How a Meow Meow seizure was tip of drug iceberg

Mumbai Crime Branch's tip led to the arrest of drug peddler Parveen Bano, unveiling a major synthetic drug cartel linked to Salim Dola and Chhota Shakeel.

An anonymous tip in February 2024 sent inspector Atmaji Sawant of unit 7 of the Mumbai Crime Branch on the trail of Parveen Bano Ghulam Shaikh, a 33-year-old burqa-wearing woman who lived in the slums of Kurla. She, Sawant was told, had emerged as one of the largest peddlers of mephedrone-- Meow Meow in common parlance—in his jurisdiction. A little rooting around revealed that the woman had recently paid ₹40 lakh as down payment for a flat in the

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Pravin Shinde’s revelations led to the interception of a grey Chevrolet Cruz at Thane in May last year, and the arrest of two more members of Dola’s gang who were caught transporting a kilo of Meow Meow worth ₹2 crore in the market. Their confessions, in turn, led to a raid at a factory at Vikarabad in Telangana, where more people were arrested and drugs worth ₹25 crore were seized. One of the men arrested from the Telangana factory, Dayanand Muddenar, pointed investigators to a man in Surat, Zulfikar alias Mohsin Kothari, who gave them money and raw material to run the Telangana factory. Using this information, cops raided Kothari’s Surat home where they found ₹10.84 lakh in cash. Kothari told the cops that the money had been given to him by Salim Dola to buy the raw material to manufacture MD. He also told the police that Dola used the services of a Mumbai-based angadia, Hussain Mustafa Furniturewala, for hawala operations to send money to Dubai. This allegedly included a tranche of ₹50 crore sent from the sale of drugs made at the Sangli farm.

The loop began to close, and the Dola family was now in the cross hairs of law enforcement agencies

However, this was not the first time that investigators had heard of Salim Dola. He grew up in a middle-class family in south Mumbai’s Ghodapdeo at Byculla, and became friends with Chhota Shakeel while Dawood Ibrahim and his gang still operated from Mumbai. He started his career as a gutka supplier in Mumbai and Delhi market before shifting to the drugs business. In 2012, Salim Dola was arrested by the NCB for possession of 80 kilos of marijuana. For the next five years, as Dola remained in jail, the family fell on hard times with his son Taher—once a party-loving spendthrift--being forced to work as a receptionist at a clinic at Opera House on a salary of ₹12000 a month while his mother worked behind the counter at a chemist’s shop. Salim Dola was eventually acquitted in this case, but soon after he came out of jail, he struck acquaintance with a man called Kailash Rajput who introduced him to synthetic drugs which yielded far higher margins than organic drugs. Rajput helped Dola start a business making a drug called Button that was made using fentanyl, the pain-killer at the heart of America’s opioid crisis. Rajput, known in the drug world by his initials KR, figures in the list of most wanted persons of several law enforcement agencies including the Mumbai police crime branch, the Narcotics Control Bureau and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI). Investigators believe he is living in the United Kingdom from where he allegedly supplies party drugs like ephedrine, ketamine, meow meow (MD) and fentanyl manufactured in India. Rajput had first come to the attention of the police in 2016 when the Thane police busted a mephedrone gang allegedly headed by Vicky Goswami and his then actor girlfriend Mamta Kulkarni. While Goswami left India several years ago, the Bombay High Court quashed the case against Mamta Kulkarni last year and she has since become a sanyasin.

Salim Dola was arrested yet again in 2018 when the Mumbai police’s anti-narcotics cell raided one of his hideouts at Santacruz, and recovered 100 kilos of fentanyl. But he was out on bail within four months after a forensic report said the sample sent to them for testing tested negative for fentanyl. Out on bail, Dola fled to the UAE where he set up a real estate business for his son Taher. The money for the business, say police, was routed to him through the drugs trade in India. With the deportation of Taher Dola and Mustafa Kubbawala, investigators believe it’s a matter of time before they get to the mastermind himself.