CHENNAI: The don is dead. Long live the hit man. In the city’s underworld, lucre, liquor and lass continue to motivate a whole of lot of young and not-so-young thugs to kill people, but the legendary ‘godfather’, celebrated in films like ‘Nayagan’, has vanished. Today’s gangster is no Mogambo. He does not strike terror in the people in his neighbourhood, nor does he have absolute control over a particular territory. He operates from a location unknown to his hit men and assigns jobs through his mobile phone. Job done, he at times hosts a thanksgiving party at a farmhouse, with enough supply of wine and women to keep the spirit going.
For example, a gang threw a lavish party at a resort on East Coast Road after eliminating businessman Sankar Divakaran on May 1 at K K Nagar at the behest of his business partner. Divakaran had the patent rights for the ‘twin SIM card technology’. According to the police, at the party, each of the killers was offered a five sovereign gold chain and Rs 1 lakh cash for executing the job.
At another party hosted by the same gang, a ‘settlement’ reached in a real estate dispute was celebrated with ample supply of women, who were said to be Kollywood ‘extras’.
But the goons were not satisfied. According to the police, they wondered why they were not offered the services of a particular popular glamour actress.
Clearly, the gang leader is generous. But his henchmen have no idea where their boss lives. The boss provides them information only on a need-to-know basis, which perhaps is why he is away from the long arm of law. The leader prefers to remain in the shadows, directing operations through remote control, giving directions through the cell phone from time to time.
It’s a far cry from the style of killings in the glorious day of the don when an ‘Ayodhyakuppam’ Veeramani, along with his men chased Durairaj, a rival leader, in broad daylight and murdered him in full public view in 1995. Police say that the dons of yesteryear - like Veeramani, Vellai Ravi, Cheran of Burma Colony, Ratinakumar of Krishna Colony, who once evoked fear and awe - have been wiped out.
It’s Dindigul Pandy who personifies today’s mobster.
He was the one who threw those two parties this year. He is invisible, wily and lethal. Geography can’t limit his area of operation. Only a small caucus enjoys free access to him. He rarely meets his hit men, who are generally freelancers, paid for a specific job.
But he networks with many small criminal gangs across the State and beyond and gets assignments from them as well. As a result, he has accomplices all over the State or even the country, which helps him take shelter at safe places while on the run. Pandy, according to the police, was recently holed up in Nepal, when the cops were on the lookout for him in a local case.
How did the gangsters change their style of functioning? It all started with a series of encounters and flushing out operations by the police between 1996 and 2004. Though enough second rung gangsters escaped the purge, they did not have a ‘godfather’ who could have served as a rallying point for regrouping. Besides, the clampdown on illicit liquor trade and drug smuggling left most of them without any viable source of income.
Around the same time, the city witnessed an economic boom following the infotech revolution, which led to increased activity on the real estate front. Gangsters smelt an opportunity and offered their services to land sharks and unscrupulous realtors. In some cases, the gangsters themselves entered the real estate business. ‘Punk’ Kumar, a henchman of former gangster Cheran, who was murdered recently in Perambur in connection with a cable TV dispute, had encroached upon a prime land near Mylapore, according to a police source.
With land sharks using criminals like Nagendran, Somalaya Somasundaram, Karupu alias Babu, Sekar alias Mattu Sekar in north Chennai, Binu of Choolaimedu, Periya Mahesh of Mylapore and Tiruvengadam and Pannerselvam of Velachery and Chinna Kesavan of Guindy to eliminate or intimidate those who refused to part with their property, a new trend was ushered in the underworld - kattapanchayats (a crude form of kangaroo courts) - organised by gangsters.
Many like Natraj of Red Hills, Dhanasekaran of Ennore and Appu, an Andhra native and settled in Chennai, stopped striking terror in their respective localities and started holding kattapanchayats. “They are sophisticated now; they stay in star hotels and have separate offices to deal with these issues,’’ says a senior police officer. For other mobsters, politics became their vocation.
The bottomline: Thugs now operate in small units, work for other gangs as well and make a killing. They do not seek to be godfather.