When Singh, who himself was tall and solidly built, had stopped thrashing about, the group parted and Rao coolly walked forward. Wordlessly, he walked around a cowering Singh, knelt down and cradled Singh’s head in his hands and slipped a jute rope around it. A severely-beaten but still conscious Singh clawed at the rope around his neck and the hands holding them but Rao held fast, staring expressionlessly into his prey’s terrified eyes till he had stopped struggling. Rao’s henchmen watched in horrified awe as he drained the life out of Singh, straightened up casually, turned around and walked away. After another few seconds of staring fascinatedly at the dead man before them, the others walked away too.

  A subsequent inquiry by the prisons department revealed that Rao had bribed several prisons officials so that he could get thirteen members of the Rajan gang transferred to Nashik jail to help him with the murder. Rao had clearly taken into account Singh’s physical prowess and made sure he had enough manpower to overpower and subdue his target.

  Among the other remaining members of Rajan’s inner circle, Ejaz Lakdawala, Santosh Shetty and Ravi Pujari left to form their own gangs. Shetty was deported from Bangkok in 2011 after lengthy efforts by the Mumbai Crime Branch, and brought to Mumbai to stand trial for his crimes. Lakdawala and Pujari have managed to evade the law and somehow keep their shops open, although both have been facing the same problem: the lack of loyal footsoldiers.

  For Pujari, the problem is that he does not take care of his men once they are arrested, which makes them lose faith. Although there is no absence of poor, uneducated men willing to turn to crime for a fast buck, word travels fast in the underworld when you don’t care about your men. In fact, inmates of central jails who have worked for Ravi Pujari and have been abandoned by him are known as members of the ‘condom’ gang, as they are used and thrown by Pujari.

  Lakdawala, meanwhile, is suffering from an absence of effective recruiters. He opened another can of worms for the prisons department in November 2016, when the Mumbai Crime Branch arrested three of his shooters for plotting to kill a Jogeshwari-based businessman who refused to pay him extortion money. It was revealed that the orders had come from Lakdawala through his aide Prashant Rao, who is in Nashik central jail. The prisons department has initiated an inquiry to find out how Prashant Rao, who is relatively small fry in the underworld, managed to get a cell phone and run the gang’s affairs from inside the jail.

  Thus, both Pujari and Lakdawala are managing to keep their heads above the water with whatever money they get from whoever they manage to scare enough into paying up. Balu Dokre was murdered by Shakeel’s men in Malaysia in 2005, while Bharat Nepali, who had left with Santosh Shetty, was killed in Bangkok in 2011. Farid Tanasha was shot dead in his own house in Mumbai in 2010. Vicky Malhotra, one of Rajan’s closest aides, is managing Rajan’s affairs in the northeast, while those that helped with Singh’s murder, including Sarfira Nepali and Bala Parab, were killed in police encounters in the days to come.

  And so it was that, due to a combination of factors, Rao remained the only old-time Rajan gang member to survive and was by default elevated to a senior post in the gang, doing for Rajan what Rajan once did for Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.

  It is said that Rao still recruits petty criminals into the Rajan fold, and eventually gives them bigger jobs, like murders, to handle. He is also known to be a good manager, always taking care of his men. Whenever any of his men are arrested, he arranges for money and sureties for their bail, and takes care of their families while they are behind bars, automatically earning a place of respect and trust in the minds of his men.

  After Singh’s murder, Rao spent seven more years in prison before being released on bail. Always the favourite child of the limelight it did not take long for him to be in the news again.

  Jail, Bail, Jail

  The controversy this time was not actually around D. K. Rao but the people who attended the lavish party that was thrown to celebrate his release from jail. His men lost no time in organizing a Christmas bash in his honour in December 2009, and around a week after the party, an English daily reported that the party was attended by at least six personnel from the Mumbai police, including an assistant commissioner of police. A short video clip of the cops dancing along with Rao’s men went viral on social media shortly thereafter. The cops were suspended immediately and a departmental inquiry was initiated into the matter. The incident, however, proved that Rao had not lost his touch for expanding his clout and making contacts within the police force.

  Around this time, the author Joseph Campana requested Hussain Zaidi to interview Rao for his anthology on Dharavi. As usual I tagged along with Joseph and Hussain to meet the top gangster in flesh and blood.

  Rao had bought a huge office in the Sion-Dharavi area and set up an organization called Bhrashtachar Virodhi Manch (Anti Corruption Forum). A board at the entrance of the office announced this, along with another board, which indicated that he was a labour organization activist of Mathadi Kamgar Union. The office, which was made after joining two 225-sq feet rooms into one unit, screamed of affluence and prosperity. Rao had recently been released on bail, and yet he was able to operate from such a plush office. There were nine phones, including a couple of satellite phones, on the table in front of Rao, who was himself busy working on a tablet. A lawyer sat by at Rao, and he countered every question put forth by Campana and Hussain about Rao’s past and underworld activities with an argument. After this had gone on for a while between the lawyer and us, Rao finally interjected, ‘I do property work. People consult me on property matters especially in Sector 4 of Sion, Dharavi and other places of Antop Hill.’

  When questioned about his criminal past, Rao said he was a reformed man. ‘I believe in the doctrine of Nirankari Baba and Swami Samarth and practise yoga as taught to me by Art of Living volunteers. In fact, I also met Sri Sri Ravi Shankar when he came to Borivali.’

  After some mundane conversation, he said with an enigmatic smile, ‘Now I teach yoga on my building terrace to all the youngsters of the area.’ Hussain had heard that the classes included martial arts, and suspected that Rao’s smile was because of this.

  Rao’s lackeys were getting increasingly uncomfortable with our presence. They did not allow the interview to last long.

  Once outside they told us that it was time for ‘Baba’ to rest, and it was inconvenient for him to entertain us anymore.

  The whole set-up gave us the sense that he had no intention of retiring, despite him setting up an NGO against corruption, becoming a follower of Sant Nirankari Baba and claiming to be a reformed man. It took only a few months for this theory to be proven right. Rao was arrested for a daring shootout right outside the residence of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar’s brother Iqbal, in which Iqbal’s driver lost his life. The three shooters, supposedly on orders from Rao, lay in wait at Pakmodia Street, traditionally known as the epicentre of the Kaskar family’s power in Mumbai, and opened fire at Iqbal’s driver, Arif Bael (bael means bullock; here it means buffoon), when he came out of the house to start the car for his boss.

  It is assumed that the shooters were told to kill Iqbal Kaskar but ended up killing Bael instead. Another theory is that Rao knew that Iqbal would not be so easy to get to, but wanted to send a message to Dawood nonetheless. Killing Iqbal’s personal driver sent a message all right, one that travelled all the way to Pakistan and made Dawood seethe with anger. The incident was less of an attack and more of an insult for him. He immediately instructed his man Friday, Chhota Shakeel, to teach the impudent upstart a lesson.

  Rao, over the next three years, went on to be charged with several other cases of extortion, and was back in jail. During this time, he was also questioned in connection with the murder of veteran journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. Dey was shot dead in June 2011 a short while after he left his residence in Powai on his bike. Subsequent investigations revealed that Dey had managed to rub Rajan the wrong way, leading to the don ordering a hit on the investigative journalist. Rao was among the several Rajan aides questioned by the Mumbai Crime Branch in their quest for information about the murder, a logical step due to his prominent position in the gang and his closeness to his boss.

  Three years later, in 2014, the Pakmodia Street shootout came back to haunt him. Shakeel finally managed to find out enough about Rao’s schedule and planned a hit. Rao, who was in Nashik jail at the time, was being produced in the Sessions Court regularly in connection with the trial in the Pakmodia Street shootout. Shakeel hired two shooters, Mohammed Siddiqui and Akhtar Khan, to kill Rao as well as Ashok Satardekar, another old-time Rajan aide.

  The plan, according to Crime Branch officers, was to bump him off when he was brought to the Sessions Court on 4 September. Luck, however, favoured Rao a third time. A few days after Siddiqui reached Mumbai and started staying with Khan, awaiting further orders, the Anti Extortion Cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch got a tip-off that something big was going to go down soon. Police Inspector Vinayak Vast, in charge of the AEC, and his subordinate Jaywant Sankpal, leaned on their informants and pulled out all stops to find out what was in the offing, and on 4 September, they arrested Siddiqui and Khan, seizing a .32 bore revolver and four live rounds from them. The duo had been told explicitly to kill Rao first, and then move on to Satardekar. Life, it seems, has a soft corner for D. K. Rao. No amount of bullets appears capable of killing him.

  The last indicator of Rao’s clout and activity, as well as the fact that prisons in Maharashtra are now second home to him, came in June 2015, when he was lodged in the Taloja central jail. A surprise check of his cell revealed three mobile phones, which were seized by the prisons department. The phones were presented at the MCOCA court where Rao was being tried for a case against him at the time, and the court ordered the Navi Mumbai police to conduct an investigation against him.

  The Hindu, in the very first issue of its Mumbai edition launched on 28 November, reported that when the Navi Mumbai police obtained call data records of the three cell phones and analyzed them, they found that no less than five hundred calls had been made using the three cell phones over a period of five to six months, and a large chunk of these calls had been to international numbers. The prisons department, meanwhile, conducted an inquiry of its own and found four prisons staff members guilty of helping Rao get the cell phones. All four were suspended for a period of four months, and full-fledged departmental inquiries were initiated against each of them.

  The timing of these calls to international numbers is pertinent because Rajan, who is now in the custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation after being arrested in Bali in October 2015, was very much active in foreign countries at the time. Rao is suspected to have been in regular touch with Rajan and several of his aides abroad through these cell phones till the time that his boss was caught and brought to India.

  HITMAN 10

  The Saga of Sunil and Sulaiman

  En route to Dubai

  The man gently toyed with the revolver on the table. Drops of whiskey formed little condensed pearls on his favorite gun. He took a sip from the glass and slid the gun into his pocket. The yacht swayed gently on the Persian Gulf as it headed towards Dubai and one man’s complete freedom.

  ‘Sulaiman Bhai, boss ka phone hai aapke liye,’ a boy in a white shirt said, handing a phone to him.

  The man was wide-shouldered, burly, and of medium height—five feet eight inches. He looked fearless. He had a square jaw, a clean-shaven face, and filled-out cheeks. The eyes were a misleading window. A naïve soul would have mistaken him for the average Indian common man—he looked like a well-fed central government employee. Neither his eyes nor his healthy face—usually calm and collected—betrayed his profession. He seldom smiled, but he didn’t have a grouchy demeanour. He had a deformity in his left ring finger duly noted and filed away in the tomes of various police stations in Mumbai where he was a wanted man.

  The man took the phone from the boy, mumbled a few words, nodded in agreement, and then hung up. He went back to his drinks, pulling the woman sitting next to him closer. He relished the fact that, at that exact moment, as much as he was wanted by the Indian police, he was protected by his beloved boss, Dawood Ibrahim.

  Sulaiman was sitting peacefully, watching the sun drift lazily past the clear waters, when the boy in the white shirt took a seat opposite him and told him that Chhota Rajan, who had by then left Dawood’s gang, wanted him dead. It was six o’clock in the evening, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and up until that point, Sulaiman had been in a good mood.

  Sunil Sawant aka Sautya

  Born Sunil Sawant and nicknamed Sautya, the terror tales of this hitman from the Dawood gang begins from the time he was sixteen and had committed his first murder. He was done being bullied by Bhau Marathe, the brother of a powerful Shiv Sena leader from Girgaum. On a clear day in February 1982, Sautya decided to avenge the insults Marathe had thrown at him. He spotted Marathe sitting near a shop in Girgaum. With the stealth and calmness of a tiger approaching its prey, Sautya walked up to Marathe, who was engaged in a deep conversation with his friend. He tapped Marathe on his shoulder to draw his attention. The moment the unsuspecting Marathe turned, without a words or a warning sign, Sautya dug into his pockets and drew out a chopper. Before a bewildered Marathe could react, Sautya stabbed him like a mad man. A bloodied Marathe fell to the ground. Marathe’s friend and the passersby were too stunned to react and Sautya smirked and sauntered away like a man without a care in the world.

  Sautya was a native of Kaarewadi in Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, and his father worked as a railway ticket collector in Mumbai. A government job meant that Sautya had a fairly comfortable upbringing as compared to other boys who lived in Girgaum. His father put him in south-central Mumbai’s prestigious Marathi-medium school, Chikitsak Samuha Shirolkar High School. It was an old institution, set up way back in 1906 and its students were known for their academic brilliance and stood first in the state’s Secondary School Certificate (SSC) exams. The school has produced some of the state’s finest writers, poets, scientists, economists, professors and doctors. The teachers at the institution were very inspiring too. So it was a surprise when Sautya simply dropped out of school before completing his tenth standard.

  For him were not the laurels of academia. Since the age of fourteen, Sunil Sawant had been emboldened by his own bravura and recklessness. He had formed his own gang while in the Chikitsak School, much to the horror of the staff. His boy gang had three members: Santosh Lad, Manoj Kulkarni and Bachi Apte. Like Sunil, the other three boys were also well-built and sturdy and they infused terror with their mere appearance.

  Now, the world beyond Chikitsak beckoned, and this precocious boy plunged into it with much ado. At the age of sixteen, he crossed over to the abyss, knowing fully well that it was a one-way ticket. Bhau Marathe was no small fish in the pond. His brother was in the Shiv Sena, already very popular in the ’70s as it was advocating rights for sons-of-the-soil. The Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray, was the uncanonised godfather of Maharashtra and his pull with Marathi-speaking Maharashtrians was tremendous. Killing a Shiv Sainik in Girgaum was Sautya’s Valkyrie moment.

  But the throne for the ultimate gang supremacy in the area had come with a battle. Dashrat Rahane was another gangster rising to glory. Based in Kranti Nagar, Rahane had managed to get something that Sautya couldn’t: a friendship with the gangster Amar Naik. Rahane had cast his extortion net around the steel traders and market at V. P. Market, and owed his allegiance to none other than Naik.

  Sautya competed with Rahane for a while, hoping that Naik would be drawn towards him and ditch Dashrath. When he failed to make headway with Naik, he thought he would do away with the competition. He didn’t know how or when, but Rahane nettled him, and he didn’t like nettlesome adversaries.

  It was Raksha Bandhan, the festival that binds siblings to one another. Sautya met his married sister, Surekha Parab, to get his rakhi tied around his wrist. Surekha was his older sister and she constantly fretted about his wayward ways. He handed her a handsome amount as a return gift for the rakhi. She had prepared a sumptuous lunch for him on the occasion. He had just finished his lunch when he was interrupted by a message from his close aide, Avadhoot Bonde. Surekha wondered what had come over her brother—he suddenly seemed all charged and ready to go. He didn’t even wait to say the customary goodbyes.

  Bonde had called to say that he tracked down Rahane; he was last seen in a bar near Lalbaugh, enjoying a drink with his friend Surendra Nair.

  Sautya asked Bonde to wait for him near Ganesh Talkies at Lalbaugh. He took a cab from Bhootachiwadi in Girgaum and reached Lalbaugh around half past three. It was hardly a fifteen-minute ride. Bonde greeted him with a welcoming hug. The men then took their positions outside the bar. Sautya warned Bonde that Rahane was to die only by his hands. Bonde could keep Nair for himself. An hour later, Rahane and his friend Nair both stepped out, sozzled to their gills. But despite his inebriated state, he spotted Sautya and Bonde. Sautya looked at Rahane and smirked. An uncontrolled round of gunshots followed. Rahane and Nair both dropped to the ground, dead.

  And so, by the age of twenty-four, Sautya, having notched two high-profile murders under his belt, got the attention of none other than the Big D, Dawood Ibrahim himself. Dawood was always scouting for men like Sautya. Good breeding but wrong wiring. Men who had been consumed by and convinced of their invincibility. Men who were fired up from within. Men who did not hesitate to snuff out lives; who did not blink when their quarry collapsed in a helpless mass. Men who were antiheroes. Men whose hearts were black as coal dust, men whose souls were mortgaged to the devil himself.

  After Dashrath Rahane was dispatched to the dungeons of hell, Sautya finally won over Amar Naik. He filled Rahane’s shoes easily. They were big ones to fill, considering that Rahane had entrenched himself as Naik’s pointman. But it took no time for Sautya to fill the hearts of traders with dread at the mere sound of his footsteps. Meanwhile, Sautya ignored Dawood Ibrahim’s overtures. It was a practical choice as, having bumped off Rahane to gain the attention of Amar Naik, he didn’t want to upset Naik by switching loyalties. But Dawood did not like being rebuffed and so he did what he does best—played Machiavellian.