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COVER STORY: CRIME
COKE TALES
If you wanna hang out, you've gotta take her out, Cocaine
—Eric Clapton.
 Take
them out. Ali, the little Afghan peddler, did, and often. To snort, shake
and swig at Delhi's most glamorous discos and night clubs where smoke
hangs like curtains and price tags read like crazy cell phone numbers.
And the calls on his flashy handset came pouring in, not just from Delhi's
glam set but also young chieftains of industry, the fashion circuit, the
Page Three People, the BMW owners and celluloid stars. They acknowledged
Ali, or Naqibullah, as the king of the cocaine ring, they held celebratory
parties in his name, and they would beg him to sell them the fix every
day. Little did these rich men and women know that detectives were monitoring
their every call, every lurid word, every moaning exchange. So even as
"high" society sniffed and paid through their nose, the policemen
began to get a whiff of a big story.
Close to midnight on August 24, Ali the refugee's
luck ran out. As it did for Neeraj Vadera, 44, Yanchia to Delhi's sniffing
brigade, part-owner of the 21-storeyed Hans Plaza hotel on Barakhamba
Road. Vadera and Ali had exchanged six calls earlier that day. When the
seventh one was made, this time from Ali's mobile (9810247778) at 7.47
p.m. on Vadera's cellphone, the hotelier was preparing to soak up some
glam at the Hyatt Regency hotel with his fiancee Komal Rampal. Ali promised
to hand over 2 gm of cocaine, and the rendezvous was set for the Out gate
of Hotel Ambassador in the Lodhi Road area.
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THE PUSHER: Ali, the king of the cocaine ring
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When the Michelin tyres of Vadera's shining 4,400cc
black BMW screeched to a halt, Ali was already waiting. As was a team
of Delhi Police's special cell, led by Inspector M.S. Bhasin. Ali fished
out a little pouch of white powder, and Vadera handed him Rs 3,000. Then,
as they exchanged their goodbyes, the long arm of the law hustled them
inside waiting vans, and whisked them away from the good life. Says ACP
Rajbir Singh of the Special Cell who painstakingly developed information
on the narcotics peddlers and went after Ali: "As policemen, our
job is not to catch merely small time buyers and sellers and allow the
big fish to swim away. This case has for the first time in Delhi opened
up a can of high-profile worms."
In Delhi's "snowing" discos and bars,
word of the arrest spread fast. Ali had been caught and he would sing
like a canary. Cellphones were rapidly switched off; landlines remained
unanswered; and as the heat rose, several in the glam circuit even booked
their tickets to cooler climes. Back at the Lodhi Road police station,
inside its non-air-conditioned confines, Ali and Vadera began to sweat
for more reasons than one. As the heat began to rise, they cracked. Within
hours, a 37-year-old Nigerian national on a fake passport, and another
from Swaziland, a year older, both couriers of cocaine to Delhi, were
picked up. Their interrogation gave the inside picture of a powder business
that spans continents and has its roots somewhere in the lawless interiors
of Colombia (see map).
Over the next seven days, a tale of conspiracy
and international trafficking in narcotics slowly unravelled, through
hours of questioning of the four men arrested under the Narcotic Drugs
and Psychotropic Substances Act. Vadera was sent to jail by a special
judge, while the three foreign nationals were sent to police remand. India
Today's investigation into Ali's mobile number had its own shocking story
to tell (see chart). The scrutiny of thousands of calls made to Ali and
by him to his clients since January 2001 (during which period Ali's peddling
career graph really soared), has now become a major concern for the Delhi
Police. Powerful reputations stand to be destroyed by a few calls made,
perhaps a few grams of cocaine lines cut.
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