"My Conversations With Dawood Ibrahim" continues...

He took it upon himself to ferret out members of D-company for liquidating them one by one. Killing and counter killing by D-company and Rajan’s gang continues till day. Manish Lala, though a Hindu , was perceived by Rajan to be a D acolyte. He was to fall victim to the ongoing internecine warfare.

On June 4, 1998 at about 6 pm, three shooters of Chota Rajan gang namely Venkatesh Reddy, Sanjay Wadkar and Kiran Dogre pumped bullets into Manish Lala at his second-floor office in Old Oriental Building, killing him at the spot. Thus fell another important member of D-company to the never ending war of attrition in Bombay’s underground.

With the passage of time several cases with D-company’s involvement kept coming to me from time to time and our paths kept crossing each other frequently, the last of which was the IPL spot-fixing case in 2013. The Delhi Police cracked a trans-national multi-crore racket involving bookies, fixers, underworld and cricketers. I was then the Commissioner of Police, Delhi and had a small but significant role to play in leading the operation. The backward linkages behind betting and spot-fixing in IPL 6 led to none other than Dawood. (Please see ‘22 Yards of Deceit’)

The don’s involvement in the case made big news globally. Unconfirmed news reports of Dawood fleeing from his lair in Clifton, Karachi to some undisclosed location kept filtering in. However, there was no way for us in the Delhi Police to confirm or deny the information.

One day I received a call on my personal mobile sometime in the last week of June, 2013 from an ‘unknown number’. It was in all probability the Don himself.
He said: ‘Kya Saheb, aap retire hone ja rahe ho. Ab to peehca chhod do.’ (What is this
Sahib? You are soon retiring. Isn’t it time you left me alone?) The caller hung up before I
could respond. I smiled to myself bemusedly on getting the veiled threat reminding me of
my impending retirement after which I would be stripped of security provided by the
government.

To be continued...