One by one, all the men accused in the Ramdas Nayak murder were nabbed by the cops. This was a major success for the police force. However it was shortlived. Three years later, Firoze Kokani, the main accused in the murder, successfully staged a daring escape.

  During the course of the investigation conducted afterwards, it was learnt that Kokani’s father Abdullah had plotted his escape. He and two cops, Sub-Inspector Satish Gawte and Constable Surya Sawant, were later arrested by the police for aiding and abetting Kokani’s escape.

  The Making of a Killer

  After the serial blasts of 1993 and towards the beginning of 1994, underworld kingpin and don Dawood Ibrahim left Dubai and relocated to Karachi. His ace lieutenant Chhota Shakeel began to expand his network in Mumbai. Shakeel would recruit Muslim boys in their early teens to his gang and groom them to shoot and kill. Most of these boys were school dropouts and had a fascination for the gang culture. They were hotblooded and thrived on the idea of becoming a ‘bhai’. Also, they came from lower middle class families and would do anything for money. It was an era when gangs were heralded as the hub where one could make pots of money and every boy wanted his share of cash and the glory that came with the association. For these young boys, pulling a trigger for a sum of five thousand rupees meant nothing more than a challenge.

  One such boy who caught Shakeel’s eye in particular was Firoze Sarguroh.

  Firoze Abdullah Sarguroh alias Firoze Kokani had committed his first crime at the age of 16. He hailed from a conservative Muslim family of four children who lived in the Shaikh Mistry Dargah area of Antop Hill. Firoze had a sister and a brother elder to him and a younger brother. While his brothers and sisters did well in school and college, Firoze was a class nine drop out.

  He grew up with boys in Dongri in South Mumbai-the hub of Mumbai’s Muslim Mafiosi-where he used to moonlight as an office boy in an export office at Nishanpada Road. Bad company and the lure of an easy life led him to his first crime in 1992 when he along with his cronies assaulted a drunkard outside a liquor joint and made away with his watch and wallet. The man succumbed to his injuries the next day.

  This murder ensured that he gained notoriety as a dada and the shopkeepers and businessmen in South Mumbai, Pydhonie, Nagpada and Madanpura began dreading his visits. Impressed, a builder offered him a job of a bodyguard. He was a haggard 17 year old > He did his job well –braking bones and smashing cars when needed. He also hung around the Maharashtra College looking for good looking girls. He shot I nto the big league after two incidents—a contract for attacking Syed Mannan, a crime branch informer and beating up Chota Shakeel men when they approached his builder boss for protection money.

  But few know that Firoze was instrumental in the second round of communal riots that hit Mumbai in 1993. In January 1993, Firoxe had coldbloodedly stabbed two Mathadi workers to death in the Masjid Bunder area.

  In his teens, young Firoze had coldbloodedly stabbed two Mathadi workers to death in the Masjid Bunder area in January 1993.

  The breakout of communal riots in Mumbai after the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 had changed the character of the city. On 6 January 1993, several cases of stabbing were reported in areas like Dongri, Pydhonie, V. P. Road and Nagpada jurisdictions in south Mumbai. All these spots were in the vicinity of Mohammad Ali Road.

  Death and panic danced on the streets of Mumbai as the city witnessed some of the worst riots in its history. Cases of stabbing, arson, mob violence and attacks on private and government properties occurred in Dongri, Pydhonie, V. P. Road, Nagpada, Tardeo, Mahim, Dharavi, Nirmal Nagar, Chembur and Kherwadi. Most of the stabbing cases occurred in isolated lanes and bylanes, and by the time the police would arrive at the scene, the miscreants would have vanished. Mob violence accounted for the deaths of many innocent people.

  Firoze Sarguroh had just stepped into adolescence then. He had grown up in Antop Hill, not very far from Mohammad Ali Road. And like many other youngsters, he was deeply scarred by the communal tension blazing through the city. He took to the streets to avenge the atrocities committed against his fellow Muslim brothers. Looting, arson, torching police vehicles were acts of revenge he happily indulged in. He and his friends had taken it upon themselves to bring justice to their Muslim brothers who were slaughtered during the riots.

  Though mob violence and instigation by various political parties further fuelled the riots, a lot of damage was also done by rumours. Rumours of a large number of people of a particular community being killed created an air of intense panic and commotion, causing people to either retreat into hiding, or pick up their swords. Amidst the riots, there were also several stabbing incidents which were carried out by professional criminals. And such incidents were being reported in different areas of the city. It appeared that someone was doing this with the explicit intention to increase communal tensions, especially during the first phase of the riots in December 1992. Most of the victims stabbed by these professional criminals were Hindus. It appeared that these stabbings were part of an organized plan by killers at the behest of unknown sources. But given that all the victims were Hindus, it was a clear that the people behind them were Muslims.

  The Muslim criminal elements operating in south Bombay included people like Salim Rampuri and they were ultimately identified as the brains behind the stabbing incidents. Hindus used this to further fuel the fire. On 1 January 1993, Bal Thackeray, in his mouthpiece Saamna, wrote ‘Hindunni akramak vhayala have’ (Hindus ave to become more aggressive). The next day a number of Muslim hutments in the compound of M. P. Mill in Tardeo were set on fire. On the same day, there was an incident in Dharavi where two Muslims were assaulted with iron rods. Again, on 3 January 1993, a Muslim in Dharavi jurisdiction was attacked with a knife. Muslim settlements were singled out and surveys were conducted by the Shiv Sainiks. In Asalpha in Ghatkopar, a taxi ferrying a Muslim family, including a bearded man and a burqa-clad woman with two children, was set ablaze.

  Seventeen-year-old Firoze Sarguroh was not a very tolerant boy. The growing number of attacks against his community pushed him to pick up his own weapons. As per his own confession to the police, on one night he saw a news capsule called Ghumta Aaina (The Revolving Mirror), which showed atrocities on Muslims across the country. Firoze was disturbed by the news reports and images.

  He decided to target Hindus where it would hurt the most. The Mathadi workers who lifted huge weights in the docks and other parts of Mumbai were a strong power force in themselves. Though they were not aligned to any right-wing Hindu parties, they were Hindus. Consequently, an attack on a Mathadi worker would be an attack on Hindus. Also, because he lived in a locality which neighboured the Mathadi workers’ settlements, they were convenient targets.

  Night had just fallen on 5 January 1993. A fog of fear blanketed the city. The grisly silence of the night was about to be broken. Firoze had been keeping a watch on the godown of a transport company in south Mumbai. He had stationed himself behind a truck so nobody would see him. A Mathadi worker who was sleeping in the go-down dragged his sleepy self across the street to relieve himself. Firoze followed him, and before the Mathadi worker could anticipate his fate, Firoze attacked him from behind and stabbed him to death. His screams alerted three other Mathadi workers who rushed to the scene. But they were no match for a raging Firoze, who took both of them down with his knife. The frenzied assault resulted in the death of two men, while two were left injured and bleeding.

  The murders of the Mathadi workers lit up Mumbai in new flames of communal tension.

  The Mathadi Workers’ Union called for a bandh the next day and meetings were held. The public, like the police, were oblivious to the identity of the man behind the killings. The Shiv Sena openly accused Muslims of being responsible for the ruthless murders, thus instigating another round of ‘an eye for an eye’ revenge.

  Two days later, a mob of Hindu people attacked Muslims in Mahim. This led to the second phase of the riots, only more brutal and gruesome this time. Firoze was thus single-handedly responsible for engineering the second round of riots in the city.

  Don Dumps Darling

  After having recruited Firoze, Chhota Shakeel developed a close bond with the young shooter. They shared a rapport so strong that often Shakeel addressed Firoze with all kinds of endearing names, which was quite unusual behaviour for a gangster of his stature. Shakeel and Firoze would call each other ‘Darling’, something that the don did not do with any of his other gang members.

  Under the tutelage of Chhota Shakeel, Firoze Kokani became a hardened killer. He killed an innocent Shaikh Hanif Patel by mistake when he was targeting a Shiv Sena leader Raghunath Sagwekar. He killed Ashfaq Koorla at Pune, fired at Rahim in Null Bazaar, shot at builder Bhagat and killed one person in Vikhroli. He depleted the crime branch’ sources of information by killing several informers. He shot dead Tasleem Ghare at Dongri, Haji Bidar, an erstwhile partner of narco-don, Mohammad Dosssa and Praveen Zubair at Crawford Market.

  Soon after his escape from J J Hospital, Firoze crossed over to Nepal through the porous border and reached Dubai. From there, it was easy to unite with his boss in Karachi. But when Firoze landed in Karachi, his ambitions had grown manifold. He desired the throne for himself. Firoze thought Shakeel was a small-town guy who had just gotten lucky, and that he, Firoze, had undertaken many risky assignments and killings and had made a prominent name for himself. He thought it was time to dethrone Shakeel. But Firoze had overlooked the fact that his utility in Shakeel’s gang was that of a shooter. Firoze lacked the leadership skills of a boss. And Shakeel would never concede his power and glory to any man.

  Later it was revealed that Dawood Ibrahim’s brother, Anis Ibrahim, was not happy with Firoze, as he had discovered that he was backbiting him. Somebody had taped a conversation in which Firoze was recorded liberally abusing Anis. This proved fatal for Firoze.

  Firoze failed to understand the basic principles and protocols of hierarchy in the D-Company, and the result was that somebody plotted to have him eliminated from the scene. Shakeel made an agreement with the Mumbai police to hand over Firoze Kokani in exchange for amnesty for his gang. The story goes that Firoze was then nabbed in a market in Karachi in 2003, based on a tip-off from none other than his own boss and leader. The way to get power is to grab it, but Firoze Kokani was no match for Chhota Shakeel or Anis Ibrahim and thus came an abrupt end to the scintillating stories of the twenty-one-year-old shooter.

  The theory is that, if he were alive, Firoze Kokani would have continued with his trail-blazing career in the mafia. Only his death could have put paid to his plans. His friend Sajid Batliwala also escaped with him to Dubai and Pakistan but returned to India three years later. The law caught up with him after twelve years when he made a couple of mistakes with his new identity whilst living in Mira Road, a suburb of Mumbai.

  Among all the mafia boys, the story of Firoze Abdullah Sarguroh alias Firoze Kokani is an especially sad one. Here was a promising young lad, very intelligent, good-looking, smart, an absolute charmer who simply took the wrong path. At the age of seventeen he had committed his first murder, and by twenty-one he was an old hand with eighteen murders behind him, and scores of robberies, stabbing and firing cases. At one point of time he was regarded as the youngest and most ferocious killing machine in the Dawood gang.

  The boy was actually a victim of both the mafia and political parties. The way he sprayed Ramdas Nayak with his AK-47, without any fear of Nayak’s bodyguard retaliating, has been pointed out. And the very fact that most of the murders committed by Firoze Kokani were politicians—including Shiv Sena leaders R. T. Sagwekar and Vilas Sawant—seems to indicate that the mafia and politicians used the boy, and then disposed of him when he was of no use to them.

  And it is not that Kokani got his dues from the mafia. It is said that, in 1998, when Kokani was taken by Batliwala to meet Dawood Ibrahim in Karachi, the don did not like Kokani’s attitude at all. Firoze was gauche, as he was very young, and boasted of his murders and achievements. Batliwala had to apologize to Dawood for his temerity in bringing the young impudent lad to meet a don of his stature.

  Whatever Dawood thought of the boy’s boasting, the truth is that some of Kokani’s actions had a great impact. For instance, in the way that the riots took on a different hue after the Mathadi workers were stabbed by him. To this day, Mumbai sits on a communal tinderbox and the scars have not healed. Ramdas Nayak was very likely to have become the chief minister of Maharashtra, as he was steadily climbing the ladder in the BJP hierarchy. Firoze Kokani changed both the political fortunes of a party and the state by cutting Ramdas Nayak from the fray. Firoze Kokani’s life was a short one, but the mayhem he unleashed changed Mumbai’s history.

  HITMAN 8

  From Political Assassin to Padre

  The Target and the Threat

  ‘Nanga kardoonga!!’

  The furious threat reverberated throughout the sixth floor of Mantralaya, the seat of the Maharashtra government’s administration, causing everyone to look up from what they were doing.

  The bearded old man wearing a kurta pyjama seemed to be infuriated about something. He was trembling with rage and fury.

  The man was a regular visitor to Mantralaya and was known to the administrative staff on the sixth floor, which only housed the offices of the chief minister and the home minister of the state. This corridor of power was not easily accessible even to several ministers. But Maulana Ziauddin Bukhari, former Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Muslim League, was a man who could not be stopped by red tape or bureaucratic screening. He was known to barge into offices, meetings and closed-door deliberations, and was thus a familiar face to officers and clerks.

  During the intense and violent bout of riots in Antop Hill and Sion area, when hundreds of Muslims were trapped and unable to step out for fear of being killed by Shiv Sainiks on a rampage, Bukhari had rescued hordes of terrified people with the help of army trucks.

  Bukhari was well-known in Muslim circles in the city and had tremendous clout. Considered to be a powerful orator, Bukhari’s vitriolic speeches held lakh-strong audiences enthralled during his sermons in congregational Eid Namaz in Azad Maidan in south Mumbai. Bukhari’s strident virulence and aggression had endeared him to the community and put fear in the hearts of his detractors. He was emerging as a strong Muslim leader and the community looked up to him.

  It helped that Bukhari was also a shrewd businessman. He had managed to procure a huge piece of land in the prime locality of Oshiwara in Andheri West and built twenty-nine buildings between 1970 and 1980. Millat Nagar, as it’s called, is nowan exclusive colony inhabited largely by Muslims.

  It was this pull and connection with the community that no politician in his right mind could ignore.

  Since 12 March 1993, when the city was rocked by serial bomb blasts resulting in the deaths of over 257 people and injury to over 800, Bukhari had been helping the government with investigations and playing the role of mediator between the community and politicians.

  But today, despite several weeks of dedicated and diligent service for the government, Bukhari felt humiliated. Apparently, the chief minister, Sharad Pawar, had refused to meet him, which had enraged Bukhari. Instead of calmly leaving, the man had exploded in fury and issued loaded and dangerous threats.

  ‘They don’t know who they are crossing. They don’t know! I will expose all of them,’ he shouted, as his aide cowered in fear.

  ‘I will call a bloody press conference and tell everyone who is really behind the 1992 riots, the killer of Muslims, and who is behind the March 1993 blasts and the massacre of Hindus,’ he went on. ‘Mujhse jang bahot mehengi saabit hogi. Nanga karke rakh doonga ek ekko!’ Bukhari thundered. All fingers pointed towards a particular minister in the Congress government.

  The threat was heard by many and assimilated with varying reactions. While some were left wondering, others speculated.

  One mind in particular was thinking very hard. Bukhari needed to be silenced. The state government could not afford a controversy now. If Bukhari managed to stir the hornet’s nest, then it could topple the government. The minister’s mind began working deviously.

  Those who knew Bukhari well knew his shady and indelible past. Bukhari had risen to power with the support of Bashu Dada, one of the original dons of the city. Long before the flashier generation of gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, Chhota Rajan and Arun Gawli, there was Bashu Dada, a burly, fearsome ganglord who ran an akhada, wrestling ring, in Teli Mohalla and ruled Dongri with an iron fist. Dada would always be seen with heavyset, menacing bodyguards flanking him, and no one dared to cross his path.

  With Bashu Dada’s support, Bukhari entered politics and went on to rise through the ranks till he became an MLA. However, his election was set aside by the Bombay High Court since he had used communal speeches to win the election. After Bashu’s death, Bukhari became close to Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim. During his ascent through the state’s political hierarchy, he also developed close ties with the then chief minister, Sharad Pawar.

  Now, on that scorching April afternoon in 1993, all the people who heard Bukhari’s threats eagerly waited to see what would happen next. They expected something drastic to unfold, something that would shake the government and expose certain ministers and their involvement in the recent blasts. Something dramatic did happen. But it was not what anyone had anticipated.

  The Supari

  While other ganglords in the city were on the run and had left the country, Gawli had preferred to stay put and control his boys. Now, Gawli’s fortress, Dagdi Chawl, in Byculla, was shrouded in a strange silence. The gang had just been offered the supari of a highly-respected Muslim leader. Gawli was loath to accept the contract. Despite being a devout Hindu, Gawli had married a Muslim woman, Zubeida Mujawar, from Wadgaon Pir in Pune. He did not want to be known as a Muslim baiter. Killing a Muslim gangster was justifiable, but how would he explain the killing of a venerable maulana? On the other hand, Gawli could not refuse the supari as it had come from a top politician in the Maharashtra government, who was also a Union Cabinet minister in the Congress regime, as well as a close friend of his arch enemy Dawood Ibrahim. He wanted nothing to do with Dawood, and if he took the supari, he would be indirectly helping Dawood, he thought. Why didn’t the strongman go to Dawood and his cronies instead of putting me in this dilemma? Gawli wondered.