Inside Mumbai’s new extortion economy

MUMBAI : In February, the month in which an SUV with 20 gelatin sticks was found near Antilia, the posh south Mumbai residential tower owned by India’s wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, officials of the Mumbai Police’s crime branch arrested Tariq Parveen just a few kilometres away from the tony address. His report detailed the gangster’s extortion network, which included police officers who would even decide targets and amounts; the gangster allegedly squealed that a high-ranking IPS officer was his “boss". Fadnavis cherry-picks here, as the Aam Aadmi Party leader Preeti Sharma Menon remarked to Mint, “It was his government which did not probe alleged underworld connections and extortion claims which were made back in 2018." “I’m surprised by the scale and depth of the extortion now, but it’s not a new thing," M N Singh, former Mumbai police commissioner, told Mint. There are dozens of stories—a middle-rung cop’s wife received a packet with currency notes at the end of the month in which her husband passed away; the constable who delivered it told her it would be the last but he had been posthumously given his “rightful share"; filmmaker Mahesh Manjrekar received multiple calls during the lockdown last year from a man who claimed to be gangster Abu Salem’s man and demanded ₹35 crore as hafta; a bureaucrat joined a real estate company and helped builders negotiate haftas; a top builder routinely travelled to Dubai to “settle" on a lower vasooli; other builders paid the mafia’s local agents or became politicians.