The World's Most Evil Gangs (19 page)

Another headache for the Brazilian authorities in encouraging visitors to the country is the nation’s highly publicised spate of kidnappings, particularly plaguing São Paulo. Recent figures revealed that one person was kidnapped in the city every two days.

The most infamous abduction was that of Marina da Silva Souza, mother of Brazilian football’s brightest young hope, Robson de Souza, better known as Robinho. After seizing her in November 2004, the kidnappers first demanded that Robinho stop playing football – seen as a psychological ploy to show that they were in control. They next sent him a videotape of his mother, in which the kidnappers could be seen cutting off her hair. ‘I don’t know what sort of people do these things,’ said Robinho. ‘They are people with evil in their hearts.’ After 41 days in captivity, his mother was finally freed after the soccer star paid a ransom equivalent to £43,000. This encouraged the kidnap gangs: five other footballers’ mothers were kidnapped during the next five months.

The kidnap gangs are so well organised that a special
anti-abduction
task force, the Divisao Anti-Sequestro, operates in São Paulo. Since its formation in 2002, when about 30 victims were being held at any one time, it has had some success. Recently, however, the gangs have tended to change their tactics. The new style of abduction is known as ‘express kidnapping’. In 2012 there were more than 250 of these lightning seizures in greater São Paulo. Victims are generally grabbed in shopping malls, grocery stores or car parks, and then held only long enough for them to empty their bank accounts via ATMs.

The other worrying growth in organised crime is far away from the crowded cities. Piracy in the Brazilian Amazon made international headlines in 2001 following the murder of Sir Peter Blake, a world-famous sailor and environmentalist who was shot by a gang known as the ‘Water Rats’ while on a research expedition to the region.

The 53-year-old New Zealander had returned from dinner
with his crew in Macapa, a remote city on the northern bank of the Amazon delta, when a gang of eight men arrived at his boat by rubber dinghy. Blake reached for his gun and shot one of them before the robbers opened fire. He himself died from gunshot wounds and two members of the crew were injured.

Local boatmen say attacks are now common in Pará, a sprawling, sparsely policed region that has led to the formation of an anti-piracy task force. Eight boats and 50 officers are deployed but Pará’s security minister admitted that tackling river crime in such a vast region – the ‘largest hydrographic basin in the world’ – was not easy.

The gangs’ modus operandi is typical of the attack in June 2011 on a passenger vessel by gunmen who approached in small motorboats, firing into the air. Once aboard, the men threatened to execute some of the 140 passengers, including children. All survived but one passenger said: ‘They had pistols, revolvers – lots of weapons. They said they would kill us. They put guns to the children’s heads and even said they would cut the fingers off those who didn’t hand over their rings. It was two hours of terror.’

During the same year, a sailor was killed when two boatloads of pirates raided his vessel as it transported fruit to Belém. Two other sailors were shot by pirates in the neighbouring state of Amazonas. Police blamed a gang known as the ‘Black River Pirates’. Larger ships carrying 300 passengers have also been targeted.

Another ongoing gang problem that Brazil is tackling with urgency is human trafficking – both for prostitution and for forced labour. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, sex trafficking of women occurs in every Brazilian state. Women, often from the state of Goiás, are
found in forced prostitution abroad, principally in Portugal, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan. The trade is linked to foreign organised criminal networks, particularly from Russia and Spain. Brazilian women and children are also subjected to forced prostitution in neighbouring countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Paraguay.

Human trafficking for forced labour has been a problem in Brazil since the late Sixties when farming began expanding into Amazonia, the contemporary slogan being that this was ‘a land without men for men without land’. While the land-grabbers got rich, however, the poor farm workers lured there by the traffickers found it a land without hope. It is estimated that there are now 25,000 to 40,000 people working in conditions of slave labour in the agricultural sector. Thousands of slavery cases are reported annually to the authorities, usually associated with plantations growing sugar cane and African palm. Both are used for production of ethanol, billed as an environmentally friendly alternative to petrol. On sugar plantations, the cutters harvest much of the crop by hand using machetes.

A 2007 raid on an estate in Pará that produced 13 million gallons of ethanol a year uncovered more than 1,000 indentured labourers working 14-hour days. The authorities described the three-day raid as ‘Brazil’s biggest attack to date on debt slavery’. The practice involves luring poor labourers to remote locations, where they rack up increasing debts to the plantation owners, who charge exorbitant prices for food and the horrendous accommodation.

There is a saying: ‘Sadly in Brazil, everything that’s bad becomes a fashion’. The nation’s gangsters have long tended to prove this true. Brazil’s formidable organised crime networks
have been on the warpath and have increasingly targeted symbols of the state. In the year following the transfer of the Olympic mantle to Brazil at the end of the London Games in July 2012, more than 100 police officers were killed, at least 40 of them clearly victims of summary executions.

Frustration exploded onto the streets again during spring and early summer of 2013. As well as Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, more than 80 cities saw an estimated one million Brazilians clash with police in violent demonstrations against what was seen as governmental corruption. Increases in taxes and public transport fares, plus neglect of local services, incited rioters who blamed the financial crunch on the need to pay not only for the World Cup but for the Olympics, too – the nation’s pride in these global events being soured by the suspicion that the beneficiaries were more likely to be big business, bent administrators and the burgeoning web of organised crime than the average Brazilian struggling to make ends meet.

The challenge of hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympics gave governmental and law enforcement agencies the determination to tame the country’s gangster culture. But an appraisal of the task ahead came from Jose Junior, the head of AfroReggae, a favela-based cultural organisation in Rio that works closely with the government to remove youths from gang life. He said: ‘If this doesn’t work, if the country doesn’t manage to change by 2016, I think it will take another 50 years to solve these problems.’

I
ndia’s racketeers are specialists in the vilest of trades, child slavery. It’s a shameful scandal, as portrayed in the movie
Slumdog Millionaire
, but the reality is far, far worse. As many as 200,000 children a year fall into the hands of slave traders. Many are sold by their poverty-stricken parents for as little as £11. Others are reported missing and are never seen by their families again, kidnapped by gangs who sell them on to their employers. In recently released statistics that shame the booming super-state, there are estimated to be 10 million child slaves working in India’s factories and backstreet sweatshops.

Thousands of illegal placement agencies flourish in cities like Delhi where there is a high demand for youngsters. ‘Employers are specifically looking for children because they are cheaper, complain less and can be exploited,’ says the Indian human rights agency Shakti Vahini. ‘Some parents might be willing to
lose their children to the agencies in the hope that they’ll live a better life in the city and send back money but instead what the children go through in the cities is nothing less than hell.’

India is under increasing pressure to make a start on stamping out the trade in youngsters. In June 2012 the US State Department labelled India as a child-trafficking hub and urged the country to bring its laws into line with UN conventions. The country’s labour minister has promised a new law banning child labour, but that will not happen swiftly, according to Gursharan Kaur, wife of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, who warned: ‘It is the poor who send their children to work due to their low earnings. If their own families do not understand the child’s rights, who will?’

It is not only youngsters who fall victims to these racketeers, however. In the stream of migration from countryside to city, many women are also being trafficked for bonded labour, forced marriages and sexual exploitation. A previous US State Department report spelled it out: ‘India is a source, a destination and a transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labour and commercial sexual exploitation. Internal forced labour may constitute India’s largest trafficking problem; men, women, and children in debt bondage are forced to work in industries such as brick kilns, rice mills, agriculture, and embroidery factories. Some estimate this problem affects tens of millions of Indians. Those from India’s most disadvantaged social economic strata are particularly vulnerable to forced or bonded labour and sex trafficking. Women and girls are trafficked within the country for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced marriage. Children are also subjected to forced labour as factory workers, domestic servants, beggars, and agricultural workers’.

Child-snatching is one of the many illegal roles of specialised gangs dealing in kidnapping, smuggling and the contract killings of rival businessmen. They offer their services openly around Mumbai’s busy JJ Hospital Junction. These gangs, making millionaires out of their ‘Slumdog’ victims, are thought to have more than 10,000 heavies as full members.

A ‘refinement’ by Indian gangsters – already mired in drugs, extortion, gambling and prostitution – is ‘apartment theft’. Because of the extreme housing shortage, tenants are leaned on to move out of rent-controlled buildings so that they can be replaced with higher-paying occupants. Other areas targeted by Indian mobsters are the building industry, plantations and horticulture.

Bollywood is not untouched. Half the money ploughed into India’s massive film industry is said to have come from crime. Stars of the screen have traditionally been quite open about their criminal connections – often the only way of ensuring their next roles. And some of Mumbai’s crime ‘dons’ are as famous as the superstars themselves. One of the most infamous, Dawood Ibrahim, head of the crime Syndicate ‘D-Company’ which is heavily into the movie business, has had films loosely based on his activities, with titles like
Black Friday
and
Shootout at Lokhandwala
.

Ibrahim, born in 1955, began his career of crime in Mumbai working for the Karim Lala gang in the 1980s, exploiting sweatshop labour in the fast-expanding textiles industry. He then switched his headquarters to Dubai, where he formed his D-Company, initially dealing in the
ship-breaking
industry, which swiftly became a conduit for smuggling arms, explosives and contraband into India. He set up real estate and betting businesses and was believed to control much of the ‘hawala’ system – the commonly used
unofficial way of transferring money without raising the attention of official agencies.

In March 1993, 13 bombs exploded across Mumbai, killing 257 people and injuring 800. The first blast was beneath the Stock Exchange, followed by others over a three-hour period across several districts of India’s financial capital. The powerful explosives had been packed into cars and scooters, under a manhole cover and in a hotel room. Some brokers and investors were trampled to death in the stampede. Leaders of the city’s notorious ‘Tiger Memon’ crime family were subsequently found guilty of what was widely seen as an act of Islamist terrorism. Among them was Sanjay Dutt, a Bollywood star accused of buying and supplying weapons. The prosecution claimed that the prime motive for the attacks was revenge for the loss of homes and property during previous anti-Muslim riots. And it was claimed that the main organiser and financier of the operation was Dawood Ibrahim – by then on the run and labelled India’s ‘Most Wanted’.

The gangster-turned-terrorist is believed to have forged links with al-Qaeda and to have also provided the logistics for a further murderous attack on the city. In November 2008 Islamist terrorists were responsible for 12 coordinated shootings and bombings across Mumbai, killing 174 people. The only terrorist who was captured alive confessed that Ibrahim’s organisation had provided arms and explosives to the Pakistani-based militants who carried out the attacks. In 2011 Ibrahim, now living in Pakistan, was placed at Number Three on the Forbes list of ‘World’s Top Ten Most Dreaded Criminals’.

Long before Dawood Ibrahim rose to infamy via Bollywood, organised crime was rife in Indian cities. The earliest example of what is now considered the ‘Indian Mafia’ can be traced back
to the 1860s when what was known as the Thanevale Gang, based in Mumbai, were responsible for over 80 per cent of all opium and heroin trafficking. Narcotics are still the Number One illicit trade in India, which has the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest legal grower of opium. Quite apart from the criminal diversion of the home-grown product, the country has become a major transit point for heroin entering from the major Asian opium growing areas, the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent, on its way to Europe.

There are some ruthless men in the Indian underworld but some of the women are just as tough. Quite a few of them have made a mark in the world of crime, according to authors Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges in their 2011 book,
Mafia Queens of Mumbai
. ‘Women in the Mumbai underworld are dangerous, strong-willed and unlike their male counterparts, more focused and determined,’ says Borges. One of them, Ashraf Khan, became a gang leader of some influence after her husband was killed – some reports say in a police shoot-out, others by Dawood Ibrahim’s men. After his death, Ashraf transformed herself from happy housewife to cold and calculating killer. Calling herself ‘Sapna Didi’, she seduced another Mumbai gangster, Hussain Ustara, who tutored her in the use of weaponry, from a Mauser pistol to an AK47 assault rifle – and even her feet, for he taught her kick-boxing too.

The couple then muscled in on Ibrahim’s businesses, causing him severe losses. Once they almost got killed while looting one of Dawood’s drug consignments smuggled across the border with Nepal. Ashraf and Hussain were hijacking a batch of donkeys laden with contraband when Dawood’s men surrounded them. She kicked one of the animals and escaped in the ensuing mêlée. Ashraf and Hussain realised that they would never be safe as long
as Dawood was alive, so plotted to kill him very publicly while he watched a one-day international cricket match at Sharjah. Dawood got wind of the plot – probably through an informer within Ashraf’s gang, says author Zaidi – and four hitmen burst into her home in South Mumbai. She died of 24 stab wounds. Hussain was also eliminated, while on a visit to one of his mistresses near Agripada in 1998.

The book
Mafia Queens of Mumbai
created a publishing sensation because it revealed that so many of India’s crime ‘kings’ over the last couple of decades have actually been ‘queens’. The authors identified a woman, as yet unconvicted of any crime, as being head of a massive prostitution racket in Mumbai’s smart Malabar Hill district. The clients tended to be politicians or rich businessmen and their sons – who would be secretly filmed and then blackmailed. The book also identified Mumbai’s ‘wealthiest drugs baroness’. She ran the trade with her daughter, both of whom have been cleared 12 times on charges of heroin dealing. An oddity of her gang is that she employs eunuchs as bodyguards.

The veteran female who wielded most power over the city, however, is named by Hussain Zaidi as Jenabai Chavalwali. During India’s prohibition days in 1939 she amassed enormous wealth as a bootlegger. She was the elder sister of notorious gangster Haji Mastan and became aunt to the young Dawood Ibrahim. So trusted was Jenabai that she was able to forge a landmark peace pact which brought together the Ibrahim and Mastan gangs with their sworn underworld enemies, the Pathan gangsters led by Karim Lala. Together they formed a force that, she declared, ‘even the government will stand no chance against.’

One of India’s most wanted criminals was Archana Sharma, girlfriend of gang leader Om Prakash, also known as ‘Babloo’
Srivastava. She is still on the ‘wanted’ list because no one knows whether she is dead or alive.

Hailing from Lucknow, the university-educated Archana moved to Dubai in 1993 and opened a fashion store. There she met ‘Babloo’ Srivastava and together they travelled the world – until Interpol caught up with him in Singapore and he was extradited and jailed. Archana followed him back to India and had a brief stint as a Bollywood actress – appearing in a movie titled
Gangster
– before devoting herself to a full-time career of crime, organising violent extortion rackets for her jailed boyfriend.

In 1997 she was arrested by Delhi police in a murder case but jumped bail. The following year she turned up in India’s seventh largest city, Pune, where she organised the abduction of a businessman, whose body was found hacked to shreds in his abandoned car. She had employed a team to follow the victim for 34 days before striking. Sharma resurfaced briefly in Kolkata in December 1998, where her kidnap target was a wealthy hotel owner. This time a police tip-off foiled the plot. She has not been seen since, and there were reports that she had been killed in Nepal for cheating a drugs cartel. But the Indian press still regularly asked the question: Is the ‘Lady Don’ dead?

Sharma’s principal rival in Pune was Arun ‘Daddy’ Gawli, whose murderous rule began when he personally disposed of the owner of a garment company in the early Eighties. His gang went on to run a systematic extortion racket and contract killing operation in Pune. Gawli was a protégé of gangster Rama Naik, who was working for Dawood Ibrahim. (That name again. All recent criminality in India seems to be linked to Ibrahim, though perhaps only by repute. Even Archana Sharma was reported to have been granted his protection when she went on the run.)

The triumvirate of Pune gang bosses fell out over a property deal in 1987. Naik was murdered and his partner Gawli blamed Dawood. Thus began a deadly rivalry between the two men, which extended to Mumbai, where ‘Daddy’ Gawli was, by the Nineties, probably the only gangster strong enough to oppose Dawood. In 1993 he even ordered the murder of Dawood’s brother-in-law, Ibrahim Parkar.

Gawli’s downfall came when he tried to muscle his way into the political power base, back in Pune. A long-standing contract killing had been offered by local property developers on a leading member of the Shiv Sena party, Kamlakar Jamsandekar. In March 2007 four hitmen entered the politician’s house and shot him dead at point-blank range in front of his daughter. The following May, Gawli and 11 members of his gang were arrested. Big ‘Daddy’ avoided execution but, after a long-delayed trial, in August 2012 he was given a life sentence.

Historically, Indian police have always acted with supreme force against the nation’s hardened criminal gangs. But the men in khaki have in recent years been mired in allegations of corruption, mafia links and human rights violations. In 2000 Prime Minister Atal Biharee Vajpayee pushed through a massive modernisation programme that improved police stations, weaponry, transport, computerisation, as well as police pay and housing. This infusion of funds from the centre has made a substantial difference to the enforcement of law and order in many states. But as a Mumbai newspaper commentator recently said: ‘The task of changing medieval cops into modern ones won’t be achieved in a decade.’