Daruwali, the only woman who walked the fine line between the mafia and the police in those days. Adorned with gold jewellery, she was a curious lady to whom every gangster in Bombay went for advice. Haji Mastan addressed her as Jena Ben (sister) while Dawood called her Jena Maasi (aunt).

  Pathan gangsters like Amirzada, Alamzeb, Shehzada, and Samad Khan were also present, and so was Dawood Ibrahim, now in his mid-twenties, Sabir, and their brother Anees.

  Bombay’s streets were littered with corpses and the police were baying for the blood of gangsters—any gangster. The violent skirmishes between the Pathans and the Dawood-Sabir gang had become a cause for concern for the stalwarts of the Mumbai underworld. Mastan and Karim Lala had not only been suffering sleepless nights, they were also growing increasingly worried at the bloodshed. The killing of any Pathan affected Karim Lala, while any hit taken by the Dawood-Sabir gang forced the cops to launch a crackdown on the Pathans. After all, Dawood was the darling of the Bombay police. Then, there was Ibrahim Kaskar, patriarch and Crime Branch cop, and personal friend of both Mastan and Karim Lala. Ibrahim, absent today, was in turmoil; his sons were taking the bull by the horns and the bloodletting could consume all of them. Mastan spoke firmly, as he stood looking at all those who were present in the room. He said, ‘Bloodshed is bad for any business, especially ours, because for our government it is not even worth a stray dog’s piss. We are all Muslims; and believe in the same religion, as opposed to our hostile government. Why make them happy by our infighting and dog fights on the streets of Bombay?’ Using their common religion, he strove for a common chord.

  ‘Mastan chacha, we never initiate any attack. We know they are from our qaum (community) and in a way our brothers, but we cannot tolerate it if someone wants to fuck us royally,’ Sabir interjected.

  ‘You are jealous of our clout. The mighty Pathans have ruled Bombay for decades. You are just not able to digest our supremacy,’ Amirzada replied.

  ‘Supremacy, my ass! Had not the elders intervened, we could have decided the matter once and for all in a matter of days. It is because I respect Karim chacha and his family that I have swallowed my pride so far, but for how long?’ Dawood barely restrained his anger.

  ‘How about deciding it right now, here in this room?’ Amirzada said, gesturing towards the others, who lost no time in heeding his call. The Pathans stood menacingly in unison, ready to face Dawood’s challenge.

  The atmosphere in the room had swiftly turned dangerous. Dawood, of course, remained seated nonchalantly, seemingly unperturbed by the turn of events. Only his hot-headed brother Sabir seemed ready to accept the challenge, and rose even as his brother laid a hand on him to keep him from making a fool of himself.

  All eyes were set on Sabir, who looked at Dawood. In turn, Dawood quietly rose from his chair. He walked to the corner where Mastan stood, increasingly aware of the possibility of potential bloodshed in his house. Mastan was still holding his cigarette; Dawood took it from his hand, quietly. Then he walked towards the centre table where the ashtray was kept. Instead of stubbing it in the ashtray, he simply took the burning end of the cigarette in his palm and crushed it to ashes.

  In a calm, measured tone, he addressed the meeting. ‘We know how to handle the fire and when to crush it with bare fingers. We don’t need any provocation or challenge. It is not a lack of courage but the veneration of our elders that has held us back so far. We can hurt ourselves but not their prestige,’ Dawood said, scoring a point over his adversaries. For the first time, the world saw the young Dawood mature enough to refrain from being provoked by the violent Pathans at a meeting called for truce.

  A hush of admiration fell over the room, at the guile of his speech and the delivery of his powerful rhetoric. Amirzada and Alamzeb were bristling with anger but they had just been smoothly disgraced and did not want their foolhardiness on display again. They stood there for a while, seething, then sat down without a word.

  Dawood was now matching his gaze with that of everyone in the room.

  ‘Beta, yeh sab khatam karo [boy, let’s get over with all this],’ Karim Lala said in his gruff, Pathani-accented Hindi.

  Mastan, who had not uttered a word beyond his opening speech, interjected at last, ‘I think we should resolve our differences and for the sake of Allah and the Koran take an oath that we shall refrain from targeting each other anymore. We will abstain from bloodshed.’

  Dawood and Sabir nodded. Karim Lala and Ibrahim gave smiles of encouragement. Rahim chacha got up and asked one of the boys to lift the Koran from the corner table and place it in the middle of the mahogany table kept in the centre of the room.

  ‘Let us take an oath,’ Rahim said.

  Dawood and Sabir were among the first to place their hands on the Koran, followed by others present in the room. They all muttered something to the effect that they would henceforth try to live peacefully and abstain from violence.

  Thus, a historic peace pact was engineered by Mastan, far from Dongri. The truce was intended to ensure that the Pathans and the Sabir gang gave up the power struggle and bloodshed. They would demarcate their r
espective turfs in the city and refrain from violating the pact.With the pact in place, it was time for celebration. Tea and biscuits were served and there was even some lighthearted banter.

  For Mastan it was a major victory. And Karim Lala and Ibrahim Kaskar were greatly relieved at the prospect of safety and security for their boys. For two men—Amir and Alamzeb—in the room, the pact meant they could marshal their forces and catch their rivals off guard. For two other men, Dawood and Sabir, the pact was something they were seriously applying their mind to, though they were wary. The underlying thread that connects and defines the underworld in Bombay is the agenda beneath all its actions. The ability of those few men to think beyond the here and now under all circumstances set them apart.

  Of course, Mastan himself had his own agenda in arranging this meeting. For a very long time he had coveted a plot of land on Belassis Road near Mumbai Central. This plot belonged to a group of Gujarati Muslims from the Banaskantha district in Gujarat, a tribe called the Chilias. The Chilias are a particularly fierce tribe, committed to protecting themselves and their properties. As Mastan was known all over the city as an all-money-no-muscle don, he had not taken them on, till now. But the alliance he created between the Pathans and Dawood ensured that the plot of land that he had so far only made several unsuccessful bids to win, would be his. He knew that the combined strength of the Pathans and Dawood could put him in a position of ultimate power and the fact that he had played this messiah-like role in bringing about this understanding between the two gangs put him in a position to leverage them.

  Soon after the truce, he let them in on the problem he was facing at Belassis Road. The Pathans and Dawood’s gang proceeded to meet the tenants and coax them to vacate the land. There was fighting on the battleground for a while; the Chilias fought valiantly. But they could not withstand the joint might of the two gangs and finally lost their land. Mastan then went on to build a tall, multi-storied building on the plot and name it, gloriously, Mastan Apartments.

  20

  Dawood’s Smuggling Business

  Dawood was now riding high. Only 25 years old, he had been adjudged important enough by the enormously powerful Haji Mastan to be included in a meeting with the other powerful gangs of the time. He had committed successful robberies; he had managed to avenge his friend against the reigning gangsters of his time, the Pathans (Amirzada, Alamzeb, and Samad Khan); he had shown that he could not be taken for granted. He had even managed to get senior cops dancing to his tune, something that the Pathans had never managed to do despite a reign of thirty years or so.

  But now, after a peace pact with the Pathans, Dawood became a bit complacent and stopped watching his back. To him, the covenant of non-violence by taking an oath on the holy Koran was sacrosanct, and he assumed that nobody would have the temerity to violate it. Now his one-point programme was to expand his business and fill his coffers. With Khalid Pehelwan’s chutzpah and his brains, Dawood’s financial stock began looking north. From Bombay to Daman, electronic goods to silver and gold, Dawood had it all covered. And soon he found himself making inroads to Gujarat. Emboldened and brazened by his success and mettle, Dawood’s business mushroomed all along the Western coast. Khalid Pehelwan had taught him well. Being a part of the smuggling racket and the right-hand man of Baashu, he was already in the trade for over a decade, and taught these to Dawood. Through all of this, he continued to stay in Musafirkhana, which was a veritable fortress, and almost impenetrable to outside attacks.

  Dawood had begun making trips to Dubai, hobnobbing with the sheikhs of Dubai. He was fascinated by the opulence and affluence of the Gulf megacity. His quality of life and the people he kept company with had now improved; from street-level riffraff to millionaire Arab sheikhs.

  Dawood now cemented his position as the ultimate man to be dealing with. This status drew, in part, from his ever-growing clout over the Bombay police and its Crime Branch.

  As Dawood arrived at the shores of Gujarat, he knew well that Alamzeb and Amirzada had already set up base there. Abdul Latif Khan was heading their Gujarat operations. But shrewd as Dawood was, the only man he wanted to outsmart and break was Sukur Narayan Bakhiya, the single largest gold smuggler in the country. Haji Mastan had earlier tried to outdo Sukur’s business but had miserably failed to do so.

  When Sukur and the Pathan gang learned of Dawood’s foray into Gujarat, they tried to edge his business out, but there was nothing much they could try against a man who had already long established himself in the business of smuggled goods, courtesy Khalid.

  Dawood’s current status was further strengthened when he moved from the coasts to the airports of Bombay. The devious modus operandi of the gang while smuggling gold from Dubai was appropriately called Kachra Peti line (garbage line).

  His men would board the Bombay-bound plane from Dubai, storing gold biscuits in innocuous boxes in the guise of mithai boxes. Before the person got to the customs officials when the plane landed in Bombay, he would signal the sweeper in the area by making eye contact and nodding and then dump the box into the garbage bin. The sweeper would immediately take this valuable bit of trash out of the airport with the rest of the bin’s contents. He would then hand over the smuggled gold to Dawood’s men. The sweeper would get a commission every time he picked up a box.

  It was a strategically executed plan, its ears close to the ground as was the case with all of Dawood’s schemes. Unfortunately, somebody had already tipped off the authorities this time, and Indian customs officials swooped down on airport maintenance within minutes. The police retrieved gold biscuits worth 25 lakh rupees from the Santa Cruz airport. This was after interrogating every person employed with the airport authority. When they finally caught the sweepers who had had a hand in the smuggling, the men confessed that they did not know anything except that all the boxes were for Dawood bhai.

  And very soon, Dawood was arrested under Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act (CoFEPOSA). For the first time in his life as a don, circa 1980, he was being legally detained for smuggling. But on his climb up to great monetary and muscle power, Dawood had begun to cultivate men in the government machinery. He managed to buy off witnesses and work over the papers, and was acquitted of all charges in 1983.

  Emboldened and raring to take back his position as Bombay mafia’s numero uno, Dawood went on a vengeful quest of self-assertion. The Pathan gang seemed like distant folklore, as waves of Dawood’s new campaigns sent ripples all over Bombay’s underworld. He had found his calling and the edge he had always sought over the Pathan gang, and intensified his activities, and kept trying new ways to carry out his old schemes. All the while, he was also on the lookout for the Trojan horse in his outfit.

  Soon, Dawood’s men invented new ways of smuggling using the cavities of human bodies that the X-ray machines of those days failed to detect. They began hiding gold pieces in the rectum and named it the ‘godown line’ or ‘underground line’. Passengers were called carriers and in addition to return airfare and a week’s stay in Dubai, they were paid a satisfactory amount of what was relatively easy money. People began to queue up to become carriers and the business flourished. Residents of Bombay no. 3 and Bombay no. 9 (to use Bombay police lingo for areas like Bhendi bazaar, Imam Baada road, Sandhurst Road), in south Bombay became rich by making few trips to Dubai. Of course, if carriers could rake in money in huge amounts, Dawood and his men stood to gain much more.

  Bombay became too small, and he had to now look for other avenues, mostly opportunities in Dubai to invest his monies. The Dawood–Sabir syndicate had not only become flush with cash but also clout and connections in the Middle Eastern countries.

  The human tendency is to become oblivious to other issues in life when the coffers are filling. Dawood got busy counting cash and stashing his ill-begotten money. Unfortunately, Dawood lowered his guard towards his one-time nemesis, the Pathans, who were watching
each and every move of their arch rival. They were witnessing the rapid strides forward that the don and his brother Sabir were making.

  There was a distinct difference between the smuggling business of the Pathans and that of the Dawood-Sabir gang. While the Pathans had more or less remained the landing agents or distributors on the coasts of Gujarat, Diu and Daman, Dawood had managed to transcend these lower level operations. He negotiated deals with Arabs directly, fixed prices, and oversaw all operations till the final bit of execution. This benefited him in two ways: his profit margins soared and this gave him a centralised grip over operations. His business grew manifold.

  The Pathans could never penetrate the market in such a manner. Despite their best efforts and huge risks they could only incur losses and never managed to break even in the high stakes business of smuggling. They simply did not have the resources, or contacts, and acute business acumen of Dawood and Khalid Pehelwan.

  Dawood not only had a sharp mind in the form of Khalid but also growing connections in the police force, something which the Pathans could never manage to approach in terms of tenacity and canny strategising. The frustrations of defeat, losses in business, and their rivals’ unstoppable success had fuelled the fire of jealousy and rancour among the Pathans. They now realised that the famous truce at Mastan’s bungalow had been enacted only to fill his coffers and give Dawood time of around a year and a half to grow in Bombay and Dubai. It had done nothing for their own business.

  Amirzada and Alamzeb also thought Dawood was meant to give them a hand in business and treat them as partners, as part of the goodwill inferred in that pact, sharing the spoils with him. However, they felt that Dawood had given them a royal ignore, thereby becoming, in their eyes, the first one to violate the holy pact.

  The Pathans got together and began plotting what they did best—violence and bloodshed. As they believed Khalid was a mere manager, they did not accord him much importance. They had to get one of the two brothers, Sabir or Dawood. Or why not both of them? This would effectively destroy the whole of the Dawood-Sabir syndicate.