Black Friday Page 3

  Dawood Ibrahim thought he was no less powerful than the occupant of the other, rather better known, White House. His home in the plush Zumera area had become a landmark in the city since the diminutive don had shifted base there from India in 1984. Within the opulently furnished bungalow, Dawood and his five brothers—Anis, Noora, Humayun, Iqbal and Mustaqim— conducted their many businesses. The gregarious Dawood also regularly entertained friends here, ranging from sheikhs and emirs from across the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to film stars from Bombay. During the eight years that Dawood had been in Dubai, both his business and social profile had grown dramatically. In the bylanes of Pakmodia Street, Dongri, Nagpada and Dimtimkar Street in Bombay, where Dawood had first cut his teeth as a criminal, his story had assumed the proportions of a myth. He was no longer considered a criminal, but was reverently referred to as ‘bhai’ (literally brother but imbued with great respect).

  Within the White House, the mood was mixed. On 24 December Dawood would turn forty, and this year as usual a lavish party had been planned, which would be attended by politicians from India, Pakistan and Nepal, bankers from Geneva and bureaucrats from London. Yet those close to him sensed a strange unease and reluctance. Unlike earlier years, the plans for the party seemed far from his mind.

  Of course the news from India was distressing. Every day Dawood’s friends and associates in Bombay sent him reports of Muslim men being butchered and women gang-raped. Along with these stories came pressure. Many in the Muslim community, especially in Bombay, thought of Dawood as a protector, and felt sorely disappointed by his apparent indifference towards the bloodshed. Reports reached the UAE of how some of his former associates in Bombay had raised slogans of ‘Dawood murdabad ’ (Death to Dawood) and ‘Dawood bhai, hai hai !’ (Down with Dawood). And now there were also these mysterious parcels.

  It had been a long way from Musafir Khana, Pakmodia Street, in southern Bombay, where Dawood and his family lived in a ten feet by ten feet room. His father, Head Constable Ibrahim Hassan Kaskar, found it hard going to support his seven sons—Dawood, Sabir, Anis, Noora, Humayun, Iqbal and Mustaqim—and three daughters—Salma, Haseena and Zainab—on his meagre salary, but at least he was grateful that he had a steady government job. From an early age, the children were aware of the need to earn. The family was from Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra’s coastal belt, and the community was known as Konkani Muslims. In later years, Dawood would land his goods in the area his forefathers hailed from.

  When Dawood, the eldest, was growing up in the 1960s, south Bombay’s underworld king was Abdul Karim Khan, popularly called Karim Lala, a six-foot Pathan from Afghanistan, one of the many from his community who lived in Bombay and worked as moneylenders. Karim Lala’s territory extended from Walkeshwar and Grant Road to Dongri and Masjid Bunder, Byculla. By the time Dawood started making his forays into the underworld, in the early 1970s, Karim Lala had retired from active work and supervised a second generation of the Pathan Mafia.

  Dawood studied in a local English-medium school until Class IX. After that, the need to earn made him drop out. But both he and his brother Sabir found it hard to get a job with their meagre qualifications. The CBI dossiers on Dawood state that they gradually started stealing and extorting money from traders, hotel owners and shopkeepers in the neighbourhood. Soon, they progressed to selling smuggled goods in Mohatta Market and Manish Market, near their home. Until the early 1970s, Dawood was just another street ruffian.

  The first case registered against Dawood was on 4 December 1974 when he, along with eight others, committed daylight dacoity. The gang attacked a trader, Kantilal Jain, threatened him with country-made revolvers and choppers, and robbed him of Rs 3.75 lakh. The Pydhonie police arrested Dawood and his associates. Dawood and six others were convicted by the trial court but acquitted by the High Court. This had terrible consequences for Head Constable Kaskar, whose reputation in the crime branch was forever tarnished by his son’s criminal connections.

  During the Emergency of 1975–77, Dawood was detained under the Maintainence of Internal Security Act (MISA), as were many people with criminal records. While in jail, he came in contact with two of the biggest gold and silver smugglers of the time, Haji Mastan and Yusuf Patel. As it happened, they were looking for someone to take over their business cabal as they were contemplating retirement. They liked the young man with his energy, determination and obvious intelligence, and decided to induct him into their business.

  Once out of jail, Dawood started putting together a network to aid his smuggling operations. According to gang lore, his syndicate expanded their territory along the coast, and consequently his influence increased within the city. Karim Lala was outraged. He asked his nephew Samad Khan to teach this bunch of upstarts a lesson. Samad fired a couple of times at Dawood in the building where the latter lived, but did not succeed in hitting him. Other members of the Pathan gang, like the dreaded brothers Alamzeb and Amir Zaada, also started confronting Dawood. There were stabbings, shootouts and ambushes between the two gangs. At Pakmodia Street, they say it was destiny that Dawood survived such a deadly onslaught from the ruling gang.

  Dawood was arrested under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act (COFEPOSA) in 1979 and was lodged at the Yerawada Central Prison at Pune. He was released soon, but was arrested again in 1980 by the Dongri police.

  Haji Mastan tried to intervene in the continuing gang war, but failed. In January 1981, Alamzeb and Amir Zaada followed Dawood’s brother Sabir to a petrol pump near Prabhadevi and shot him dead. They also tried to kill Dawood but failed. The Zaada brothers fled to Gujarat to escape Dawood who had sworn revenge. Dawood started his hunt for them, contacting his smuggling associates in Gujarat. The search continued for over two years. In 1983, Alamzeb once again made unsuccessful bids on Dawood’s life at Thane and Ahmedabad.

  Meanwhile, according to official records, Dawood managed to complete another mission of revenge. He had Samad Khan followed and discovered that he was most vulnerable when he was visiting his girlfriend at Grant Road in the heart of Bombay. On 4 October 1982, as Samad Khan was getting out of the lift at the building where she lived, Dawood and six others surrounded him and opened fire. During the post mortem, thirty-two bullets were found in his body. The Pathan syndicate was cowed forever.

  Dawood was again detained under COFEPOSA in 1983 and lodged at the Sabarmati Central Prison. He was released on 21 August. On 6 September, he managed to finish his mission of avenging Sabir’s death.

  Amir Zaada had been arrested and lodged in jail. As the jail premises were inaccessible, Dawood told the contract killer he had hired for Rs 50,000—an unemployed youth called David Pardesi—to kill Amir at the court premises. This was an unheard of fee in 1983 when the usual amount paid as supari (contract killing) ranged between Rs 500 and Rs 5,000. Pardesi received training in firearms at Dawood’s house. On 6 September, as Amir was being escorted to court, Pardesi shot him at point-blank range. Pardesi was arrested and so was Dawood. Dawood obtained bail against a cash deposit of Rs 20,000 and was released in May 1984.

  Dawood had realized that these periodic trips to jail would continue as long as he was in India. When he had been released from prison in August 1983, Laloo Jogi, a smuggling associate from Gujarat, had introduced Dawood to Haji Ashraf of Dubai, who invited Dawood to visit him and see the business prospects there. Dawood decided to follow this up. On 4 May 1984, he jumped bail and fled to Dubai.

  From Dubai, Dawood systematically built his empire in Bombay. He gathered together local gangsters—Bhai Thakur of Vasai, Chhota Rajan of Tilak Nagar (northeast Bombay), Kim Bahadur Thapa of Bhandup, Sharad Shetty of Jogeshwari, Khalid Pehlwan and Chhota Shakeel—and organized them into a flourishing syndicate smuggling gold, silver, electronic goods and textiles. At that time, he avoided smuggling drugs. The D Company, as they came to be known, also collected protection money from hoteliers, builders, businessmen working in iron and steel, grain and textile industries,
and the diamond merchants in Zaveri Bazaar and Panchratna. They solved disputes between businessmen for handsome premiums, known as ‘matter pataana ’. Their monthly income from extortion, protection and settling disputes was estimated at Rs 20 crore in 1992.

  His unofficial second-in-command at Bombay at that time was Chhota Rajan, born Rajendra Sadashiv Nikhalje. Rajan had started his underworld career blackmarketing cinema tickets at Sahkar Cinema in Chembur, in the late 1970s. Gradually, he and his mentor Rajan Nair (Bada Rajan) had extended their area of influence from Chembur to Ghatkopar East in northeastern Bombay, and had achieved notoriety for their innovative use of weapons.

  After Bada Rajan was killed by a gangster called Abdul Qunju under command from a rival matka king, Yashwant Jadhav, who ran a gambling business, the daring revenge that Chotta Rajan took made reigning dons like Dawood Ibrahim and Arun Gawli take notice of the youngster. As Bada Rajan had had connections with Dawood, Chhota Rajan accepted Dawood’s offer to join the D-Company.

  Dawood Ibrahim (right) and Chhota Rajan (Courtesy Mid-day)

  In Dubai, Dawood set up legitimate construction businesses and traded, especially in gold. His business nourished, particularly after Chhota Rajan joined him in the late 1980s, when Bombay became too dangerous for him. Dawood had offices in Nairobi, London, Singapore and Kathmandu. He soon started overshadowing the big names in smuggling in Dubai, like Haji Ashraf who had invited him there, and the Bhatti brothers from Pakistan.

  There is no such thing as job security in the underworld, so Dawood consolidated his position by building up a group of trusted lieutenants whose loyalty to him was absolute, such as Chhota Shakeel and Chhota Rajan. They were responsible for the rapid growth and stability of Dawood’s empire, though later their rivalry grew bitter. For example, when Rama Naik, an influential Hindu don, had a dispute with one of Dawood’s associates regarding a piece of land, Chhota Rajan was assigned to take care of the problem. Rama Naik was killed in a police encounter in a hairdressing saloon in 1987.

  The death of this influential don sent a chilling message that Dawood was not to be opposed. Naik’s protégé Arun Gawli, who had grown up with Dawood in the Byculla Company (a group of budding gangsters in south and central Bombay) had not had any enmity with Dawood, but was enraged at Naik’s death and swore revenge. Dawood tried unsuccessfully to convince Gawli that he was not behind the killing but Gawli was not convinced. His plans for revenge grew, and there were several shootouts and gang-related killings. In early 1992, Shailesh Haldankar and other members of the Gawli gang killed Ibrahim Parkar, husband of Dawood’s sister Haseena, at Nagpada in south Bombay.

  Dawood was deeply upset that he had failed to protect his sister. Retaliation was swift. In the early hours of 12 September that year, when Shailesh Haldankar and his colleague were in JJ Hospital, Dawood’s henchmen Subhash Singh Thakur and Sunil Sawant stormed in with AK-47s and killed Haldankar. Such a killing in a major hospital stunned the city. It also exposed Dawood’s nexus with politicians in Bombay and neighbouring Bhiwandi, as the car used for the operation belonged to a prominent member of the Bhiwandi municipal council.

  Dawood always longed to return to Bombay, for he loved the city. Yet he knew that as soon as he returned he would be arrested. Even when his father died in 1994 or his sister Haseena was widowed, he was not able to be with his family. Life in Dubai was good—top-rank politicians, film stars and cricketers from India would go to pay homage at the White House. But his love for his native city was well known, which was why after the riots in the city, he was acutely distressed.

  When the third parcel was delivered to him, Dawood and his closest associates were busy sorting out the fine print of a business deal. The room fell silent as Dawood toyed with the parcel, clearly reluctant to open it in the presence of others. The earlier ones he had received had angered and embarrassed him. He turned towards his confidant, Shakeel Babumiya Shaikh, popularly known as Chhota Shakeel because of his diminutive stature, who had moved to Dubai in 1987. With the marginalization of Chhota Rajan, Chhota Shakeel had taken his place as Dawood’s right-hand man. As usual, Shakeel knew instantly what was expected of him. He gave a brief order that the room be emptied. Then he came over and took the packet from Dawood. As he tugged at the thread, the fragile box gave way, and the contents—dozens of red and green glass bangles—spilled across the oval table. Wordlessly, Dawood and Shakeel looked at the colourful pieces glinting mockingly under the light of the chandelier. Dawood’s face was ashen.

  There was a one-line Urdu missive with the parcel: ‘Jo bhai bahen ki izzat ki hifazat na kar sake use ye tohfa mubarak (A brother who cannot protect the chastity of his sister deserves this gift)·’

  The meaning was clear. Dawood was being rebuked for his inaction, for his failure to protect his community. For the proud man, this was bitter humiliation.

  The trill of the phone broke the oppressive silence. Shakeel picked it up and barked, ‘What?’

  The speaker’s voice could be heard in the silent room. He reported that Dawood’s latest consignment of goods had been seized, probably by the Paksitani smuggler Dawood Jatt.

  The other phone, whose number was known to barely half a dozen people, rang. Shakeel answered it and, handing the receiver to Dawood, tactfully moved away to the other end of the room. There was a long muttered conversation.

  When Dawood hung up, his demeanour had changed visibly, the earlier dejection replaced by resolution.

  Shakeel remained seated quietly.

  Dawood walked towards him. ‘They called,’ Dawood said. Shakeel had never asked and Dawood had never explained who ‘they’ were. It is believed that the term referred to top officials in Pakistan.

  ‘They know about Aslam Bhatti and Dawood Jatt’s attacks on us. They say that they want to land some important cargo in Bombay through our landing routes at spots near Shekhadi and Dighi. Tiger and Taufiq will handle the entire operation of landing, paying the doctors and other such things. In exchange, they will arrange total security for our business.’ He paused and then continued meditatively, ‘I think that this cargo will not be ordinary stuff like gold biscuits or silver ingots. It could be something meant as a retribution for the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the massacre of Muslims. I told them that if it only means using my infrastructure and nothing beyond that then I have no problem. I can seek solace in the fact that the blood of my brothers will be avenged.’

  Dawood took out a cigar from his pocket and tucked it between his lips, a sign that he was feeling relieved. Shakeel lit the cigar for him. Although the don had not said it in so many words, it was clear that the cargo would be death.

  2

  The Conspiracy

  The simmering resentment was not confined to that room in Dubai. It spread like a forest fire. From the kahwa-khanas (tea joints) of Iran to the mosques of Jordan and the maktabs (religious schools) of Syria, the conversation invariably dwelt on one topic: how to avenge the demolition of the Babri masjid in Hukumat-Al-Hind (India).

  The suggestions ranged from the sane—enforcing an oil embargo on India—to the radical, like blowing up vital installations. The continuing riots in India only fuelled the determination of expatriate smugglers like Haji Ahmed, Haji Umar and Taufiq Jaliawala, one of the most successful smugglers of the day, as well as Pakistani smugglers like Dawood Jatt and Aslam Bhatti, to avenge their qaum.

  Plans were chalked out, strategies suggested and discarded in the search for a consensus. Several bank accounts were opened and slush funds created to fund the tehrik-e-intequam (movement of revenge). Millions of dirhams and dollars secretly poured in and many leaders in Islamic nations pledged tacit support, though officially they would not hear of anything subversive against India. Gradually from this haze of theories and plans, a coherent scheme began to emerge.

  As 1992 drew to a close, Taufiq joined hands with Anis Ibrahim, Ejaz Pathan, Tiger Memon, Mohammed Dossa and Mustafa Majnun, and began working with them. Taufiq, to the surprise of many
who expected Dawood Ibrahim to play a leading role, seemed to be directing operations as the latter seemed strangely reluctant to involve himself.

  As he drove his off-white Toyota down the expressway in Dubai in end December 1992, Ibrahim Mushtaq Abdul Razak Memon, called Tiger by his associates, was still smouldering as he remembered how his office had been set ablaze earlier that month during the Bombay riots. That was the first time he could remember that he had felt truly helpless. Now he was in distant UAE where a group of men had come together to plot retribution against an entire nation for the acts of a handful. As Tiger parked his car and walked towards the grey building, it seemed like the culmination of what all his life had been leading to.

  Like Dawood, Tiger Memon was a Bombay boy. The Mandvi post office in Bombay stands at the junction of a Hindu area and a Muslim borough. Opposite the post office, at the corner of Mohammed Ali Road, is the Kadiya building, a rambling four-storeyed building with seventy tenements. The construction of this had been financed by the erstwhile maharaja of Gwalior some time before 1947, and it was given to the loyal masons, after whom it was named, by the maharaja. Each mason family was assigned an identical 260-square-foot room, with a kitchenette attached. Several tenants shared the common toilet on each floor. The children grew up in the common passage, a narrow veranda that faced each room, to escape from their tiny, cluttered homes.

  Mushtaq was born in one such room on the third floor. The royal masons had long since gone. The residents were now predominantly Muslims. But because of the location of the house, Mushtaq grew up with access to both cultures. Until the riots of 1992, there was no Hindu-Muslim animosity, barring a few minor skirmishes. Besides, Mushtaq’s father, Abdul Razak Memon, was a sportsman, and for him there was no question of harbouring communal feelings against his Hindu brothers with whom he played. Abdul Razak’s small room housed not only his wife and six sons, but also the innumerable trophies and medals he had won. He excelled in all kinds of sports, especially in cricket. He once played a league match with the famed Tiger Pataudi, and from then on he was called Tiger in the neighbourhood. This was long before his second-born Mushtaq would inherit the name.