Abdul Karim Telgi and the Stamp of Doom

‘‘The Crime Branch made enquiries, then the SIT (Special Investigation Team) took our old registers,’’ says the fuming Lawrence. ‘‘We don’t know if somebody stayed here with bogus names.’’

Sridhar Vagal (50) should be able to tell you. As Joint Commissioner of Police, he ran the Mumbai Crime Branch, a once-illustrious unit now plagued by whispers of having gone rogue. It led the fight against the mafia, but in doing so could never stem the strong rumours of fake encounters and protection payoffs. But the Crime Branch found its real golden goose in Telgi, latching on quickly and efficiently to his vast wealth.

With his receding hairline, casual dress sense — the two top buttons of his shirt were usually undone — and leisurely drawl, it was hard to tell that Vagal was a nuclear physicist from IIT Mumbai, topped off with IIM Ahmedabad. None of that stopped him from accepting a bribe of Rs 76 lakh from Telgi, says the SIT. Today, fighting fatigue and insomnia in Pune’s Cantonment police station lock-up, Vagal reflects all that went wrong. It was quite straightforward: corrupt but intelligent officers, a super-rich criminal and limitless greed.

Currently, it’s the police officers who are falling into the net. Two MLAs — one from Andhra Pradesh, another from Maharashtra — have been arrested, but these are still the small fish. It seems obvious that Telgi’s reach extended to the highest echelons of politics and the police. The unravelling of his cosy arrangements is only just beginning.

HOW TO USE THE POLICE

THE arrangement was simple. Instead of jail, Telgi spent his days after his last arrest in various Mumbai hotels or his flat in super-swank Cuffe Parade. The former travel agent was in Crime Branch custody between October 28, 2002 and January 2003, but he was never where he was supposed to be: In a grim, grimy lock-up in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum.

Instead, Telgi and his captors just had a lot of fun, including a three-day holiday in Goa. The chief organiser was Assistant Police Inspector Dilip Kamath, who helpfully did the bookings from his mobile phone (those records are now in the custody of investigators). So while Telgi indulged himself in his favourite herbal massages and soaks in jacuzzis, Kamath and a police informer did their own thing.

It wasn’t just about the comforts the police allowed the genial Telgi. His first arrest in 1999 didn’t slow him down either; he continued running his pan-Indian operation — with its vast network of distributors, MBAs and printing presses — from custody. The arrangement, obviously, was that the officers supposedly investigating him would get a substantial cut.

The Telgi tangle is still unravelling, and it’s too early to say how much the bribes were exactly: The biggest payoffs seem to have gone to big-name politicians. Still, some indication comes from IGP Vagal, who with his Rs 24,000 salary clocked in assets worth Rs 25 crore, according to the SIT. Then there’s Crime Branch’s Senior Inspector Vashisht Andale. On a monthly salary of Rs 14,500 he’s got assets valued at Rs 50 crore, including a foreign bank account, says the SIT.

It hasn’t happened overnight. Andale and Kamath cleverly realised Telgi’s vast income-generating potential in 1996, when Telgi was in Bangalore jail. Both the officers were in touch with the kingpin. Records maintained by Bangalore jail authorities indicate that Andale and Kamath visited Telgi regularly in 2000 and 2001. This was the duo that helped Telgi talk to senior police officers and even a minister, says a source in the SIT. Almost any policeman who ever investigated Telgi has met the duo — they would arrive promptly and play mediator.

A small indicator of how the police milked Telgi is available from Bhiwandi, 60 km northeast of Mumbai, where Telgi printed and stored fake stamp paper. In January 2003, Rs 837 crore worth of stamp paper was seized by a Mumbai police officer — not the Crime Branch. It was sheer providence, since it came from an independent tip-off. Kamath, in connivance with his superiors, had been planning to sell the counterfeit stamp paper.

The Mumbai Crime Branch was the latest — and probably the biggest — player in the Telgi game. The 60 arrests and investigations across Maharashtra and Karnataka, where the probe is run by the drolly named StampIT, or Stamp-paper Investigation Team, indicate how Telgi had reached the innards of the political, commercial and administrative system of at least seven states.

TELGI’S EARLY INVESTMENTS

‘‘SIR, I am a commerce graduate, I have come from a very poor family, I am unemployed, but for your kind information, I have vast contacts in different banks and multinational companies, commercial organisations etc.’’

That was Telgi’s plea in a letter he wrote on February 18, 1994, to Maharashtra’s then Revenue Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, who went on to become chief minister.

‘‘Pl consider immediately,’’ Deshmukh scrawled in the margins. Less than a month later, Telgi received the stamp vendor’s licence that he so wanted. Telgi was right about his vast contacts.

‘‘The racketeers have been able to develop a large clientele consisting of at least 52 builders, 48 banks and 61 private limited companies who had purchased such fake stamps, apparently unknowingly, in the past,’’ said no less a person than Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani in a letter to Deshmukh last year. Advani suggested that Deshmukh — then chief minister — hand over investigation ‘‘at the earliest to the CBI’’.

Of course, Deshmukh did nothing of the sort. Instead, a few months later, the government tried suppressing an SIT report that indicted the Crime Branch and raised questions on the involvement of senior officers, including R S Sharma, who’s just gone on leave as Mumbai Police Commissioner after two days of intensive questioning by the SIT.

But the secret report was leaked to The Indian Express, and on the day it was published, there was serious damage control. Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal — who personally cleared incarcerated IGP Vagal to his former post as Joint Commissioner Crime — called saying it was ‘‘a conspiracy’’ by ‘‘another group’’ of officers. On Bhujbal’s instructions, Sharma walked into The Indian Express office to further the conspiracy theory.

But the SIT’s investigations would still have been swept under the carpet if it were not for Anna Hazare, the doughty Gandhian crusader who alleged a cover-up and dragged the entire case to the Bombay High Court.

Acutely aware that SIT chief Jaiswal was only a mid-level Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of police — frequently stonewalled by his superiors and Maharashtra’s political masters — the justices handpicked a quiet, philosophical officer to head the SIT. S S Puri, who never got to head the Maharashtra Police (he had an unpalatable quality: honesty) shook up the police force like never before. IGP Vagal was arrested, Commissioner Sharma was questioned.

But there is much, much more to be done, even though it appears that substantial progress has been made. There are those who seem to have gotten away clean, and their connection with Telgi again reveals the astounding network of contacts that he built.

In 1998, Telgi audaciously tried to approach no less that the Union Finance Ministry to get a promotion for Ganga Prakash, a deputy general manager of the Indian Security Press in Nashik. It’s a high-security institution that prints currency, and the stock of Telgi’s trade — revenue stamps and stamp paper.

A recommendation letter for Prakash was forwarded by then Urban Affairs Minister Ram Jethmalani and forwarded to former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha on June 2, 1998, says a chargesheet filed before a special judge. During questioning, Jethmalani told investigators that Maharashtra MLA Anil Umrao Gote — now in custody — had brought Telgi to him to pursue Ganga Prakash’s promotion. The letter was forwarded to Sinha, Jethamalani said.

Gote and Telgi travelled by air to New Delhi on November 26, 1998. They stayed at five-star Hotel Ashok. Telgi, of course, picked up the tab. So it wasn’t surprising that investigators found Telgi to be in possession of production programmes of the Nashik press. It was from here that Telgi bought printing machines — marked as scrap and supposed to be destroyed — after being the highest bidder.

He meticulously built a nationwide network of agents, marketing experts (many of them MBAs) and contacts in revenue offices. Telgi was deeply connected with the press and knew serial numbers of stamp papers. Prakash is still in service.

There are now 1,300 hours of critical tapes in six languages to be transcribed, wiretaps made by the Karnataka SIT of conversations Telgi had with police officers and politicians. The SIT investigations in Maharashtra and Karnataka have much probing to do — and much more stonewalling to face.

S Ahmed Ali & Sweta Ramanujan with reports from J Dey