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 more upscale neighbourhood of Mahim. A few days later, as Parveen Bano got off a late-night local train from Mira Road, she was intercepted, and caught with 641 grams of mephedrone (aka MD).

Representational image (Representational image)

But that tip, 17 months ago, led to a multi-agency crackdown on Maharashtra’s largest synthetic drug manufacturing cartel, and the extradition, in the last one month, of two members of the Dola family which controls the MD  trade in the state, and enjoys proximate relationship with Chhota Shakeel, according to investigators at the Narcotics Control Bureau.

Last month Taher Dola, 33, was extradited from Dubai in the UAE and on July 11 the Central Bureau of Investigation got custody of his cousin Mustafa Kubbawala, 44, also from the UAE, under the mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT). The hunt is now on for the patriarch of the family Salim Dola, 57. On July 9, Mumbai newspapers carried an advertisement from the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) offering a reward of ₹1 lakh to anyone with information on his whereabouts .

A week prior to Kubbawala’s arrest, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced in the Assembly that his government would be amending the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) to bring drug peddlers under its purview, doubling down on his priority to crackdown on the drugs trade. Central Government statistics from 2019 to 2021 show the state has the second highest number of drug cases registered in the country after Uttar Pradesh.

Salim Dola and his family are central figures in the drug manufacturing and peddling business that spans Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana, says deputy commissioner of police Datta Nalawade who supervised investigations into one of the country’s largest MD  factories at Sangli in Maharashtra. “About 25-30% of synthetic drugs used in Maharashtra and the other four states were made here,” said Nalawade. “Our investigations have revealed that Salim Dola is the main financier who provides the money to set up MD factories as also the raw material to manufacture it and its subsequent transportation from the factory to distribution,” he adds. Nalawade’s drugs bust resulted in seizures worth ₹252.55 crore and came exactly a month after inspector Atmaji Sawant arrested Parveen Bano outside Kurla station.

Here is how investigators painstakingly worked their way backwards from the last link in the chain which was the burqa-clad peddler to the head of the cartel: Parveen Bano’s interrogation revealed that she used to collect the drugs from a man at Mira Road whom she called ‘Dabs’. He turned out to be a 25-year-old man called Sajid Mohammad Asif Shaikh who ran a peddlers’ network across Mumbai. Shaikh later told investigators that he had been appointed by Salim Dola and his son Taher and nephew Mustafa Kubbawala. He also revealed the names of two suppliers in Surat who provided the raw material for making MD at the Sangli factory.

The March 2024 raid on the Sangli factory led to the arrest of six more people including a key figure, Pravin Shinde, who helmed operations at Sangli. He had learnt MD-making at Varanasi during the lockdown in 2020. Shinde returned to Sangli after the lockdown was lifted and bought a 12-acre farm on the outskirts of his hometown. Salim Dola’s nephew Mustafa Kubbawala met Pravin Shinde in 2023 and assured him of uninterrupted raw material supply from Surat. Within a year, police say, Shinde manufactured more than a thousand kilos of MD. For this he charged the Dola family ₹5 lakh per kg. Kubbawala would collect the MD consignments from the Sangli farm and transport them to Mira Road in high-end luxury cars to evade detection by police stationed on the highway. At Mira Road, the man they called ‘Dabs’ would distribute the MD  to his network of peddlers like Parveen Bano.

HT graphics. (HT)

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.