THESE days you find reports of fake cops robbing people every other day. But that wasn’t common around 40 years ago.
Around 1970, a man answering to the name of M M Dawood conceived the idea of impersonating as Customs officials to rob the rich of their unaccounted money. A dealer in smuggled watches, Dawood shared the idea with his friend T V Vaitheeswaran, who lapped it up. Vaitheeswaran owned a drug store, had some knowledge of medicines and a lot of financial troubles.
He decided to put the plan into action and set up a nine-member gang. Two of them, C R Parthasarathy and Venugopal, looked stern, so they were assigned the role of Customs officials by Vaitheeswaran.
A city hotel was chosen to trap the victims and room boys Jaffarullah and Thyagu were inducted into the gang. They were to act as stool pigeons. K A Lakshmanan and Kannan Pillai joined the gang later. Two other members were Ayub Khan, a car driver of a printing press and a close associate of Vaitheeswaran, and Majeed Ebrahim.
Modus operandi
Vadivullan Chettiar, 24, the son of a wealthy moneylender of Malaysia was the first victim. On a wintry December evening in 1970, as the young man stepped out of the hotel, ‘Customs official’ Parthasarathy stopped him. He was whisked away in a taxi to the medical shop of Vaitheeswaran.
Despite threats, Chettiar did not agree that he had illegal money and did not reveal his real name.
So, the gang took him out again in a taxi and forced him to swallow many Phenobarbitone tablets. When Chettiar began losing consciousness, they emptied his pockets, which had Rs 1.5 lakh, a princely sum in those days. They then dumped him near the Chengelpet highway. The president of Senneri village panchayat found him drugged and rushed him to hospital. Chettiar died the next day without regaining consciousness in the Chengelpet government hospital.
Vaitheeswaran later shared the booty with Parthasarathy and Venugopal.
Shahhul Hameed (30) of Malaysia who stayed in the same hotel was the next victim. To ‘facilitate’ interrogation, he was administered a Pethi- dine shot. He was told it was a ‘truth serum’. The gang stole Rs 55,000 from him. Hameed’s body was later found hang- ing from a tamarind tree in Chittor district of Andhra Pradesh.
Buhari Thampi, Sathak Ibrahim, Mohammed Salique, and Thaikkathambi too were killed in similar fashion. They were given Pethidine injections and strangled with a fan belt. Their bodies were stripped, burnt and thrown in remote places. The gang also bumped off Dakshinamurthy, an informer of the real Customs Department and a friend of Venugopal. He was killed for informing the real Customs officials about the sudden accumulation of wealth with Venugopal.
In all, there were seven near-identical murders, 23 gold biscuits missing and Rs 3.5 lakh stolen in cash.
After investigations, the CB-CID arrested Vaitheeswaran on February 10, 1973. Soon, they rounded up the whole gang. Vaitheeswaran (38), Parthasarathy (26), Lakshmanan (30) and Kannan Pillai (30) were sentenced to death. Ayub Khan, Majeed Ebrahim and Gopal were given life terms. Venugopal turned approver.