Byculla to Bangkok

by Hussain Zaidi

  He became a police informer and began squealing on Manchekar’s hideouts, his people and his lieutenants. Unlike Rajan or Dawood, who were clever enough to keep the law enforcers in their pockets, Manchekar was a novice and still had to master the tricks of the trade.

  He had not even realized that he had stirred a hornet’s nest by antagonizing Satam. But now, the law enforcers were onto him and his gang.

  Satam was constantly tailing Manchekar’s gang and every little scrap of information he got, he passed on to the police. Between the local police and the crime branch, Manchekar and his gang were almost wiped out of Parel.

  But Manchekar had realized that crime was his forte, and merely shifting out of his lair in Parel was not going to change him. He was going to go ahead full-steam with his ambition to become a don. He looked for a place away from the spotlight, from where he could operate safely. In the late eighties, the Kalyan–Dombivli area was yet to witness a large-scale construction boom. There were a lot of middle-class Maharashtrians and south Indians living in Dombivli and there was a huge industrial belt to one side; Suresh Manchekar decided he would shift base there, without loosening his vice-like grip on Parel.

  The incessant police action and the frequent betrayal of people around him had taught him two things. Never trust an outsider, and conceal the real identities of your gang members. In a master stroke of sorts, and in what was a first of its kind, Manchekar turned the mafia business into a family enterprise. He appointed his sixty-year-old mother Laxmi Manchekar and his unmarried sister Sunita as finance and personnel managers respectively of his gang. His father Dhanaji was already dead, or he too would have been enlisted.

  Ignoring protests from his brother Ramesh, Manchekar ensured that Lakshmi and Sunita began collecting the extortion money and allocating work to his people. He knew he could count on them to not betray him or reveal his hideouts to the police. To keep them loyal and ensure that there would be no problems, no rifts or jealousy amongst family members, he decided not to marry. Tiffs between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law or sister-in-law could prove to be his undoing, he decided. He did not want any obstacles in the smooth functioning of his gang.

  Assured of full control over his finances, Lakshmi and Sunita rallied around him. Their trust and loyalty would not only serve Manchekar well, it would thwart any designs of the police and his enemies. Also, as they were women, the police would not be able to detain them at the police station beyond a few hours and could not subject them to third-degree torture. And thus Suresh Manchekar Incorporated launched the first family-run mafia enterprise in Mumbai, and the police were completely outsmarted by a wannabe ganglord.

  The young man’s experience with Guru Satam had taught him another trick. He introduced yet another new angle to keep the police from sniffing out his gang by appointing decoy extortionists. He only got collection agents or negotiators who already had perfect covers and could never be suspected of being the henchmen of gangsters. This continued for years, until the cops managed to penetrate his shield and got their informants to dig deeper.

  Ashok Pardeshi, for example, used to work as a ward boy at Wadia Hospital in Parel. The man was a paramedic by day and a Manchekar lieutenant by night. Builders and jewellers were threatened and asked to keep their bag of valuables or cash in the general ward of the hospital while Pardeshi was on duty.

  The other decoy was Manohar Zingare alias Manya of Parel. Zingare ran his music and audio cassettes distribution business from the Kardar Studio compound in Parel. He used to collect money from people in the Kardar garages of Parel and pass it on to Manchekar.

  Young Manchekar’s move to Dombivli–Kalyan made him even more powerful. His wealth and clout began to increase, and the business and trading community, both in Parel and Dombivli–Kalyan, lived in constant fear. Manchekar knew from his early days that he had to shed blood to remain in control: fear is the lifeblood of this business. Earlier, he had stuck a knife into his enemies at the slightest pretext, but now he realized that he had to plan something special that would grab attention.

  Manchekar looked around and settled on Shiv Sena corporator Vinayak Wable of the Sewri area in south-central Mumbai, who was a constant thorn in his side. Wable had initiated a drive against illegal hutments in Sewri; these had been constructed by Manchekar and he took large sums of money from slum dwellers for them. Wable’s initiatives caused the municipal corporation to raze the whole slum pocket in the Sewri area. Despite Manchekar’s threats, the corporator remained firm. Now Manchekar, along with a group of six men, shot Wable dead at Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Marg in Wadala, on 13 March 1991. Manchekar’s personal participation in the killing enraged the Shiv Sena and the police. Except for Manchekar, all the others were arrested; by then, people were so scared that none of the eyewitnesses would testify against him. All six of his men were acquitted by the court.

  In the meantime, Manchekar jacked up his extortion rates and people still paid up without any complaints. He began intervening in disputes between businessmen and builders, and making slums and extensions. In Parel, he was the undisputed don. People started coughing up money to his agents, no questions asked.

  The cops had no way of tracing Manchekar or his lieutenants. Mobile phones were yet to come to India and the landlines used by Manchekar could not be tapped because the gang used public call offices. The calls were made to landlines and specific instructions were given for collections, leaving no trail. The crime branch was baffled and his rivals were totally mystified by the way Manchekar operated. They were making no headway in tracking him down.

  Finally, it was his bête noire Guru Satam, who tipped the scales in favour of the police. Satam had thought he had flushed out Manchekar from Parel, but to his chagrin Manchekar had grown bigger and bigger. Parel was completely under him and this was bad news for Guru Satam. He could not forget the slight he had suffered at the hands of Manchekar. How dare that chit of a boy emerge as a frontrunner in what was once his backyard! Satam received intelligence about the Wadia Hospital general ward and Sangeetkaar (Zingare). He began working on his intelligence to crack Manchekar’s other operations, and put his boss, Chhota Rajan, on to Pardeshi and Zingare. Rajan, too, sought to control Manchekar as the latter was eating away at his own gang’s power base.

  Rajan assigned the task of killing the decoy henchmen to two of his most ferocious killers. The squad, led by blood-slurping Kali devotee Baba Reddy, tracked down both the men and killed them in a span of four months.

  FOURTEEN

  Dawood’s Killing Machine

  ‘Shivaji is my hero and I live by the principles of that Maratha veer (braveheart),’ thundered Sautya over the phone to Dawood. The don was listening to his top lieutenant give a sermon in Marathi on the traits of gallant men.

  Sautya had studied in a Marathi-medium school and adored Shivaji, like most Maharashtrians, who had made a cult out of his philosophy of courage.

  ‘Maaghar ghene Marathyancha raktaat naahin, me tyanchi maa bahin ek karin (Retreating is not in the blood of Marathas, I shall annihilate them),’ Sautya said before ringing off.

  There was a point to his long speech. By this time, Sautya had made too many enemies in the city. All the rivals of Dawood were after him, and Dawood had instructed Rajan to immediately take him out of Mumbai and get him to join them in Dubai. When Sautya heard this, he did not want to disobey his boss but neither did he want to leave the city. Rajan asked him to take up the matter with Dawood. Sautya rarely called Dawood directly, but because he believed that his running away from the city would be viewed as an act of cowardice, he decided to try and persuade Dawood.

  With the vertical split in the gang, the Maharashtrian cadre in the D-Company had grown in stature and clout. Chhota Rajan had become the commander-in-chief and Sautya had become a virtual killing machine. Rajan had gone on a hiring spree, employing many young boys from Tilak Nagar and Chembur. It seemed as though he had decided to provide a livelihood to all the jobless youth of Tilak Nagar.
He had the freedom to induct whoever he wished to, and delegate responsibilities as he liked. Also, he had Sadhu Shetty look after the beer bars of Mumbai, and Shetty soon got his entire cash-rich community under the aegis of the D-gang.

  The hafta that began flowing in from the 3,000 bars in Mumbai itself ran into crores. Imagine if even Rs 10,000 came from each bar every month and multiply that by 3,000 bars – the sum amounts to a staggering Rs 30 crore a month. Going by this conservative estimate, the gang managed to rake in Rs 360 crore a year.

  Rajan used to give Dawood the entire amount that was collected, then deduct a fraction to pay for the expenses of his people. Sadhu Shetty was also given a percentage of the money he was bringing in, and it made him so rich that he bought three bars for himself: Sridevi in Amar Mahal, Guruprasad on Sion-Trombay Road and Akash Bar in Sindhi Colony, Chembur.

  As Shetty was close to his sister, he also acquired a couple of bars for his brother-in-law Prakash Shetty. Thus, Lady Luck began smiling on the whole of the Shetty clan and most of the homes in Tilak Nagar.

  Shetty bought a bungalow for himself and a swathe of properties in his hometown, Mangalore. Another Mangalorean who looked after Rajan’s growing businesses and wealth was Mohan Kotian. Kotian launched a fisheries company for Rajan and established an export firm, Ankita Traders. He also began taking care of Rajan’s real-estate investments

  In the mafia, top lieutenants are usually kept under close scrutiny for fear of a coup. Dawood, however, let Rajan be.

  Meanwhile, Sautya was gaining a reputation as Dawood’s Yamraj, the angel of death. He started to enjoy killing people; seeing their blood spill, hearing them shriek in pain and horror, gave him pleasure.

  Soon, he was offered a partner to help in the bloodletting. He chose a man called Subhash Singh Thakur, from Khar. Educated till class 12, Thakur had worked as a machine operator in Sriniwas Cotton Mill. He belonged to a family of farmers.

  Thakur had become a criminal purely because of the Mumbai police’s obstinacy in booking him for a couple of murders that had taken place in Khar. Every time there was a murder, he and other young men were rounded up and thrown in jail. A crime branch cop even tried to kill him in an encounter, but he survived. The cops’ desperate need to book someone for the murders finally turned Thakur into the criminal he hadn’t been – and a bloodthirsty and ferocious one at that. As the adage goes, ‘Man follows the path of his friends.’ During his frequent visits to jail, Thakur rubbed shoulders with hardened criminals. This was bound to influence him. He went and met Karim Lala and expressed his desire to join the Pathan gang, but Lala directed him to Chhota Rajan, who introduced him to Sautya.

  Sautya, who had watched him go in and out of jail, was fully aware that Thakur bore a deep grudge against the police. He asked Thakur to be his companion. Thakur knew that his frequent visits to jail meant that he had lost all credibility and claim to decency. Joining Sautya seemed to be the only sensible option left to him. It would ensure that the gang protected him from poverty and the clutches of the police. Thakur joined Sautya and became his most valuable protégé in crime. Much before the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) fighter gave himself the name of the Undertaker, Thakur called his team the Undertakers.

  Dawood had, all this while, continued his assault on the Gawli gang and, in his zeal, he violated a cardinal principle of the mafia. Blood is cheaper than petrol, but family is sacred. While business may get dirty, the purity of blood has to be protected. But Dawood wanted to finish Gawli – his brains, brawn and blood.

  Gawli loved his elder brother Kishore Dada alias Pappa Gawli. Stricken with grief at having lost so many close confidantes, he had sought solace in Kishore’s company. As Kishore was not involved in any criminal activities, he felt no fear for his life and went about freely – until Dawood organized a hit on him.

  On 22 January 1990, Kishore was shot dead outside Sitladevi temple in Mahim by a neophyte sharpshooter, Srirang Pawar, who could never have been traced back to Dawood. As it happened, the shooter was arrested but charges under TADA were dismissed after a review and subsequently he was acquitted of the murder.

  A bereft Gawli was distraught beyond description at the bloodshed that had engulfed his kith and kin. He could not believe that Kishore’s killing was the handiwork of the mafia. It was part of an unwritten code that family should not be killed. He began a process of reverse intelligence to establish the origins of the killing.

  As Sautya was leading the death brigade of Dawood, Gawli felt he had to be involved in some way or the other. So, he first picked up an associate of Sautya, Ravi Kamathi, who was then tortured in the dungeons of Dagdi Chawl. Kamathi said he did not know if Sautya was involved, but that he had given instructions to give some weapons to Manoj Kulkarni.

  When Gawli’s men went to get Kulkarni, they realized that his sister’s wedding was going on and the pandal was protected by several toughies. Gawli, in no mood to wait, was prepared for an allout gun battle.

  He spoke to Constable Prakash Joglekar, and bribed him to get two white Ambassador cars with beacons on them. His men drove up in these cars and met Manoj’s father, Sadanand Kulkarni. They masqueraded as plainclothes crime branch cops and issued veiled threats to Sadanand. They told him that if his son did not promise to show up the following day, they would obstruct the wedding celebrations.

  Sadanand did not want the wedding disrupted in any way. He immediately got his son, who was hiding in a neighbour’s house. The fake crime branch men assured the father that they would take him in for questioning and return in a few hours.

  The official-looking Ambassadors took Kulkarni to Dagdi Chawl, where he was brutally tortured. Finally, he broke down and confessed that he had been a side shooter – along with Sautya and Parab. Kulkarni was killed and thrown on the road, and Sadanand was informed, ‘Your son has been released after a few hours.’

  Meanwhile, equations and alliances were rapidly changing in the Mumbai underworld. All the splinter gangs that had clout in their local areas thought they had to join either Dawood or Gawli. This would give them stature and security.

  In Satish Raje’s lifetime, Dawood had never bothered to look at the Dadar, Parel and Lalbaug areas. Smaller groups were active here. Now, Babya Khopade of the Golden Gang at N.M. Joshi Marg and Guru Satam of Parel joined Dawood, while their direct rivals, the Amar Naik gang of N.M. Joshi Marg and the Pappa Nair gang of Parel joined Gawli.

  Dawood immediately decided to strengthen his allies and issued orders to target the Amar Naik gang. Chhota Rajan put Sautya on the job. After receiving orders from Chhota Rajan, Sautya, along with Subhash Thakur, killed Sashi Singh Thakur in Andheri.

  Within days, Sautya took Thakur for another job. Along with other members of the death brigade, they bumped off Lalu Mahadev at the Sun-n-Sand hotel in Juhu. Both men belonged to the Amar Naik gang and the killings were designed to curb their growing menace. Thakur had made his debut in the underworld.

  As both of Amar Naik’s aides had aligned with Gawli, their killing was a personal slight to the Daddy of Dagdi Chawl. Sautya’s growing allegiance to Dawood also irked the Gawli gang and they make plans to teach Sautya a lesson.

  They found his conduct treacherous. If Sautya held the ethos of the Marathi manoos close to his heart, why was he part of Dawood’s gang? After all, he and Gawli had a common mentor in Rama Naik. At this point, Rajan and Sautya were two of the main pillars of the D-gang, and at least one of them had to be eliminated. Rajan was safely ensconced in Dubai and was beyond his reach, so he began making plans to kill Sautya.

  Dawood, who had his spies within Dagdi Chawl, got a sense of Gawli’s intentions and alerted Sautya at once. Sautya was furious upon hearing of Gawli’s machinations and did not want to retreat. He first convinced his boss in Dubai, then began making preparations to take on his enemies.

  In the underworld, they say offence is the best form of defence. The best strategy was to swiftly eradicate all the new men in the Gawli gang and leave it cripp
led, so Sautya began to target Gawli’s men systematically. His first target was Paul Patrick Newman, who was killed at Ballard Pier on 28 July 1990. Newman was Gawli’s right-hand man. This was another major setback for Gawli, just as the killings of Rama Naik, Reshim and Joshi had been.

  The second massive assault was on Kanjur village, which still boasted an alliance with the Gawli gang and swore by Ashok Joshi. Sautya, along with Thakur and others, stormed the village, shooting indiscriminately with his AK-47 rifle. The attack left Ravindra Phadke, Joseph Perreira and four others dead. Sautya became closer to Dawood now, having nearly decimated the Gawli gang.

  By 1990, the crime branch had understood the growing importance of Sautya in the Dawood hierarchy. They planned operations to track him down, but Sautya was always one step ahead. He knew that the police were feeling the heat with so many killings in the city and they would come after him full throttle. This time, he had to leave the country. As the airports would have a lookout notice with his photograph and all major railway stations would have increased security, roads were his safest bet. The Nepal border was porous enough to allow people with influence to infiltrate easily, he thought.

  Raxaul in Bihar was Sautya’s cross-over point near the Nepal border. From here, he, along with his associates, made the journey to Kathmandu. Sautya became the first man from Dawood’s gang to set up base in the city. Later, he invited close associates like Prasad Khade and Bachhi Singh to join him. Subhash Thakur had numerous police cases against him because of the crimes he had committed with Sautya; by now, each had more than 20 murder cases registered against his name. So he too decided to cool his heels in Kathmandu until the police gave up the chase and normalcy returned to the city.

  Gawli, on the other hand, had undergone a long spell of mourning following the killing of his brother. His seclusion had hit his gang hard. Gang members were getting killed and they had no protection from the ire of Dawood.