Nana and his band of black marketers were arrested later by the police and beaten up in the lockup. But Goonga was specifically instructed by Rajan Nair, the reigning don of the area, to take care of the ‘chokra log aur unka bail’. Within days, Nana and his minions were released on bail.
Now that they had carved a reputation for themselves in the area, everyone was scared of Nana’s gang. The entire Tilak Nagar and Chembur area began talking about Nana in hushed whispers.
At this time, the mafia scene was dominated by Rajan Nair’s gang – the Rajan-Rama company – in the northeastern suburbs. Rama Naik took care of Byculla, Lalbaug, Parel, Dadar and Worli. He also had connections in Bhandup and Kanjurmarg because of his affiliation with Ashok Joshi.
When Nana came out of jail, Rajan Nair called for the boy and praised his courage in front of everyone. ‘Achcha hero giri kiya woh din (nice work that day),’ he said, referring to the police beating and patting an elated Nana on his back.
Rajan Nair soon inducted Nana into his group, and Goonga, earlier affiliated with the Rajan Nair gang, became closer to Rajan ‘Anna’. In the seventies and even the early eighties, the combined gang was regarded as far more powerful than even the Dawood Ibrahim gang or the Pathan mafia.
Nana had idolized Rajan Nair even before he had begun worshipping Mithun Chakraborty. He ruled the roost from Chembur to Ghatkopar, RCF to Kurla East, and parts of Sion.
Nana’s father Sadashiv was a worker at Hoechst, in Thane. Nana had three brothers, Prakash, Deepak and Akash, and two sisters, Malini and Sunita. The family hailed from Lonar village in Satara.
Jobless and a Class 5 school dropout, Nana had not been able to find a respectable vocation for himself. He and his family lived in the lower-middle-class area of Tilak Nagar. The building was a two-storey structure, with ten rooms on each floor. Each house had two rooms, with a shared bathroom and a common verandah.
After dropping out of school, Rajan fell into bad company and joined a gang of boys led by Goonga.
From his teenage years, Nana had played cricket with people like Sadhu Shetty, Vilas Mane, Mohan Kotian, Avdhoot Bonde and others in the Tilak Nagar area, which was full of wide open spaces and large grounds. They called their cricket group the Diamond Cricket Club. Goonga was Nana’s mentor and the ringleader of the gang of jobless youths in Tilak Nagar’s Chembur area.
In the early eighties, jobs were hard to come by and young men in the lower-middle-class colonies were desperate. When they could not get a steady job, they began selling movie tickets in the black market. In the era of single-screen theatres and limited choices, black marketers thrived and made considerable amounts of money. Nana was barely twenty-five years old, but he was adept at avoiding the cops. He did brisk business.
After a while, he became so clever that Goonga elevated him as the head of the black-market ticket-sellers at Sahakar. Today’s multiplex generation, so used to booking tickets on the internet, would have been worn out by the tedious task of getting a cinema ticket in those days. Each suburb had just one or two single-screen theatres and tickets were hard to come by. Though Ghatkopar East had the Odeon Theatre, Sahakar in Chembur catered to customers from Mankhurd to Sion East to Chembur, Shell Colony, Pant Nagar, Sixty-feet Road, Garodia Nagar in Ghatkopar East and, of course, Tilak Nagar.
Each theatre had two ticket counters, one for current booking and the other for advance booking. At the current booking counter, cinegoers could buy tickets just before the show started. If the window was closed, you could fall back on the boys hawking tickets outside the theatre. The price for these tickets was steep, sometimes double or even three times the original. The problem arose when the police swooped down on them suddenly, once in a while, especially when they miscalculated the popularity of a new release. In those days, only a big movie, a Rajesh Khanna or Amitabh Bachchan starrer perhaps, managed advance bookings and made the black marketers happy.
Slowly, the black marketers started working in collusion with theatre owners. They sold only a few tickets through advance booking and kept the current booking counter open for just a short while. A major chunk of the tickets was funnelled out to the black marketers. Profits were split between the theatre owners and the black marketers, who had formed a cabal. Each theatre had a group associated with it and outsiders were not allowed to do business there unless they were dealing with some standalone movie featuring B-grade stars.
Goonga and Rajan, along with their friends from the Diamond Cricket Club, were in control at Sahakar. Like other theatre owners, the management at Sahakar decided to bow to the wishes of the black marketers without any fuss. They opened the current booking counter only as a formality, and the income sustained the whole gang for months, until the time of the lathi charge.
Nana’s infamy had grown in the last couple of years after his first brush with the law outside Sahakar. Then, one day, Rajan Nair was killed by a rickshaw driver at Esplanade court at the instance of Abdul Kunju, Nair’s archrival. Nana was devastated, and decided not to rest until he had avenged his boss’s killing. The murder of Rajan Nair alias Bada Rajan catapulted him into the big league. Nana was rechristened Chhota Rajan. The name stuck.
The first thing that Chhota Rajan’s men did in Ghatkopar was enforce an impromptu bandh. All shopkeepers were asked to down their shutters. In those days, bandhs were the prerogative of the Shiv Sena or the communists – this bandh was a first for the mafia.
Meanwhile, Kunju was running for his life. Rajan chased him like an angel of death; wherever Kunju went, Rajan seemed to know he was hiding there. Chhota Rajan had taken charge of the gang, and finding Kunju and killing him had become a matter of prestige.
Finally, Kunju surrendered to the cops, thinking he would be safe in jail – but Rajan stalked him even in police custody. He fired at his target when he was being escorted from the court to jail. Kunju survived, with a bullet injury.
Rajan followed this up with an attack at J.J. Hospital, but Kunju, who seemed to have been blessed with a cat’s proverbial nine lives, survived again.
Rajan’s pursuit of Kunju impressed many a mafia boss across the city, including Dawood Ibrahim. Now, all the major gangs in northeast Mumbai wanted Rajan to join their gang. Kunju had managed to escape again, but his pursuer’s stubbornness caught Dawood’s attention.
Dawood had heard about Rajan while dealing with his mentor Rajan Nair in the matter of the Amirzada killing. When he saw his persistence, his planning and execution, he thought it would be worthwhile to work with the boy. In Dawood’s mind, everything happened for a reason; there was a plan and an agenda that brought people from varied backgrounds together.
Dawood had something in mind for Chhota Rajan and he made his move before the Pathans or Haji Mastan could think of roping the boy in.
Acting swiftly, Dawood invited Rajan to his gang headquarters at Musafirkhana and subsequently into his gang. It is said that no mortal ever refused the invitation of Dawood, and for Rajan, it was a dream come true. Dawood was even bigger than Rajan Nair, of course, and for Rajan, who had lived on a diet of Bollywood films where mafia dons were larger than life, Dawood was the apex of mafiadom. He had an aura that was akin to the dons of Hindi movies.
That Dawood had invited him to his house so graciously floored him. But Rajan was alone in his delight. Not a single one of his gang members liked his association with Dawood.
They felt that even without an association with Dawood, they were in the big league, part of the syndicate. Joining hands with Dawood, they argued, would reduce their stature – though it would undoubtedly increase their clout. Rajan had a hard time convincing his team that the affiliation could lead to overflowing coffers. Plus, they would graduate from street ruffians to real mafia men.
That did the trick. Soon after, Rajan joined the Dawood gang and managed to get Kunju killed while the latter was playing cricket at Ghatkopar. Rajan had now become a name to reckon with.
Soon, Chhota Rajan rose to become Dawood’s right-han
d man – and the don then elevated him from the position of right-hand man to left brain. When Dawood escaped from Mumbai in 1986, Rajan stayed put and managed his finances and the gang’s affairs with considerable skill and dexterity. He was a natural. His down-to-earth nature, lack of arrogance and humble background ensured that he managed people well.
Barely a year after Dawood’s relocation to Dubai, he realized he needed his manager with him. Also, the Mumbai police had launched a massive crackdown on the gang and Dawood knew he could not afford to let Rajan go to prison.
In 1987, Rajan fled India and joined Dawood in Dubai. He continued to display his managerial prowess there and expanded Dawood’s business in Mumbai.
But Rajan, a loyal fan, never felt a greater sense of accomplishment than when he met his favourite actor at a gathering in Dubai. He was awestruck and his first meeting with the star left him dumb; he hugged Mithun Chakraborty repeatedly and kept holding him by his arm.
Eyewitnesses recall that they had never seen Chhota Rajan behave in such a manner with anyone. He fawned over the actor so much that even Mithun, for whom being accosted by crazy fans was an everyday occurrence, seemed embarrassed.
Nana got himself photographed with Mithun that day – ensuring that his Tilak Nagar gang could see the august company he kept. From selling tickets for his idol’s movies to breaking bread with him – that was the mark of true success.
EIGHT
Baptized by Bapat
Until the 1970s, the Maharashtrian mafia were yet to make their presence felt in the underworld. They had no real concept of territory, clout or influence, as they had no use for such things then.
The first gang to make its notorious entry into the Mumbai police’s dossiers was the Golden Gang in the early 1970s. It started out as a small group of thieves operating around the Byculla railway station, where they stole goods from stationary trains. The gang had two outstanding qualities: they were extremely proficient in the practice of their vice, and even better at not getting caught. The group, which until then was without a leader, now wanted to be known as a gang, so they randomly chose the name ‘Golden Gang’.
The name stuck. The members of the gang came from Byculla, Parel, Dadar and Chinchpokli. They were Maharashtrian youth who had not been able to pursue higher education and belonged to dysfunctional families. Their lives were anything but golden, and they believed that affluence might alleviate their sufferings.
Similarly, Amar Naik’s nameless gang was originally formed by Ram Bhatt, whose stronghold spanned the Grant Road areas of Congress House and Kennedy Bridge, till Dadar. The one thing Amar Naik was uncomfortably aware of was his lack of resources in his war with the Gawli gang. As he was also overtly anti-Potya and anti-Golden Gang, he decided that aligning with Ram Bhatt, a local thug, was a safe bet.
Naik’s gang was known for using the guerilla technique of weakening a rival gang’s hold by attacking its matka dens. The gang had started using a cab as a getaway vehicle after covering the number plate with a piece of cloth. They also pillaged the matka dens while brandishing swords – but never used them on anyone. The sight of the swords was enough to terrorize the owners and they immediately emptied their coffers for Naik’s gang.
Their confidence growing exponentially with these easy wins, the gang then went after liquor dens. A sword and a few proclamations – ‘Aamhi bapat gang aahot’ (We are the Bapat gang) – sufficed. Their individual identities remained secret as they entered the targeted shops and dens with their faces covered. The only thing the police had on them, in fact, was a small but significant detail – one of the members was referred to as ‘doctor’ by his mates.
The doctor in question was a man called Bhogale.
Bhau Torsekar, who had once been a senior of Bhogale’s in college, recounts the following story. He lived in the same area as Bhogale, and often bumped into him. Once, Torsekar recalls, he found Bhogale and Amar Naik sitting in a restaurant enjoying missal pav. Spotting Bhogale, and with no idea that the man next to him was Amar Naik, Torsekar headed straight for the former, intending to give him an earful about his activities.
He said, ‘I heard you are unleashing terror in the vicinity.’ There was silence. Bhogale could not say a word.
Torsekar continued, ‘And I heard about this man called Amar Naik. Naik tar lukhhach aahe, pan tula akkal nahi?’ (Naik is just another loafer, but don’t you have a brain?)
Naik was furious to hear himself referred to as a ‘lukhha’. His big aspiration had always been to be a gang leader, and here was Torsekar, a skinny little weakling, calling him lukkha. Naik rose to charge at Torsekar – but Bhogale stopped him.
He explained to Naik how he and Torsekar were from the same college, and told Amar Naik that Torsekar was only chastising him as he usually did and meant no disrespect towards the ganglord.
Naik backed off, but Bhogale decided to ask Torsekar why he had called them lukkhas. They were at Anand Bhawan, at Delisle Road (near Chinchpokli station) and Torsekar, between mouthfuls of missal pav, started explaining why he considered them lukhhas.
Torsekar was a well-read man. He was himself interested in stories of the mafia and had read extensively about the Sicilian mafia. He knew about Lucky Luciano’s biography and legendary singer Frank Sinatra’s connections with the mafia. He told Amar Naik bluntly that all his gang did was commit petty theft, which even a street thief could do, yet they used swords. This was hardly going to get them to an elevated position in the underworld.
Torsekar then began to relate the story of New York’s Lapke gang (part of a fictional drama called Gangs of New York), which extorted large sums of money from bread factories in the city. New York consumes an enormous amount of bread every day, and the Lapke gang ensured that the bread factories flourished, just as they flourished in return. Lapke demanded a cent for each load produced by each of the factory owners, in return for protection. In a few years, he had earned a sizeable fortune, without any bloodshed.
Torsekar said this was the hallmark of a big gangster. Quiet menace, not pillaging shops with the laughable waving about of swords.
Torsekar’s reasoning made sense to Naik, and he began to see how he’d failed to get the bigger picture. The ganglord was quick to apply the newly learned principle in the Dadar bhaji market. He introduced a ‘bapat’ price, which was 40 per cent of the original price of goods. Thus, a bapat rate became big currency in the Dadar area – and Naik started reaping cash and respect from it.
Now, Naik was a goon and made a show of ogling any women who passed through the Dadar market or were visiting Plaza Cinema. He was particularly drawn to a brahmin girl who was a regular visitor to the market. She had a mesmerizing gait. Torsekar recalls, ‘It was almost like that of a supermodel walking the ramp.’
Her walk, unfortunately, also brought out the worst in the men of the Naik gang. Naik was particularly vulgar in his derision of the poor girl. He said the girl walked the way she did because she had a 50-paise coin stuck between her butt cheeks. The girl began to be called Bapat. Whenever she came to the market, there were shrill whistles and catcalls and comments like ‘Ae Bapat, kuthe challi? Ae Bapat, bagh kashi chalte! Ae Bapat bolavte mala!’ (O Bapat, what are you up to? Look how Bapat walks! O Bapat, are you calling me?)
We asked Ashwin Naik about this story when we met him, but he just smiled, neither confirming nor denying it.
In 1983, ‘doctor’ Bhogale managed to procure a country-made revolver and it soon got about that Amar Naik had a sharpshooter in his gang. No one knew that Bhogale could not even shoot straight.
Over a period of time, Naik’s clout and connections increased. In 1985, he began to enter into strategic alliances with other gangs in the area. His first alliance was with the Walji Palji brothers in the Prabhadevi area. The duo was notorious, and known to be extremely ruthless. For some inexplicable reason, they swore allegiance to Amar Naik.
Naik became so well connected that during the 1985 corporation election, his gang threa
tened to stop a Parsi councillor from contesting from Dadar unless he paid protection money. And he did not allow the Shiv Sena to put up any banners or hold rallies in Dadar, although it was their stronghold.
When the independent Parsi candidate agreed to pay up, he was allowed to contest in the area. He turned out to be the only candidate who held rallies in Dadar. No one else was allowed to enter the area for campaigning, and the police remained mute spectators.
Despite all his machinations, the Shiv Sena won the elections and it was then that Amar realized that the Shiv Sena had real clout. He decided that if he had to remain in power, he would have to ally with them. This, he figured, would be politically beneficial to him – and would also allow him to strengthen his gang.
Amar did not know that the sword that empowers can also kill.
NINE
The Byculla Company
This was his first assignment as a hitman. He had never held a gun in his hand before.
It had been a couple of years since he joined the Chhota Rajan gang, but he had never got an assignment. He liked to call himself Robin, which was not his real name. It was a mask that took attention away from his real persona. His short and unimpressive physique made him the butt of cruel jokes, and they called him Wangya – brinjal – instead.
Today, he planned to reinvent his past and earn his stripes. Henceforth, he decided, his name would inspire awe in the minds of everyone in the city and he would be elevated by several ranks in the gang hierarchy.
He had borrowed a cab driver’s khaki uniform and tucked the gun into his trousers in the small of his back, as he had seen actors do in Hollywood.
He managed to enter the Andheri Metropolitan Court at 2 p.m. No security person, no cop, no lawyer tried to stop him, or even thought his movements suspicious. His diminutive build did have some advantages.
At exactly 2.10 p.m., when the court was in session, this tiny man walked in with aplomb, fished out his gun and opened fire on a man standing near the witness box: Hansraj Shah.