Stepping back from the unwritten, old-world mob commandment that women and immediate family be kept at an arm’s length from the murky operations of the syndicate, the gangsters from Mumbai rely and trust only their women to handle the key to the safety lockers. And today, it is the wives of the bhais who are funneling the ill-gotten money accumulated from extortion, real estate, smuggling and drugs back into circulation.

The police say don Chhota Rajan’s wife Sujata Nikhalje was his business and financial manager and she adroitly kept track of 37 accounts in various banks, including Standard Chartered, State Bank of India, Sangli Bank, Canara Bank and the Union Bank of India. Nikhalje apparently received lakhs of rupees by way of remittances from foreign banks. The Mumbai Police eventually caught on to the game and in 2006 Sujata Nikhalje became the first mafia-missus to be booked under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA). She was charge-sheeted last year along with eight other Rajan aides who are now facing trial.

“She is a housewife and running legitimate businesses like any other woman entrepreneur,” says advocate Satish Maneshinde, her defence counsel. “If she wanted to support her husband in his activities, she would not have stayed in India and suffered for 17 long years.”

Not many are willing to listen, even if Nikhalje is doing the once unthinkable of handling mob moolah. But Rajan is not the first gangster to fall back on the family. His one time crony, gangster-turned-politician Arun Gawli, actually started the trend. In the past five years, Arun Gawli, the only don to have stayed put in Mumbai and capped a career of crime with a seat in the Maharashtra Assembly, kept exhorting his wife to come out in public as a singer. Asha Gawli, heeding his advice, launched a music company and dished out several albums of paeans to her deity. Despite the songs having no takers, Aai Music Service, her company, has raked in big profits according to Arun Gawli’s account books. And when the Income Tax Department announced an amnesty under the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) a couple of years ago, the don admitted to an annual income of over Rs 1 crore. By last year, when he filed the statutory income statement before fighting the state elections, his income had swelled to Rs 2 crore.

In Mumbai’s underworld, most gangsters have opted for love marriages. Inter-faith marriages are also very common. Asha Gawli was a Muslim before she got married to Arun Gawli. Except for one marriage that fell apart (Ashwin Naik, a Maharashtrian, killed his Gujarati wife Neeta Naik who was a city corporator for cheating on him), most mafia marriages seem to survive the test of time and trials and separation.

The longevity of mob marriages is suddenly a topic of concern. The Mumbai police have now discovered to their chagrin that the mafia wives—either tutored in the mafia ways or picking them up by assimilation—are money-savvy, smarter and clever. So while Nikhalje was handling the big sums remitted in the name of her three daughters, other gangsters too were using their wives to launder their illegal earnings and even to manage their funds.

Wannabe gangster Ravi Poojari, hailing from Karnataka but with his base in Mumbai, married Padma, a Punjabi. When Poojari escaped to Bangkok, Padma along with her three children continued staying at the Shere-Punjab colony in Andheri East in the metro. According to the Crime Branch officers who arrested Padma in a case of passport forgery, Poojari had no top lieutenants in the city who could launder his money in Mumbai and in south-east Asian cities.

Inspector Milind Khetale of the Crime Branch says, “We have found in our investigations that Padma used to help her husband in his operations and manage his funds and criminal activities.” A fact that the cops remained unaware of until she managed to procure a passport on a forged documents and jump bail.

Padma,a well-educated woman, not only managed her husband’s financial affairs when he was on the run, but she also ensured that Poojari remained in the business. Of course, her lawyer, Shyam Keswani, denied that she stood in for her husband. “There is no truth in the cops’ claims,” he insisted. However, once arrested and produced in court, Padma came under the cops’ scanner and, under intense pressure to come clean, had no option but to flee the country. There is now an Interpol red-corner notice out against her name.

Padma is the second mob moll flagged with a red-corner notice. Before her, Sameera Jumaani, former wife of Abu Salem, had a notice pending against her since 1993, when soon after the serial blasts in Mumbai, she and her husband escaped to Dubai.

The lucre seems to have blinded the women to their men’s licentious ways. It is possible, at least in the case of Salem, that a woman is still playing a big role in his litigation. That woman is Jumaani, whom he separated from after he met Monica Bedi and got besotted with the starlet.

Salem claimed he was totally bankrupt when he was extradited back home from Portugal in November 2005. However, the don, even by conservative estimates, has since ended up spending crores of rupees on an expensive legal defence team. The law enforcement agencies, including the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), Central Bureau of Investigation and state police forces, have no clue to the identity of the person who is picking the tabs for Abu Salem’s high-profile lawsuits. He has hired costly lawyers like Niteen Pradhan and Ashok Sarogi, who have travelled to Portugal to defend him. “As far as legal fees are concerned none of his lawyers have charged anything, while the foreign trips and other expenses are met by Salem’s three brothers Abu Laees, Abu Hakim and Abu Jaeish,” claims Sarogi.

“We are flummoxed by this mysterious sponsor who is bailing Abu Salem out financially,” say ATS sleuths. “Since the transfer of funds in the country are beyond the purview of our investigations and there are specialised agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and Directorate of Revenue Intelligence who probe such matters, we wrote to them to draw their attention to Salem’s finances. We are awaiting a reply from them,” says ATS chief, Krish Pal Raghuvanshi.

According to a Mumbai Police officer of the rank of inspector-general, over Rs 50 lakh was recently deposited into the account of one of the lawyers defending the extradited gang leader. The police suspect that the money was either deposited by Salem’s supposedly estranged wife Jumaani or at least that she facilitated the deposit. Currently, based in the United States, Jumaani is flush with funds, claims Sarogi, even as he flatly denies she has any contribution to make towards Salem’s stay in India.

Salem has another woman to be grateful to, say the police. A school dropout, Salem suddenly found himself adrift in uncharted waters when he and Bedi were on the run together. Salem knew little about handling money through numbered accounts and making investments in foreign countries in international currency. The CBI agents who brought them back from Portugal claim that Bedi not only taught Salem how to dress well and speak a smattering of English, but also introduced him to the fine art of handling money and investing in tax havens across the world.

However, none of the invetigating agencies, not the CBI or the ATS or the Crime Branch, could gather evidence about Bedi managing Salem’s funds. The only case that Bedi is facing in India relates to her passport. She faces two charges of forgery, one in Madhya Pradesh, the other in Hyderabad—where she has already been convicted.

“In these times of intensive police scrutiny and overall surveillance, the underworld can only trust their family members. We found almost all the gang leaders handing over the reins of their financial empires to their wives or immediate family members,” says Dhananjay Kamlakar, deputy commissioner of police, detection, Crime Branch.

They’d better wake up to the fact that the other half could be the better—or more notorious—half.