Scratching the underbelly

BOOK REVIEW

Mumbai’s masala comes from money, movies and the mafia. An investigative journalist scrapes a little dirt to offer a glimpse of the last and least attractive facet.

The financial capital of India, Mumbai is known for its wealth-creation and glamour. Every day, thousands of youngsters walk into this vibrant metropolis, attracted by its rags-to-riches stories. The city also attracts the attention of the home-grown mafiosi who have terrorised it for four decades, prospering with the rest of the economy.

Khallaas: An A to Z Guide to the Underworld, written by Mid-day’s investigations editor J Dey, captures the darker side of the city’s underbelly. Almost every moneybag of the city will have some anecdote to narrate about the Mumbai mafiosi who made millions of dollars running an extortion racket and then invested this money in legitimate businesses like real estate and Bollywood.

Dey’s book is full of anecdotes and details of how the Indian underworld made inroads into the system over the decades, using all available tools, from corruption to threats, to thrive and prosper in the city. Though many Bollywood films have highlighted and even glorified the mafia, Dey’s book is right to the point and does not take any sides.

The book describes the code language used by the underworld to scuttle the police’s detection system. Most of the international calls, especially to Pakistan and Bangladesh, are tapped by the Indian authorities.

Take for example “lift-wali building”, which means a revolver in which bullets move from the bottom to the top of the cartridge while firing, or “bhai”, which stands for underworld don. Not many outside this murky world understand this code language, often used by the underworld and by its informers.

With an experience of over 15 years covering Mumbai crime for various newspapers, Dey was present during many covert operations by means of which the Mumbai police tried to break up the underworld network. In the last 10 years, more than 600 people accused of a nexus with the mafia have been killed in chilling “encounters”, and the book gives details on a few of them.

Although Mumbai’s underworld really shot into the limelight with the 1993 serial bomb blasts which killed 257 people and shook the Indian authorities awake from their deep slumber, it had been present in the city since the late 1970s, when the mafia started its operations from the docks by smuggling gold, textiles and watches from West Asia.

From the docks, underworld groups later made inroads into the corporate sector by terrorising the unions in the early 1980s. Thousands of cases were registered in various police stations across the city, especially in the Kurla-Ghatkopar belt, where criminals owing allegiance to various factions of the underworld stabbed and killed various union members and mill-owners.

The underworld then shifted its attention to Bollywood, which was running mainly with the help of black money. Investments in the real-estate industry, narcotics and terrorism soon followed.

By early in this decade, the underworld had spread its tentacles into almost all sectors of the economy and even made contacts with global terror cells. This led the Prime Minister’s national security advisor N K Narayanan to issue a warning that terror syndicates are using the stock markets to launder money.

This book is a must-read for every law-enforcement officer, and a good read for anyone who wants to know more about Mumbai’s underbelly.

KHALLAAS
An A to Z Guide to the Underworld
AUTHOR: J Dey
PUBLISHER: Jaico
PAGES: 224
PRICE: Rs 275