Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by Hussain Zaidi

  The commando teams will work in tandem with the elite Anti-Extortion Cells (AECs). Besides one such cell in the Crime Branch, there are four more cells created under the command of each regional additional commissioner of police. As the officers in these AECs have not been trained in handling automatic firearms, setting up ambushes and chasing criminals, the commando combat teams will provide them with the required “muscle and fire power.” While the first batch of commandos will be attached to the Crime Branch, the subsequent teams will go on to consolidate the regional AECs.

  And though not a single bullet has been fired yet, the entire police force is crackling with enthusiasm. At a meeting to discuss the measures to tackle a resurgent underworld last Saturday, senior officers had unanimously supported Mendonca’s aggressive posturing. An additional commissioner of police who attended the meeting said: “In a nutshell, the strategy that we discussed was attack.” One of the deputy commissioners of police added: “We are already cleaning our guns.” But they have an uphill task ahead.

  The covert aspect of operations had a much more aggressive gameplan. Additional Commissioner of Police Dr Satyapal Singh and Param Bir Singh were assigned the task of wiping out the underworld from the city. Both the Singhs had a superb rapport and a burning desire to rid the city of its pervasive mafia menace. The two stalwarts formed three elite encounters squads under the leadership of three daring officers, inspectors Pradeep Sharma, Praful Bhosale, and Vijay Salaskar. The three officers belonged to the same 1983 batch and had certain ‘killing instincts’ in them.

  Also, they were known to have the best intelligence network in the city. While Sharma was a protégé of Satyapal, Bhosale, and Salaskar owed allegiance to Parambir. As Chhota Shakeel and Arun Gawli were the immediate priorities of the Mumbai police, the three encounter squads were working on a specific brief: ‘Finish off the Shakeel and Gawli gangs’.

  Salaskar and Bhosale went after Gawli, while Sharma decided to take on the Shakeel gang. Between the three of them, they eliminated over 300 gangsters, of which Sharma scalped the highest number. Sharma alone managed to eliminate over 110 gangsters, which also included three terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, while Bhosale managed to kill over ninety gangsters from both the Gawli and Chhota Rajan gangs.

  Salaskar could only kill sixty gangsters but he managed to singlehandedly finish off the muscle power of Gawli gang. Almost all the top shooters of the Gawli gang met their fate at Salaskar’s hands.

  The police top brass believed that encounters would prove to be a major deterrent for the underworld as they would instill the fear of God in the minds of the reckless gangsters. It was a grim war. As rising unemployment continued to drive scores of youths to join Mumbai gangs, earning anything from 5,000 to 25,000 rupees, the cops had found it difficult to stem the growing number of sharpshooters. But encounters ensured one thing: the young men who had been inveigled into this life of crime realised that the underworld was a one-way street. The fate of joining the underworld could only be death.

  This understanding seriously depleted the growing numbers of underworld recruits. The bullet-for-bullet and life-for-life credo the Mumbai police began to follow ensured that the mafia ran out of getting fresh blood. The ranks and files of the underworld were thrown out of gear.

  Finally, the cops had something to smile about.

  16

  Tech That

  The British must have had their reasons to shift the Mumbai Police Commissioner’s office in 1896 to an Anglo-Gothic building, which faced a very busy thoroughfare and a wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Although the majestic Arthur Crawford Market building, an architectural marvel, overshadows all other British architecture in its vicinity, the Mumbai Police Commissioner’s office which serves as the headquarters of the city police is no poor cousin. It too figures on the heritage list.

  More than a hundred years later, the Mumbai police headquarters (HQ) is still sitting in the midst of the sprawling Crawford market and many other shopping plazas and markets that have mushroomed around it. For great bargains there are Mohatta Market and Lohar Chawl, Manish Market on the other side, Dava Bazaar on Princess Street, and Fashion Street if you walk a little further on the Metro Cinema side. While the entire stretch near the Mumbai police HQ is a shopper’s delight, for traffic, pedestrians, and the police it is a nightmare junction. It is always throbbing with roadside vendors, the mathadi workers pushing handcarts and a sea of shoppers who spill over onto the roads jostling for space with the oncoming traffic.

  Back in the early nineties, when the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and then Finance Minister Dr Manmohan Singh ushered in economic liberalisation, most of Mumbai’s traders and businessmen quickly cashed in on the moment to import things that were once only smuggled in. It was a time of sweeping changes everywhere in India, more so near the Mumbai police HQ’S unofficial shopping district. Rundown old shops were giving way to swankier departmental stores with elegant facades and amazing window displays. While the wholesale markets were still doing business in small, stuffy shops, new stores like Roopam, Roop Milan, and Metro, bang opposite the police headquarters, were actually minting money as shoppers went berserk.

  For the businessmen who set up shops here, it was bonanza time from day one, and they had the added bonus of having the Mumbai police as their neighbour. Yet, while genuine traders set up shop here, so did the dubious ones. Notorious drug baron Iqbal Memon alias Iqbal Mirchi acquired a cluster of shops across the pavement from the headquarters. The Mumbai mafia, much like the other organised gangs in the world, cocked a snook at the law enforcers. Dawood Ibrahim’s gang managed to construct an illegal shopping complex on government land near the police headquarters. It was called the Sara-Sahara shopping centre and the police did not have a clue about this for a long time.

  But the worst was yet to come. The perpetration of a violent crime in broad daylight, right across from the high security precincts of the Mumbai police HQ, was to prove an indelible blot of shame for cops who prided themselves as the second best after Scotland Yard. The Mumbai police would never recover from this embarrassment.

  The first shooter spotted his quarry dressed in a blue shirt and black trousers coming out of Roopam and walking towards a public telephone booth. He picked up his mobile phone, dialled a Karachi number, and called Chhota Shakeel who asked him to stand by for further instructions. The first shooter nodded at the second shooter, who discreetly began moving towards the same public telephone booth.

  Bharat Shah was one of the top business tycoons in the city. He had several huge departmental stores. Often he was spotted at Page 3 parties, where his picture merited a mention in the tabloids. Of late, though, Shah had been a worried man. He was being forced to do the bidding of lowly riff raff, the likes of whom he would not even allow to stand in front of his store; the mafia had been giving him trouble. Today, on 8 October 1998, he was asked to call a Karachi number. He did not like to leave his work and walk towards the public booth designated to make the call.

  Reluctantly, he went to the public booth and placed a call. He barely spoke a few words but a witness recalled later that he sounded agitated and non-compliant. He also got irritated midway and hurriedly finished the conversation, minutes after he was connected, exiting the booth. While Shah was making the payment for an international call, the first shooter got a call from Karachi.

  ‘Daal do behenchod ko [kill the sister fucker]!’ was all the caller from Karachi said.

  The first shooter looked at the second shooter and gesticulated with two fingers across his jugular vein, indicating a symbolic slitting of the throat.

  The second shooter, who was waiting for his cue, now moved with amazing agility, whipped out an automatic pistol from the small of his back, and accosted Shah, who had stepped out onto the pavement outside the public telephone booth. Shah, still irritated, had turned disdainfully towards the man, w
hen the shooter began firing at him point blank. Shah’s eyes had widened with fear and disbelief, but by then enough cordite had entered his blood to stun his voice and reflexes. Shah’s lifeless body slumped to the ground.

  The second shooter climbed onto the pillion of the bike behind the first shooter, fleeing the scene. The motorbike quickly disappeared into the swarm of vehicles at the Crawford Market junction.

  Two more men, backup shooters, emerged from the woodwork and dialed the same Karachi number to report the killing.

  ‘Bhai, Shah ka kaam tamaam ho gaya [Bhai, we’ve killed Shah].’

  Shah, a billionaire, lay dead on the Mumbai pavement. He had been shot dead in the police’s own backyard. The killing shook the city and left the reputation of the famed Mumbai police in tatters. The edifice called the Mumbai police HQ did not seem so formidable now.

  The 27th Police Commissioner of the Mumbai Police, Ronald Mendonca, now came under immense flak from all quarters. Any other police chief would have been punished for this slackness and given the marching orders for failing to prevent such a sensational crime. Another Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra had been shunted out after the Gulshan Kumar murder. Mendonca survived because the de facto chief of the then Shiv Sena-BJP state government in Maharashtra was Bal Thackeray. For some reason, Mendonca was his favourite.

  But one police officer took this personally: Assistant Commissioner of Police Pradeep Sawant. At the time, he was a handsome, strapping young police officer who brooked no nonsense. He was resourceful, diligent, and one of the smartest cops in the Mumbai police. Unlike those who belonged to the illustrious Indian Police Service (IPS) cadre, Sawant had been inducted into the service through the Maharashtra Police Service Commission (MPSC), which made him inferior to the so-called ‘blue blooded’ IPS. But Sawant decided to ignore this notional superiority of cadres and establish his worth through merit. Starting as an assistant commissioner of police (ACP) from the quiet division of Byculla, Sawant rose through the ranks. He managed to crack many sensational crimes in the Byculla division and won the annual award for the best detection officer. Sawant won accolades from his friends and grudging admiration from officers who had initially looked down upon him for being of state cadre. Unlike other DCPs of Crime, Sawant had been picked up purely on merit, as a man who deserved a place in the hallowed precincts of patharwali building (a building made of stone), another name for the Crime Branch building in the Mumbai police HQ.

  At the Crime Branch, Sawant continued his lucky run. Mafia gangs had begun to recognise him and were often scared to take on an assignment, fearing his iron hand. They knew that if they were caught by Sawant, they were as good as dead or handicapped. Sawant reveled in their fear; if the mafia was afraid of him, he had really arrived.

  But Shah’s killing had come as a head-on punch to the face, leaving him with a black eye. Sawant was seething with frustration and anger. He wanted to retaliate and convey a lasting message to the mafia: that they could not get away this time.

  However, Sawant realised that the mafia had all the means at their disposal and no rules to abide by—while the Crime Branch was shackled with so many antiquated laws.

  Sawant’s subsequent investigation revealed that Bharat Shah had received a call from Shakeel and was asked to return the call. While Shah had made the call, several communications were exchanged between Shakeel and his shooters and it seemed that it was decided that Shah had to be killed following the end of that brief phone call.

  That half an hour between the first call to Shah to the first bullet that was shot was crucial to his eventual fate. If only the Crime Branch had been listening in, the killing could have been avoided.

  Now, Sawant was not a technologically savvy man. He did not know much about wire tapping or telephonic surveillance. In fact, the whole of the Mumbai police were luddites when it came to technology. No police officer had ever actually tried using technology to his advantage. Indian communication systems and police surveillance were in their infancy until the turn of the century.

  There was only one instance where the police had managed to beat the criminals with the help of technology. In 1995, Arun Gawli’s men had killed Bal Thackeray’s manasputra (adopted son), Jayant Jadhav, in Prabhadevi. The city police was totally clueless and had no inkling of who killed Jadhav and why, except that a boy had seen one of the shooters using a mobile phone right after the killing to inform someone that Jadhav had been eliminated.

  Additional Commissioner of Police, central region, Sridhar Vagal, who was from an engineering background, used this clue and got in touch with mobile service providers to crack the case. Maxtouch services helped the cops in identifying the signals and the cell phones that were within the crucial range and at the spot of the killing. The cops began zeroing in on all identified numbers and got their first clue when it turned out that the number was registered in the name of a Dagdi Chawl resident. The case was cracked thanks to Vagal’s quick thinking.

  Sawant did not have an engineering background; he began reading books and summoned all service providers to the Crime Branch office.

  Wire tapping was still carried out by means of the antiquated methods of parallel line, also called a dummy line. Whenever a call came in, the voice got recorded on a tape which could be used as evidence in a court of law during a trial.

  Incidentally, the Indian Penal Code did not have many provisions for wire tapping except a century old law of the Telegraph Act of 1885, which was later updated and became the Indian Telegraph Act of 1975. The procedure was as such: if a particular number had to be tapped then the concerned officer would make a request to his senior, who could be an additional commissioner of police or joint commissioner of police. He in turn would seek a go-ahead from the police chief. The police commissioner would have to get the approval of the home department. By the time, the procedure was followed through, precious time was squandered and the quarry lost, most of the time.

  ‘The first World War happened because of a stray telegraph. When Arch Duke Ferdinand was killed in Austria, a telegraph using Morse code alerted all the people concerned. Consequently, Germany moved swiftly and annexed Austria,’ observed an additional commissioner of police. Such were the dangers that prompted the powers that be to realise the need for a controlling act for the telegraph during war.

  Sawant learnt that off the air or illegal interception required just technological knowhow and no paperwork or extra time: it could be done by anyone with a briefcase-sized gizmo in his car. There was also a major issue in the conversation thus recorded; someone had to hear each and every word and build up a case as the cops never had access to advanced software, which could be used for automated content analysis.

  In techno-surveillance of all kinds, the only privacy left is inside your head. The software of automated content analysis picks up chosen words and throws up that particular conversation after a random search. So, for the Mumbai police any conversation that had words like Dawood Bhai, Shakeel Bhai, paisa, wasooli (procurement), ghoda (gun), or other similar flagged terms would be picked up and brought to their attention.

  The Mumbai police, accustomed to the old parallel line methods which involved hours and hours of listening, recording, and manual transcription, somehow failed to adopt and adapt to this new technology. One group of policemen from the Mumbai police, the controversial encounter specialists, managed to crack it. They got a mobile tower and started doing off the air interception.

  After Sawant met the major service providers of the time, Maxtouch and BPL, he realised they had hit pay dirt. The cops realised they could tap whichever phone they wanted and in whatever manner they wanted.

  At the time, the Crime Branch’s human intelligence or what is also known as the informer’s network was still strong. The cops found out that the murder was organised by none other than Chhota Shakeel and that his two men Mohammad Ali Kanjari and Yusuf Shai
kh might be involved.

  Necessary permissions were soon sought and the police began listening to the conversation of the duo. Soon after, they picked up Kanjari and Shaikh in the Bharat Shah murder case to salvage their lost pride. In the process, they outdid themselves, achieving a coup of sorts when they managed to crack Karachi-based Chhota Shakeel’s SIM card. Now, they realised, they could even tap his Pakistani phone.

  The Mumbai police to this day, rely on phone tapping for most of their intelligence. All this began way back then, when the Bharat Shah case gave them confidence that they could tap anyone’s phone, even beyond the city or the country.

  Once they began listening to Shakeel’s phone, what they found was a goldmine of information. The cops were led to a trove of Shakeel’s connections with politicians, senior cops, journalists, and above all most of the film stars, including some of the reigning Khans.

  17

  Close Shave

  For six years, he had constantly been on the run. Running from the law of the land, running from Interpol, and above all running from arch fiends Chhota Shakeel and Dawood Ibrahim, his nemeses. Now, in 2000, he was tired of running.

  Chhota Rajan was a classic example of the gangster who could not find a safe place to hide and live happily, despite having been on the move for six years. He was, however, never short of money or resources. The Intelligence Bureau was clearly giving him the required logistical and financial support, yet Rajan could not escape the hawkish eyes of his enemies.

  Rajan spent several years on a yacht off the Kuala Lumpur coast in Malaysia. The waters there were usually safer than buildings; anyone approaching the yacht could be spotted from a distance, intercepted, and neutralised.