Dawood Ibrahim, India’s D Company, and the Mumbai Attacks
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Hey, what's up?

Hello, hello, welcome to the Underworld Podcast, where we dive into the secret world of transnational criminal organizations, scams, gangs, and all that fun stuff. I am one of your hosts, Danny Gold, and I'm here with Sean Williams. And yeah, we've been doing this a few weeks now, Sean. I think we're...

We're almost getting the hang of it. We're actually recording this before we launch. So I don't know if you guys have like a ton of feedback. We haven't listened to it yet, but we will because this is this is for you, the listener. It's not for me and Sean.

No, no, no, never. I mean, you've got to see my setup here is pretty professional, actually, Danny. Like, I've got a half-finished room in a friend's studio. I've got a pop filter made out of insulating material. It's really, it's pro stuff. It's pro stuff. I think we're going to, we can only go up from here, though. Yeah, we probably won't have to record the same episode like four or five times because we keep messing it up anymore. No, not again, probably. That is, that's the hope. But, uh...

But yeah, thank you guys for tuning in and for all the support we've gotten so far. I'm saying that not knowing if we'll get that support, but I'm really hoping that's the case. There could be two of you. There could be 2,000, I don't know. Yeah, we'll get there. Mum's doing it. We'll get there. So, Sean, who are we talking about today? What are we talking about? Have you heard of the word Ibrahim before? I have, just a bit, but I'm looking forward to learning more from your wisdom.

Yeah, this guy started out robbing people on the street, ended up a world's most wanted criminal and terrorist. So he's had a pretty interesting career curve. Yeah. Yeah, give it to me, man. Give me the rundown. Yeah, I mean, yeah, this guy like pretty much ran Mumbai. This guy's pretty much done it all, right? So he starts out the son of a cop.

He sounds productive, which is an admirable skill to have. Yeah, good work ethic there. Yeah, definitely. I

I mean, like four decades after he started out as a gangster, this guy is still his country's most wanted and has made almost as much cash as Pablo Escobar. So he's done something right or wrong. I mean, either way, he's pretty bad, right?

Yeah, I mean, bad, good at being bad, one of those. Yeah, I got you. I mean, that's the whole podcast, right? Yeah, good at being bad. Yeah. I mean, I think like aside from Escobar as well, no single mobster has come to take such a kind of like legendary folkloric character in his hometown's history. So yeah, this is a story of Mumbai's Dawood Ibrahim and his D company. So two questions. How bad were the movies he made? And are we going to talk about Shantaram at all?

Okay, first one, no comment. Probably pretty crap. Second one, we can, yeah. I mean, I've had plenty of conversations over the years about this book. It's basically everyone's backpacker's kind of fodder, right? When I was traveling around Europe 13 years ago, pretty much every guy had one in his bag, as well as Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest. Actually, I have not read Infinite Jest. But Shantaram, yeah, I was in Southeast Asia around the same time, maybe 13, 14, 15 years ago. And this was the book that...

everyone was passing around from one person to another. For those of you who don't know, it's a really good read. It's about an ex-con from Australia who finds himself in the slums of India and befriends all these guys who end up being mafiosos and gets involved in all sorts of criminal shenanigans. It's written in a weirdly poetic way that's kind of off-base at times. He'll talk about how the sun was setting the colors in this woman's eyes. Awful, corny stuff like that, but the story itself is just...

And there was always rumors of how much of it was true and how much wasn't. And I think Dawood Ibrahim was rumored to be one of the main characters in the book or one of the main characters was based on him. Yeah, definitely. He's there. I mean, Gregory David Roberts is the guy, former heroin addict, bank robber who wrote the book. And he admits that it's kind of like based on his real life in Mumbai and half just based on kind of fictional events.

here or there based on people that he met while he was out in India so I mean whether it's true or not who knows but like Leopold's the bar that everyone's meeting and doing shady deals at that's definitely true a bit of a tourist trap these days to be honest but it's definitely good to have a few glasses of beer and spend a few hours in a smoky bar

There's actually an Aussie TV series of the books starting shooting like last October. So I think it's going to be back in the news pretty soon. I'm amazed they haven't done something sooner, really. Yeah, I remember hearing stories that the rights have been bought.

with like famous actor i think leonardo caprio and there's like johnny depp or something right yeah it was johnny depp that's right and there were photos of i think madonna and the slums with him and all that i mean this book was it was the kind of thing where your friend would get it you were traveling with and then you wouldn't see him for for eight days because he was in his room locked in reading the whole thing so i'm kind of i think your story right now you tell you it's going to be the same people just gonna lock themselves in a room and listen to this podcast over and over for eight days

Yeah, do it. And then donate to us, obviously. Yeah, that too. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, Robert's got one thing right about Mumbai for sure. It's absolutely nuts. It's kind of this super city part of India, but totally separate too. You know, like a bit like Manhattan's basically just an island off the coast of America and not really in the country. It's got...

The finance, the movies, the sports, it's like New York, LA, and Chicago rolled into one. And it's massive, right? 20 million people live in Mumbai, which is called Bombay until 95, by the way. And it's the most densely populated city on Earth, three times more than NYC. Some people call it the maximum city, and they're not wrong about that at all. That's another good book about Mumbai. I forget who the author was. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, but Maximum City... Suketu Mehta. Yeah, it's an awesome book. Yeah, and he gets into the underworld too, and the dons and all that, so...

I mean, having read both these books, I've always been fascinated with the city. Haven't made it there. So I'm kind of liking your description and diving into it. Yeah, I've spent a couple of trips in Mumbai, maybe like a month or two overall. And it's one of my favorite places in the world. It's absolute bedlam. To an outsider, it's just completely nuts and crammed, full of people, color. There's insane characters everywhere. Yeah.

There are a few things that make Mumbai tick, right? There's Bollywood, of course, pumping out thousands of movies and making idols of folks like Aishwarya Rai and Amitabh Bachchan. There's the big business, the billionaires of Reliance and Tata, the stock exchange, and there's sport, well, cricket, really. Every field, school, street, it's full of kids and adults playing India's favorite pastime. We're going to get deeper into that later, so brace yourselves because it's my favorite sport too. Yeah, I'm not excited to learn about it, but I'm excited that you're excited about it.

You're going to get excited. I'm going to make you excited about cricket because no one else is. So the only time I've been excited about cricket was that in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I used to watch these Rosses play just for hours and they'd be blasting reggae and it looked like a good time. I had no idea what was going on, but that's the extent of my excitement about cricket. You don't need to know anything. You just sit there and enjoy it.

There's actually an amazing book about cricket in New York called Netherland as well, so I recommend that if you want to learn more. Yeah, it was fiction, right? I remember that won a bunch of awards. Yeah, yeah. It's a pretty awesome book. But anyway, back to India. Back to India for now. Mumbai...

It's like not just the movies, it's not just the finance and everything else. It's actually a city of mobsters from top to bottom. There are famed gangsters like Karim Lala, Haji Mustan, Badabai. The origin of the word thug even comes from bands of professional robbers and murderers who flourished in Mumbai in the 1800s actually.

But above all these guys, legends, scumbags, whatever you want to call them, one man stands head and shoulders above them all. Dawood Ibrahim has made money from just about every inch of Mumbai and much further beyond. His D company mafia has become one of the world's most notorious groups and a political bogeyman on the subcontinent as well. But

But just like so many Dons, Dawood started small. He came from Dongri, a chaotic little district in southern Mumbai where the city thins out into a spit into the Arabian Sea. It's a largely Muslim neighbourhood in a city dominated by Hindus, which is a really important thing to remember by the way. And it's tough, really, really tough. Next to it's the city's famous Thieves Bazaar, where all kinds of dodgy stuff's bought and sold.

Thieves was all... Like, is that a market where thieves who have stolen stuff go sell their wares? I mean, that's just a great name for anything whatsoever. It's pretty cool, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's like something out of a fiction movie. Like...

I'm probably going to get fact checked on this, but I think yes. But like I've been around the area and it's like absolutely crazy. There's just market setting everything you can even imagine. I'm sure there's plenty of black market stuff. I know there's plenty of black market stuff going on too. Yeah.

yeah like this area Dongri it's just a hubbub of like people running to and fro teams of pickpockets and knife wielding hoodlums run riot for decades when Darwood was born in 55 this place is like the size of two football fields maybe but it gets its reputation as Mumbai's baddest hood even today totally mad always full of people home to a bunch of buzzing little markets really cool place but uh yeah pretty shady too

So Dawood's a Muslim kid from Mumbai's roughest corner, and you'd expect him to be as tough as nails too. But his dad's actually a police officer and seems to have raised his kids pretty strictly, by all accounts. It seems that Dawood realises pretty quickly, though, that towing the government line and being a good boy in India like his old man isn't what makes you rich. So from an early age, he gets involved in low-level thefts, robbery and frauds with his older brother Shabir. By the early 70s, the brothers are doing pretty well, and they decide to set up their own gang.

But, you know, that's hardly rocket science in Dongri. It's been a proving ground for Mumbai's biggest gangs since the turn of the 20th century or so. Dons like Karim Lala, Haji Mustan, they both rose up from Dongri from the end of the war till the 60s. Lala was an Afghan who led the Feared Patans, an Indian way of saying Pashto, which is one of the biggest ethnic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They were the big dogs in town for a long time.

Mastan was originally from southern India, but he was a king in Dongri too. And he carved out a pretty successful empire, Hawking Goods from Gujarat, the state just north of Mumbai's Maharashtra that's well known for its diamonds. So all these guys came from the same tiny neighborhood that's only the size of two football fields? They didn't come from there, but they set up shop there.

And I think that's kind of important, right? Because there's all these markets where things are getting bought and sold on the black market. It just seems to have carved out this reputation as a really badass place. I think Mustang was from Tamil Nadu, which is the state that's next to Sri Lanka. Lala's from Afghanistan, but somehow they've worked their way to this little tiny corner of Mumbai. That's pretty telling, I guess. But yeah. So it's just where the money is made, you know, where deals are done, that sort of thing.

Seems so, yeah. It's kind of the downtown for all the Bakshish and the black market stuff going on, yeah. But Dawood's a local lad, so he's actually from the neighbourhood. The thing is, at the time, India's economy was really helping them. It's this unique thing. So, pretty

Put your learning cap on, by the way, because I'm going to do a quick economic history lesson. Yeah, educate me, man. I'm ready. All right, cool. Let's go for it. So the British Raj falls in 1947. India's leadership closes the economy off to the world, and it kind of follows this Soviet model, right? It has five-year plans, giant public sector. It's a founder of the non-aligned movement, which is countries that refuse to at least back the Americans or the Soviets in the Cold War on paper. And it was a democracy, but it was...

The economy was pretty Soviet-shaped, if not completely communist. Basically, all of this means that stuff wasn't easy to find in India during the Cold War, and the Dons made millions humping all sorts of banned goods from outside, and mostly through the docks of Mumbai.

Yeah, there's no money like contraband money, I think, as we've covered pretty extensively already. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And if you wanted bootleg booze or TVs from Japan or China, you went to the dons. Gold was massive, too. A lot of that coming from Gujarat. And they're pretty much keeping to themselves. There's violence, but it wasn't crazy. And the big bosses like Mastan and Lala, they're master dealmakers above all else. As long as they were making cash, they didn't really care about getting into a scrap with their neighbors.

But they're not, like, nice guys, right? I mean, they're extorting the locals, they're running illegal casinos, brothels. That's all fair game, of course. These guys, they're like celebrities in Mumbai, pied pipers for the underworld, right? They partied with the musicians and movie stars and hobnobbing with politicians and royalty. Bollywood lionised them in glitzy shooters starring the era's biggest celebs. They're plastered all over magazines and newspapers every day of the week.

mustan especially he loved the stardom he drove fast cars he wore sharp suits and he produced bollywood movies himself actually if you look him up on wikipedia he comes up as an indian film producer which is quite funny he even manages to stay friendly with the leader of the shiv sena which is kind of like a hindu nationalist cross between the tea party and the kkk i guess yeah they sound uh

pretty awful. I think they're actually in the sequel to Shantaram, which was not as good. They're a big part of it. Oh, really? Yeah, they're shits. They're nasty. Like a nasty, nasty group. Yeah, they're pretty bad guys. But yeah, the amazing thing was that Mustan is a Muslim and he worked for all these grassroots Muslim causes and he manages to make friends with the Shiv Sena, right? So this guy is a pretty incredible deal maker.

I actually visited his niece, I think it was, when I was in Dongri, and she was a local councillor. She's still got posters of him all over the walls, and people were just constantly telling me how great he was. So yeah, I guess you could say that the Dons own the place, basically. I appreciate that. I want a Don who drives fast cars, wears Versace suits, and makes his own movies. Better if the movies are about himself, too. I don't want some quiet guy in the back...

pretending he leads a normal life, wearing glasses, acting like an accountant. Like, give me this sort of guy any day of the week. Oh, yeah. These guys are like, they own the gangster lifestyle, right? But then that doesn't last forever. So in 1991, Soviet Union collapses. The Gulf War smashed oil prices all over the world, and it forced India to finally open its economy up.

Anyway, this economy lesson ends with the Dons finding out that all the stuff they could make cash off the black market with is suddenly all kosher, right? Boats are coming into Mumbai from all over the world. Capitalism is killing the Dons' cash cows, and their contraband's just normal stuff now. These guys, though, they built up massive fortunes by then. If smuggling was a bit of a lame duck, India's perestroika meant its real estate is booming. And Mumbai, as India's economic heart, was exploding.

Gangs piled money into building projects, extorting managers and builders, and they got their fingers into every aspect of the city's new boom. It's always real estate. It's always real estate. Yeah, yeah.

So by this point, I need to backtrack a bit, actually, because Darwood was well on his way to becoming a boss by then. After doing all of his small-time scams with Shabir in the old days, Darwood gets into more complex stuff. He's known as this meticulous planner, and he demands people fork out cash for made-up weddings and funerals, which, of course, is totally BS. Wait, can you explain that? What does that mean? How...

How made-up funerals... It's just like... It's just like a cover story, right? He's basically just sticking people up in the street, but he's saying, pay for my friend's wedding, pay for this funeral. He basically means pay me or I'll shoot you in the fucking head. And they pay up, right? I mean...

this is for good reason. Dawood is known for this short temper and he's got a punch on for vengeance as well. As a teenager, he shocks the Mumbai underworld for attacking a major don called Bashu Dada. And he attacks the guy with soda bottles and light bulbs just after Friday prayers outside the guy's mosque. Then he smashes up Bashu's headquarters and he chases the former boss out of town. It's pretty wild. I mean,

Soda bottles and light bulbs is kind of like a little, he sounds like a teenager, you know, in a rumble in like the 1950s. Yeah, he's literally a teenage guy just trying his arm at anything, right? I mean, can you imagine like the Godfather getting pelted with glass bottles by a bunch of kids in the street? I mean, that's pretty bold move pretty early on.

But even in 1974, right, and he's not 20 yet either, Dawood and his thugs rob a guy transporting cash to Haji Mastan. Big move. Even bigger than he thinks, actually, because when Dawood and Shabir look at all the stuff they've just grabbed, they find out they've just taken around $200,000. An absolute fortune at the time. Mastan isn't a man to be messed with, obviously, but actually it's Dawood and Shabir's old man who gives them a real pasting, and he hauls them down to the local police station.

So, I guess they might have been feeling a bit worried by this point. But when the Ibrahims meet the local chief, he offers them a deal, and this is a big moment. The Batans will be coming far too big for the cops to control. Defeat them, the chief tells the boys, and they'll be looked after. Instead of taking the law into your hands, he tells them, you can do it with the law by your side.

Oh, you got to take that deal. That's a good deal. Great deal, right? That's a really good deal. Yeah. And shock, they take it. By the way, at this point, I'm quoting a lot of work by Hussain Zaidi, who's a Mumbai-born crime writer who's written tons of stuff about Dawood Ibrahim and other Indian dons. You should really check out his work. It's awesome.

So, this episode with the robbery and the cops is kind of like the match that lights the standoff between the Dawood Shabir gang at the time and the Pataans, who'd been trampling all over Mumbai for decades. In 1981, a journalist named Iqbal Natiq, who's friends with Dawood, is

is beaten to death for reporting on the Pataans. This sparks an all-out war. One of the guys who killed Natiq is murdered by having his ankles and wrists slashed. The other gets all of his fingers chopped off before escaping into Dongri Police Station. Later that year, Pataan gangsters working for Karim Lala's nephew Samad Khan shoot Sabir dead at Mumbai gas station. They go for Dawood too, but he manages to survive.

Then, Dawood's vengeance instinct goes into overdrive, right? He has the two hitmen taken out soon afterwards, and Samad, a pretty big boss himself, is shot dead by members of Dawood's gang, which he now calls D-Company after himself in 1983. How do we rate that gang name? I love it. Yeah, it's pretty good. I like it too. I think it's solid. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, like...

So things are happening outside of the underworld at this time that are going to become really, really important soon. So in 1984, the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, comes into power in India. So the same year, cops indict Dawood for Samad's murder and he flees Mumbai for Dubai, swapping one big port city for another. Is Dubai... I mean, Dubai isn't like it is now. This is 35, 40 years ago. Nah, there's no, like, megatowers and all that kind of glitzy, stupid stuff. There's, like...

It's pretty much like a really important port stop-off, though, between the Middle East and South Asia. So there's plenty of chances for an enterprising Don like DeWood to get his fingers into a few pies.

but there's not money flowing through it like there is now where every gangster in the world has set up shop there in a way. It's more, I mean, I, it's what I'm assuming. It's more like a backwater in some sorts. It's kind of, but like the shakes still have the money, right? They still got the gold and they've still got the oil. So there's money there. There's just not the kind of international glitz that it has these days. But yeah, there's, there's for sure tons and tons of money going through Dubai. Um,

When he gets there, the woods already involved in precious metal smuggling in India and electronics and a bunch of other stuff. Like I said, the contraband that you couldn't get in the country at the time. But he also gets stuck into Hawala, which is kind of this informal remittance system that's popular in the Middle East and South Asia. Can you break that down a little bit, what it is? Or not, or you guys can just look it up. Yeah, sure. Like Hawala, yeah. Yeah, just look it up. Yeah.

So, yeah, you're going to try and get me to explain some like dense economic thing that I'm not going to have a hope in hell of adequately describing. You're doing a lot of good work here. Don't even sweat it. Yeah, keep me on the dons. I'm good on them. All right.

The Wood's ridiculously rich, of course, and he makes even more money ferrying gold from Dubai's souks into India. And he masterminds everything from abroad and leaves a daily grind in Mumbai to his right-hand man, this big round guy called Chota Rajan.

At the same time, cops are ramping up a war against organized crime back home, and they kill hundreds of guys during so-called encounters. At the same time, cops are ramping up a war against organized crime back home, and they kill hundreds of guys during so-called encounters. Hussein Zaidi calls it a bullet-for-bullet game plan. It's pretty spot-on. Police tactic old as the guns they do it with. Blast some guy away, say he fired first, get away with it. Same thing happened in the Philippine drug war and the US right now, I guess.

I mean, the scale. We're not going to do that. Yeah, let's keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Safe. So, D Company at this point, its leaders are spread out across the world. The gang's numbers are growing and some of the older dons are pushed out by the cops and their killer tactics. So, throughout the 80s, D Company just swirls up. It becomes Mumbai's number one mafia by a long shot.

It's pretty much a part of the city's fabric by now, and the media is full of stories about DeWood. They love him. Same has been with the old Dons and Mustan and those guys. He doesn't seem to mind the attention. He hosts lavish parties and he fraternizes with Bollywood actresses. He calls all of his residences the White House, by the way, be it in Mumbai, London, Dubai, wherever. He thinks it's cool to be associated with the US president. Maybe he's changed that now. Whatever he thinks, it's fair to say that DeWood believes his own hype pretty well.

So Zaidi writes,

Dawood himself was rumored to be in a relationship with a Pakistani actress, Anita Ayyub, and when a director refused to cast her in one of his films, Dawood had him killed. Yeah, that's the kind of support you want from a partner. Like, if your man isn't having people who don't promote you murdered, then what are you doing in the relationship? Yeah, you've got to get better agents, guys. Like, this is a proper agent. Forget agent. It's a proper spouse or boyfriend. True, true. Yeah. That's the message that we're sending out on this pod.

Kill for your lover. I think that's the message of every single true crime podcast is murder somebody for your lover so you can be with them or get away with something or whatever else. But do it better because then otherwise two white women in their 40s will solve it. Amen.

So, yeah, this is in 95 that that happened, right? And two years later, in 97, the company hitman shot dead Gulshan Kumar, who's a famous businessman and producer. And other gangs harassed actors and directors all the time. There's no separating these two sides of Mumbai. Yeah, I have to imagine there's money laundering going on as well during this. But I really want to know...

Were the movies about them? Were they the equivalent of rap videos when rappers pretend they're like mafia dons and shoot these videos where they're sitting at a long table with a cane and directing their soldiers? But except here, it was kind of realistic too? Yeah. I would not say that the films I've seen the trailers for during my research were realistic. But they're pretty entertaining. They're more like...

like a 90s Bruce Willis flick, right? It's just like all... Maybe Steven Seagal is more of a...

better kind of comparison they're all like uh stupid fighting and like gun battles all the time it's more like action these guys have this kind of like all action sort of uh reputation more than just sitting back and making things happen is there singing and dancing like are these all the guys and dolls of the indian underworld oh you bet they're singing and dancing yeah it's awesome um but

But anyway, like, remember how I told you about 91 being the seminal year for India and the mafia? Not really, but I want to hear more. Okay, well, back to my economic lesson. So if that was the end of Dawood's first act, right, the next few come thick and fast, and they're going to define him for the rest of his life. Later that year, a bunch of D company mobsters are holed up in a ritzy condo complex in northern Mumbai when up to 100 cops corner them.

So till now, the company has reserved its violence for civvies who won't pay up and rival gangs. When these guys fire back at the police with AK-47s, it's the first time the group has fired on officers to kill.

What makes it more shocking is that a popular news show broadcasts the entire ensuing shootout, after which cops kill seven of the gangsters. In 92, Dalwood henchmen murder a guy who'd shot dead his brother-in-law earlier that year, in broad daylight. Wait, go back to the shootout with 100 police? I mean... Yeah. What? How?

It just, they find these guys and they're in this kind of like newly finished block of flats in sort of central Mumbai. And then they just start like firing at each other. These guys, I mean, if you see footage of terrorist attacks, it's pretty much similar to that. And then this show, I can't remember what it's called. It's kind of like a dateline show. Just shows blood everywhere. The bodies spat all over the floor. Like it's pretty heavy stuff.

I'm going to leave a link for a YouTube video to this old show on the website so people can check that out as well. Yeah, I want to watch. It's getting out of control at this point, right? Dawood is sitting in his ivory tower in Dubai, already hits on all sorts, and they're pretty much wiping the floor with any rival gangs in Mumbai. Zaidi writes about this 92 hit.

Dawood has cemented his reputation from far afield, and with a bang, for this was not merely one gang taking revenge on the other, or extracting its pound of flesh. 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.

There's your obligatory Sicily reference there. Gotta have one in every episode. Always, always. So later that year in 92, Shiv Sena radicals, remember them? They demolish a 16th century mosque in northern India. They say it's on top of a Hindu shrine. This triggers riots that kill up to 2,000 people across the country, the vast majority of them, of course, Muslims. It's a breaking point in religious tension that harks back to the bad old days of partition in 1947 when up to 2 million died.

Mumbai is this melting pot with strong Muslim neighbourhoods like Dongri, so it sees the worst of the writing. Almost half the dead lay there. Like we mentioned in your Archon script, this moment just lit the spark on a massive outpouring of communal violence. Neighbours fought each other and the police just sprayed bullets down the street trying to keep things under control. Obviously didn't work at all.

The Will has kept D Company a largely secular organisation up to this point, but the 92 massacres encourage him to take revenge on the Shiv Sena and the Indian state. Working with Pakistan's ISI, its intelligence division, he smuggles explosives and guns from Karachi into Mumbai. Then at 1.30pm on Friday March 12th 1993, D Company turns from a mafia into a terrorist organisation.

13 bombs tear through key buildings like the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India HQ, and of course the head office of the Shiv Sena. By the end of the day, 250 people are dead and 1,400 are injured. It's Mumbai's first exposure to these kind of terror attacks, and it will never be the same again. A BBC article describes it well. For decades, the Mumbai Noir had been dominated by gold smuggling, with its ancillary industry of crime and gang warfare. Slotting

Smugglers were perversely romantic figures, none more so than Dawood Ibrahim, the son of a constable who had become the city's most powerful underworld figure and eventually became India's most wanted man. Now, for the first time, Dawood's gang had leapt beyond the violent protection of its commercial interests and into a political vendetta wreaked indiscriminately against an entire city. In other words, Dawood was a terrorist. The entire country blamed Dawood Ibrahim for the blasts, writes Aidy.

Everybody was convinced that it was he alone who had planned the attack. Only he had the power to bring Bombay to its knees like this. I mean, you can tell by this point that Dawood is just almost like a demigod figure. He has so much power over this city that he's able to control life and death. Was there evidence against him? I actually haven't seen anything other than absolute certainty that he did it.

So, I don't know about that. I mean, the authorities are pretty certain. Yeah, I don't know about that. But he convinced authorities to blame his co-conspirator, Tiger Memon, who's a key player in D-Company as the main planner. And there's still a shred of confusion as to how the blasts actually happened. But his excuse is like, I didn't do it. The guy that I work with all the time who's underneath me, he did it.

Yeah, you know, oldest trick in the book, right? Blame you, Lieutenant. And who is Tiger? Tiger Memon. That's a good name. It's a pretty good name. Actually, he's still on the run. No one's found him either. So he's still one of the most wanted people in India. Is Tiger his given name or is that an earned name? I am almost certain it's not his real name. But please fact check that and send us emails. Yeah.

Still, the horror didn't just tear through Mumbai. It broke the company in two as well. Chota Rajan, remember him, the guy who was staying behind in Mumbai while Dawood was flaunting his cash in Dubai? He's a Hindu and he splits from the gang and he takes his work to Southeast Asia. First stop is Kuala Lumpur, actually.

Dawood and other kapos decamped to Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city. They tell everyone they're still based in Dubai, though. And Chota Shakil, who's one of the other lieutenants in the D Company, he even used an Emirati sim the whole time he's in Pakistan to throw people off the scent. Dawood's image in India unsurprisingly changes at this point, from a sort of self-made godfather type to a terrorist who committed treason against his own neighbors. You can't really pull the whole Robin Hood thing if you're blowing up civilians and attacking your own country like that.

No, I mean, but Escobar managed it, right? And he was blowing up half the country at the time. That's true. I mean, he still had a lot of love in Medellin and stuff like that. So I stand corrected. Yeah, I mean, you stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone in the street, right? And they'll still follow you. We can't. I mean, people don't want that. We're not diving into that. This is a safe space.

From American politics. Yeah, safe space. From culture war and all that. It's a safe space for our audience to hear. Yeah. Now, plenty of death and violence, but it's a safe space from that other stuff. Cool. Gotcha.

The Wooden Rajah then begin this kind of Cold War era, right? And they battle for control of Mumbai's black markets. Both gangs ramp up the hiring of hitmen. Gangland killings explode. At one point, a police commissioner tells residents to arm themselves with hockey sticks. The violence is so bad. I'm not sure what a hockey stick's going to do against the gang, but... Are there hockey sticks in India? Like, India doesn't strike me as the kind of place where a lot of people play hockey. Oh, they mean like field hockey, right? The stuff with the wooden sticks. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. We're talking old British sports here. It's none of your newfangled American stuff. I would take a hockey stick over a field stick. I don't know what a field stick looks like, but hockey sticks, I think, are bigger. Would you take a hockey stick over a semi-automatic, though? No, I'll take a semi-automatic over that. Cool. Yeah. All right.

Dawood used a guy called Abu Salem, this handsome, daring mobster from the north of India, who hires kids as trigger men from his tiny hometown and ships them quickly home after carrying out killings. So shielding from the cops are obviously pretty useless. Rajan does similar, but it will be scooped up in a raid in Bali in 2015. And he's actually serving life in a Delhi prison right now.

I actually met a D company hitman when I was last in Dubai. His name was Prince Achoo, although I think it might have been a pseudonym or just a sound made at the time. The 1992 riots claimed three of Achoo's relatives and he had nowhere to turn. Plus he was full of hate. That's like a common story back then. He shot high value targets with a German Mauser gun and close quarters kills with a so-called Desiccata. That is a homemade weapon from India.

Is that a blade or... No, it's a gun. I think they were made for hunting deer out in the forest and the wild and stuff. Who did he work for as a hitman? Was he working for a D company? Was he working for a rival? Anyone he could get a job with? He was pretty into D company, yeah. So he was part of this turn...

after the riots right where it became more of an ideological sort of islamist thing rather than just a organized crime outfit um he told me he could actually make up to three grand us for a hit which isn't bad in a place where the average monthly income is like 400 bucks it's far far less in the slums of course where most of these guys would have come from how did you go about meeting him

Lots of trips at two or three in the morning in the backs of cabs to absolute divey parts of town, brothels, bars, that kind of stuff. He was one of the least reliable guys I've ever followed, ever. I think former hitmen don't really keep a great schedule.

And I think it took me like a week of missed meetings to meet this guy. And then we just drove around town in the back of a cab for like three hours chatting to him, learning about his life. It's pretty full on. So is he one of these, oh, I used to do this and now I've got a non-profit that gets people out of violence? Or is he still active as a hitman? Actually, he's kind of one of the most fascinating characters I've met in terms of how cities change over the years, right? He used to...

carry out these really low rent hits for d company and now he can't actually find any work he's pissed off he's like he's an out of work hitman because so much of the crime now has gone upstairs and it's all white collar stuff because mumbai is so rich right so if you want to carry out a crime now you either get like a full bona fide hitman for like thousands of bucks or you just like hack people's computers and steal all their money that way

Dude, globalization and the technological increases in the world, right? It's putting hard-working, low-rent hitmen out of business. There's no jobs for them anymore. They've got to learn new... Did you tell him that he should learn how to code? I didn't quite have the balls to do it at the time. Yeah, maybe I'll send him a message.

So during these 90s, the mafia side of the company becomes this sort of cross between a McDonald's franchise and the Stasi. Right. If you're in the gang or company touch as subcontractors called themselves, you could use the word's name to leverage all kinds of shady deals. But screw up and you're in big trouble. The company has someone on every street corner and they're watching all the time.

Dawood, meanwhile, is still, allegedly, holed up in fancy digs in his Karachi White House, quarterbacking his minions back east. India is still desperate to bring him and Tiger Mamon to justice for the 1993 bombings, and he becomes this political actor between them and Pakistan. It's this war that's been raging ever since the countries existed independently. Thanks, Britain. Again.

It's not known whether Dawood's loyalty to Pakistan is one of religious identity or convenience, by the way. That's always been this kind of running debate about him. But he's definitely hand in glove with his government to some extent. He's thought to have bailed out Pakistan's central bank with massive cash loans, and he works with Pakistani intelligence outfit, the ISI. If you're an organized crime guy and you can get a deal with an intelligence agency, it just...

It's kind of as good as it gets. Nothing like having the army sitting on your doorstep to ward off potential rivals, right? Yeah. So Dawood even helps exploit his trafficking routes to arm the Lakshya-e-Taiba, an Islamist militant group that wants to break Indian control of Kashmir. In fact, Dawood has taken to backing an array of fascist Islamist groups over the years, including Jayshir Mohammed, another prominent Kashmiri group, and even Nigeria's Boko Haram, so maybe there is a bit of ideology behind it. In

In 2008, a series of blasts and raids carried out by Lakshya Itaiba militants leaves 164 dead across Mumbai. They include a three-day siege at a Jewish centre, indiscriminate firing to commuters at the city's CST station, its biggest one, and a four-day siege at Mumbai's iconic Taj Mahal hotel, killing 31. I mean, I remember that being on the news. It was plastered all over the place when it happened. It was pretty...

Crazy, crazy story. Yeah, that was chaos. I mean, still, the movie came out, what, a year or two ago? But it's, I mean, this guy really hates his city now, huh? I mean, to do that, yeah, it's pretty dark.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's gone full on warlord, right? Insiders obviously point a finger at Dawood after the 2008 attacks, saying he helped ship the killers into Mumbai. No wonder by this time India's got a $25 million US dollar reward for his arrest. And the US and Interpol both have him on their most wanted list. But he's never been caught. Is he just holed up in Pakistan? Is he like out in the open or is he hidden and on the run?

Nice. By all accounts, he's in some luxury condo somewhere in Karachi. It's kind of this open secret. We're going to get to that in a minute, actually. But first, I want to focus on a new source of income for the guy.

This one I'm going to enjoy. That's cricket. Look how much you're smiling right now. You're so excited. I'm actually beaming. Like, you have no idea. It's like the biggest sport in South Asia by a mile, cricket. The Indian Premier League is this kind of like glitzy, baseball-y short version of the game that started in 2008. It's become one of the world's richest sports tournaments and has almost as high an average attendance as the NFL.

Cricket betting is officially illegal in India, but the real market's worth about $40 billion, or almost as much as the whole country's defence budget, right? It's massive. You can imagine that's a pretty tasty prize for the Dons. So no wonder D Company's got its hands in

In 2013, an India Today report revealed how Dalwood's brother Anis ran a massive IPL betting ring, bribing star players and threatening others to throw games. In 2018, a D company guy told an undercover Al Jazeera reporter that he could swing 60 to 70% of games. So imagine the Sinaloa cartels paying off Tom Brady, right, to throw duds at the Super Bowl. And that's pretty close to how big this stuff is. Did I get that reference right? Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that sort of works. Okay. Tom Brady's a football player, right? Yeah, he is. He's a good one, even though we all hate him. Cool. Okay. Yeah, that works then. In 2015, Forbes estimates the Woods' net worth at $6.7 billion. That makes him the second wealthiest gangster ever, behind Pablo Escobar's $9 billion Forbes reckoned he was worth in 1989.

I don't know if I buy that Forbes list stuff, man, even with celebrities, you know, Google was celebrity net worth. And, and I don't know, I, I, how do they do the math? It's all nonsense. I actually, I wrote this and then I was hoping you'd jump in because it seems bullshit to me. Right. I mean, it can't be right.

I mean, I'm sure he's making that much, but you hear stuff about Chapo, about El Mayo, about the Russian guy, Semyon Mogilevich. And what about like all the other Russian gangster businessmen who were these giant oligarchs? I don't know, man. Yeah, there's billions flying around with those guys as well, right? I think we can just say he's doing well.

Yeah, I mean, that depends on your definition of a gangster too, right? Like Suharto, he sucked up up to 35 billion from Indonesia and Marcos stole up to 10 billion from the Philippines, right? So, you know, depends what you're calling a gangster really.

Yeah, fuck Forbes. Yeah, fuck Forbes. Another great message we're going to broadcast. Either way, though, like, Dawood's influence is massive in Mumbai and all over the world. A 2015 NYU paper says that today it's important that all of D Company's faces be acknowledged. This includes the organization's role as a transnational criminal organization, a terrorist group, and an economic actor inside of Pakistan.

Okay, what is a 2015 NYU? Is this like some NYU undergrad just submitted a paper? Or are we talking like a... This is a professor, I think. A full-blown professor of something. Oh, in that case. I'm on board then. I'm not sure right now, but I will post it to the website.

So this is pretty heavy stuff, right? I mean, Dawood is still in the news all the time. In June, papers report he and his wife have COVID, but they're clearly alive. And the latest twist in the D company story actually came this week, right? As we're recording, which is like the end of August, Pakistan admitted for the first time that Dawood was living in Karachi, which given he's been there like forever, it's a bit of a piss take.

According to Pakistan state officials, Dawood has nine Indian passports and five Pakistani ones. How was the COVID story presented? Like, what do we...

we're talking like inquirer stuff right that's that's the kind of level of gossip rag that that he's plastered all over these days i mean he's either sleeping with some bollywood starlet or he's got covid or he's ordered a hit on some random guy in mumbai like the guy is never out of the news are there other photos uh they use these kind of like stock six pictures of him like there's one of him at

at the horse racing that's been produced about 50,000 times. I feel like I've seen only one photo of him and he just has a really sweet stache in it. Yeah, that's his thing. Apparently he's had that shaved off these days. But they're sticking with it for the Gossip Rags. Yeah, it's an elegant look. Very, very. It's a thing of beauty. He's kind of got an Escobar thing going on a bit. Yeah, I can see that. I mean...

Like, there's a lot of parallels between this guy and Escobar, right? He's tried to hone this Robin Hood image. He's a local kid, grown up, come from nothing, made everything. And he's bombed his own country. So actually, they're probably good friends. They might be. And he has a sweet stash and appears to favor gigantic sunglasses. And he's got a TV show coming out soon. But the interesting thing about this news this week, actually, is that

Maybe Pakistan's going to finally cut him loose, right? Maybe he's too much for them to handle. I mean, you've got armed struggle constantly in Kashmir. You've got the threat of mutual nuclear destruction. Maybe hiding a wanted gangster and terrorist isn't quite what the two countries need right now. Maybe he'll finally face justice or just as likely he'll just keep evading the authorities and become an even bigger tycoon in 2020s. Where do you go if Pakistan cuts you off? What's the move for him right here?

Afghanistan? Don't know. Maybe he goes back to Dubai? Oh, Dubai, yeah, of course. Which White House is it going to be? It's got to be Dubai, yeah, that's got to be the answer. Every one of these episodes just ends out with someone settling in Dubai. Yeah, I mean, I lived there for a year, actually. I wouldn't recommend it, but maybe if I was on the run for a massive terror attack, I might consider it. That's pretty much the only time I'd consider it, actually. Were you doing crimes there?

I think I might have got drunk in a hotel bar, which I think is technically illegal. I think I kissed someone on a dance floor. That's definitely illegal. Were you hiding from crimes that were done somewhere else? Yes. And we'll go no further.

All right. Thank you guys once again for joining us here at the underworld podcast. Again, subscribe on Stitcher, Spotify, iTunes, Google, and not just that one. I said like a subscribe at all those. Yeah. Dermal dermal. Yeah. And you can always find us at the patron, which is patreon.com slash the underworld podcast, where you can give us money to keep doing this if you enjoy it. And yeah, thanks again.

Shall I do the website as well at this point? Yeah, yeah. Throw the website up there, man. You built it. Yeah, we've got the Underworld website, which is underworldpod.com. And I think we're on Twitter now and Instagram. Hopefully we're actually updating these things. I registered for them. We have not touched them yet. By the time you hear this, we're going to be active. Oh, we're going to be active. Yeah, active. Activity. But yeah, thanks again. Signing off. Yeah, cheers. Thanks for listening.