Rise and fall of an unlikely don

LIFE OF CRIME Once considered errand boy of Dawood gang, Ravi Pujari rose through underworld ranks to helm an extortion racket

MUMBAI: On February 3, 1993, a Mumbai Police officer, Vijay Salaskar, shot dead Shrikant Desai alias Shrikant Mama, a key associate of Sharad Shetty, the man who handled the finances of the Dawood Ibrahim gang. Desai was in charge of Dawood’s smuggling operations at the airport’s and sea port’s cargo area, and was one of Shetty’s most trusted men.

This encounter with Salaskar (who was killed by terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008) would be the making of the gangster who came to be known as Ravi Pujari. Till then, the role of the short, stocky Raviprakash Surya Pujari in the gang could be best described as that of an errand boy, a senior Mumbai crime branch officer said .

This profile of Pujari, who was arrested on January 21 in Senegal, and chronicle of his criminal career was put together by Hindustan Times on the basis of interviews with eight serving and retired police officers. The officers spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pujari, in his 20s and living in Andheri in Mumbai’s western suburbs when Desai was killed, was convinced that there was a mole in their gang, and sought to identify and eliminate him. Pujari, the police officer said, took this death of Desai personally because the latter and Shetty had groomed him from relative poverty to becoming a trusted member of the gang.

“First, they would send him to buy vegetables, but later had enough faith in him to send him to receive smuggled weapons from various parts of the world,” the officer cited in the first instance said. “Desai’s death affected him so much that he planned a Bollywood-style revenge. Desai was a like a father figure to Pujari.” Both Desai and Shetty were affiliated to Rajendra Nikalje, alias Chhota Rajan, who was, at the time, a part of the Dawood gang.

In his hunt for the mole, Pujari zeroed in on Bala Zalte, a gang member who was interrogated by Mumbai Police a week before Desai’s death. Zalte’s elder brother, Bandya was another notorious gangster and both, like Dawood, were sons of a policeman, and had chosen to work for Dawood. In March 1993, Pujari led a mob of goons to Zalte’s house and murdered him.

News of the 1993 killing was splashed across every city newspaper. It was eventually revealed that Pujari had killed the wrong person. The actual mole turned out to be another criminal, Mohan Shedge. Pujari killed him too in 1994. After that, he went into hiding in Mumbai.

Though there is no official record of Pujari’s exact date of birth, Mumbai Police say he was born in the early 1970s in Padubidri in coastal Karnataka, around 30 km north of Mangaluru, whose police force eventually reached Senegal last week and arrested him. His family shifted to Mumbai in the mid-1970s. He was enrolled in an English-medium school but dropped out before high school and got a job at a roadside tea stall. It was here that he began working for Desai.

A few months after he killed Shedge, Pujari was arrested in 1995 by Mumbai Police for the first time when he returned to Mumbai to see his newborn child. He had married Padma, whom he had known from childhood. Police had information of his arrival and caught him at his Andheri house.

Pujari’s fingerprints were recorded then, and it is this document that eventually helped Karnataka Police confirm his identity and apply for his extradition from Senegal.

Meanwhile, according to police officers in Mumbai, Chhota Rajan took note of Pujari’s brutal killing methods and decided to take him under his wing, through his confidant Rohit Verma alias Hammer, a gangster from Vakola. This coincided with the time that Rajan and Dawood separated, with Rajan calling the latter anti-national for orchestrating the March 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai. Pujari had to choose sides, and he chose Rajan.

When Pujari was released on bail, he first fled to Nepal and eventually reached Bangkok in 1995. By then, Rajan was in Bangkok. He had declared himself a “patriotic don” as a counterfoil to Dawood. In the early 2000s, soon after Dawood’s closest aide, Chhota Shakeel, sent a hit squad to kill Rajan, who escaped with major injuries but Verma was killed. Rajan suspected Pujari of working as a Dawood informant. He sidelined him. Pujari was forced to leave and reside in Australia. With Rajan’s clout diminishing , Pujari decided to take on his previous mentor’s mantle of a “patriotic don”.

From Australia, Pujari briefly moved to South Africa and then on to Morocco. Pujari’s first major operation in Mumbai (although his whereabouts at the time are not known) was his unsuccessful hit on Nationalist Congress Party leader and criminal lawyer, Majeed Memon, in July 2005. Memon had been appearing as a defence lawyer in high-profile cases under the now repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 including for those accused in the 1993 blasts.

Soon after the Memon attack, former encounter specialist Pradeep Sharma arrested Pujari’s wife Padma in a fake passport case. A month later, Padma got bail,had another fake passport made from Mangalore and escaped to Bangkok.

It was then that Pujari spread terror among Bollywood personalities, developers, and automobile shop owners by calling them through Voice-over Internet Protocol and blackmailing them. He asked them to deposit “protection money”, that is money they had to give Pujari to be spared an attack. Between 2005 and 2015, Mumbai Police registered 52 cases of serious crimes against Pujari, including extortion, attempt to murder and murder.

A Mumbai crime branch official told HT that Pujari became a respected figure in Burkina Faso on account of his philanthropy. Pujari then invested in a garment factory in Sudan, and, in 2015, moved to Senegal.