Besides, Gawli also had a paucity of shooters who would dare to step into a Muslim locality and fire at a respected priest and stage a safe escape. Bipin Shere and Shailesh Haldankar had shot dead Dawood Ibrahim’s brother-in-law Ibrahim Parkar at Nagpada in July 1992 and were almost lynched by bystanders. Killing Bukhari would be equally tricky.

  Gawli could only trust two of his men at that moment, Sada Pawle and Raju Shirsat Philips. Finally Raju solved Gawli’s problem by accepting the gauntlet. Gawli was relieved.

  Bukhari’s office was below the Byculla Bridge near Khada Parsi Chowk. It was a predominantly Muslim locality. The hitman was expected to kill the man and ensure that he was back in the cocoon of Dagdi Chawl—which was barely 1,500 metres away from Bukhari’s office—before the neighbourhood erupted in reaction.

  On the morning of 21 April 1993, Bukhari had just stepped into his office when two men entered it. Their intrusion, lack of customary greetings, total disregard for any decorum, was shocking. Before Bukhari or his companions could make a move, one of them whipped out a gun, fired several rounds at him at point blank range, and both men fled. Bukhari died on the spot.

  There was shock at this ruthless murder. And with the shock came anger. And with the anger came furious cries for justice and the usual accusations that the police were just mute bystanders and useless. The Mumbai police, anticipating a severe backlash the moment the murder was reported to them, had in fact swung into action, tapping sources, picking up suspects and doing everything else they could to track the killers.

  The speculation was that this was the handiwork of the D-Company. At the time, Dawood had already fled to Dubai and was running his gang from there. He was the first choice for contract killings: he had a wide array of shooters at his disposal, men who were ready to further themselves in his good books by adding another feather to their caps, or more suitably, another scalp to their belts.

  A month of intensive inquiries with all known Dawood aides in the city yielded nothing in terms of clues, leaving the police flummoxed. If anything, Dawood’s men themselves appeared to be clueless about who had taken such a big supari. Bukhari was a hugely-famous Muslim leader with a wide following, and it took guts to accept a hit on someone like him. More importantly, they were curious to know who had dared to accept and execute a contract in the city that they thought they ruled.

  The answer, when it came, stumped policemen and criminals alike. Bukhari had not been killed by the Dawood gang. It was, in fact, the Arun Gawli gang that had executed the contract.

  Even more surprising, though, was the shooter.

  Short, scrawny and bespectacled, Raju Philips walked with a slight limp and went against every stereotype that existed of a dreaded killer. Nondescript, diminutive and timid-looking, no one could believe that Raju Shirsat, alias Philips, was the contract killer who had shot Bukhari. This four-and-a-half foot man had stunned the underworld and the city with the way he had coolly entered Bukhari’s office and shot him dead.

  According to the treatise compiled by then joint commissioner of police, crime, M. N. Singh, tentatively titled, ‘The Growth of Gangsterism in Mumbai’, Philips was the third senior-most leader in the Gawli gang, and in charge of extortion and gang activities in the Byculla area.

  Meeting Bukhari’s Killer

  Peon Chawl is a building a few metres from the Byculla station on the eastern side. The building is part of a cluster of buildings, each comprising long corridors of single-room tenements. At the time, most of the residents of the building were lower middle class Maharashtrian labourers, including mill workers.

  Since the building is close to Dagdi Chawl and houses several Gawli loyalists, not many crime journalists venture to the area, let alone enter the building asking for the room of Raju Philips.

  But then, Hussain Zaidi didn’t fit the stereotype. He asked me to accompany him to Raju’s house—he was working on a story and he needed Raju’s inputs. In case things went awry and Raju decided to kill him, at least I could inform the police and Hussain’s family, he said. I found the proposition to be quite risky and reckless, but tagged along with him.

  Raju turned out be unexpectedly warm and friendly. Hussain’s apprehensions were unfounded. Raju introduced us to his cheerful, smiling wife. We saw Christian symbols—a crucifix, a picture of the Madonna, a Bible—all over the place. Perhaps Raju had converted to Christianity after marrying the love of his life, herself a Christian. Raju could not walk without the help of a walking stick.

  Raju offered us soft drinks and coffee, but Zaidi bluntly and undiplomatically refused. Raju thought it was because of his dubious profession. He said, ‘I will ask my wife to make some tea for you.’ But Hussain refused to have tea as well; it was one of his principles: to not break bread with either the mafia or the police.

  We discussed a lot of things with Raju. We found out that he had faced a lot of atrocities after he was booked under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act following Bukhari’s killing.

  This was a time when the rivalry between Gawli and Ashwin Naik was at its peak, despite both of them being Maharashtrians. When Hussain brought up their rivalry, Raju became agitated. His small frame was full of fury.

  ‘Sab bolneki baatein hain (It’s just talk),’ Raju told us. ‘The truth is that the police are on the payroll of all our rivals, and their sole mission is to eliminate us. Only our men are killed in encounters. Others are arrested or allowed to flee the country.’ The Shiv Sena only supported Amar Naik (Amar Naik was eventually killed and Ashwin Naik, Amar Naik’s younger brother, heads his gang now) because his sister-in-law Neeta Naik was in their party; they had no sympathy for Daddy (Gawli), Raju insisted.

  Hussain continued to visit Raju on and off. Once, he found Raju at the sewing machine, trying to stitch clothes. The gangster was struggling with the machine because it required both feet to work it, and his bad foot was not efficient in its movements. Hussain also tried to get Raju to introduce him to another hitman from the Gawli gang—the strangely named Paul Newman. But Raju refused to set up a meeting.

  Once, the British author Misha Glenny visited Mumbai for research on his book on organized gangs. He asked Hussain for help in this, and they would frequently meet at the Persian Darbar restaurant at Byculla for lunch and dinner. When Misha requested Hussain to get the Crime Branch’s dossier on the Arun Gawli gang for his research, Hussain managed to do so. Misha acknowledged Hussain’s help in his international bestseller on world gangs, McMafia.

  Misha almost jumped out of his seat when he found the mention of Paul Newman’s name in the list.

  ‘I thought Paul Newman was a top actor in Hollywood movies; why is his name mentioned among the sharpshooters of the Gawli gang?’ Misha could not hide his chagrin.

  We explained to him that it was a just a coincidence. Misha said perhaps Paul’s parents were a big fan of the Hollywood star and they had named him after the actor. However, the baffled look on Misha’s face still amuses us whenever we talk about the incident.

  Philips as Politician

  Philips, one of the two Christian members in Gawli’s gang, was born in Peon Chawl in Byculla and was recruited into the gang at a young age. He participated in several extortion jobs for Gawli, picking up targets from their residences or offices and taking them to Dagdi Chawl. Here, they would be made to sit in a corner for a couple of hours, listening to Gawli’s thugs talk about murdering or maiming someone or the other. The cowering targets would then be taken to Gawli, where the ganglord would demand money from them. The slightest sign of defiance would elicit a trip to the dreaded ‘inquiry room’, where targets were beaten mercilessly by the likes of Sada Pawle, a particularly cruel Gawli aide. Any resistance would quickly disappear and the target would put all his remaining energy into arranging for the sum that Gawli had demanded.

  Bukhari’s murder thrust Philips into the limelight, turning him overnight from just another Gawli man to a name to be taken seriously. Gawli himself was in the Yerawada central jail at the time, having been arrested under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) Act, but he had quickly worked out a way of running the gang from inside the jail. It was just a matter of greasing the right palms, which Gawli did, and in no time orders were being issued from inside the jail, and Sada Pawle, in whose hands the reins fell in Gawli’s absence, took care to enforce them.

  Philips, after his involvement in the murder was revealed, became one of the most wanted men at the time. He was arrested a month after the murder, but he had by this time become immune to the police’s interrogation techniques, his strong resentment for the cops having turned into a suit of armour.

  Philips’ hatred for anything khaki was connected to his limp. Philips was born with perfectly healthy legs. However, in the early ’90s, he was picked up in connection with one of the scores of extortion cases against Gawli. His unflinching loyalty towards Daddy sealed his lips and he refused to open his mouth, no matter how much he was pressurized. The loyalty, however, came with a price. He was subjected to such intensive third-degree methods that he sustained a fracture to his right leg. The policemen who had picked him up did not provide medical aid in time, perhaps to avoid action for inhuman interrogation methods, and when Philips walked out of the lock-up, he had a permanent limp, as the fracture never healed properly.

  A photograph taken at a party in Dagdi Chawl a day before Philips was picked up by the police shows him dancing merrily with other Gawli aides, a smile on his face, without a care in the world. Little did Philips know that he would never dance again. At least not without grimacing in pain each time he put his right leg to the ground.

  From that day onwards, each limping step that Philips took reminded him of the fact that the men in khaki were no better than the criminals that he hobnobbed with on a daily basis. His hatred and disdain for the police was visible and intense.

  After securing bail in the Bukhari murder case, Philips went back to the Dagdi Chawl as a celebrity. He was now in the big league and, apart from being sent on more and more extortion and murder jobs, he was also given a prominent place in the Akhil Bharatiya Sena (ABS), the political party that Gawli had founded.

  Gawli made Philips the spokesperson for the party, and Philips used his position to launch scathing attacks against the police force, calling them corrupt, inefficient and biased, and dismissing their encounter specialists as little more than hitmen in uniform for rival gangs.

  His loyalty to Gawli also manifested itself in violent ways, and he was among the first to attack anyone who said a word against Daddy. Anindita Ramaswamy, a journalist with the Asian Age, was one such victim. In 1997, she published an article in the daily saying that Gawli, who was still in jail at the time, was facing problems in paying his gang members regularly, which could impact his image and sway on the city’s underworld. Needless to say, the article did not go down very well with either Gawli or his trusted aides. The ABS was at the time trying to gather as much clout as possible to contest the upcoming parliamentary elections in 1999. It had faced humiliating defeats in the previous elections, with twelve of its candidates, including Philips himself, having to forfeit their deposit. Philips and another Gawli hitman Sunil Ghate had contested the corporation election and lost. The jeers of ‘zamaanat zapt’, ‘lost his deposit’, still echoed in their ears and the article only angered them further.

  Ramaswamy went to Dagdi Chawl the same day that the article was published to do a follow-up story. While she was making her inquiries in the chawl, a Gawli aide came up to her and asked her who she was. Dagdi Chawl, although teeming with armed and mean-looking thugs working for Gawli, was usually open to journalists. Philips himself met and interacted with a lot of reporters to try and further the image of Gawli as a poor, helpless soul being targeted by the police, as well as to gain political mileage for the ABS. Nevertheless, the gang members made it their business to closely monitor the interactions of journalists in the chawl.

  On hearing that she was a journalist with the Asian Age, the henchman told Ramaswamy that the article on Gawli had been read that morning and that the one responsible would not be spared. Ramaswamy told him that she was just looking for information on an ABS office in Dadar, and he told her to wait. She then exited the chawl and informed her office about what had happened. But instead of leaving the scene, she bravely went back inside and waited where the man had told her to.

  Meanwhile, the Gawli henchman ran to Philips and told him that the journalist responsible for the article about Daddy was at this moment inside Dagdi Chawl. A furious Philips rounded up a small team and left for the spot immediately.

  Ramaswamy had only just come back to the spot after calling her office when she was hit by a stone in her face. Even before she could realize what was happening, three to four men advanced towards her, pelting stones. In the lead were Philips and Suresh Bhaskar, another trusted Gawli aide. Ramaswamy managed to escape with injuries to her face and made her way to her office, after which she was taken to the Hinduja Hospital. She also filed a complaint with the Agripada police, and while Bhaskar was arrested the same day, Philips was picked up a day later.

  Needless to say, as soon as he secured bail, Philips was back in his little office in the Dagdi Chawl, spewing even more hatred against the police.

  The Gawli gang stuck to its claim of being the victim and not the villain till the very end. In fact, soon after, Philips and thirteen others were arrested again for Bukhari’s murder and a large amount of arms and ammunition were seized from them. Gawli’s wife called a press conference at the Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh hall in south Mumbai, at which she claimed that she knew of a plot where Dawood had paid off the Mumbai police to murder her husband.

  Philips’ Journey to Priesthood

  Philips left the gang in the early 2000s, after the gang’s influence started to peter out. He went to his native place with his wife, where he quickly got involved with the local church. Soon, he became a priest himself.

  Old-timers in the gang still chuckle at his transformation. ‘Aapla Philips aata Father jhala aahe,’ they say in amused wonder, referring to his priesthood by the colloquial name for padre.

  Not much is known about the circumstances surrounding Philips’ exit from the gang. There are some who say he had turned informer in the later years, a claim that is scoffed at by many, given his loyalty to Gawli. However, multiple sources have claimed to have seen him visiting senior police officers on more than one occasion.

  This was also the time when some of Gawli’s loyal members started turning on him. The worst impact of this was observed when Shrikrishna Gaurav helped police with vital information about the murder of Shiv Sena corporator Kamalakar Jamsandekar in 2007. Another aide, Sandeep Gangan, turned approver in the case, and Gawli was convicted for the murder.

  Whether or not Philips crossed over to the other side, in 2005 he submitted a written application to the Mumbai police claiming that he feared for his life as Gawli was trying to have him killed, a claim that was rubbished by Gawli.

  Philips’ last brush with fame was in 2006, and for a very unusual reason, considering his repertoire of murder, assault and extortion cases. When Indian astronaut Sunita Williams went on her first space expedition, he held a prayer meeting for her safe return. Concern for her well-being was very high among Indians, as Kalpana Chawla, another Indo-American astronaut, had lost her life in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.

  The Indian Express carried an interview with him, in which he was quoted as saying he was doing God’s work. The article made it to the front page anchor and was later followed up by television channels.

  Raju Philips’ transformation from Gawli’s work to God’s work was astonishing.

  Last heard, Raju had hit the road in a mission to conduct prayer meetings and to spread the message of Jesus, the Messiah.

  The execution of Bukhari through the Gawli gang instead of Dawood men was the Maharashtra minister’s masterstroke. He killed two birds in one stroke. He had got Bukhari killed and eliminated a major threat to his political career which was already in the doldrums. And after it was found that the Gawli gang was behind the killing, it could only be surmised that perhaps Bukhari was killed for communal reasons or his association with the Dawood gang. The killing could never be connected to the minister or to his threat of exposing him.

  Police sources said the politician could have asked Dawood to bump off Bukhari, but the subsequent arrests would have only established the minister’s nexus with Dawood, which was at the heart of the conflict between him and Bukhari.

  HITMAN 9

  Bulletproof Bora Becomes Baba

  An Unlikely Yogi

  He walks with a limp, is short and wiry and would not elicit a second glance if he walked down a crowded street in any area apart from Dharavi and Chembur, where everyone knows who he is. They know that the strength of the nondescript man lies in the sheer clout that he seems to wield, and they are aware of the awe-inspiring incidents he has committed that have contributed into shaping the legend of the man. Until his arrest, he was known as the Yogi Baba of Sion, while the police called him ‘DK of Dharavi’.

  His given name is Ravi Mallesh Bora, a name that not many would remember today. Say the name D. K. Rao, however, and anyone’s eyes would light up in recognition, along with no small measure of respect, however grudging.

  Rao came to Mumbai from his native Gulbarga in Karnataka with his parents, who migrated to the metropolis to escape the persecution that their tribe, the Barias, had been suffering right from the time of the British Raj. The denotified tribe was among the many declared as criminal tribes by the erstwhile rulers of the country, leading to years and years of indignity and hard labour. Rao’s father brought his family to Mumbai to try and give them a better life. Little did he know that, fifty years later, his son’s name would overshadow every other name in his family tree.