Mother, 6 sons in Tihar with 99 crimes between them

NEWDELHI: This could be the knockdown version of the Corleone family, minus the godfather. A woman and her six sons are in Tihar jail for committing a range of crimes in the Capital — from bootlegging to theft, and from extortion to murder.

The 62-year-old homemaker and her sons, aged between 15 and 38, accumulated 100 criminal cases between them since she began selling bootlegged alcohol in early 2000, after the family migrated to Delhi’s Sangam Vihar locality from Dholpur in Rajasthan. The seventh son was arrested this June for theft and sent to a juvenile detention home.

At the top of this criminal family tree is Basiran, a mother of 11 who is imprisoned for extortion.

But her husband Malkan Singh and daughters are clean. The family’s home in Sangam Vihar, was padlocked when HT tried to contact the father and daughters.

Basiran was drafted into crime selling illicit liquor to augment the family income. Her husband earned little as a freelancing electrician to feed his large brood of growing kids.

“The liquor business was ripe. Most local criminals bought liquor from her. The sons, Shamim and Shakeel, were lured by these criminals. They quit school,” said a neighbour who asked not to be named. Basiran and her sons gradually advanced from selling moonshine to petty crimes such as snatching and stealing. Till their arrest over the past 10 months, they ran an organised syndicate, specialising in stealing cars, running a water supply mafia, and brewing and selling illicit liquor, police said.

Records show members of the family were charged with serious crimes such as extortion, keeping illegal arms, and murder between 2004 and 2017.

In police records, all of Basiran’s sons are “bad characters” — a term used by cops for people they need to keep an eye on. If Wakil is facing 10 charges of robbery and rioting, Shakeel has 15 cases against him, and Shamim alias Gunga, the gang leader in mom’s absence, has 61. Wakil was first arrested for bootlegging in 2002.

A fourth son, 26-year-old Sunny, has four cases and Faizal, aged 21, has three. Brother Rahul, who is 19, was charged with murder just after his 18th birthday.

“The family was involved in all sorts of illegal activities here ... We put pressure on some of Basiran’s sons to come out of hiding and got them arrested,” said Upender Singh, the Sangam Vihar police station in-charge.