Dongri to Dubai (2 page)

Anthropologists like to use the phrase ‘thick description’ to describe an explanation of a behaviour that also includes and explains context, so that the behaviour becomes intelligible to an outsider. For most readers, I think, reading
Dongri to Dubai
will at first feel like a journey into an alien landscape with a trustworthy, experienced guide; by the end though Hussain has made us see, helped us to comprehend, and we recognise this terrain as our own world, and we understand—but don’t necessarily forgive—its inhabitants.

I am grateful for this book. The work that Hussain does is exacting and sometimes dangerous. Reporting about these deadly intrigues and the human beings caught within them is not for the faint of heart; the web stretches from your corner paan-shop to the bleak heights on which the Great Game is played, and there are many casualties. We all profit from Hussain’s intrepid investigations.

Preface

D
ongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia
has been my most complex and difficult project since I took to reporting on crime way back in 1995. The biggest challenge by far has been chronicling the history of the Mumbai underworld and keeping it interesting for lay readers as well as choosing incidents that marked an epoch in the Mumbai mafia.

It was first suggested to me by a friend in 1997, when I was barely a couple of years into crime reporting, that I should try to write about the history of the Mumbai mafia; I was advised to replicate something like Joe Gould’s
Secret
. At the time, I had not even heard of the book; to be honest, I felt it was too colossal a responsibility for someone who was still wet behind the ears.

But having put my ear to the ground for
Black Friday
, I felt ready for a bigger challenge. Initially, I set out to find out why so many Muslim youngsters from Mumbai were drawn to crime. Was it the aura of Dawood Ibrahim or was it economic compulsion that drew them? That was the question with which I started. And somewhere along the way, I ended up doing what my friend had asked me to do initially.

When I set off on the story from Dongri, the metaphor was not lost on my friends. Am I guilty of linking members of a particular religion with crime? Unlike in the US, where exhaustive studies have been conducted on race and crime and their correlation, if any, there has been no serious debate or study on the causes that made Muslims prone to following a life of crime in the last fifty years.

When I say Dongri, it is not just the area that starts from Mandvi near Zakaria Masjid but from Crawford Market to the end of JJ Hospital, covering Null Bazaar, Umerkhadi, Chor Bazaar, Kamathipura, and all the interweaving cloth and retail markets and masjids.

Tracing the history of Mumbai, historian and researcher Sharada Dwivedi writes that the area was once a flatland and Dongri was a hill; there used to be a Portuguese fort here that the British took over and fortified. But before the British started reclaiming the land, the fort area was a low-lying area below the rocky heights of Dongri, which provided easy access to the sea. Muslim settlers are known to have lived in the higher lands near the present day Chakala Market, and in Dongri, from as far back as the fourteenth century.

The eastern part of Bombay
¹
island was predominantly Muslim dominated for a long time, and remains so even today. After the seven islands were linked, Dongri got a life of its own. The chaos around it happened gradually; with access to the markets, commerce thrived and so did the population. Traffic is a mess, the pavements have been taken over by hawkers, pedestrians spill onto the streets, and the place is always bustling with activity. To the west of Dongri is the Chor Bazaar (literally meaning ‘thieves’ market’) where you can get everything from old wardrobes discarded by Parsi households to antiques, gramophones, and other curios.

Long before Dawood changed the way Dongri is perceived today, others who had walked the hall of fame and notoriety in the Dongri area were Chinka Dada, Ibrahim Dada, Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, and Baashu Dada.

In those days, the easiest crime was to accost late night travellers and relieve them of their valuables. The art of pickpocketing was yet to be learnt and perfected. But the wielding of the shiny blade of a knife, sword, or chopper was enough to send shivers down the spine of the peace-loving residents of Bombay, as it was known back then. Every little crime was reported with flourish by the British journalists. One of them, Alfred W. Davis alias Gunman, who reported on crime for the
Blitz
, was a legend. A reporter who flowered under his tutelage was Usman Gani Muqaddam. Usman was known for his diligent news gathering and investigative skills. After extensive interviews with Usman Gani and other veteran crime reporters and my own research, I gathered that Dongri had always been the epicentre of crime in Mumbai.

In the first fortnight of 1947, the city witnessed a spate of crimes. the
Times of India
reported four incidents. On 1 January 1947, stray knife attacks were reported at Lalbaug, Agripada, and Dongri. The police arrested nine people and launched a drive to nab the culprits involved. Within days on 8 January, the Anti-Corruption Bureau seized 400 carving knives from a flat on Marine Drive but could not arrest anybody. The same day, a social worker was stabbed in Parel. B.J. Deorukhkar, a municipal councillor, was also murdered, an incident that shocked the city and raised an alarm.

Even before the cops could take a breather, there was another incident, but this time, they showed amazing alacrity. On 11 January, the police arrested two Pathans who had looted a bank within ninety minutes of the crime being committed. The robbers had entered a bank in south Bombay and decamped with the booty in a waiting car. The car, bearing the registration number BMX 1221 (they had covered the license plate on the back of the car with a red cloth) was making a getaway at full speed when a constable with the Esplanade Police Station, now known as the Azad Maidan Police Station, intercepted it and hauled them to the police station, where they were arrested. Ah, the power of the constabulary! Once upon a time, the constables were the backbone of the police force in Mumbai.

In the next couple of days, on 14 January, the police busted a gang of racketeers operating at the parcel booking office at Victoria Terminus (now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus). The members of the gang would approach people and ask for money, assuring in return that their parcels would reach their destination earlier than via the usual route. Needless to say, the parcels never reached. Those arrested were identified as Nazir Abdul Kader, Sayed Bashir Nazir, and Fakhruddin Kaderbhai.

Most criminals from in and around Dongri became increasingly emboldened in their modus operandi as their crimes went undetected. Others from the area joined the fray when they realised that it was a chance to make easy money with very little chance of being caught. Thus, the boys from Dongri began making their mark in the crimedom.

But Dongri gained notoriety with Dawood Ibrahim; nobody took Dongri to Dubai like he did. This book traces the eventful journey of Dawood’s predecessors, but most importantly, it follows Dawood’s trail too, the life of a boy from Dongri who made crime very fashionable; the boy from Dongri who flew out of the coop but refused to leave India behind, who took refuge in an enemy country but continue to play his games here. The boy from Dongri who became a don from Dubai.

Endnote

1
  The name of the city ‘Bombay’ was changed to ‘Mumbai’ in 1995. So the city is referred to as ‘Bombay’ in the book for the time period till 1995.

Introduction: Up, Close, and Personal

I
n the nineties two things happened in India that changed the fortunes of the mafia in Mumbai. When I was writing about the Mumbai mafia back then, it had been a decade since Dawood had left its shores. Three years earlier Dawood had emerged as a key player in the serial blasts of Mumbai in March 1993. It was also at this time that Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao woke up to release the country from the grip of the Licence Raj and ushered in the liberalisation of the Indian economy. When the Indian perestroika happened, it released a flood of economic opportunities and the first to smell the potential profit was the mafia, by then already entangled with Bollywood.

Suddenly there were so many real estate opportunities. There was talk of mill land sales. At the time, the many mills in Bombay were closing down fast, which meant that there was a whole lot of land in the real estate business to play around with. The only surviving mafia don at the time in Mumbai, Arun Gawli, spent most of his time behind bars. Ashwin Naik was absconding and Dawood was still in remote control mode in Dubai. His brother Anees Ibrahim was more active on the ground. And then there was the breakaway Abu Salem. Chhota Rajan had broken off with Dawood and anointed himself a Hindu don. Both were baying for each other’s blood and in the intermediate period were busy bumping off each other’s business associates in broad daylight. If it was the now defunct East West Airlines chief Thakiyuddin Wahid one day then it was builder Om Prakash Kukreja another day. The Mumbai police were blushing at the horrific body count. One police commissioner even recommended using hockey sticks for the public to defend itself. It was a great time to be a crime reporter.

Although I had missed out on the earlier generation that saw Dawood actually emerge as a don, I was there for the part of the action that resulted in the meltdown of the Mumbai mafia. As I wrote their stories, taking swipes at them, describing their hidden dens and their networks, their interests, their women, their colourful lives, their hold over Bollywood and real estate deal-meddling, I met with the dons themselves to hear their stories firsthand and set them down. So there was a meeting with Arun Gawli, the don from Dagdi Chawl in south Mumbai at the Harsul Central jail in Aurangabad. I spoke to Chhota Rajan, who was spitting fire at Dawood, his one-time friend and benefactor, who was holed away in southeast Asia; then I spoke to Dawood’s Man Friday Chhota Shakeel and, of course, Abu Salem and Ashwin Naik. As a crime reporter, however, my repertoire would not be complete until I had interviewed the one man who had left the shores of Mumbai but still held sway over his city from afar.

By then, of course, everybody was writing about Dawood but access to him had trickled away. Although Dawood had given interviews to journalists before 1993, he had simply vanished off the media radar after 1995. Dawood had just relocated to Karachi at this time and was virtually inaccessible on the phone.

I decided to take the second best option. I began working on Shakeel’s Mumbai network: his hawala operators, gang managers, and other contacts. Within a few months, I was one of the first journalists to crack a hotline to Chhota Shakeel.

Eventually I asked Chhota Shakeel to set up an interview with Dawood. Soon after, T-Series music baron Gulshan Kumar was killed by Abu Salem, who was by then operating on his own. But Chhota Shakeel did not want any part of the blame to fall on Dawood, as his boss was not responsible for Kumar’s death, Salem was. So finally Dawood Ibrahim did agree to an interview. The terms for the interview were set: I would publish Dawood’s interview without any distortion and I would not contact the man who had led me to Dawood any more. A big price to pay.

This is how it was to work. My instructions were to wait patiently; Dawood would contact me whenever it suited him. For a long time after that, there was no beep on my pager from my source. Then
Outlook
magazine ran a story on how Dawood was public enemy number one. This hit him badly—so much that he sent his men to attack the
Outlook
office. The office was badly vandalized although nobody was hurt.

Within a couple of days, my pager beeped and I was asked to call on a local number. I was in a rickshaw passing through Kalina so I got off and called from a local restaurant. I was asked to wait for a couple of minutes, and soon after I received a call at the number I had just used.

The caller spoke in a very polite manner. His phone manner was perfect, enough to put a well-bred Lucknowi to shame. I was amused, thinking to myself that the don had done well for himself and hired some really cultured phone attendants. I switched to my own repertoire of chaste Urdu and asked, ‘
Janab, aap ka isme geraami
[pray what’s your good name]?’

I was utterly taken aback when he said, ‘
Main Dawood bol raha hoon, aap mujh se baat karna chahte the.
[This is Dawood speaking. I believe you wished to speak with me.]’

We spoke for fifteen minutes, during which he painstakingly tried to explain how he was not public enemy number one and wondered how his name had unnecessarily been dragged into the serial bomb blasts case. I said, ‘Okay, I want to record this. Can you give me an exhaustive interview?’

The interview was to be conducted over the phone and via fax. If he did not like a question on the phone, I was not to repeat it on the fax. I agreed.

He gave me a date and time and the number of a PCO, where I was supposed to wait. On the appointed day, he called exactly at the designated time, 10:40 pm IST. The interview lasted for fifty minutes.

I called my editor, Meenal Baghel at the
Indian Express
afterwards. She sounded pleased, as she usually did, with my big stories. She gave me a compliment too: ‘You have reached the stature of Ritu Sarin [a top-notch reporter in the Delhi bureau of the
Indian Express
].’ This was a scoop that was to go down in reporting history; also the first time Dawood had given an interview after he had gone into exile.