The police then entered the building and stormed flat number five, looking for Anil Khubchandani, the only one unaccounted for. He was found dead in a pool of bullet casings and his own blood in the middle of the flat which, like most of the ground floor, was pockmarked with bullets. The unidentified man who was shot down along with Buwa was later identified as Vijay Chakor, a constable posted with the Yerawada Central Jail in Pune. While there have been theories and counter-theories over the years, what he was doing there remains anybody’s guess.

  More than 2,500 bullets were fired in the operation, which lasted for four-and-a-half hours. The official term for what happened at the Lokhandwala Complex on that November afternoon was ‘encounter’—defined as an armed face-off between policemen and criminals. In reality, what had transpired, on live television no less, was war. A clear message had been given out by the police: no matter who you think you are; you shoot at us, we shoot you down.

  For six hours, the BBC covered the entire operation live, something that would only repeat itself during the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008 which, incidentally, also occured in November. The footage aired by the BBC showed the entire locality struggling to calm down long after the operation was over. Women were crying, children were screaming, men were trying to comfort their families while wiping the sweat off their faces.

  The aftermath was almost anti-climactic. Deshmukh drove to the D.N. Nagar police station and, as per procedure, registered a formal complaint against Maya and the five other dead men. They were booked for attempt to murder, attempt to commit murder of police officers by dangerous weapons, deterring public servants from discharging their duties and unlawful assembly. The last section left even some policemen chuckling as the FIR was finetuned. The Indian Penal Code designates an assembly of five or more persons as ‘unlawful’, ‘if the common object of the persons composing that assembly’, the IPC quotes, is a show of criminal force, to resist the execution of any law or to commit any other offence. While what Maya and his men did that afternoon overshoots every word of this definition, it is, nevertheless, a section that is applicable by law. One can only imagine the moment of dark amusement that police might have gone through while adding the section to the FIR.

  Gharal, who was rushed to the Hinduja Hospital, recovered from his injuries and retired as ACP, Vakola division, in 2015. The entire team was recommended for Gallantry Awards, but the commendation was soon overshadowed by controversy following allegations and questions about the authenticity of the encounter. A petition was subsequently filed in the Bombay High Court, which the HC dismissed.

  Some say it was a tip-off from informants that brought the police to the building. Others allege that it was Dawood who gave the order to eliminate Dolas as he was getting too big for his boots, to the extent of disrespecting Dawood. But almost everyone agrees that Maya’s growing arrogance and escalating criminal activity in the city was the cause of his downfall. It either angered the police, rubbed someone close to Dawood the wrong way or incurred the wrath of Dawood himself.

  Another theory is that Dolas was a casualty of the rift between Dawood and Rajan, which had begun brewing in 1991. Rajan later gave an interview to a television news channel, in which he claimed that Dawood had started picking off the shooters recruited by and loyal to Rajan in order to cut him down to size.

  Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the seventy lakh rupees which Dolas apparently had in his possession which had gone missing. No one could locate the money or even offer an opinion on where it had gone. All speculation seemed to indicate the involvement of the ATS officers who actually risked their lives to contain the shooters that day.

  Whatever the case, the encounter gave a much-needed boost to then police commissioner S. Ramamurthy’s career. The now-retired cop had been at the receiving end of daily brickbats over the ever-rising menace of the underworld and the increasingly-frequent murders—a by-product of gang wars—being committed in broad daylight. Maya Dolas contributed in no small part to this, and the Lokhandwala encounter cemented Ramamurthy’s image as the man under whose leadership the police had given a fitting reply to the criminal underworld of the city.

  In death, Dolas gave a new lease of life to Ramamurthy’s career.

  HITMAN 5

  The Mama of Maharashtrian Mafia

  The Graph of Girangaon

  A monolithic business entity with several big companies working under the aegis of the same leader is often referred as a megacorporation. And mafia gangs in Mumbai are like megacorps. There were many ganglords, smugglers and underworld chieftains before Dawood Ibrahim set foot in the Mumbai mafia. But it is he who has the dubious distinction of corporatizating the underworld.

  Dawood compartmentalized gang operations and made his henchmen managers of each wing of his several businesses. Dawood totally decentralized the command structure and stepped in only when his intervention was absolutely necessary. Thus, there was someone to look after the extortion business; another to oversee film territories abroad; a group focused on money-laundering and money-cleansing in India; one section in charge of cricket-betting, horse-racing and fixing sports….

  However, most other gangs believed in a centralized command, with the leaders ruling over their men with an iron fist. Their insecurity that their henchmen would topple them and take over the gang would not allow them to delegate powers to their managers.

  Among all the gang leaders, Arun Gawli was the most insecure one. He never wanted to share his power and authority. Even when he was imprisoned, he handed over the reins of his gang to his wife Asha Gawli. Unfortunately, while Asha Gawli was a highly venerable figure in the hierarchy, managing a gang with its multifarious operations was beyond her capacity.

  Gawli’s frequent incarceration and his constant hide-and-seek with the law all fuelled the aspirations of the second-rung members in his gang. While Gawli was focused on carving a niche for himself in politics, his lieutenants began earning their stripes and registered their upward climb in the gang.

  ‘They are called “sikkas” in the underworld lexicon. A currency that keeps the gang’s name going in the market. For every gang, there is at least one sikka at any given time that the gang capitalizes on. For more than seven years, Arun Gawli’s sikka was Sadanand Pawle,’ a Crime Branch officer said. Gawli trusted Pawle because he did not embezzle money, and kept up the gang’s fear quotient in people’s minds,

  Pawle, like several mobsters, joined the gang due to unemployment and the frustration of a jobless youth unable to feed his family.

  The infamous mill strike of 1982 had rewritten the destiny of the city with blood, gore, violence, death and a relentless cycle of crime.

  Dr. Datta Samant, a reluctant union leader, had announced a textile mill strike in 1982, resulting in the displacement of over 250,000 workers who had a long history of strikes under the presumption that there would eventually be a rationalization of wages on par with that of other industries. At the time of the strike, a skilled textile worker was drawing Rs. 1,500 while an unskilled worker was drawing Rs. 700/800.

  The mills had begun a downward spiral long before Dr. Samant called the strike. The textile workers, who knew they were underpaid as compared to workers in the pharmaceutical or engineering industries, decided to approach him to take up their case. They were tired of the official industry union, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), which was affiliated to the Congress-I, and had failed to take up their cause. Dr. Samant had fought for workers in other industries, and had a great fan following because his agitations always resulted in unheard of wage hikes. He was reluctant to call for a textile workers’ strike as it was not his field of work. But t the workers surrounded his house in Ghatkopar and refused to leave until he buckled.

  The fact that many companies, which initially had pleaded an inability to increase wages later agreed to pay more, added to Samant’s and the workers’ resolve not to let the balance sheets come in the way of their ‘exorbitant’ demands.

  The strike received national coverage. The government of the day refused to budge despite the economic losses suffered by the city and the industry. The eighteen-month mill strike, one of the longest in India’s labour history, proved to be the death knell of the already-struggling textile mills. Most of them shut down or moved their plants outside the city after the strike collapsed. Three lakh textile mill workers lost their jobs.

  By this time, there were hardly any textile mills running to full capacity, and international brands like Finlay’s, Calico and Binny’s lapsed into history. Though the strike was blamed, every mill had its own reason for closure. Some closed because of the competition that was the result of globalization, some because they were labour-intensive and others because of family feuds.

  The workers in the mills were predominantly Maharashtrians from south Raigad and Ratnagiri. The Konkan coast was very poor in those days, and farmers had to fall back on one rice crop and mangoes. Thus, the cotton mills were the warp and weft of the migrant’s life. For trade unionism, they would align with the communists, but as the communists did not believe in religion or culture, the workers soon came under the sway of the right-wing Shiv Sena. The Shiv Sena found its early cadres amongst the mill workers of the Konkan region.

  There were also workers from other Indian states who eventually put down roots here. Slowly, chawls that were just ten minutes’ walking distance from the mills evolved into multicultural spaces driven by common middle-class values.

  The chawls and two-storeyed tenements, like the BDD chawls at Worli, housed workers in small and cramped rooms. Alcoholism was rampant, as was moneylending. Bootleggers and matka dens thrived. To escape the squalid living conditions, workers and their children spent much of their time outside the house. Children lived and survived on their wits. Sociologists talk of communalism breeding here.

  But there was something else that was being bred—organized crime. Gawli worked in Shakti Mills (the now infamous mills where a young photojournalist was gang-raped on 28 August 2013), following in the tradition of his parents. The family of another Maharashtrian ganglord, Amar Naik, sold vegetables in Dadar, but his parents worked in the mills. Gangster D. K. Rao’s parents worked in a mill, as did the parents of Anil Parab. By the early ’90s, the Maharashtrian and non-Maharashtrian boys who grew up in Girangaon (the village of mills), working their way up the mafia ladder by stabbing and killing for money, realized that they were sitting on a goldmine.

  South Mumbai was cramped and bursting at its seams and there was no place for expansion. The Bandra-Kurla Complex was being promoted as an alternative, but it lacked proximity to south Mumbai.

  The real-estate mavens, the mafia and the politicians realized that the only way for Mumbai to go was south-central. Girangaon had to make way for the new face of Mumbai, probably the next financial nerve centre of the city. One by one, the mills that had survived Dr. Samant’s strike closed. The money at stake was running into crores. Some mills were sold for four hundred crore rupees onwards and others were pegged at six hundred to nine hundred crore.

  By the ’90s, Girangaon had become the next Kurukshetra.

  The big players like Dawood had aligned with the builders, while the Gawlis aligned with the mill owners. Everybody benefited, except the mill workers. And the new players, both among the mafia and Maharashtra’s politics—and possibly even the politics of New Delhi—would come from the money of Girangaon.

  Pawle’s Promotion

  Sada Pawle, like his peers, was the product of despair and penury.

  A little over five-and-a-half feet, but very muscular in build, with a perpetually menacing look on his face, Pawle channelized his pent-up physical energies and sense of a hopeless future into crime. Pawle and his imposing physique became the epitome of power. All Pawle had to do was to make a phone call and the person at the other end would start quaking in his shoes.

  The youngest of three siblings, Pawle had an elder sister, Hausabai, and a brother Anand, who worked in Central Railways. Anand eventually got married and moved out of the family home to live in Central Railway quarters, while Hausabai, too, got married and went to live with her husband, Gundu Tawde.

  Dagdi Chawl old-timers remember Pawle as a young mill worker who stayed near Gawli and played kabaddi very well. Kabaddi was among the more popular sports played by residents of the chawl and Pawle, when he was not busy beefing up his physique in the chawl’s gymnasium, would play on Rama Naik’s team. Whenever the team had a disagreement with whoever was playing against them, Pawle was the first to get aggressive.

  Pawle’s belligerent tendencies soon became his signature in Dagdi Chawl, and word spread around that he was not someone you wanted to get into a fight with.

  Like hundreds of mill workers in the 1980s, Pawle was drawn into a life of crime partly due to sheer frustration over the ongoing disputes between the unions and the mill owners, but also because of the lure of money. People like Naik and Gawli were getting famous, throwing around money and living in style, and everyone wanted to be like them.

  Pawle was recruited into the gang by Gawli’s mentor, Rama Naik, in 1987, along with others like Dilip Kulkarni and Bandya Adivarekar. The gang survived mainly on extortions, and there was a constant need for henchmen like these to pay a visit to businessmen who thought defying the gang was a good idea.

  In a year, Pawle was among the favourite musclemen of the gang. He was short-tempered, scary and his blows hurt. What more could a boss ask for in a henchman?

  In July 1987, Naik was killed in an encounter by sub-inspector Rajendra Katdhare. Naik was at a saloon in Chembur getting a haircut when Katdhare reached the spot. There are some who suspect that Dawood Ibrahim, who had already moved to Dubai and had started eliminating his rivals one by one, played a role in Katdhare learning about Naik’s whereabouts the day he was killed.

  The Byculla area was at the time ruled by a triumvirate of gangsters: Naik, Gawli and Babu Reshim. That same year, Reshim was killed by Vijay Utekar, a D-gang member who had been severely beaten up by Reshim a couple of years earlier over a local dispute. Dawood sought out the revenge-hungry Utekar, befriended him, and put a gun in his hands. Utekar took care of the rest. In one of the most daring murders in the history of the city, he stormed into a police cell at the Jacob Circle jail and shot Reshim dead inside the lock-up. The stunningly audacious murder included lobbing grenades at the police lock-up to blow open its doors.

  With this, the reins of the gang fell to Gawli, who became the undisputed king of Byculla and nearby areas. A lot of the henchmen who earlier worked under Reshim and Naik began working for him. Among these was Sada Pawle, whose propelment to a place of such importance in the gang would have perhaps surprised himself as well.

  Pawle was as merciless as he was coldblooded. The true mark of an inhumane killer, according to several Crime Branch officers, is the way he kills. It is easier to point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, they say, than to stab someone repeatedly while geysers of blood erupt from his body till life has drained out. It takes real nerve to be able to keep stabbing your target while he is writhing and screaming in pain, and even more so to keep doing it till the final scream; much harder than squeezing off a few rounds from a gun at a distance and running away before the target has even hit the ground.

  Of the eight to ten cases of murder and extortion that were registered against Pawle in his lifetime, the first few were committed with daggers. Pawle only started using guns later on in his career, when the underworld started procuring sophisticated pistols and AK assault rifles. His preference for using blades and his bare hands was one of the reasons why he became a name that struck fear in the hearts of people. They never knew when Pawle was going to get angry and pounce upon them.

  Pawle’s Powerplay

  An apocryphal story is related about a top politician in Thane who made several statements against Gawli. The story goes that Pawle managed to enter his office in a casual manner, uncocked his gun, kept it on the table and began staring at the politician without blinking. The politician, who had heard about Pawle’s reputation and was well-known for his bravado and arrogant swagger in the corridors of power, could not stand Pawle’s icy stare beyond a minute. He didn’t say a word lest Pawle pick up the gun and empty the whole magazine into him. Subsequent to the meeting, the politician never dared to utter a word against Gawli.

  By 1990, Pawle had become Arun Gawli’s sikka. Gawli knew that if he sent Pawle on a job, he did not need to worry about it getting done. First, a henchman would call the target and tell him that he was speaking on behalf of Sada Pawle. If that was not enough for the target to start sweating in rivulets, Pawle himself would speak to him. If the target showed even a hint of defiance, Pawle would pay him a visit. Defiance was something that Pawle had no patience with.

  Pawle also proved his loyalty to Gawli in 1990 when the latter was seething with the intense desire to avenge his brother Pappa’s murder in Mahim. Using all his contacts and goodwill, Gawli found out the name of the man in whose name the car used in the killing was registered.

  Gawli then told Pawle that he wanted this man—Manoj Kulkarni—at any cost. Pawle spread out a dragnet to catch Kulkarni and the efforts paid off when Pawle learned that Kulkarni was coming to Mumbai to attend a wedding in his family.

  Pawle found out where Kulkarni was staying and, on the morning of the wedding, as Kulkarni was about to leave, Pawle, along with his trusted aide Vijay Tandel and two others, reached the spot in a white Ambassador car, wearing formal shirts and trousers. The Ambassador was an official police vehicle back then, and the formal shirt and trousers are still associated with policemen in plain clothes.

  Posing as Crime Branch officers, Pawle and his team told Kulkarni that he needed to be questioned and bundled him into the car. Kulkarni was indeed questioned, but not in any police establishment.