My Name is Abu Salem

by S. Hussain Zaidi

  In the meantime, Salem had begun facing problems everywhere. The hordes of enemies he had made were baying for his blood. Anis had heard about his sly plans to relocate, so he had begun making plans to snitch on him to the Dubai government or to the CBI officers, while Shakeel was waiting to bump him off at the first available opportunity. His other detractors in the Company had also begun their backbiting. The CBI and IB had stepped up their efforts to extradite him and monitored each of his moves. Salem felt as if his enemies were closing in on him.

  Salem asked Monica to leave Mumbai at once and head to Dubai. She was not prepared for this abrupt departure, particularly since her career had just shown signs of improving. After much back and forth, Salem finally dropped the bombshell: It was a choice between either leaving now for safer shores or spending her life in jail. Salem had discovered that Monica was increasingly attracting the suspicion of the police. They were just waiting for any evidence to tighten the noose around her, charging her of being complicit with Salem. This was enough for Monica. She decided that she would rather flee. With a heavy heart, she left tinsel town, her dreams of stardom cruelly crushed.

  Nineteen

  Salem in South Africa

  IN OCTOBER 1999, THE TWO LEFT Dubai for good. Salem did not want Anis to get wind of his plans to escape, for he could rat him out to the CBI. Salem was a proclaimed offender and an accused in the serial blasts case, and would most certainly be arrested overseas if found out. He needed to sneak out of Dubai stealthily, a thief decamping after emptying a rich man’s locker.

  From his experience in Mumbai in the days following the serial blasts, Salem knew that a good plan to escape from the law enforcers was always the one in which it is completely impossible to predict in which direction the trail will turn. After getting forged passports prepared in Hyderabad, Salem got another set of forged passports made in Bhopal. His own passport bore the name Danish Beg while Sameera’s was Rubina Beg. Monica would travel under the name Fauzia Usman. The idea behind a stack of different identities was to ensure that they were always prepared to become someone else in an hour of sudden need.

  And it was through this method that Salem and Monica embarked on their world tour, partly out of desperation, partly for pleasure. Salem was trying to hunt for a safe location that could double up as his new base. At the same time, he wanted to ensure that Anis Ibrahim’s hounds could not locate him. He also wanted a king-size life. That was always very important to Salem. He wanted to drive the finest cars, dine at the finest restaurants, live in the finest house, bathe in the finest bathroom and make love on the finest bed money could buy.

  In his search for a new hideout, Asia was a total no-go zone. The Middle East and Pakistan was D-Company territory. By association, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal were all out of the question. As for South East Asia, Cambodia was Chhota Rajan’s HQ and going anywhere near there would be foolish. The Rainbow Nation would be their first choice.

  Salem had never been to Africa, so the journey had an air of infectious uncertainty and excitement to it. Monica seemed excited too about visiting a new country. They travelled extensively around Johannesburg and Cape Town. Salem was fascinated that these two cities seemed so modern and advanced on the one hand and yet had the kind of poverty that reminded him of home. Over time, the fugitive gangster spread his wings and travelled all across Africa, spending some time in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi as well.

  But, having travelled up and down the continent for six long months, they couldn’t decide on a place to settle down. The cities they visited all had their own charms, but there was always one problem or the other. If they didn’t really blend in too well with the local Indian crowds, then they couldn’t find a home that matched Salem’s lofty standards. In other places, the locals recognized Monica and, in doing so, blew their cover. Half a year later, the safari was over and it was time to search for a new continent to set up camp in.

  In the meantime, Salem was counting the months since he had last earned any money. The last lucrative days had been in Dubai. He was getting increasingly concerned about his dwindling finances when, out of the blue, came a windfall that not only stabilized his money situation, but also taught him a few lessons in life. In the decade and a half he had spent in crime, Salem felt he had seen everything. But this treachery was the foulest he had ever witnessed.

  Milton Plastics was a reputed brand in consumer products, a family business that was run by Chiranjeev Vaghani. Chiranjeev’s elder brother called up Salem from the US and asked him to kidnap Chiranjeev. Salem harboured no great affection for the Milton Plastics director, nor did he owe him any allegiance, but in his village, Salem had been brought up with the idea that a younger brother is always the apple of one’s eye.

  And here was Vaghani calling him and offering him money to abduct his younger brother. The senior Vaghani had told Salem to demand Rs 25 crore as ransom for the safe return of Chiranjeev. This was gangster Babloo Srivastava’s territory, and besides, high-profile abductions had never been Salem’s thing. But the elder Vaghani brother seemed to trust Salem and his clout in Mumbai enough to offer him the job. The money on offer was tempting. So too was the fact that he was being asked to take the assignment even though he had decamped from Dubai. There’s nothing quite like being in demand.

  On 17 February 2000, four of Salem’s men turned up at Chiranjeev’s plush Malabar Hill home and picked him up. It was a simple enough task. Chiranjeev remained in the custody of his men for three days and his family was notified that the cost of his safe return was Rs 25 crore. Meanwhile, the Mumbai Police, routinely labelled (often by themselves) as the Scotland Yard of the east, remained clueless. Neither they nor the CBI had any clue about the whereabouts of the plastics baron. And even though Chiranjeev had five other brothers who were all very well off and had a fair bit of clout, no one could work out who had kidnapped him.

  Eventually, after three days, Chiranjeev was allowed to return home safely after the ransom was paid. The Maharashtra deputy chief minister at the time, Chhagan Bhujbal, held a press conference and brazenly told the media that one of the six Vaghani brothers had been responsible for Chiranjeev’s abduction. Some believed that the matter between the Vaghanis was settled with a sum of Rs 2 crore—a far cry from the Rs 25 crore that had been initially demanded.

  Subsequently, the police and other investigating agencies made frantic efforts to hunt down the location from where the kidnapper’s call originated. Some believed it may have come from Dubai, others thought London was the source. Finally, after checking phone records and tracing the numbers, the police concluded that the call had been made from a phone in Hong Kong. All along, Salem had been sitting comfortably in South Africa, monitoring the operation and ensuring that it was carried out smoothly.

  Subsequent investigations revealed Salem’s shrewd game plan in the sordid saga. Since his days of using police commando Rajesh Igwe as a sharpshooter, Salem knew that any new criminal enterprise needed the blessings of the police. To help with the Vaghani kidnapping, Salem had roped in a controversial police officer named Sanjay Shinde. Throughout the operation, Shinde remained in touch with Salem and kept relaying his instructions to the abductors.

  Unknown to Shinde, Salem’s phone was being tapped by the Crime Branch and police officers. Following this disclosure, the police department mooted the proposal for Shinde’s dismissal, but let him off after a warning. Salem, meanwhile, had tasted success in a new territory and had finessed the art of using police officers to carry out his dirty work. He had now moved from using a constable to making a higher-level officer his accomplice. And for a pittance.

  Yet, despite how effortless the whole abduction had been, the gangster was still uneasy. The job had taught him that there were no true friends or relatives in the cold world of business and that the only thing that truly mattered was money. Truly, sabse bada rupaiya.

  He’d seen this phenomenon occurring in the past as well. When he had ordered a hit on builder Om
Prakash Kukreja in late 1997, Salem had sent two of his most trusted hitmen, Salim Haddi and Rajesh Igwe, to kill him at his own residence. Moments after the duo entered Kukreja’s apartment with loaded weapons, Om Prakash’s younger brother had fled into his own bedroom and locked the door from inside. As Salem saw it, the younger brother had chosen to protect himself rather than save his kin, call the police or take on the attackers. Om Prakash Kukreja was killed in broad daylight and no one did a thing to save his life. This, as Salem perceived it, was what the world had turned into. Cowardice reigned supreme.

  Twenty

  Sameera’s Souten

  NO WOMAN CAN TOLERATE ANOTHER WOMAN on her marital turf. So, it’s no wonder that Sameera considered the other woman in her husband’s life, the souten, as the curse in her life. She felt that she had made a lot of sacrifices to keep the marriage steady. She had always known that Salem had a proclivity for bedding beautiful women, particularly starlets from the film industry, but she had allowed him to live his life as he saw fit. In fact, she knew about Monica and Salem, their growing intimacy and his huge efforts to promote her career. But she stayed calm and stoically accepted the truth. But now, Monica had entered Sameera’s turf.

  Salem had flown in to their palatial house at Jasmine Court, Fayetteville, in Georgia, unannounced and with Monica, and had mooted the idea of the three of them living together. Sameera had by now become accustomed to her new life as Sabina Azmi. Salem had invested heavily in a supermarket-type grocery store so that Sameera could make a living. He had also transferred $170,000 (which in rupees was worth almost a crore) to ensure that she could maintain herself and their son. In America, she felt she could make a comfortable, safe life. But the second she saw Monica with her husband, she lost her temper. It was one thing to accept her husband’s infidelities from a distance, another to confront it daily in her own home.

  The problem was that most of Salem’s money was in Sameera’s name. Before leaving Dubai, the gangster had been careful to transfer funds from his bank in Sharjah to Sameera’s accounts in Georgia. Salem had also invested in some properties in the USA in Sameera’s name. He knew that business wasn’t exactly booming, but these properties were set to appreciate in value. Both husband and wife expected to turn over a huge profit in time.

  He thus needed Sameera to remain his wife formally and legally. The terms of the truce were that Salem and Monica would live far away from Sameera, but the latter would remain the gangster’s wife. To seal the deal, Salem retook his marital vows, in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 4 March 2000 with Sameera. He then disposed of his huge Jasmine Court mansion and bought a modest house, Gadsen Walk Villa, in Duluth, Georgia, for Sameera and his son. Salem then moved out of the city and busied himself trying to settle down in Chicago.

  Salem obtained a non-immigrant work visa as maintenance manager in a marine engineering company. He then used various other identities to set up businesses. In Dubai, Salem had met Farhat Husain, an event organizer, who had also become his financial and business adviser. Farhat advised him to buy a two-screen film theatre in Chicago which would only screen Indian and Pakistani movies. Since Chicago had a lot of Asians, the movie theatre business promised to be very profitable. Salem promptly launched a company by the name of Ariyan International that would deal with the overseas rights of Bollywood movies and organize events across the US. Under the aegis of the company, Salem bought a two-screen theatre by the name Da Plane.

  In the meantime, after sorting out his personal life, Salem began to refocus his attention on the business side. Much to his relief, he realized around that time that despite his relocation and the unceremonious manner in which he had got up and left Dubai, his clout hadn’t been affected even one tiny bit. He regularly met members of the Hindi film fraternity whenever they were in the States to shoot their films or perform at shows. He also began to get them together and organized shows of his own. Ariyan International handled the business side. Farhat Husain was of immense help to Salem. It was only a matter of time until the cash registers began ringing again. Once again, he began using the Captain sobriquet.

  A number of big names from the industry used to come to pay obeisance to him regularly and were more than happy to shell out money and share their profits with him. For the next year and a half, life was extremely satisfying and pleasantly uneventful. An ongoing trend in Salem’s life was that nothing ever seemed to last very long. And after dropping anchor in the US, it was perhaps a bit naive of him to imagine that such domestic bliss would last forever. But for a brief moment in his life, he believed he had truly settled down. It had taken some time and there were some rough edges that needed to be sanded down, but he was actually comfortable for the first time in a long time.

  During this period, he moved a great deal of his money out of Dubai to the USA. The CBI, in their investigations (pieced together with the FBI), came across minute details of Salem’s deals and money transactions in the US prior to 9/11. According to a top-secret CBI dossier, on 1 October 2001, a real estate appraiser, Buckhead Advisory Group Limited, valued Salem’s immovable property at $1,325,000 (approximately Rs 6.5 crore). The valuation done by J. Michael Smith of Georgia raised the eyebrows of the FBI.

  Salem owned five apartments in the US, besides a cinema and a few petrol pumps. He ran an automobile company and tyre company in the Middle East. These properties were largely acquired in the name of Ariyan International Private Limited, Salem’s firm.

  In January 2000, as Arsalan Mohsin Ali, resident of Commercial Area, Tariq Road, Karachi, he remitted $115,000 from his Standard Chartered Bank account in Sharjah to Wachovia Bank in the United States. Within three months, in April 2000, $200,000 from the Wachovia Bank account was sent to an account in Lasalle Bank, Schaumburg, Illinois. In June 2000, he transferred another $15,000 to a Citibank account in Chicago.

  The CBI sleuths suspected that Salem also used Monica’s account to move the money. In July 2000, Monica Bedi, resident of Eastwood Court, Schaumburg, Illinois, had $575,282 (Rs 2.6 crore) in her Citicorp account in San Antonio, Texas. Salem’s bank account in Dubai showed that in October 2000, he had a balance of Rs 176.675 crore.

  Apart from Salem’s, the CBI recorded Monica’s transactions as well. These were far smaller remittances as compared to Salem’s, but were nevertheless interesting. In September 2001, Monica operated her Canara Bank account in Andheri to remit several transactions worth Rs 49,000 each which could only be collected by her parents in Norway. A family contact, Brij Arora, was used for the transaction through Credit Kassen Bank, Norway. In that period, she also operated a joint account owned by Ramesh Kumar and Monica Bedi. The account at HDFC Bank in Juhu–Versova Link Road in Mumbai had Rs 15 lakh as balance. The identity of the joint account holder with Monica Bedi—Ramesh Kumar—remains a mystery for the CBI sleuths.

  A senior officer feels that it was Salem himself who masqueraded as Ramesh Kumar as he wanted to keep his finances under his own control and did not want Monica to have complete access to his monies. This has some credence because the CBI in its files has also noted that an application was submitted in the German consulate for a Germany visa for one B. Ramesh Kumar and his wife Monica Bedi. This was, incidentally, Salem’s first-ever attempt to have a Hindu identity.

  Far away from the likes of Shakeel, Anis, Dawood and all their goons, and with his finances consolidated, Salem began to believe he was finally on his way to building a peaceful and stable life with Monica. However, one man was watching them quietly. They might have escaped the scorching glare of rivals and detractors, but Salem and Monica could not skip the scrutiny of Neeraj Kumar, who was the joint director of the CBI in New Delhi. He received an intelligence input that Salem was trying to establish a base for himself in the US.

  Neeraj Kumar got in touch with his counterpart at the FBI, but much to his chagrin, the FBI officer did not seem too keen on pursuing the lead. The reply that Kumar received from the FBI officer was something which he would never forget.

  ‘
Is this guy Al-Qaeda?’ he was asked.

  The US was yet to declare its war on terror against Al-Qaeda, but recent incidents such as the attacks on the American embassies in Dar-e-Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi in August 1998 and more recently the fidayeen attack on the USS Cole on 12 October 2000 had already put the terror organization on their hit list. The US investigating agencies were programmed to hunt only for Al-Qaeda operatives across the globe.

  On 11 September 2001, the world changed. Salem woke up reasonably early on that fateful Tuesday morning and switched on the television set with a yawn and a stretch. Flicking past channels, he noticed the same image being broadcast on each channel. Two iconic monoliths, one grey-white smear moving towards them. An explosion. Shock. He switched channels to see if he was imagining things, but it was the same clip looping on all news channels.

  Walking through the fear-gripped streets of Chicago in the days to come, Salem could sense a more than palpable feeling of being watched or, more precisely, stared at. The anti-Muslim sentiment had turned into full-blown paranoia. Immigrants, especially recent immigrants, were being targeted. Muslim-owned shops were being vandalized, the term ‘raghead’ had turned into a racial slur as big as ‘nigger’ and even turbaned Sikhs were getting beaten up in the streets.

  Salem was more nervous about being assaulted than worried about the plight of all Asian or Asian-looking people. He also knew that if he were to be admitted to a US hospital, they might run a background check on him and then discover that he wasn’t Arsalan Ali, but Abu Salem—one of the accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts.

  The frequent visits and quizzing by the FBI, CIA and members of other investigating agencies were also putting him on edge. Money could not be a shield any more. With all the racial profiling, random violence and psychotic paranoia that was in the air, there was absolutely no way he was willing to risk his safety and that of Monica’s in that country.