Jan 25, 1999

Violence is not his style, so he uses psychological warfare instead to continue running a thriving extortion and kidnapping racket from the safety of his prison cell.

By Sumit Mitra, Subhash Mishra and Sayantan Chakravarty

In December last year, a lanky youth wearing Nike shoes and a gaudy jacket visited the south Delhi residence of Rajesh Rathi, chairman of Rathi Super Steel. His dress was misleading, for he soon broke out in chaste Bhojpuri, inquiring if there was a chauffeur's job going. "Draivoor ki jayiga khaali ba?"

The household's supervisor bundled him out, but not before volunteering the crucial information that his master's firm used hired cars and if he was interested in a job he should rather check with the car rental company. Eager to help the struggling youth, the supervisor rattled off the rental agency's name and telephone number.

A few weeks later, on January 4, when a team of south Delhi Police led by Inspector Raman Lamba intercepted a kidnappers' gang staking out Rathi's son, 22-year-old Gaurav, one of the five people arrested was the youth from north Bihar. Abdullah Khan Rehman, the gang's "spotter", had in fact found a job with the car rental company, manipulated the roster to get behind the wheel of a car hired by Rathi Steel and, after securing access into the office, closely monitored Gaurav's day-to-day movement. Rehman's "recce report" was perfect to the minutest detail. At 8.30 a.m., his Honda City would pass Nehru Place. Between 9.15 and 9.25 a.m. it would be at a particular spot near the office-cum-factory at Ghaziabad. He also detailed the usual stopovers on the return journey.

Before the arrest of the gang, the police thought the ransom bid to be the handiwork of a network of extortionists based in India. But now the interrogation of the arrested persons and scanning of the transcripts of their telephone conversations show that the network is far more widespread than believed. The ransom, if realised, would have got sucked into the coffers of a Gulf-based crime syndicate. The operation in India, however, was left to a resident mastermind.

He is Om Prakash (Babloo) Srivastava. The 37-year-old don has been in jail for more than three years now. But surprisingly, his spies and henchmen are everywhere. Till a few weeks ago, he kept in daily touch with them through an array of cell phones and a seemingly unending supply of pre-paid SIM-cards. Interrogation of some of Babloo's button-men in a couple of recent kidnap attempts in Calcutta and Delhi has blown the lid off a spider's web of armed criminal youth spread across the length and breadth of the country. Investigations reveal that he also has at his command an army of "spotters" -- educated young men and women who bluff and bluster their way into the prey's secrets. To zero in on details like cash flow of business, illegal transactions, sequestered assets and their daily movements.

At the centre of the web is the imprisoned spider. And it seems the Uttar Pradesh Police have looked the other way while Babloo, extradited from Singapore on a murder charge and accused in 45 cases of murder, extortion, rioting and possession of illegal arms, plotted his operations from inside the 8 x 8 ft Cell No. 1 at Naini Jail in Allahabad.

The clockwork precision with which the web operates was evident in the December operation in Calcutta. Babloo had targeted Raju Punwani, owner of the city's Lytton Hotel, for kidnapping and a subsequent Rs 5 crore ransom demand. The operation failed due to a "SIM-card lapse": Babloo thought a particular card in his cell phone did not have a prototype with the state police's Special Task Force (STF) but he was mistaken. However, the STF staff marvels at the meticulous care with which Babloo's agent Archana Sharma, a svelte Lucknow University graduate, had set up home in a rented flat in Calcutta to "research" the target. She contacted the hotelier's chartered accountants to get a fix on his business cash flow. And she planned the getaway, including cars and air tickets for the team members and the kidnapped. Says an STF member: "Archana even created a Bengali identity for herself."

The recent revelations, which began trickling in after the arrest of the alleged frontman of Dawood Ibrahim in Delhi, Romesh Sharma, point to the umbilical links between the Gulf-based master gangster, his satellite groups led by Abu Salem and Chhota Shakeel, the Malaysia-based Chhota Rajan and Babloo, the kidnap-artist in jail. Amod Kumar Kanth, joint police commissioner, Delhi, who busted the Sharma ring, says that the large crime syndicates are intertwined by mutual interests "though there are occasional skirmishes among them, leading to killings".

It is estimated that the gangs directly commanded by Babloo were successful in at least 20 known extortion operations last year. In some cases, some wealthy people were targeted for kidnapping, but the threats apparently fizzled out later and the trails got cold. There could be financial "settlements" in most of these cases. Like that of Babu Bhai Singhvi, a businessman in Bhuj; Jagdish Ramani, an oil dealer of Indore; or Satish Shetty, the wealthy owner of a large ceramics factory in Hubli. Several abduction attempts have reportedly been foiled by the police. But the reality is many of these targets have paid up and will not talk about it. Alternatively they have just fled the country. Like Delhi garment exporter Subhash Rastogi, a forex dealer in Mumbai or the owner of a south Delhi hotel, whose son was the target of an abduction attempt in 1997. A highly placed source in the CBI's special task force says that the Babloo gang collected at least Rs 100 crore as ransom last year and is now threatening more than 40 people, mostly industrialists. "If you look at organised crime as an industry," the source says, "Babloo is one of its captains. He has the largest income."

At Naini Jail the huge iron bars mock at the popular notion about its seclusion. Besides supplying Babloo the cellular phones, a gaggle of jail officials bent backwards to cater to the don's needs. An investigation report prepared jointly by Allahabad District Magistrate Neeraj Kumar and SSP Pramod Tewari notes that the jail's senior SuperintendentR.N. Upadhyay even put extensions of his office and residential phones into Babloo's cell. The report talks of the jail constables shuttling between Allahabad and Lucknow with bhaiya's instructions to his lawyers. Notable among these hired guns is Vijay Kumar Srivastava, son of a retired district judge, who has confessed to the investigators of having received Rs 10,000 as "fee" for passing each SIM-card to his weighty client. Rs 15,000 was paid every month to the jail's head warden for posting "suitable staff" in Cell No. 1. A jail staff member even visited Calcutta to hand over arms to Babloo hit man Manjit Singh.

Babloo's reach extended much beyond the jail administration. A property dealer has confessed that he arranged sweetheart deals at Babloo's insistence in favour of the son of a BJP minister in the state Cabinet and a former private secretary to Mayawati when she was the state's chief minister. The resident editor of a Hindi national daily was his main conduit for information on the Calcutta shootout after Babloo was forced to switch off his mobile phone.

The intelligence on the underworld is teeming with misinformation and disinformation on inter-gang rivalries. Last year, Delhi Police intercepted a telephone conversation between Sharma and Abu Salem in which the former promised to liquidate Babloo in prison. Police thought it could be the signal of a permanent rift between Babloo and the Dubai dons. The impression was strengthened by the reported murder of Babloo's ally in Dubai, Irfan Goga, allegedly at the hands of Dawood's brother Anees. (Goga is reported missing).

However, in the light of the new facts, the police are more cautious in presuming things about the so-called gang wars. It could be possible, the police now say, that Sharma was merely trying to impress Salem, the hot-head, while he had abiding links with the powerful inmate of Naini prison. The link is evident from the seizure of a dollar cheque worth Rs 50 lakh from Sharma's Delhi farmhouse by the police raiding party. The cheque was part of a Rs 1.5-crore ransom settlement that Babloo had earlier collected from Gujarat meat exporter Gautam Adani. Even more startling is the attack by a Babloo gang on Rastogi, a Delhi garment exporter now living abroad. Rastogi had fired at his attackers, injuring Jaspreet Singh alias Ginni, a 28-year-old desperado who managed to escape and has since become Babloo's chief henchman in north India. Police sources say that Rastogi began getting threatening calls after he'd applied for the Delhi dealership of a well-known textile brand and had, in reply to the brand-owner's questions, given out the details concerning his assets, including those not shown in his company's balance-sheet. Sharma reportedly accessed this information and then began Rastogi's grilling by the Babloo gang.

The son of a technical school principal, Babloo would perhaps have grown up like any other child in a middle-class home if he'd not fallen in the company, as a law student in Lucknow's DAV College, of Ram Gopal Mishra, former Congress MLC and a mafia don of Sitapur. His Congress links grew stronger in the '80s. By 1985, when the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was crusading against power brokers within the party, Babloo had become the general secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Youth Congress. For him, like many others of his ilk, the white khadi was a convenient mask. He'd by then been blessed by master-kidnapper Raju Bhatnagar (involved in the jailbreak by Charles Sobhraj) and was even plotting with Bhatnagar to abduct film star Amitabh Bachchan.

After Bhatnagar's death in an encounter in the late '80s, Babloo shifted his base to Delhi where he took shelter in godman Chandraswami's house. Babloo became the battle-axe of the tantrik, known in the early '90s for his links with former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. Babloo was smart enough to leverage his new political connections in Delhi for gaining the confidence of the big-ticket smuggler-dons of the times -- Dawood and Chhota Rajan, who operates from a yacht off the Malaysian coast. The confidence of the big syndicates brought him the prize assignment to eliminate L.D. Arora, an intrepid customs officer in Mumbai who was killed in 1993 after his transfer to Allahabad.

Till the Arora murder, Babloo was a bit player in the underworld, now he was on to big time. He fled to Dubai after the murder and apparently reinvented himself in the world of big money, glitz and sleaze. There he dined, on his own admission, with such silver-screen idols as Juhi Chawla, Raveena Tandon, Mamta Kulkarni, Saif Ali Khan and Shah Rukh Khan and spent a day with cricket star Mohammed Azharuddin. But in Dubai, he obviously did a lot more than party. By 1994, he'd set up his own extortion gang in the desert city, and had found in Goga a daring second-in-command. He targeted from there a gaggle of Mumbai's diamond merchants, builders and industrialists. The hallmark of his operation is the war of nerves he initiates through threatening calls. It turns the prey into pulp. Seldom has he used violence. Police sources say that is a remarkable change in him -- from a contract killer to a master of psychological war. In one case, he extracted Rs 50 lakh from a Mumbai jeweller simply by threatening to fax to the Enforcement Directorate some documents pertaining to his hawala transactions.

Just how effective his long-distance extortions became is evident from the kidnapping in June 1994 of a businessman in front of Express Towers in Mumbai's Nariman Point. The ransom demanded from him: Rs 2 crore. However, a police officer on patrol, who witnessed the incident, alerted the control room and the police caught the kidnappers after a shoot-out. A gangster was killed in the firing. Weeks later, Babloo called the same businessman from across the sea and nonchalantly said: "You've caused me a harm. I have lost a man. Now you must pay me Rs 4 crore."

Intelligence sources say the man broke down -- not only did he make the full payment via a hawala channel through Singapore but visited Dubai to personally "apologise" to Babloo. With his eventual arrest in Singapore by the Interpol, Babloo obviously lost the strategic advantage of operating from a safe haven in the Gulf. But he still has a pointman in Dubai in Sanjay Khanna, who stays in touch with him in Naini Jail and carries out his orders.

No police agency has an actual count of Babloo's gang members. The guess varies from 100 to 250. But everyone agrees that the gang's catchment area is rich and well-defined. It comprises the educated, unemployed middle class aspiring to live better, and only a push away from seeking that life in the world of crime.

In none of the 45 cases against him has the police been able to produce strong witnesses. Babloo told a CBI team: "You can't prove a single case against me because you won't find witnesses. In the end, I shall come out and join politics. Then I'll frame the laws that you must serve."

Some swagger! But he has a right to swagger. The Government has after all failed to even move him out of the range of a cell-site. Babloo's defiance of the state is of a piece with that of a gaggle of fugitives from the law operating from the apparently friendly emirates in the Gulf. The arm of the law is wobbly. It is neither long nor strong.

© Living Media India Ltd