The mystery of Indian gangster Dawood Ibrahim

Few names strike fear into the hearts of Indians quite like Dawood Ibrahim. From a Mumbai slum, he built his ‘D Company’ into the country’s biggest and most feared mafia. Today he still remains at large…

Is there anybody on Earth more elusive than Dawood Ibrahim?

The Indian gangster turned-terrorist has been on the run for almost thirty years, and there’s been little Delhi can do to reel him in. Dawood, head of the ‘D Company’ mafia he founded in the late 1970s, is an enigma-at-large.

Cops still hunt him, gossip rags guess his every move, and barflies whisper his name as if he was stood next to them.

They’re not entirely wrong. Dawood hasn’t lived in Mumbai since 1993 when 13 bombs he helped plant blew swathes of it to the ground, and killed 257 people. Then, he fled to neighbouring Pakistan. According to most sources, he’s still there.

But D Company henchmen still run Mumbai, India’s so-called “Maximum City.” They pimp and push, smuggle and skim. D Company goons slip vast shipments of contraband into the city, extort the stars of Bollywood, and fix cricket. He even backs militants in Kashmir and northern Nigeria.

***

In truth, D Company is more than a mafia. It’s “a transnational criminal organization, a terrorist group, and an economic actor,” wrote one US academic. And it remains “both a national and regional security threat for South Asia.”

It all started very differently. Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born in 1955 in Dongri, a poor, chaotic corner of central Mumbai, heavily Muslim in a Hindu-dominated city. Dongri was barely the size of two football pitches, but it had gang pedigree. Crooks hawked stolen goods at its Thieves’ Bazaar, and the city’s biggest dons— Karim Lala and Haji Mastan—both cut their teeth in Dongri after the Second World War.

Dawood’s father, Ibrahim, was a local police constable. But picking up a steady wage was never on the cards, and Dawood and his brother Shabir got involved in theft, robbery and fraud from an early age. Dawood was a meticulous planner with a quick temper. He got his break in 1974 aged just 19, when he jumped a courier for Haji Mastan, banking US$200,000 in the process.

Ibrahim senior marched the boys to a local police station but the chief, sensing an opportunity, told Dawood and Shabir to keep fighting Mastan. “Instead of taking the law in your hands,” he said, “you can do it with the law by your side.”

It was a red rag to Dawood, ever the planner, and the young gangster kicked off a vicious war against Mastan and his allies. In 1981 assassins cornered Dawood and Shabir at a gas station. They killed Shabir but Dawood escaped.

Within three years all three assassins would be dead—but the violence was too much for Mumbai’s cops, and they indicted Dawood for murder. The don fled to Dubai, where he made fortunes in gold smuggling and hawala, an informal remittance still popular in some parts of the Middle East.

He called his home the White House—as he did every residence owing to a fascination with the US presidency—and hosted crime bosses and Bollywood stars.

Dawood left D Company’s day-to-day to his lieutenant Chhota Rajan, and throughout the ’80s it became India’s biggest mafia by far.

“Right from Bollywood to horse racing to the share market, he aimed to spread his tentacles everywhere,” wrote S. Hussain Zaidi, a chronicler of Dawood’s underworld career. “There was to be no megabucks business that was not controlled by his cartel.”

But things were about to change. In 1991 India’s economy opened up, ending decades of hermetic socialism. Overnight, the black markets dons had controlled became legitimate. Japanese TVs, or Chinese radios, could be bought in a store down the street. Mumbai’s docks were no longer its gangsters’ back yard.

The city’s police saw their chance. Hundreds of mobsters were gunned down in so-called “encounters,” where cops shot first and planted guns later. “We cleaned this place up,” one former officer told me defiantly, last time I visited Mumbai. “We did whatever it took.”

***

In 1991 D Company members held a shocking gun battle with police, all of which TV crews captured.

A year later Dawood ordered a hit on a rival in broad daylight. Mumbaikars were repulsed at the violence. “This was not merely one gang taking revenge on the other, or extracting its pound of flesh,” wrote Zaidi. “It was a daring daylight attack on the system itself. The killing and injuring of policemen was unheard of in Mumbai’s chequered mafia history, and it seemed Mumbai was turning into another Sicily.”

In 1992 Hindu nationalists choreographed the destruction of a 16th-century mosque in northern India. Ensuing riots left 2,000 mostly Muslims dead.

Almost half lay in Mumbai, the country’s biggest religious melting pot. It was a sobering reminder of partition in 1947 when a retreating Britain hastily redrew communal lines, and two million died. The grisly episode lit Dawood’s taste for revenge.

On Friday, March 12th the following year, 13 bombs ripped through political buildings like the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India headquarters and the office of the Shiv Sena, the far-right party who’d called for the mosque demolition. Mumbai’s noir was hitherto dominated by gang warfare.

Now, wrote a BBC journalist, “Dawood’s gang had leapt beyond the violent protection of its commercial interests, and into a political vendetta wreaked indiscriminately against an entire city.”

Dawood Ibrahim had brought Mumbai to its knees. D Company had become a terrorist outfit.

***

The FBI and Interpol placed the don on their most-wanted lists. Mumbaikars clamoured for his arrest.

Chhota Rajan, a Hindu, was repulsed by the attacks and took his slice of D Company’s business to Kuala Lumpur. Dawood and other capos decamped to Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city.

There, in another White House, they laid low—and lived under the protection of Pakistani authorities keen to keep a bargaining chip over their rival neighbour.

Dawood paid Pakistan its dues. He bailed out its Central Bank with a massive cash loan, and armed the Lashkar-e- Taiba, a militant group bent on wresting control of Kashmir back from India. He even gave cash to Boko Haram, the Islamist group in northern Nigeria.

In 2008 Lashkar gunmen carried out blasts and raids across Mumbai— including a four-day siege of its iconic Taj Mahal hotel—killed 31 people. Dawood, insiders said, smuggled the men into India.

India placed a $25 million reward on Dawood’s head, and it seemed justice might be just around the corner. But he kept evading capture. D Company grew quieter, more clinical. It got deeper into gambling— especially over cricket, India’s national obsession.

***

In 2008 the Indian Premier League was christened, a twenty-over tournament now worth almost US$$7 billion.

In 2013, India Today report revealed that Dawood’s brother Anees ran a massive IPL betting ring, bribing star players and threatening others to throw games. In 2018, a D Company goon told an undercover news reporter that he could swing two-thirds of all games worldwide.

In 2015 Australian cops captured Chhota Rajan in Bali, Indonesia. D Company isn’t the streetfighting mafia it once was, but it still runs Mumbai’s underworld. And its leader is still on the run, shielded by geopolitical struggles and a mutual nuclear threat.

With that in mind, no wonder India’s most infamous criminal has never been caught.

---

Sean Williams is a reporter, journalist and co-host of ‘The Underworld’ — a podcast that exposes the secret world of transnational criminal networks. To listen, visit stitcher.com

---

---

Esquire now has a newsletter – sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox.

Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit ‘Like’ on our Esquire Facebook page and ‘Follow’ on our @esquiremiddleeast Instagram and Twitter account.