Back in the 1990s, Bollywood was nothing like the sanitised, studio-controlled, corporate-financed industry it is today. Tinsel town had its moguls and its mandarins who, along with Mumbai’s realty players, controlled incredible sums of black money. So it was only natural that when Salem decided to go beyond the construction business, it would be to the veritable gold mine of Bollywood.
The first target would be Subhash Ghai, one of the reigning maharajas of superstardom. Ghai’s cash registers had been ringing and coffers overflowing ever since his 1993 box office superhit Khalnayak, starring Salem’s now-on, now-off friend Sanjay Dutt. The director’s stock had soared so much that he could even sign Shah Rukh Khan for a film.
This, Salem believed, was the perfect time to send Bollywood a message. And the target would be Ghai. Salem deputed five youths from Azamgarh to deliver this ‘hit’. But the deputy commissioner of police, Zone VII, Satyapal Singh, received intelligence about the hit squad. He immediately assigned the task of foiling the attack to his special squad, led by Assistant Inspector Pradeep Sharma. The police team laid a trap and arrested the quintet of would-be killers.
Salem, on his part, continues to maintain that he had never intended to kill the director. All he wanted was to send out a message to him. And that missive was: ‘Pay up now or be prepared to face dire consequences.’ Later, Ghai said in an interview that Salem had called him and spoken to him quite politely. Salem wanted the foreign rights for his movie Pardes and when Ghai told him that it had already been signed away, Salem asked for a print of the movie so that he could make pirated copies and sell them. Salem also reportedly told Ghai that he was a big fan of his work.
Salem’s other target in Bollywood was director Rajiv Rai, who had seen major commercial success with Tridev (starring Naseeruddin Shah and Sunny Deol), Mohra (starring Akshay Kumar and Raveena Tandon) and Gupt (starring Bobby Deol and Kajol). As it turned out, Rai was a far easier man to convince than Ghai.
Annoying reporter
One day, Salem received an annoying phone call from a news reporter who worked with The Indian Express. Audaciously, the reporter asked Salem if his men were so incompetent that they couldn’t even deliver on a single death threat. The gangster said simply that it had never really been his intention to kill either Ghai or Rai. He added that the following week would see someone killed.
The next week came along and, sure enough, the gangster delivered on his word. Gulshan Kumar was brutally killed in public. The killing would also become Salem’s big ticket into the heart of Bollywood. After the Gulshan Kumar murder, the Indian Express reporter called Salem again. ‘Was this the murder you were talking about?’
But this time, the bluster was missing on the other end of the line. The Indian government was furious about this high-profile murder and the mafiosi was getting jittery. The whole of the Dawood gang was running scared, tails between their legs.
Salem hesitated for a moment and when he did speak, it was to say, ‘Yeh murder Lal Krishna Advani ne karvaya hai, why don’t you call and ask him?’ So, Salem did not own up to the Gulshan Kumar murder; nevertheless, he had managed to generate a deep-rooted fear psychosis in the film industry. Filmwallahs had a simple logic: If this man could make someone like Ghai cower and could bump off a big fish like Gulshan Kumar, no one was safe.
Code name
Salem had begun to use a code name when he called film personalities: Captain. The Mumbai Police had begun tapping phones, and since these conversations were considered to be culpable evidence, Salem decided to use the code name. The industry was soon abuzz about calls from the Captain.
Salem also appointed a small army of spies and scouts in the industry, people who were keeping tabs on a wide range of industry insiders. The most famous among them was a producer called Bobby. This man could walk into any Bollywood office, meet any star and demand a commitment. ‘At one point of time, some thirty top film stars had signed contracts with Bobby. They had promised chunks of dates to Bobby and there was no hassle about the remuneration,’ recalls a top film director.
Even some top stars who routinely played hookey after committing dates with reputed banners and haggled endlessly over their signing amount and fee would heed hastily when that one call came from the Captain, followed sometimes by a polite threat from Bobby. Suddenly, they would all be available, usually gratis.
Suave, elegant assistant
Soon, all of Bollywood’s biggest names were inhabitants of Salem’s cell phone book. And whenever they flew to a European destination to shoot a scene or a song, they would invariably fly into Dubai to pay obeisance to him in person. Without exception. But none of them met anyone called Salem.
The mafia boss’s modus operandi was to meet Bollywood’s who’s who as Arsalan (a fictional assistant to Abu Salem). This man was a suave and elegant person with a sophisticated, polite and urbane manner, while the reputation of Abu Salem was that of a ferocious, bloodthirsty don whose language was littered with more profanity than Mumbai’s roads are filled with potholes.
For, Salem’s relationship with Bollywood was no one-way street. In addition to making his influence felt, he too was deeply influenced by Bollywood, its megalomania, its larger-than-life plots, its drama. He was fascinated by the idea of a dual identity.
He relished posing as Arsalan and would even go so far as to look at his cell phone every now and then and claim he had received a missed call from Salem bhai. He’d sometimes have imaginary conversations with this caller, even as the stars he was spending time with shuddered in fear.
(Excerpted with permission from My Name is Abu Salem, by S. Hussain Zaidi, Penguin Books)
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