Telling tale by a top cop

Gaurav Kanthwal

The world’s most wanted fugitive Dawood Ibrahim has spawned terror, death, narcotics and virtually everything that organised crime is known for. Interestingly, he has also inspired many books on the underworld. S Hussain Zaidi’s Dongri to Dubai, Mahesh Narain Singh’s The Gangsters in the City, Sharafat Khan’s Underworld King Dawood Ibrahim and Gang War and Deepak Rao’s Mumbai Police are some of the well-documented accounts of the underworld nexus in India.

BV Kumar’s DRI & The Dons: The Untold Stories is another one in this series. Kumar held the key positions of Director General, Revenue Intelligence, Narcotics Control Bureau and Economic Intelligence Bureau during his career spanning 33 years. However, the highlight of the book is Kumar's chase of world’s most wanted fugitive Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar for three years — he once interrogated him in Baroda in 1983. 

According to Kumar, then the Commissioner of Customs, Gujarat, Dawood confessed to him about his illegal activities. Kumar returned to Ahmedabad and obtained a detention warrant against him under COFEPOSA. However, senior counsel Ram Jethmalani successfully pleaded Ibrahim's release in the Gujarat HC. Kumar says he had requested Jethmalani not to plead for Dawood's release. However, the lawyer had asked him how rich Dawood was. On being told, Dawood was ‘filthy rich’, Jethmalani just smiled and left the place.

Understandably, this chapter, the longest in the book, appears immediately after the introduction and sets the tone for the book. Kumar also gives details about covert networks operations and tells some striking anecdotes.

In the chapter, Daniel Hailey Walcott Jr. - A Swashbuckling Smuggler, Kumar quotes the late Khushwant Singh's column, More Malicious Gossip in which Walcott Jr., a proclaimed offender, simply disappeared from Tihar Jail after dropping chocolates, cookies and cigarettes all over the jail for the other inmates before sneaking away to Pakistan in his Piper Apache plane on September 26, 1963.

Equally amusing is Kumar's description of a sting operation by a TV channel, which unearthed the round tripping of diamonds. The former DG of Economic Intelligence Bureau comes to a conclusion that had financial institutions and the regulators had taken cognizance of the scandal, PNB scam involving Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi could have been avoided.

Kumar is well aware that catching big fish does not put an end to the crime and even his most successful encounters only stopped criminal activities temporarily and ‘up to some extent’.

A book by a top dog of various law enforcement agencies is bound to be narrated with wariness but Kumar has described well how a government servant functions within constraints. His refrain is justified: All countermeasures will only succeed when there is political will and direction to combat the menace.