‘On 15 August 2003, at around 2.30 a.m., a team of officers intercepted a Tata Sumo near Ujjwaldeep Hotel at Gandhi Nagar corner, near ST stand in Kolhapur. The team of officers was led by API Ravindranath Angre.
‘When Manchekar alighted from the Tata Sumo, he was told to surrender. But Manchekar, who had managed to evade the police dragnet for several years, stupidly fired two rounds from a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver at the police. In retaliation, and in self-defence, they had to fire at Manchekar, who was injured. They rushed him to the nearest government hospital, the Chhatrapati Pramila Raje Hospital, where he was declared dead before admission.’
Thane police chief Suprakash Chakravarty told media persons, ‘Manchekar had managed to give the police the slip for the past several years, but this time we tracked him down in Kolhapur and his killing will cripple the activities of his gang.’
Nobody wondered why Manchekar had fired back at the police, knowing that he could get killed. Or about the fact that he was cornered, not in Belgaum but in Kolhapur, 110 km away.
Angre is a veteran of fifty-two encounters, but Manchekar was his biggest hit, wanted as he was in thirty cases of murder and extortion. Within a week of the encounter, the cops also picked up Santosh Naik alias Maharaj, who was the backbone of the Manchekar gang. He, however, managed to survive an ‘encounter’ with the police.
Maharaj’s calls had terrorized his victims. Unlike other dons, who would start with khokhas, or crores, Maharaj was pragmatic. He used to call and say, ‘Maharaj bol raha hoon, dus peti mere aadmi ko de dena.’ (This is Maharaj calling. Arrange for 10 lakh. My boys will collect it from you.) If the victim cried or begged for sympathy, the amount was slashed by 50 per cent and reduced to Rs 5 lakh.
The police apparently spared Maharaj’s wife, who was identified as Avantika; she was not even booked for complicity. But the specially designated MCOCA court sentenced Manchekar’s seventy-two-year-old mother, Lakshmibai Manchekar, to life imprisonment in the Khanvilkar murder case – thus bringing down the curtains on the gang.
FORTY
The Encounter-proof Gangster
The mayhem continued as the executioners of the Mumbai police force took the law into their own hands. In twenty years, the Mumbai police had killed more than 1,500 gangsters in encounters. Nobody lived to tell the tale – save one.
D.K. Rao survived not just one but two police encounters. The first one was executed by a woman police officer; the second was especially shocking – he survived 19 bullets shot at him by one of the top encounter specialists.
Mumbai has been home to thousands of gangsters. It has been called Gangland and Mafia Nagar, the crime capital of the country. Amidst all the myths and the noir tales about the city (archived in the dossiers of the Mumbai police), D.K. Rao’s story is the most bizarre for several reasons. Rao is less than five feet tall and unimpressive looking – no aura of menace about him. He has a balding head, a bandaged leg – and has never met his boss personally, yet he is Chhota Rajan’s top aide in Mumbai.
Having been in jail very long, Rao is said to be well-versed with the law and can carry on an informed discussion with advocates. Rakesh Maria sums up his chances: ‘He is no pushover. He is a survivor and he is a fox. He is a heavyweight in the mafia whom you have to watch out for. He is to Chhota Rajan what Chhota Shakeel is to Dawood Ibrahim.’
Ravi Mallesh Bora alias D.K. Rao started off as a chindi chor (a petty robber, with a poor standing in the criminal hierarchy). He hailed from a denotified tribe called the Baria; denotified tribes were branded as criminal tribes by the British for over seventy-five years, and they lived a life of hard labour for several generations. Originally from Gulbarga in Karnataka, Ravi Bora’s parents had come to Mumbai to work in the mills. His father worked at Prakash Cotton Mills in Lower Parel.
When he was twenty years old, Ravi Bora was involved in a murder that, according to police records, ‘happened on the spur of the moment’. A little street brawl that went awry, but one that set him apart forever. His name was etched in the police diary, a sign of things to come.
Khalsa College in Matunga–Wadala was the gangster’s hangout. This is where he cobbled his first group of robbers together, in the early nineties, at just twenty. They may have been neophytes, but their loot was not less than Rs 25 lakh in the year 1996.
Ravi Bora was the Gabbar Singh among his gang of forty. He did all the meticulous planning and, together, they staked out targets for days. Most of the time, the target was a van on its way from a bank vault with money. In a short span of time, Ravi Bora turned out to be a big headache for the Mumbai police and he had cases registered against him at several police stations: from Khar, Mulund, Vile Parle and Bhandup to Dahisar.
With such a record, the law soon caught up with him. It was while he was incarcerated in Thane jail in the early nineties that Sunil Madgaonkar alias Matyabhai decided to induct the boy into the Chhota Rajan fold. Soon, he found himself in the company of thieves like Babbu Pandey alias Rohit Verma, Vinod Matkar and Jaggu Shetty alias Fakira, who was known to have pulled off a Rs 66-lakh robbery in 1994.
Once out of prison, Bora took to carrying the identity card of a person called D.K. Rao, who worked at a bank. It is not known whether he stole the identity. The name stuck because of an encounter with a policewoman. At the end of 1997, in Juhu, a police sub-inspector, Mridula Lad, had been informed about a robbery that was being planned in the area by Ravi Bora and a man called Aware.
When the duo reached the spot, they realized that the police were onto them. Aware fired a round at Lad, but she ducked. She fired back, and the bullet hit Ravi Bora on his leg. He has a limp to this day. Aware escaped and is still at large. Ravi Bora was nabbed, and based on the identity card he had on him, he was recorded in the police diary as D.K. Rao. The name sat well on him. Ravi Mallesh Bora was a chindi chor, but D.K. Rao grew larger than life to take on the responsibility for Chhota Rajan’s vast crime syndicate in India.
Both Mumbai’s cops and the mafia still tell the jaw-dropping story about the miraculous rising-from-the-dead of D.K. Rao. It happened on 11 November 1998, around the time when Chhota Rajan and Dawood Ibrahim were into reprisal killings. Chhota Rajan claimed that he wanted to eliminate everyone who had participated in the 1992 serial bomb blasts to prove his ‘patriotism’, while Dawood Ibrahim’s gang was eliminating Chhota Rajan-associated businessmen and rivals. D.K. Rao was on one such mission to kill Shaikh Mohammed Ehtesham and Baba Moosa Chauhan, when he almost met with his maker.
Shaikh Mohammed Ehtesham and Baba Moosa Chauhan had already been sentenced by the special TADA court in Mumbai. Shaikh Mohammed Ehtesham was charged with having helped with the landing of arms and ammunition in Raigad, Maharashtra while Baba Moosa Chauhan was charged with being one of those who had gone to film star Sanjay Dutt’s residence to deliver AK-56 rifles. Both Ehtesham and Chauhan had been sentenced to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment and were in court for their hearing.
At the time, a senior inspector of the Mumbai crime branch, Ambadas Pote, known for his loyalty to his job and his great daring, intercepted Ramesh Pujari, Raje Gore, Jairam Shetty, Vipin Khanderao and D.K. Rao in Dadar. The spot was Sayani Road, near Khed Gully, just below the Zandu Pharmaceuticals building. Rajesh Vithal Kamble, who was 18 years old then, recalls, ‘The goons were in a Maruti Esteem and suddenly the cops came in a Maruti Gypsy van and intercepted them. They didn’t give them any chance to open fire. They just riddled their bodies with bullets and put them in a police van.’
D.K. Rao matter-of-factly recounts the story of the day he came back from the dead. ‘Raje and Vipin died on the spot but Jairam, Ramesh and I were still alive when Jairam, unable to bear the pain, called out “Amma!”. That was it. The cops realized somebody was alive and fired more shots at us. Jairam slumped dead and so did Ramesh. I got the extra bullets in my feet. There were four bodies on top of me. I was conscious throughout. Once they took the police van to the morgue at the KEM Hospital in Parel, I got up
and screamed that I was alive. I got nineteen bullets that day and lived to tell the tale. I don’t know how I survived. People say that I know yoga and may have held my breath. But I will not tell you that because I really think it was my destiny to live.’
For ten years after his recovery from the bullet wounds, D.K. Rao found himself shut away from the world in prison cells across Maharashtra. Somewhere along the way, developments within the Chhota Rajan gang helped him climb the ladder.
Chhota Rajan’s trusted aide, Sunil Madgaonkar alias Matyabhai, had been killed in a police encounter in 2000. Matya was a formidable gangster, and the one man Chhota Rajan could trust in Mumbai. Former Mumbai Police Commissioner Subhash Malhotra had given him the title ‘Director of India Operations for Chhota Rajan’ in 1997. He had executed three top hits for the gang: East-West Airline chief Thakiyuddin Wahid, businessman Mahesh Dholakia and Arun Gawli’s ace sharpshooter, Ashok Joshi. After that, scores of gangsters from the Chhota Rajan group were locked up in jails under the dreaded MCOCA or killed by policemen – and Matya was one of them.
The day Matya died, Chhota Rajan was afraid he was done for, and fearful that his crime syndicate would collapse. It took more than a dozen of his trusted men to fill Matya’s shoes. But he cobbled together a small group to manage affairs: O.P. Singh, Bharat Nepali, Ejaj Lakdawala, Rohit Verma, Balu Dokre, Farid Tanasha, Ravi Pujari, Santosh Shetty, Vicky Malhotra and, of course, D.K. Rao. Chhota Rajan would probably have laughed if anybody had told him that eventually D.K. Rao would be the one in charge of his entire network.
The attack on Rajan in Bangkok proved fatal for his gang. The wickets started falling one by one. Some were killed by Chhota Rajan himself when he felt that they had defected, others by Chhota Shakeel. O.P. Singh was killed in 2002; Ejaj Lakdawala left the gang and got shot in Bangkok in 2003 (some say he is still alive); Ravi Pujari left to form his own gang; Santosh Shetty also left to form his own gang and declared war on Chhota Rajan; Balu Dokre was butchered in Malaysia in 2005; Bharat Nepali, who left Chhota Rajan’s syndicate to join Santosh Shetty, was shot in Bangkok in February 2011; and Farid Tanasha was killed in Mumbai in 2010. Vicky Malhotra manages the country’s north-east operations for Chhota Rajan. And so, by a process of elimination, D.K. Rao remained the sole survivor in Mumbai from among the inner circle of Chhota Rajan’s men.
In 1997, Matya had told an Indian Express reporter on one of his court visits that the gang easily made Rs 300 crore annually and that much of it was siphoned off to their boss through hawala channels. Rs 50 crore or so was kept with Matya, who disbursed the money among the gang members, both inside and outside jail, and also used it for procuring weapons. After D.K. Rao took on the mantle, it is anybody’s guess how many zeroes have been added to the figure.
In the underworld, pedigree matters. A small-time robber can hardly expect to rise to the top. But D.K. Rao proved he could outlast all the other men in the gang. In the words of Rakesh Maria, chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, Maharashtra, ‘At the Arthur Road jail, where Rao was lodged with rival gang members, he stood his ground and got a lot of respect.’
The way he killed his one-time colleague O.P. Singh, in 2002, is testimony to D.K. Rao’s deadly skills – Rakesh Maria calls him ‘the Black Mamba’. (The Black Mamba holds on to its smaller prey until there is no muscle movement, and against larger prey, it keeps striking repeatedly.)
When Balu Dokre filled Chhota Rajan’s ears about O.P. Singh leaving the gang to either defect or start his own gang, Chhota Rajan wanted Singh to be liquidated. He squealed about his whereabouts to the Indian enforcement agencies, who picked him up from the New Delhi airport in 2001.
O.P. Singh got wind of Chhota Rajan’s plans to finish him off and thought he was safer in jail, but he hadn’t reckoned with Rao. Rao, who was lodged at the Arthur Road jail at the time, used his influence with the jail authorities to move to Nashik jail where Singh was doing time.
Rao knew he would need help to kill his target; he was a tall, big man, and smarter than him. So he also got a few of his cronies shifted to Nashik jail, where they lay in wait for the opportune moment.
O.P. Singh was the complete antithesis of Rao. While Rao had barely completed his tenth standard, Singh was a chemistry postgraduate from Mumbai University and he hadn’t started off in crime. He was employed as a quality control officer at the Mazgaon docks when his elder brother Arun Singh, a professor at Jhunjhunwala College, was killed in the early nineties by the Amar and Ashwin Naik gang.
When Singh named them in his police complaint, he was targeted too. In 1995, during one of his frequent drinking sprees at a bar, he came in contact with some Chhota Rajan men, to whom he spilled his story. Rajan, who at the time was desperately looking for a brainy and educated strategist, thought Singh was a great find for the syndicate. He was quickly inducted into the gang. Though he started out with small robberies, he was ‘fully absorbed’ when he and his accomplices gunned down a security guard during an abduction attempt.
Soon Singh’s crime graph soared; a number of cases were registered against him at Goregaon, Pydhonie, Khar and Malabar Hill in Mumbai. His meticulous planning and research impressed Rajan and Singh graduated to being his Man Friday in 1997.
Singh also initiated contacts with several policemen and politicians for Rajan, who was then based in Malaysia. Rajan then invited him to Kuala Lumpur and elevated Singh to the position of his advisor and planner. Singh managed to keep himself off the police radar for a long time and by the time they discovered him, he was holed up in Bangkok, from where he helped Rajan with his unfinished business: such as bumping off Mirza Dilshad Beg in Kathmandu in 1998.
Later, when there was a bid on Rajan’s life on 15 September 2000 by Chhota Shakeel’s men, Singh took charge of the gang and coordinated with Rajan’s lawyers and the Thai media. It is said that Singh was instrumental in Rajan’s escape from Smitivej Hospital in Bangkok. He also helped expand Rajan’s network in the northern and western regions of India.
Why Singh decided to leave the gang and strike out on his own is not clear. Clearly, there was a lot of resentment directed against him from the Rajan cadre because he was educated and smart. On the other hand, it could be that there was some financial dispute that prompted Chhota Rajan’s decision to bump him off. But to this day, the brutal killing of Singh at Chhota Rajan’s behest, and at the hands of D.K. Rao, remains a spine-chilling story. There were no guns used and it all happened in the confines of a jail.
It was a Sunday and there was a cricket match on at Nashik Jail. D.K. Rao was playing, along with thirteen of his henchmen and O.P. Singh. It was a matter of minutes before Singh found himself kicked, beaten and strangled to death. The person who reportedly strangled him was Rao, using some jute rope at hand. The then Inspector General of Police (Prisons) U.D. Rajwade, while suspending jail officials and instituting a probe, admitted to the possible connivance of the staff in the killing. The Nashik Road police registered a case of murder and conspiracy under section 304 IPC against Rajan aides D.K. Rao, Sarfira Nepali, Bala Parab and ten others for the killing.
Most of the gang members involved in the killing of Singh were later killed in encounters with the police, including Sarfira Nepali and Bala Parab. Only Rao escaped.
Rao apparently managed to climb to the top of Rajan’s crime syndicate because he was not only loyal (he once planned to travel to Dubai to kill Dawood Ibrahim during his daughter’s wedding), he is said to have shared the loot with his network of men. It is said that Rao still recruits small-time robbers into the gang. These robbers eventually end up as contract killers, but Rao always takes care of his men. He arranges for their bail and provides for their families. It is said that he is the first gangster who actually took a smaller share of the loot for himself and disbursed the larger share among his men.
In 2006, when the crime branch was tapping Chhota Rajan’s phones, they intercepted several conversations between him and Rao, then lodged at Arthur Road jail, which fuelled a
major controversy. Rao had apparently asked for Rs 5 lakh from Rajan, which he needed to pay Sitaram Mhetre for the reinstatement of 11 jail officials suspended in the O.P. Singh case. Mhetre at the time was a state minister in the home department. The conversation was placed in the MCOCA court and Mhetre had a tough time defending himself and protesting that he did not know Rao.
Rao was released from prison after 11 years of incarceration and made a posh home for himself in Dharavi. He calls himself president of the Anti-Corruption Forum and is teaching yoga on the terrace of his building. But the police are watching him closely; they keep slapping cases against him to try and keep him behind bars.
FORTY-ONE
Ashwin Atones
Ashwin Naik, who spent ten years in prison – five in Tihar Jail and five in Yerawada in Pune – was released on 1 May 2009, after he was acquitted of his wife Neeta Naik’s murder and fifteen other cases including murder, drug peddling and extortion. He was given a rousing welcome by his neighbours and his two children at his home in Chinchpokli.
Ashwin had been brought to Yerawada from Tihar in 2005, to stand trial for Neeta’s murder. On 31 January, the MCOCA court acquitted him. He now stays with his teenaged son and daughter in Chinchpokli.
In an interview to Velly Thevar in The Telegraph in 2012, Ashwin recounted his five-and-a-half-year stay at Tihar. ‘Having done time at various prisons in Maharashtra, Tihar was the best. Kiran Bedi, the doughty IPS officer, transformed the prison into a veritable living space. At one point of time, she would not even allow the staff to walk in with a danda so as not to demoralize the prisoners. After all, there were undertrials lodged in the prison too.
‘The prison was well organized and had a lot of facilities. There were several hospitals in all the jails that came under Tihar. The hospitals were manned by professional Keralite nurses and I was constantly spending time at the hospital because I was handicapped and needed attention. Sometimes, the nurses would even share their dabba with me and we sometimes flirted with them. There are several prisons in Tihar, extending right up to Rohini. At that point of time, there were six jails, now there are ten under Tihar. I was in Jail No. 3. The prisoners were clubbed together in alphabetical order.