Byculla to Bangkok

by Hussain Zaidi

  On 19 January 2003, when Shetty emerged from the club, chatting with Kotian, two men opened fire at him. Shetty collapsed on the ground. The shooters then fired at his head at point-blank range. According to the Dubai Shurta, 20 bullets were fired; Shetty was declared dead on the spot.

  Lt General Dahi Khalfan was reminded of the killing of Sautya in 1995. He tracked the shooters down with a vengeance. It took the Dubai police five days to arrest them, just as they were planning to board a ship back to India.

  Khalfan expressed his anger against the Indian gangs operating in Dubai in interviews he gave to the Dubai press. Investigations by his team proved that Vimal Kumar had helped Karan Singh, Manoj and Bam get visas to enter Dubai. Kumar then armed them with 0.38 pistols and trained them in using the pistols at a shooting club until they excelled at marksmanship. He also helped them get guest memberships at the India Club, the venue of the murder. The prosecution alleged that he had helped the three suspects study Sharad’s movements and timings, before providing them with the hit-and-run plan.

  One man who got trapped in all this was the Nepali driver, Bam, who repeatedly pleaded his innocence. Bam said he had not known about the murder or the plan to murder anyone. He had been recruited in India to work as a driver in Dubai, and had no knowledge that his employers had criminal intentions.

  When men from his village near Kathmandu visited him in prison, Bam accused the Dubai police of using torture to make him confess to the crime. He also complained that the language barrier (he did not speak English or Arabic) prevented him from understanding the case and the charges against him.

  Dubai prosecutors dismissed a petition from Karan Singh and Kotian which stated that Bam had not participated in the murder in any way, and that he had driven the getaway car without knowing anything about it. Bam’s wife had to mortgage her jewellery to pay for his defence.

  Khalfan wanted everyone involved to pay, regardless of their role in the crime. Within nine months, all four had been executed by the UAE authorities. Karan Singh was thirty years old, Manoj Kotian, thirty-two and Vimal Kumar Ram, twenty-six.

  Shetty was dead, and Rajan was satisfied. He now felt heavily indebted to Santosh, and opened his coffers to him, offering to help him in any business venture.

  Santosh took advantage of Rajan’s offer and borrowed two million US dollars to immediately open a plant for the production of Mandrax in Bottam, Indonesia. There, he manufactured a drug called Quaalude, a ‘downer’ drug sold extensively in South Africa, from which he made a neat profit.

  Apart from the drug business, Santosh dealt in counterfeit; chiefly, printing American dollar bills. ‘I got fake notes from China and Indonesia and sold them in Singapore. The profit out of this business was routed to buying a restaurant in Jakarta, which I named after my Chinese girlfriend Nayatali,’ Santosh said in an interview. (His time in Indonesia bore many fruits. Santosh’s good looks drew a Chinese girl, Nayatali, towards him; she worked for him in Jakarta. The girl gave him a son who was named Suraj.)

  However, his business suffered huge losses when one of his consignments worth around 1.2 billion dollars was intercepted by the police in Singapore.

  In his confessional statement to the Mumbai crime branch, Santosh Shetty gave details of Rajan’s personal and business intrigues across several countries, in which Santosh by his own admission had played a major role.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Mumbai Gangsters in Bangkok

  Santosh Shetty, one of the most suave and dangerous gangsters in the records of the Mumbai police, was deported from Bangkok on 12 August 2011. Unlike other gangsters who started off in the lap of want and poverty, Shetty was born and bred in the upmarket Warden Road area of Mumbai.

  Shetty harboured ambitions of killing his one-time mentor and boss Chhota Rajan ever since they split in 2005 over a monetary dispute. His deportation from Bangkok, which was a joint operation of the Indian Intelligence Bureau and the Thai police, reinforced the belief of the Mumbai police that Bangkok was to Hindu gangsters what Dubai was to the Muslim mafia – a safe haven.

  It is tough to be rootless, a wandering gypsy moving from shore to shore, country to country, looking for refuge. When the Mumbai mafia decided to physically shift out of the city and remote-control events from foreign shores, Dubai was the initial choice. When their business expanded exponentially, they travelled using fake passports to most of the countries they did business with. It was an era when you could get a fake passport easily enough and you could even bypass Interpol notices. 9/11 was yet to take place and there not much scrutiny done of dubious characters. In the nineties, you could get a visa on arrival in Bangkok on a payment of fifty dollars or so.

  Chhota Rajan liked Dubai but felt stifled there after he ran foul of Dawood in 1992–93. He had been travelling in other countries like Malaysia, Cambodia and Bangkok. Bangkok emerged as the frontrunner because Dawood was so firmly entrenched in Dubai that it was impossible for the fleeing Chhota Rajan to hide in any corner of Dubai or any other Emirate without being scooped dead out of his burrow.

  At one point of time, Chhota Rajan even thought of Nepal as an option, but during that period Mirza Dilshad Baig, Dawood-aide and one-time politician, held sway there. Eventually, Rajan had Mirza Dilshad Baig killed. But Nepal was very close to India and Rajan was terrified that the Indian enforcement agencies might make a play for him.

  Unlike other organized countries in the east such as Singapore or even Malaysia, Bangkok is a little like Mumbai. The reputation of the Thai police is not very different from that of the Mumbai cops and the Thai attitude has shades of the Indian. Besides, Thailand is not an Islamic state, and this was a big draw for Chhota Rajan. This is not to deride the Thais or the Bangkok police, but it is a fact that from the mid-1990s to 2010, the Mumbai mafia had a free run in Bangkok. They killed and maimed and ran the drug trade without much interference.

  Among other advantages, the city was much cheaper to live in when compared to other exotic destinations. The fact that Thailand thrived on tourism and Thais were friendly towards Indians helped.

  According to intelligence officers, most Indian gangsters used to rent a one-bedroom flat and lived in anonymity among other Indians, albeit under a different name. They only needed a television that aired Indian channels and a telephone to call India to issue threats. Santosh Shetty was Nicholas Madan Sharma, while Chhota Rajan was Vijay Daman.

  Long before Chhota Rajan found refuge in Bangkok, it was Amar Naik who discovered the city as the ideal mafia destination. He waltzed through Bangkok as easily as he did through Byculla, without calling any attention to himself. After he was killed, a slew of contacts and Bangkok addresses were found in his wallet.

  Chhota Rajan, who lived there for five years after he split with Dawood, found it an ideal place for getting lost in. It was also perfect for conducting his anti-Dawood campaign and, of course, running the Mumbai crime syndicate. Soon after Rajan split from Dawood in 1994, his men lured Dawood’s narco-man, Philoo Khan alias Bakhtiyar Ahmed Khan, to a hotel room in Bangkok and tortured him to death.

  After Rajan fled Bangkok, the internecine gang war continued on the streets of the city despite his absence from the scene. In May 2003, Ijaz Lakdawala was attacked by members of Chhota Shakeel’s gang. The killers sprayed him with bullets fired at close range while he was on his way to dinner at a restaurant. Ijaz was associated with both Dawood and Chhota Rajan.

  Rajan’s one-time Man Friday, Santosh Shetty, also established his base in Bangkok and grew to be a formidable gangster.

  After Chhota Rajan disappeared from Bangkok, the Shettys were his stand-ins for a while. Santosh Shetty called the shots from Bangkok, and a couple of murders in Mumbai including that of Rajan henchman Farid Tanasha and the activist-lawyer Shahid Azmi, were spearheaded from Bangkok.

  Bharat Nepali, who is reported to have killed Shahid Azmi, then had a fallout with Santosh Shetty. Apparently, Chhota Rajan got in touch with Nepali to kill his one-time friend. W
hen Santosh heard about the plan, he lured Nepali to a Bangkok hotel, got him drunk and killed him in October 2010.

  The law finally caught up with Santosh Shetty and he was arrested in Bangkok in 2011. He broke the golden rule of the mafia: never draw attention to oneself. One night, he got into a brawl at a bar with a few businessmen. When the police sought his passport, he gave them a fake one. Later, they fished out his real passport from his residence and realized that he was listed by Interpol as a wanted man. By August of that year, Santosh Shetty found himself on a flight to Mumbai, extradited. He is now cooling his heels in prison.

  The quick extradition of Santosh Shetty made the Bangkok police realize the gravity of the battles that were being fought on their land. They don’t have a determined police in-charge like Dubai’s Dahi Khalfan, to uproot the mafia from their city. As a result, other Shettys and Mumbai mafiosi are still holed up in Bangkok and operating surreptitiously from there.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Manhunt for Maharaj

  The two snipers were in place, the long barrels of their rifles pointing at the entrance to the portico of the three-star hotel in Dadar East, a south-central suburb of Mumbai. Their fingers were on the trigger, and they were itching to shoot.

  The team of fifteen crime branch officers was ready to erupt into action, only waiting for a signal from the boss. Some of the officers were pretending to read newspapers in the foyer, and some others chatted with each other – only their eyes were on the revolving door of the hotel.

  Another policeman, dressed as a concierge, remained attentive. The bulge in his trousers had nothing to do with the blood coursing through his manhood.

  ‘Alertness is like an erection, it cannot remain for 24 hours,’ says an IPS officer who is a top surveillance expert. ‘You keep losing it and then stimulate it to stay in the game.’

  Outside the hotel, there were others, equally alert. Two men at the bus stop, one at the tea shop, and one getting his shoes polished. The whole set-up was a well-prepared police dragnet – a police stakeout with zero room for error.

  The waiting can take its toll. Some of the cops lit a cigarette, others gulped down cups of coffee. They were fagged out.

  They had been waiting for hours, some longer than the others. Assistant Police Inspector Ravindra Angre had been waiting for this moment for the past two years.

  Suresh Manchekar was Angre’s big ticket. The cop aspired to join the league of famous encounter cops that included Pradeep Sharma and Vijay Salaskar. The police in Thane do not receive as much media attention as the Mumbai cops do. Angre, who was from Thane district, was desperate for glory through the medium of encounters. He was so obsessed with Manchekar that he had even planted two of his men in Manchekar’s gang. He shelled out a tidy sum to the moles and often complained about their starry tantrums. One day, the moles finally threw a few nuggets at him. They told him that their boss was addressed as Maharaj. ‘M for Manchekar and M for Maharaj, which means the king.’

  After he was externed from the mill heartlands of Mumbai, Manchekar, with the help of his mother and sister, had managed to carve out a career for himself by terrorizing the citizens of Thane, Dombivli and Kalyan. The brutal killing of Sudesh Khamkar and Dr Dipak Shetty had caused panic among the businessmen as also the medical fraternity in the fast developing townships that abutted Mumbai. The Thane police had launched a crackdown on the gang and killed more than twenty-five gangsters in ‘encounters’ but they never made any headway on the whereabouts of Manchekar.

  Angre had decided to get him at any cost. So, when his snitches in the gang told him that Maharaj would be coming to a Dadar hotel to collect extortion money, Angre violated the turf issues that the police are very particular about; he got his men to keep a watch on the hotel without the rest of the Mumbai police managing to get a whiff of their operations.

  The interminable wait seemed almost over. Suddenly, Angre noticed a white Premier Fiat NE 118 swerving in the direction of the hotel. It matched the description he had. Angre stubbed out his cigarette and crushed it under his shoe, signalling for his men to be alert.

  ‘He is here, now it begins, now,’ he thought, smiling to himself. The next moment a young woman, her face bearing layers of pancake-like foundation and dark lipstick and dressed in a white salwar kameez, emerged from the car. She was wearing a tight dress that highlighted her curves, particularly her bustline. Angre was aghast. Even in this form, it was an unexpected anti-climax!

  He saw the woman walk up to the extortion victim and collect a bag. She opened it and scanned the contents, then shut the bag, rose from the sofa – her bosom heaving – and walked towards the exit.

  Angre overcame his frustration. He asked his men to follow the vehicle. The officers got into an unmarked car, and within ten minutes they stopped at a building in Parel and left the car to follow the woman. A woman cop tailed her inside the building. She went into a flat on the third floor, and disappeared.

  The police team began thinking of how to raid the flat: the men and the weapons to be used, and whether they should ask the local police to accompany them. What if Manchekar alias Maharaj was not there? He would be alerted and the only clue that they had managed to get after two years of painstaking investigations and intelligence from their embedded informants would be rendered meaningless. The cops decided to fall back on their old trick of penetrating a civilian hideaway.

  Next day, the flat occupied by the couple was visited by two men posing as linemen from Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), responding to the complaint of a neighbour. The pretext was clichéd; they needed to check if the whole circuit had to be changed or just one faulty line.

  They were quite pleased to be greeted by the well-endowed woman. During the twenty-two minutes that they lingered in the room, setting up the electronic surveillance, the desi Pamela Anderson seemed intent on distracting them.

  The only other person in the flat was a young man who seemed to be in his mid-twenties; Manchekar, they knew, was in his forties. The young fellow’s name was Santosh Naik.

  Two of Angre’s men began listening to Naik’s calls and monitoring them round the clock. For a long while, they didn’t make any breakthrough. There were calls ordering food from takeaways, medicines from the chemist, porn from the video parlour. They sniggered when they did some homework on the list of tablets the young man had ordered. He seemed too young to be suffering from erectile dysfunction.

  Through the sundry calls, one number of significance that emerged belonged to someone in a sleepy hamlet near Belgaum, in Karnataka. And so, Angre’s men finally bid adieu to their favourite girl and trained their sights beyond the couple holed up in the Parel flat.

  Belgaum is located on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border and has a population of both Marathi and Kannada speakers. Though it is in Karnataka, Maharashtra has staked a claim to it as the Peshwas had ruled it between 1707 and 1818, except for a brief hiatus when Haider Ali of Mysore overran it. It is just 50 km from the Goa state border and 500 km from Mumbai. The Belgaum airport is only 29 km from the Maharashtra border.

  Once they zeroed in on the address given to them by the cellular service providers, Angre’s men had second thoughts. It looked like somebody had played a trick on them – they were standing in the front yard of the palatial bungalow of an Alphonso-mango dealer. The two-storey villa was spread over seventy acres and contained twenty rooms. It was owned by Shashi Shinde, who lived like a king in his palace in the affluent Maharashtrian neighbourhood and apparently kept his distance from his less wealthy neighbours, in keeping with his exalted financial status.

  The policemen decided to stay put and keep a discreet watch over Shinde’s palace. For weeks, they did not notice anything out of the ordinary and felt that they had reached a dead end; there was no way that this rich man could be connected to Manchekar in any manner. They also felt it was futile hanging around in Belgaum, because the extortion calls were coming from Goa.

  Angre and his men made more th
an twenty trips to Goa, but made no headway on Manchekar. By 2003, cellular phones had made it easy for calls to be tracked, and they kept hoping that they would zero in on Manchekar through Santosh Naik. One day, the little lead finally turned up something and they hit pay dirt.

  Santosh Naik slipped up. He called a prospective victim from a prepaid number and claimed that he was Maharaj. Then he added that he would be transferring the call to Manchekar in a few minutes.

  The cops realized that Maharaj was not Manchekar as they had surmised. And because calls could not be forwarded from prepaid numbers, it meant that Naik was with Manchekar. They began trailing Naik in earnest – and this eventually led them to Manchekar.

  Subsequent investigations revealed that Manchekar was one of the shrewdest brains in the business. He had stonewalled the efforts of the police to locate him for several years by maintaining extreme secrecy. His mother and sister were his only confidantes; when he did trust a third partner, it cost him his life. And yes, he was a mango dealer from Belgaum, but he was a man with one identity in Maharashtra and another in Goa. On weekends, Manchekar drove his SUV, with its tinted glasses, to Goa, barely 50 km away. He checked in at five-star hotels which were very particular about protecting the privacy of their customers. He used to carry more than twenty-four SIM cards to make extortion calls to his victims in Mumbai and Thane, and switched off the handset once he left the hotel.

  The offices of most mobile service providers are closed on weekends. Even if the cops managed to trace a call to a Goa hotel, the earliest they could land up there was on Monday morning; by then, Manchekar was at his villa in Belgaum and his phone was switched off.

  But the Thane police team that had made Manchekar their mission closed the case at last – through their favourite kind of encounter.

  The official version, which was described in the police press release and subsequently published in all major dailies, was the standard one dished out after every encounter.