The Polyester Prince (31 page)

A week after his arrival back in Bombay, Wadia was told that his life was in danger in his home city. The chief minister, Sharad Pawar, telephoned Wadia at his home fronting the Arabian Sea at Prabhadevi waterfront. Without giving details, he warned the textile tycoon of a conspiracy to assassinate him. A squad of police commandos arrived soon after to mount a 24-hour guard on Wadia’s home. Two cars packed with armed police were assigned to escort Wadia’s limousine around the city.

Pawar was an old friend of Wadia, and no friend to Dhirubhai. He had parted company with Ambani’s principal political investment, Indira Gandhi, in the late 1970s and had run a rebel Congress Party in his own state. Brought back into the mainstream Congress only recently by Rajiv Gandhi and installed as chief minister, he remained an ambitious and independent-minded satrav whom Gandhi’s loyalists regarded with great suspicion.

Prominent among these loyalists in Maharashtra was the former city mayor and the Congress MP for South Bombay, Murli Deora, an old yarn market colleague of Dhirubhai. By then Pawar was feeling some heat himself from Reliance for failure to overrule Godbole on sales tax and for other holdups in state government clearances.

Pawar believed Reliance was stirring up certain land scandals being levelled against him by party dissidents.

Even so, Wadia suspected the security scare was a ruse to keep him under guard and keep his activities closely monitored. The next day, he gave the guards the slip and vanished for several hours. On his return, Pawar was again on the telephone and rebuked Wadia, warning him the threat was serious.

Wadia continued to be tied up with his appeal against the deportation order. On 26 July, he applied to the Bombay High Court to be recognised as an Indian citizen. On 28 July, he faced no less than the Additional Solicitor-General of India, G. R. Ramaswamy, who spent an entire day in court opposing his application. In addition, the CBI director Mohan Katre came down from New Delhi and spent the day watching the proceedings, a highly unusual level of interest given that the case was not one involving his agency. As the CBI is the only agency which can investigate judges, his presence may have been intended to intimidate the bench. Ramaswamy argued that Wadia had never been an Indian citizen, and even if he had, his application for British passports in 1964 and 1984 had automatically extinguished any claim to Indian nationality.

But on the evening of 1 August, a sensational development suddenly put Reliance in the dock. Detectives of Bombay’s Criminal Investigation Department arrested Kirti Vrijlal Ambani, a general manager of Reliance in charge of public relations and customs and excise matters, and charged him before a magistrate with conspiracy to murder Nusil Wadia.

Also arrested and charged as chief co-conspirator was a strange companion for the Reliance executive: one Mun Waghji Babaria, already widely known around Bombay as a small-time popular music band leader playing under the name ‘Prince Babaria & His Orchestra’. Then 40, Babaria had frequently organised entertainment evenings that brought Bombay’s milieux of business, cinema, and crime together. Favouring black sequinned suits, see-through black shirts and a gold medallion as stage costume, Prince played the drums in his band, while ‘playback’ singers and dancers pumped out hits from Hindi movies.

Figures such as the actor Sayeed Jaffrey, the reputed kingpin of gold and electronics smuggling in Bombay, and several senior businessmen are among those figured in Babaria’s photo-album of musical parties. Two years earlier, Babaria had taken his musical troupe to Dubai, to provide the night’s entertainment at the birthday party of Dawood Ibrahim, the preeminent don of the Bombay underworld, later to be accused as mastermind of the bombings that rocked the city in March 1993, killing nearly 300 people.

Among Babaria’s circle of acquantainces was Kirti Ambani, then 47. A long-time Reliance employee, he was originally named Kirti Shah but became so devoted to the Reliance founder that he had changed his own name to Ambani. Babaria had called occasionally at 1Grti Ambani’s office. At a party for Babaria’s young son in 1987, Kirti had been a chief guest-his presence recorded on video and camera.

The character of each of the two accused immediately threw a degree of implausibility over the alleged assassination plot: Kirti Ambani, a middle-management company man with an engineering degree, fond of playing chess, with wife and children in the suburbs; Prince Babaria, a sentimental and pudgy figure of middling talent, desperately proud of his pretty wife Hema and their two children, and living, as it turned out, in a police barracks at Bhendi Bazar-where his forebears had made a living for six generations as police informers.

Bombay business circles were incredulous enough that a Reliance employee would even think of taking out Wadia. Life was and is cheap in Bombay. right through the 1980s and 1990s leading businessmen in the construction and transport industries have been victims of contract killings carried out for amounts less than two thousand dollars. But the Arnbanis’ constantly expanding ambitions seemed to place them on a level of corporate behaviour well above this vicious jungle. Their chosen weapons were the robust publicity offensive, the judicious stimulus to bureaucrats and politicians, and an unfailing ability to interest big and srno investors in their schemes.

In compiling evidence on the alleged conspiracy against Wadia, the police also revisited earlier cases-such as the bashings and attacks met in the past by the son of Orkay Silk Mills chairman, Kapal Mehra, Jarnnadas Moorjaani of the Crimpers’ Association, and embroidery exporter Bipin Kapadia. Statements were taken from Moorjaani and Kapadia.

Wadia also recalled a threat from terrorists’ which had forced him to withdraw his two sons from their boarding school in the Himalayas at Kasaull in 1987. Nothing but the coincidence that all had at some time or other been in commercial rivalry to Reliance was established.

The police case, as eventually presented to court in October 1990, was that Kirti Ambani was deeply involved in the Reliance fight with Wadia’s Bombay Dyeing Ltd for monopoly control of paraxylene. By limiting access to cheap imports, Reliance was trying to force Bombay Dyeing to buy Reliance’s surplus paraxylene, on which the price was 280 per cent above the production cost. The two companies were in a ‘hectic campaign’ over July-September 1988.

After his job as Reliance press spokesman had been largely taken over by Anil Ambani and hired journalists in 1987, lerti Ambani’s duties continued to be ‘liaison’ with customs and excise officials. The police presented one example of such a contact, a former customs inspector named Umedsingh Sarraiya, who in 1974-78 had handled the customs bond placed by Reliance. Sarralya had frequently visited the old Reliance offices at Court House and had been introduced to Kirti Ambani by Dhirubhai’s nephew Rasikbhai Meswani, then in charge of customs matters. Sarraiya had continued social meetings with Kirti until 1989, at each other’s home, or at small hotels and restaurants around Bombay, with Kirti usually picking up the tab. Other customs officers somtimes joined them.

Sarraiya also admitted to police that he had been demoted for graft in the early 1980s, having been caught taking money from a passenger while on duty at Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport.

The police alleged that, in November 1988, the bandmaster Babaria had contacted a criminal called Ivan Leo Sequeira, alias Shanoo, whom he had known for a year or so through a mutual friend who played the Hawaiian guitar. Sequeira, then 29, had been convicted of a murder ten years earlier but acquitted on appeal in 1984. In 1988 he was again facing charges of shooting someone, and was on ball.

Babaria had a proposition. A big industrialist was to be attacked and Mied. ‘He told me that we would be getting much money in that case,’ Sequeira later confessed in a sworn statement before a magistrate. Babaria later revealed the target was Nusli Wadia, but did not immediately reveal who was paying, saying only that he was a ‘big man’.

On 13 December 1988, Babaria and Sequeira went to the Ritz Hotel in Bombay’s Churchgate area to meet Kirti. The Ritz is a small hotel close to the Nariman Point business district, and was frequently used by Reliance and many other companies for middle-level meetings. Kirti had booked a room on the Reliance account, and was generous with company hospitality at the lunchtime meeting, as ten bottles of beer and various snacks were consumed by the three.

Sequeira, introduced as ‘Shakil’, said Kirti had then discussed the plan to attack Wadia.

Kirti gave him newspaper cuttings with photographs of Wadia, as well as Wadia’s address and telephone numbers. Sequeira left the meeting and waited downstairs. Babaria came down and Sequeira said he was interested in the job but wanted an advance.

Babaria said Kirti had agreed to pay ‘50 lakhs’ (Rs 5 million, then worth about US$300 000) for a successful job.

The next day Sequeira rang Babaria and was told 1Crti had agreed to pay Rs 500 000 in advance. The two met the same afternoon at the Shalimar Restaurant near Babaria’s home at Bhendi Bazar. Babaria went outside to a lane and came back with a plastic bag containing Rs 150 000 in cash, which he gave to Sequeira. The police collected evidence of substantial cash withdrawals from Reliance bank accounts around this period, advances made to company employees, adjustment of bad debts, and internal cash transfers. All these tend to suggest of [sic] possible manoeuvring of accounts for dubious expenditure,’ the indictment said.

Thereafter, Sequeira dodged Babaria’s increasingly anxious phone calls inquiring about plans for an attack. After several weeks, Babaria went to Sequeira’s house and told him Kirti was inquiring about progress. At a second meeting, on 21 February 1989, at the Ramada Inn Palmgrove at seaside Juhu, the three sat drinking by the swimming pool on Kirti’s Reliance expense account and again discussed plans for the killing. Sequeira pressed for more of the promised advance, and was duly passed another Rs 150 000 via Babaria at the Shalimar restaurant the next day.

As more weeks went by without action, Babaria came under more pressure from Kirti Ambani. Sequeira said he was evading Babaria’s calls to a neighbour’s telephone, and instructing his family to tell callers he was not at home. In April, Babaria engaged another criminal named Ramesh Dhanji Jagothia to help carry out the attack. Jagothia was later to surrender to police two pistols made in local workshops, along with ammunition. Babaria also contracted a mechanic named Salim Mustaq Ahmed to steal a car and drive it in an ambush of Wadia’s limousine, at an agreed price of Rs 50 000.

Together with Jagothia, Babaria went to Sequeira’s home later in April and managed to find him. Babaria pressed Sequeira to get in touch with Kirti, and the next day Sequeira telephoned the Reliance general manager at his office.

‘He was very upset,’ Sequeira said in his sworn statement. ‘He told me he was taken to task by his boss. I told him that I would return the advance money. But he told me that he was not interested in getting back the money. But he was interested in getting the job done.’

In May, Babaria and Sequeira met a very unhappy Kirti Ambani at the Sea Rock Hotel.

‘He told me that he was suspecting our intention,’ said Sequeira. ‘He was upset. He was about to cry He was saying he was unable to face his bosses. I assured him that the nature of the work was serious and if anything goes wrong each one would come in trouble. He was not very happy by hearing all this.’

After this meeting, Babaria pressed Sequeira once or twice, but-according to Sequeira-came to realise that he was not really interested in the job, which Sequeira admitted himself.

‘When Babaria approached me with the offer I thought that it was a good opportunity to me to make good money,’ he said. ‘But when I came to know that the person involved is an industrialist and a prominent figure I realised that it was too dangerous and I decided to back out. However I was knowing that the persons who wanted us to do the job were also connected with industries and it was possible for me to knock out as much money as I can by dodging them. With this idea I knocked from them the sum of three lakh rupees.’

In a later interview, Babaria freely admitted to his role in organising the murder conspiracy, and said that his assembled hit-squad had actually tracked Wadia at three locations with a view to carrying out an attack.

On one occasion they followed Wadia to a bungalow at Khandala, a resort in the Western Ghat mountains inland from Bombay. ‘We wanted to kill him but were two hours late so the operation failed,’ Babaria said. On the other attempts, the gang tried to catch Wadia outside his home at Prabhadevi, and again outside the Breach Candy Hospital where Wadia had gone to visit the ailing Ramnath Goenka.

Babaria claimed that the advance actually paid to him by Kirti Ambani totalled Rs 1.3 Millon, suggesting that if Sequeira had played his cards better he could have squeezed even more money than his Rs 300 000. This tends to accord with the sudden flush of money enjoyed by Babaria at the end of 1988 and early 1989, when he lavished his wife Hema with gold jewellery bought at top jewellers in the Opera House district of Bombay, bought two old cars and a new sound system for his band, and had a priority telephone installation at his small house in the Bhendi Bazar Police Lines.

The plot came unstuck in mid-July, however, when one of the gang talked about it while drinking in a bar, and was overheard by a police informant. The gang member was taken in for questioning, and revealed the details. As the gang was rounded up, the sensational identity of the alleged target and client of the gang got attention from Bombay’s seniormost detective, the joint Police Commissioner (Crime), Arvin Inamdar.

Babaria’s new telephone line allowed the police to collect more evidence against Kirti Ambani, by tapping calls between the alleged conspirators. On 22 July they recorded Babaria calling Kirti, and mentioning details of the murder plan. Babaria asked Kirti if he knew whether Wadia was in town. Mrti replied that Wadia was in Bombay because his appeal against the visa decision was fixed for 24 July. Kirti asked about the execution of the plan. According to the police court papers, Kirti said he was ‘fed up with only assurances, dates and no results’. The people chosen for the job were not capable and his account should be settled - that is, the advance returned.