Mumbai’s Sharpshooters

Long before he became known as The Godfather, Mario Puzo's legendary mafiosa character Vito Corleone had to "make his bones" by gunning down a local businessman for a few hundred dollars. Hundreds of youth from the poorest of backgrounds, a majority from states across the country, have passed through a similar bloody initiation on the streets of Mumbai as the first step on a path to becoming dreaded sharpshooters for underworld gangs.

In the course of the ongoing probe into the murder of investigative journalist J Dey, the Mumbai Police Crime Branch disclosed that it had tracked down the seven men who carried out the attack by going back to their records and looking at known underworld shooters. Sources were activated and the movements and locations of around 150 shooters on police records were tracked before it was found that Satish Kalia, a shooter for the Chhota Rajan gang with a long criminal history, was missing with another known associate.

Investigations have borne out that Rohit Thangappan Joseph alias Satish Kalia, a 34-year-old who lived in the western suburbs of Mumbai, had fired five bullets at Dey from behind, while both were travelling on motorbikes.

On the precision with which Dey was gunned down by the professional underworld shooter, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Himanshu Roy says, "Kalia is a crack shot. I asked him why none of the other six arrested were carrying weapons. He looked straight at me and told me without flinching that he was confident he would be able to pull off the hit. The manner in which Dey was gunned down is not something just anyone could do. Shots were fired from a moving bike onto a moving target, and the grouping of the bullet wounds was within a breadth of six inches."

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