Dawood's Mentor Read online

  When the Pathans saw Dawood standing outside they were jubilant and felt that since he could be caught off guard, they could liquidate him as well.

  However, murderous intentions are not sufficient; the Maker’s permission matters too. Dawood was seemingly destined to live longer and, once again, the Pathans’ plans were thwarted by the presence of Khalid.

  Like the medieval knights, or even the gladiators of Rome, who faced their adversaries by insulting them, Khalid burst out, expending all his lung power, stretching the tendons of his broad neck: ‘Oye gandu . . . Idhar dekh! (Oh, asshole . . . Look up).’ And with this he opened fire at the assailants who were across the road. In military terms, Khalid had a coign of vantage over his enemies, giving him an edge over them.

  Bullets sprayed like water from a fire hose from both directions. It was random and both the sides were hoping to strike lucky. The Pathans were, of course, completely gobsmacked by now. The onslaught from Musafir Khana at that time of the night was a surprise. The Pathans, known for their boorish behaviour as well as their ferociousness, were unaware that Dawood had an ace up his sleeve, who was a Pathan as well. Khalid Pehelwan was a Pathan, and no ordinary one at that. He was match for all the Pathans put together, and he was with Dawood. Before they could even formulate their next plan of action, Amirzada got hit in his ribs and his big frame crumpled to the ground.

  As a bleeding Amirzada collapsed, his face down on the ground, Alamzeb and Mamoor realized that the tables had turned on them. Their woes worsened when they found that they had run out of bullets. They could not match the firepower of Khalid, who seemed to have an endless supply of bullets. The firing had only increased when Dawood also joined Khalid and began firing at his assailants from the first-floor gallery. The hail of bullets scared the Pathans further.

  Presuming Amirzada had died, they decided to be selfish and save themselves. Alamzeb and Mamoor and the other henchmen got into the car, reversed sharply and drove away fast. In their hurry to escape they did not even dare or care to get Amirzada into the car. All they wanted was to leave the battlefield behind and escape a dog’s death in the streets.

  As soon as they left, Dawood and Khalid came down to the street and saw Amirzada bleeding. Dawood always had great foresight. He was concerned that if Amirzada died outside Musafir Khana, they would all be booked again in a murder case. Dawood wanted to avoid a murder charge at any cost, even if that meant saving the life of his enemy.

  ‘Bhai, agar yeh mar gaya toh hum pe 302 lag jayega aur hum phir wanted ho jayenge (If he dies here, Section 302 [of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)] will be imposed on us and we will become “wanted” again),’ said Dawood to Khalid, who was thinking hard about what to do.

  Finally, Khalid said, ‘No, don’t worry, we can avoid this complication.’

  They asked a couple of boys to dump an injured Amirzada in a cab and drop him off at the casualty ward of the J.J. Hospital, which was barely 500 metres from Musafir Khana. Thus, they managed to avoid a police investigation and legal complications.

  Dawood felt victorious and relieved that he and his team had repelled the enemy attack even in spite of being unprepared and caught unawares. He was also happy that they had almost managed to kill his arch-enemy Amirzada.

  Dawood’s euphoria was short-lived. He had underestimated the Pathans. While he survived that night, his brother Sabir was not so lucky. That night, the Pathans had wanted to kill two birds with one stone. Dawood survived but Sabir succumbed. At the same J.J. Hospital where Amirzada had been admitted, Sabir was wheeled in a gurney, his body soaked in blood. His body looked mauled. He had been killed at a Prabhadevi petrol pump while on a rendezvous with his girlfriend from the Congress House brothel in Kamathipura. J.J. Hospital informed the Mumbai Police who, in turn, arrested the injured Amirzada for the crime.

  Dawood did not know about Sabir’s death until it was too late. He was shattered to the core when he saw his brother’s limp, lifeless body lying mutilated and butchered on the stretcher outside the casualty ward of J.J. Hospital. Dawood’s men had never seen him crying earlier. He was their tough boss who never exhibited his emotions in public. But that night they saw him bawling like a baby. Sabir’s funeral was a grand one in keeping with his status as Dawood’s brother, and as the boss of the gang; as Sabir was older to him, Dawood had always liked his elder brother to believe that he was in charge.

  Sabir was buried in Bada Kabristan in Nariyalwadi, Marine Lines. It was attended by most residents of Bohri Mohalla, lest their absence was noticed. Among Muslims, one’s presence in a funeral is an expression of solidarity in a time of grief and mourning, and skipping it is believed to reveal the rancour held against the dead and their mourners.

  In the 1980s, Bal Thackeray, head of the regional political party Shiv Sena, decided to pursue his political ambitions by using local Maharashtrians to protest on most issues. So, if he called a bandh, the entire city would shut shop fearing the wrath of Shiv Sena’s cadres. The only place where the bandh was ineffective was Bohri Mohalla. The Shiv Sainiks didn’t dare to step into this Muslim bastion. The Shiv Sena and the Muslims of Mumbai hated each other.

  But on the day that Sabir was buried, every shop in the business district of the Muslim ghetto, right from the Crawford Market stretch to Byculla, was closed. There were muffled whispers in street corners, ‘Sabir shaheed ho gaya (Sabir has been martyred),’ ‘Sabir ka inteqaal ho gaya (Sabir is dead).’

  Nevertheless, that night was a game changer for the Mumbai mafia in so many ways. It marked the commencement of gruesome violence in the city. A brother had been killed and a house attacked. After these blatant violations of the unwritten codes of the Mumbai underworld had been committed, nothing was sacrosanct any more.

  Dawood took charge of the gang and, since the Pathans were now regarded as his arch-enemies, he swore to decimate any Pathan who dared cross his path.

  There was one small footnote, however, that everyone missed in the mayhem. It was a Pathan who had saved Dawood’s life from the other Pathans. Twice in Dawood’s life a Pathan had put himself at grave risk to defend a young man in the throes of notorious fame.

  In the mafia, it is a given that one always lays one’s life on the line. But it is an unwritten rule that the ones who live are actually the ones who are smart and lucky enough to have not been foolish. Sacrifices are alien and non-existent. One man, however, defied the odds to not save his life but that of his protégé.

  Dawood owed his life and power to this man.

  The story of this Pathan—Khalid Khan, alias Khalid Pehelwan, alias KP—was untold yet.

  4

  The First Lead

  Among the various threats that film-maker Sanjay Gupta received from the many ganglords, one of them was from Khalid Khan, or Khalid Pehelwan.

  The revelation was stunning for me. I had presumed that the gangsters of yore had, by now, hung up their boots. Since I knew that Khalid was not in India, nor Pakistan, I thought he had died a rich man in some European city. But the caller who threatened Sanjay Gupta was clearly menacing and warned him of life-threatening consequences if there was any misrepresentation of his character in the movie Shootout at Wadala. This seemed to bear the mark of the underworld.

  I had always been keen on profiling Khalid while working as a crime reporter at Indian Express and later at Mid-Day. However, despite my best efforts to track down his family and relatives or his aides, I had been unable to make much headway.

  In my limited understanding of the Mumbai mafia, I had always felt that Khalid was an unlikely gangster and did not belong to the oligarchy of Dawood’s gang. Yet, he had become integral to the growing clout, notoriety and power of the gang. Had it not been for him, Dawood would not have been Dawood. He would have perished in obscurity long ago, killed either by his rivals or the police. Khalid Pehelwan always came in the way, making Dawood invincible.

  It is always easier to track down and speak to an active don whose lieutenants are positioned all over
the city, as some of the police officers may be in touch with them. But how does one track down a ganglord who has retired and is untraceable.

  It was an arduous and challenging task but not impossible. Khalid Khan was a Pathan, and quite well known in their circles. But the Pathans were wary of me because I had written about Dawood. Dawood’s story is so much about how he vanquished the Pathans.

  My hunt for a lead for the Khalid Pehelwan story was tiring and exhaustive. I tracked down virtually all of Madanpura, Byculla, Baida Gully near Novelty Cinema and other localities in south Mumbai that housed clusters of Pathan residences.

  I was completely focused on finding Khalid. My routine comprised making several calls a day, knocking on scores of doors in a week and being discreet about my search for an erstwhile Pathan ganglord. I also sought out journalists to check with their own sources if they could obtain Khalid’s whereabouts.

  One vital piece of intelligence that I managed to gather from various quarters was that Khalid might have relatives in Ahmedabad and that I could find them in the Kalupura area of the city. Mumbai was my bailiwick, but Ahmedabad would be difficult since there are a lot of Pathan settlements there. The Pathans, when they first set foot in India six centuries earlier, had taken a particular liking for Gujarat.

  Mumbai Pathans are distinguishable due to their distinct features. They are tall, well built and extremely fair, with curly red hair, and speak accented Urdu or Hindi. Many Gujarati Pathans, on the other hand, are so assimilated into the regional culture that it is difficult to distinguish them from other Muslims; for instance, the famous Pathan brothers of Indian cricket, Yusuf and Irfan Pathan.

  I was a bit disheartened at the prospect of pounding the streets of Ahmedabad and almost contemplated giving up on Khalid. But out of the blue I got a call. It seemed as if all my persistence had paid off. A stroke of good fortune got me the contact I was desperately looking for. Most of the stories I have written about in newspapers, or even in my books, have come about due to sheer luck. And so was the case this time as well.

  It was an unknown number; I was wary of answering it. In my line of work unsaved numbers are not a good omen. But as a father of two reckless and accident-prone teenage sons, I didn’t want to ignore such calls for unspeakable reasons.

  The voice on the other end was gruff, but I could discern the recognizable Pathani accent. The man was warm and courteous and said that he wanted to meet me. My hopes soared and I cancelled all my assignments and rushed over.

  Our first meeting was near Maratha Mandir Cinema in Mumbai Central. The man I met was in his late forties, very red and fair like a Parsi; he had a thick red moustache and sported a Muslim fez cap. He seemed to trust me, and I liked his goofy manner.

  He introduced himself as Sayed Sikandar Shah. He turned out to be not only the top confidant of Khalid Khan but his relative by marriage too. Sikandar himself had been named in several cases, including an assault case along with the Pathan patriarch and don Karim Khan, alias Karim Lala.

  Sikandar had spent over seven years in jail for smuggling and extortion cases. In Arthur Road Jail, his cellmate was the top dog drug lord Nari Khan, Mumbai’s most notorious drug baron and an ally of gangster Amar Naik. Both Nari Khan and Amar Naik had been killed in a police encounters, at the hands of Inspector Vasant Dhoble and Inspector Vijay Salaskar, respectively.

  At one point of time, when the Mumbai Police was trigger-happy, Sikandar Shah had been on the hit list of an encounter-specialist cop. In fact, he had also arrested Sikandar with 2 kg cocaine once. Sikandar knew that unless he did something desperately smart, his days were numbered.

  When Sikandar Shah learnt—through his snitch in the police department—that his dossier was being prepared, he felt a knot tightening in his stomach. He was involved with the mafia but that was not reason enough for him to be bumped off. He had not murdered anybody and neither was he a threat to anybody. He had a family; his children were toddlers.

  After a lot of thinking, Sikandar developed a clear strategy. He decided to use the law against the law and the police against the police. It is a dangerous game and has often misfired badly on people who attempted this. But Sikandar turned out to be among the lucky few.

  He decided to surrender to the neighbouring state police. Since he already had a base in Gujarat, he decided to surrender to a police station in Porbandar. One day he simply walked into a police station, declaring, ‘I am wanted in several cases in Mumbai and would like to surrender voluntarily so that I get leniency from the courts.’

  For the Gujarat Police, this was a prize catch. A wanted and absconding criminal had been netted without much trouble. They happily arrested him and, for good measure, subjected him to torture for a couple of days to get more information out of him. But Sikandar knew how much to reveal and when to keep the lid closed tight. Finally, the police contacted their counterparts in the Mumbai Police’s Anti-Narcotics Cell and asked them to take his custody.

  And so fate decreed that Sikandar survived the encounter specialist.

  Sikandar was produced before the sessions court judge J.W. Singh on 4 November 1995. The police wanted only a one-day remand but Judge Singh gave him six-days’ remand. The narcotics cell did not have a lock-up to keep Sikandar in for six days. So the police moved around with him across the town for six days in their police jeep. No other criminal in the country would have been so lucky to have received such a detention—moving around town in an air-conditioned police vehicle, breaking bread with the policemen and sleeping comfortably through it all, knowing full well that he could not be bumped off, even by accident, because the court was watching.

  Subsequently, Sikandar was remanded to judicial custody and sent to Arthur Road Jail. He spent seven years in jail with several top criminals and drug peddlers—Santosh Shetty, Sadhu Shetty and Bharat Nepali were his cellmates. But he was happiest to meet one particular accused towards the end of his jail tenure.

  In a strange twist, on 20 March 2000, Judge Singh, who had sentenced Sikandar, was arrested by the Mumbai police for collusion with Chhota Shakeel. Singh was alleged to have hired Shakeel to recover Rs 40 lakh from a businessman in Mumbai and, in return, he had agreed to acquit two aides of Shakeel involved in serious offences. The Mumbai Police had tapped the conversation between Judge Singh and Shakeel and their intermediary advocate, Liyaqat Ali Shaikh. Subsequently, the sessions court trial judge was slapped with provisions of the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act and sent to jail.

  Sikandar spent hours talking to the judge, who claimed he had been framed by the police. Sikandar spent over a couple of years in jail with the judge until he was released on 11 October 2002.

  Once out of jail, Sikandar had learnt more tricks and brushed up on his skills to dodge the law. Indian jails, like most all over the world, do not reform criminals. They harden the criminals and incentivize their foray in crime. So, seven years later, the Sikandar Shah that emerged was none the wiser for his incarceration. Instead, he now knew his raison d’être—hawala and kidnapping for ransom. (The system detested murderers and drug peddlers.)

  By now, Sikandar had the temerity to kidnap a whole gang of fifteen people at once—an unimaginable feat even for the bahubalis (strongmen) of Bihar or the kidnapping mafia of Uttar Pradesh.

  In a hawala transaction, one Miyaji* of Bharuch, a well-known history-sheeter, had siphoned off over 4000 Kuwaiti rials (equivalent to Rs 5 lakh), which he was supposed to pay to Sikandar in Mumbai. So when Sikandar, along with a few bouncers, visited Miyaji’s office in Bharuch, Miyaji had taken the precaution of surrounding himself with fifteen of his men. Sikandar demanded his money from Miyaji but the cunning racketeer feigned ignorance of any such transaction. Sikandar was half-prepared for this eventuality. His men immediately shoved their guns in Miyaji’s face. His army of men were stunned at so many guns and Miyaji being held captive at gunpoint.

  Since leaving any eyewitness on the spot would have compounded his troubles, Sikandar threatened e
veryone and piled up all fifteen men in two waiting Ambassador cars. Sikandar had removed all the door-opening handles and glass sliders, so neither could the car doors be opened from inside nor the glasses rolled down. The overloaded cars chugged to Mumbai and the men were packed like sardines, but they could not escape.

  The men were forcibly checked into a seedy joint in Mumbai. The gunmen monitored each and every movement of these men, including their meals and ablutions. One man even accompanied them to the toilets. They were kept cooped up until Miyaji made a call to his men and organized the money he owed to Sikandar.

  When Miyaji and his team returned to Bharuch, they were embarrassed. The news of the incident and the way Sikandar had engineered it had spread far and wide. This also reached the ears of Fazlur Rehman, a notorious criminal and kidnapping kingpin involved in several kidnappings in Ahmedabad and Delhi, including that of the Adani Group chairman, Gautam Adani. Adani was released only after a ransom of Rs 15 crore was paid. Fazlur happened to be placed in Sabarmati Central Jail, Ahmedabad, during the trial of the Adani case, and he was surprised at this kidnapping incident and wanted to look into Sikandar’s antecedents.

  Fazlur began making inquiries about Sikandar and was totally taken aback by what he uncovered: that Sikandar was a relative of Khalid’s and that Fazlur should not mess with him.

  After a couple of meetings I realized that Sikandar was a devout Muslim who never missed a namaz, often making me wait on the road because it was time for one of the five mandatory prayers for the day. I remained a sport throughout these long waiting sessions. He made up for it by treating me to gallons of fresh carrot juice.

  Sikandar was a Bollywood buff and held Dilip Kumar and Kader Khan in high esteem. In fact, he loved all the Khans of the film industry, and had actually had a few cameos in a couple of movies.

  After several meetings in between the namaz timings, I decided to disclose the reasons for meeting him. Sikandar promised to set up a meeting with Khalid but remained vague, until one day he agreed to make me talk to him on the phone.