by James Astill
India and Pakistan, in a favourite Indian strategic buzzword, had become ‘dehyphenated’ in the minds of India’s elite. Pakistan was a regional embarrassment, run by feudal lords, medieval mullahs and bullying generals. India was the regional power, admired around the world for its democracy, its growth, its excellent IT companies. Pakistan was a cricketing pariah, India a cricketing superpower. But this wasn’t the full story. In one important sense Indian and Pakistani cricket were still strongly linked, and that was by corruption.
Given the nature of his business I was surprised by Salim’s directions. ‘Come to Dongri police station before three o’clock,’ he had said on the telephone. ‘Call me when you get there and my boy will come.’
I reached the station, a tumbledown cottage with blue walls and a red-tiled roof, in good time. As I stood waiting, men and boys in lacy Muslim prayer caps flowed by. Across the street a banner was hanging from a wall, announcing, in English, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic, that Eid al-Fitr was coming. Three large piebald goats lay on the pavement beneath it, chewing on a pile of red onion skins, blissfully unaware of the death sentence written over their heads.
Dongri, a Muslim area of south Mumbai, was once best known for its textile mills. Hence ‘dungarees’, which were made from the blue denim they produced. But the mills are gone now and Dongri is better known as the home turf of the Mumbai mafia. Haji Mastan, Dawood Ibrahmin, Chhota Shakeel and other well-known godfathers grew up here, and ran their smuggling, racketeering and narcotics businesses from Dongri’s teeming streets. It is the Corleone of India.
After I had been waiting five minutes, a young man wearing a black T-shirt approached and silently beckoned me to follow him. He led me to a doorway a short walk away. Inside was a small concrete room, windowless, painted pink and just big enough to fit four folding chairs and a desk. There were a dozen mobile phones piled on top of it, through which an unshaven, youngish man was sifting. He was barefoot and wore a pair of silk black trousers and a cream shirt decorated with fancy cuffs and epaulettes. As I entered, he briefly looked up, unsmiling, and at once started talking into one of the phones.
This was Salim, as we will call him. He was a mid-tier bookmaker, charged with running a network of small-time illegal bookies in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka. Operating out of hotel rooms and by mobile phone, these bookies – ‘my boys’, Salim called them – took bets on hockey, table tennis or volleyball games, on Indian state or general elections, on American presidential races, even the weather. But mostly they took bets on cricket. And with the World Cup only a few days away, Salim was having a busy time.
He put down the phone and asked what I wanted. He was not solicitous but did not seem very guarded either. Salim, who I had been introduced to by a well-connected Mumbai journalist, knew nothing about me except that I was a British writer who wanted to understand his business. I asked how he expected it to go during the World Cup.
‘On a big game, minimum 10,000 bets, minimum, and maximum crores of bets,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Full, full betting, every people betting, family betting, ball-to-ball betting, unlimited betting.’ He expected his network to handle several billion rupees worth of bets over the course of the tournament. And if India had a good run – which Salim said they would – it would be a bonanza.
More than half his profits, Salim said, had to be pushed up to his boss – the ‘upper one’, he called him. This money was mostly sent abroad to middlemen in Europe and the Middle East, via the hawala system, an ancient trust-based means of transferring money across borders that operates widely in the Muslim world. The remainder was for Salim and his boys, and was not inconsiderable. Salim said he expected their share of World Cup loot to amount to several million dollars.
‘That’s a lot of money,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Big business, yes, but there are so many things to pay: hotel rents, office rents, lunch, dinner, breakfast. I am handling 150 families. And then there is the police, crime branch, CID, CBI, IB to manage, also the hawala rackets, all need total management.’
Salim’s own cut, he claimed, would be 8 to 10 per cent of his network’s profits, well over a million dollars for the World Cup.
‘So much money...’ I said.
Hearing the doubt in my voice, Salim gave me a look of reproof. ‘I am rich, sure,’ he said. ‘But this is risky business. It needs total involvement.’
By law, gambling is heavily restricted in India. As defined by the Public Gambling Act of 1867, India’s legal gambling industry extends to some state lotteries, betting on horse racing, and a handful of casinos. Betting on cricket is not allowed. But these strictures have proved as effective at stopping Indians from gambling as the Telegraph Act was at deterring India’s drunken cable television operators. In its 2000 match-fixing report, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation found that, ‘By the middle of the 1990s, with a surfeit of one-day matches being shown on live television ... betting had taken the shape of a massive organised racket.’
India’s gambling industry has since grown with the economy. One oft-quoted, albeit highly uncertain, estimate suggests it is worth $60 billion a year. The illegal part of the industry, which is estimated to amount to half of the total, is especially big in Gujarat and Mumbai, where it is largely controlled by gangsters.
Salim was given the odds for a big match or popular bet – like a Tendulkar century – from his godfather boss. His job was to pass the odds on to his boys and keep track of their turnover.
‘And who is the upper one?’ I asked, though I felt sure I knew.
Salim shook his head and fidgeted with his phones: ‘Nobody knows and nobody will tell.’
‘You don’t know who your boss is?’
He shook his head again. Then he turned to speak in rapid-fire Hindi with his accomplice. This was a younger man, wearing an embroidered white salwar kameez. I could make out almost nothing of their talk, except two oft-repeated English words, ‘family’ and ‘risk’.
‘OK, I will tell you,’ Salim said at length, ‘but you must not say I said it.’ I agreed not to.
The Mumbai mob rose to prominence during the 1960s and 70s, smuggling gold, electronics and liquor, goods that India’s throttling import controls had made scarce. Many of its members were Muslims, drawn from longstanding Saurashtrian smuggling networks and traditional Pushtun moneylenders, based in Dongri. They were also involved in other typical gangster businesses, including illegal drugs, prostitution, bootlegging and extortion. But they soon became best known, around this time, as financiers of Bollywood movies. This was the result of another idiotic regulation. Until 1998, Bollywood was not recognised as a regular industry, which made it almost impossible to get formal funding for film productions. The gangsters filled the gap – by the 1980s they were financing most of the 200-odd films the Hindi film industry churned out each year. It was a useful way to launder money. Hanging out with film stars also tickled the gangsters’ fancy. Indeed, some became celebrities in their own right – for example Haji Mastan, a big smuggler of the 1960s and 70s. A former coolie at Mumbai’s docks, he became known for driving about the city dressed all in white, in a chauffeur-driven white Mercedes.
In the 1980s Mumbai saw the beginning of a long property boom, so the mafia got into that business too. Real estate is another largely corrupt segment of India’s economy. It is one of the main destinations for India’s massive untaxed cashflows: an illicit economy estimated to be equivalent to nearly half of India’s official GDP.
The gangsters were rarely inconvenienced by the police. They owned many of them, and they had good friends in politics. ‘The underworld was always hand-in-glove with the political class,’ Julio Ribeiro, a former Mumbai police chief and gangster catcher of the 1980s, told me. ‘Basically when the politicians needed money to fight elections, they took it from companies and they took it from the underworld. That’s the fount of corruption in this country.’
On Ribeiro’s watch the underworld underwent a violent change. A
more vicious generation of gangsters emerged, typically Muslim and from Dongri. These killers showed no respect for the turf-agreements adhered to by their forebears, gentlemen dons like Mastan. Dawood, the son of a police constable from Dongri, was one of the new breed. ‘In my time Dawood was a small-time muscle man. He was nothing big,’ recalled Ribeiro. ‘He was the son of one of my head constables who lived in our police lines. He was a good head constable. His contacts were very good: he knew all the criminal elements. But his children ran amok. There were about 11 of them and this fellow was the second.’
The underworld became gripped by a violent power struggle, between the old guard and the new. Mastan was driven off to found a political party, and by the late 1980s Dawood and his gang, D-Company, were the most powerful crew in Mumbai. Accused of many murders, he and his top lieutenants fled into exile around this time.
Yet Dawood’s various businesses in Mumbai carried on functioning as normal. This became apparent in the investigations into the multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai, allegedly engineered by Dawood, in 1993. So did the reason why – a corrupt co-operation between the gangsters and powerful politicians and bureaucrats. A high-level commission, presided over by a senior official called N.N. Vohra, was charged with investigating this nexus. ‘The investigations into the Bombay bomb blast cases have revealed extensive linkages of the underworld in the various governmental agencies, political circles, business sector and the film world,’ it reported, quoting a senior intelligence officer. ‘The Mafia is virtually running a parallel government, pushing the state apparatus into irrelevance.’
This was part of a long report. Yet the Congress government of the time permitted only 12 pages to be made public. India’s Supreme Court, when challenged on the matter, supported that decision. It ruled that it would be ‘severely and detrimentally injurious’ to the public interest to publish more of the report. It was widely assumed this was because too many of India’s elected rulers had been cited in it.
An investigative weekly, Outlook, boldly alleged that the name of Sharad Pawar, Maharashtra’s three-time chief minister and future president of the ICC, was among them. On the basis of unpublished material held by the Vohra Commission, the magazine alleged there was a ‘definite nexus between underworld don Dawood Ibrahim’s associates and former Maharashtra chief minister Sharad Pawar’. Around the same time a leading Gujarat newspaper, Gujarati Samachar, ran what it alleged to be a telephone interview with Dawood, in which he confirmed that he had ‘good relations with Pawar’. But after Pawar sued Outlook and its editor Vinod Mehtafor $28 million, the magazine retracted its allegations.
There were calls to cleanse India’s rotten political system, and the principal solution seemed obvious. India needed to make the funding of political parties, which the gangsters often supplied, formal and transparent. But as this would have entailed a personal loss to India’s corrupt politicians, nothing of the sort has happened. And political corruption has since run out of control in India.
Mumbai’s gangsters have been reduced by other means, however. In the aftermath of the 1993 bomb blasts India’s security agencies launched a bloody assault on them. Over 600 alleged gangsters have since been shot dead by the police in pre-arranged hits, euphemistically called ‘encounter killings’. Nearly 8,000 have been arrested.
The opening of India’s economy has been a bigger blow to the underworld, leading to the collapse of their smuggling business. It has also led, more gradually, to the gangsters being pushed out of Bollywood. Over the past decade, a combination of changes to India’s foreign investment rules and official recognition of Bollywood has allowed large Indian and Hollywood production companies to invest in Hindi film. Viacom, NBC, Sony and Time Warner alone invested $1.5 billion in India’s film and cable TV sector during the decade. Bollywood is now a legitimate business.
This has left gambling as one of the Mumbai mob’s last redoubts. The rise of one-day cricket, which provided a huge boost to the industry in the 1990s, was therefore well timed for the mobsters. And in Sharjah, Mumbai’s exiled dons had a convenient stage on which to do business, enjoy their celebrity, and remind Indian politicians of their enduring relevance.
‘In the 1990s the underworld was hosting whole cricket teams, with impunity, giving the players expensive watches and other gifts. That is how the match-fixing nexus started,’ another famous Bombay cop, Rakesh Maria, the head of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorist Squad, told me. ‘The attraction worked both ways. The underworld was struck by the glamour of cricket and the cricketers were suddenly being introduced to gangsters and their Bollywood friends. And then it was easy for them to say, “Why don’t you help us to fix games?”’
According to Maria, who had investigated the tawdry matter, some of the cricketers were easily persuaded. ‘Greed is something that has no limits,’ he said cheerfully. ‘When you have a hundred, you want a thousand; when you have a thousand, you want lakhs; when you have lakhs, you want crores. And always in the back of a cricketer’s mind he knows he only has four, five years left. Swimming with the tide is much easier than swimming against it.’
Maria was in no doubt that corruption remained rife in Indian cricket, though more subtly than before. ‘Spot-fixing is quite an easy thing for a player,’ he said. ‘It is ... how can I put it? I can tell myself I’m not hurting the team; it’s something very small and innocuous. But it’s a sin all the same and it’s recently become the norm. Dropping a catch, bowling a no-ball, or a wicketkeeper letting a bye go through ... It’s very difficult to prove these things.’ Maria was smiling sadly.
Match-fixing was above Salim’s pay-grade – his mafia boss, he said, was the ‘game changer’. But he claimed to believe that most international cricket matches were fixed. ‘99 per cent are fixed,’ he said. ‘The full World Cup is fixed. India and Australia are coming in final.’
‘But you can’t possibly know that! You’d have to control them and every other team in the tournament.’
Salim looked surprised. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘The upper levels do the match-fixing and we have no involvement. Also not all teams are manageable. But we know which team will win. Pakistan is the best team for match-fixing.’
‘We hate Pakistanis!’ Salim’s accomplice chipped in. He looked and sounded very angry.
‘Why?’
‘Because they say we are not good Muslims. It’s like you are Christian and some Christian country-wallah says you are not good.’
‘They’re probably just jealous,’ I said, wanting to placate him.
He nodded. ‘We are more successful. Because we do betting, drugs, smuggling. It is the government’s fault because they do not give us Muslims opportunity. We do not get government jobs so we must do illegal things.’
‘Pakistan is easy, also Australia, South Africa,’ Salim continued. ‘The England team is too tough. They play for winning the game, not for money. Mostly Asian teams are manageable. South Africans, very easily managed. You know Hansie Cronje? He died in big crash, you know. It was not an accident.’
Salim was certainly exaggerating. But I was still dismayed by his claims. They had the shadow of truth on them. He gave me a consolatory half-smile. ‘When you know, nah, this match-fixing, you won’t have interest in cricket. In India all persons love cricket, but after knowing the match-fixing, whole craze is going. All over the world it’s a business. It’s not a game. If the bigger amount is booked on India, nah, then India will not come in final. Because money talks. After full total of betting money seen, then the uppers will decide.’
‘How about you?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t you like cricket?’
‘At first I was fanatic of cricket. But after coming into this business-line I do not love cricket. Full-on cheaters. Full fraud. How many runs, how many wickets, how many sixers, all are fixed. Cricket is not a game. Sports spirit is not there.’
‘Well, if that’s right, thanks a lot,’ I said.
Salim shrugged. ‘You know the song ‘Sab Ganda Hain Par Dhanda Hai
n Ye’? (‘It’s dirty, but it’s our business.’) It’s like that.’
‘But why,’ I asked Salim, ‘are you working next-door to a police station?’
‘That is no problem,’ he said. ‘They are fixed monthly.’
‘So is it actually better to be near a police station?’
‘Han,’ he nodded. ‘It’s safe.’
‘I am in this business 18 years and also I am an informer,’ he said. ‘You know that?’
I nodded, for I had heard it.
‘Police, Intelligence Bureau, FBI, I am informer for them.’
‘What happens if the upper man finds out?’
‘Very dangerous,’ Salim said and slid his forefinger down the side of his throat.
It was pure Bollywood. So was the song he had referred to – it was the theme song to a well-known gangster movie. I was not minded to believe him.
I looked down to check my tape recorder. But then I looked up and saw Salim’s forefinger was still pointing to his lightly bearded throat.
I leaned across the desk. ‘Bloody hell!’ I said.
The left half of Salim’s neck was encircled by a thin white scar, starting at his spine and ending near his Adam’s apple. It was criss-crossed with dozens of shorter scars, obviously left by stitches.
‘They heard I was informer,’ he said.
Salim said he had had his throat slit by a relative of his employer and had been left for dead in the street. But almost as soon as he had recovered, he had returned to work, for the same crime gang, under a different name. ‘In this business only the names are known to the bosses,’ he said. ‘They never meet the people working for them; they never know us. They only know name and number. They never know who is informer and who is working with them.’
