COVER STORY: CRIME

COKE TALES

If you wanna hang out, you've gotta take her out, Cocaine
—Eric Clapton.

Take them out. Ali, the little Afghan peddler, did, and often. To snort, shake and swig at Delhi's most glamorous discos and night clubs where smoke hangs like curtains and price tags read like crazy cell phone numbers. And the calls on his flashy handset came pouring in, not just from Delhi's glam set but also young chieftains of industry, the fashion circuit, the Page Three People, the BMW owners and celluloid stars. They acknowledged Ali, or Naqibullah, as the king of the cocaine ring, they held celebratory parties in his name, and they would beg him to sell them the fix every day. Little did these rich men and women know that detectives were monitoring their every call, every lurid word, every moaning exchange. So even as "high" society sniffed and paid through their nose, the policemen began to get a whiff of a big story.

Close to midnight on August 24, Ali the refugee's luck ran out. As it did for Neeraj Vadera, 44, Yanchia to Delhi's sniffing brigade, part-owner of the 21-storeyed Hans Plaza hotel on Barakhamba Road. Vadera and Ali had exchanged six calls earlier that day. When the seventh one was made, this time from Ali's mobile (9810247778) at 7.47 p.m. on Vadera's cellphone, the hotelier was preparing to soak up some glam at the Hyatt Regency hotel with his fiancee Komal Rampal. Ali promised to hand over 2 gm of cocaine, and the rendezvous was set for the Out gate of Hotel Ambassador in the Lodhi Road area.

When the Michelin tyres of Vadera's shining 4,400cc black BMW screeched to a halt, Ali was already waiting. As was a team of Delhi Police's special cell, led by Inspector M.S. Bhasin. Ali fished out a little pouch of white powder, and Vadera handed him Rs 3,000. Then, as they exchanged their goodbyes, the long arm of the law hustled them inside waiting vans, and whisked them away from the good life. Says ACP Rajbir Singh of the Special Cell who painstakingly developed information on the narcotics peddlers and went after Ali: "As policemen, our job is not to catch merely small time buyers and sellers and allow the big fish to swim away. This case has for the first time in Delhi opened up a can of high-profile worms."

In Delhi's "snowing" discos and bars, word of the arrest spread fast. Ali had been caught and he would sing like a canary. Cellphones were rapidly switched off; landlines remained unanswered; and as the heat rose, several in the glam circuit even booked their tickets to cooler climes. Back at the Lodhi Road police station, inside its non-air-conditioned confines, Ali and Vadera began to sweat for more reasons than one. As the heat began to rise, they cracked. Within hours, a 37-year-old Nigerian national on a fake passport, and another from Swaziland, a year older, both couriers of cocaine to Delhi, were picked up. Their interrogation gave the inside picture of a powder business that spans continents and has its roots somewhere in the lawless interiors of Colombia (see map).

Over the next seven days, a tale of conspiracy and international trafficking in narcotics slowly unravelled, through hours of questioning of the four men arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. Vadera was sent to jail by a special judge, while the three foreign nationals were sent to police remand. India Today's investigation into Ali's mobile number had its own shocking story to tell (see chart). The scrutiny of thousands of calls made to Ali and by him to his clients since January 2001 (during which period Ali's peddling career graph really soared), has now become a major concern for the Delhi Police. Powerful reputations stand to be destroyed by a few calls made, perhaps a few grams of cocaine lines cut.