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When It All Began: The Untold Stories of the Underworld
In the 1980s, the streets of Dongri, Pydhonie, Nagpada, Agripada and Byculla witnessed some of the bloodiest gang wars and reigns of terror India had ever seen. These neighbourhoods became the battlegrounds of crime. But when did it all begin?
Tracing it back to the 1930s, when Abdul Karim Sher Khan Pathan, aka Karim Lala—considered one of the first feared dons of Bombay—arrived in the city. He soon mastered the tricks of the trade with the Pathan lords Babul Khan and Jumma Khan, thus gradually establishing his dominance. As the Pathans grew in power, resentment against them simmered among the Pathans. Petty criminals from the city’s streets and markets began to evolve into ‘dadas’ and ‘bhais’, forming gangs of their own.
This gave rise to the first generation of dons—figures including Karim Lala, Haji Mastan and Dilip Aziz—who built empires through smuggling, extortion and other rackets. Over time, these groups diversified, regrouped and expanded into larger syndicates of organized crime.
But the next generation of gangsters were ruthless. Power struggles turned volatile, and many began to pose serious threats to one another. Dawood Ibrahim and his allies too emerged during this time. What followed was an era of bloody rivalries, gangsters eliminating their rivals with impunity, openly defying the police.
Rakesh Maria, the veteran Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, who led some of India’s most high-profile investigations, reflects on the tumultuous history in this extraordinary book, When It All Began. Replete with rare information, landmark cases and the full arc of gang wars at every turn, the account captures the rise and fall of Bombay’s underworld like never before. With its authoritative voice and an insider’s perspective, this book will grip you to the very end.
Tracing it back to the 1930s, when Abdul Karim Sher Khan Pathan, aka Karim Lala—considered one of the first feared dons of Bombay—arrived in the city. He soon mastered the tricks of the trade with the Pathan lords Babul Khan and Jumma Khan, thus gradually establishing his dominance. As the Pathans grew in power, resentment against them simmered among the Pathans. Petty criminals from the city’s streets and markets began to evolve into ‘dadas’ and ‘bhais’, forming gangs of their own.
This gave rise to the first generation of dons—figures including Karim Lala, Haji Mastan and Dilip Aziz—who built empires through smuggling, extortion and other rackets. Over time, these groups diversified, regrouped and expanded into larger syndicates of organized crime.
But the next generation of gangsters were ruthless. Power struggles turned volatile, and many began to pose serious threats to one another. Dawood Ibrahim and his allies too emerged during this time. What followed was an era of bloody rivalries, gangsters eliminating their rivals with impunity, openly defying the police.
Rakesh Maria, the veteran Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, who led some of India’s most high-profile investigations, reflects on the tumultuous history in this extraordinary book, When It All Began. Replete with rare information, landmark cases and the full arc of gang wars at every turn, the account captures the rise and fall of Bombay’s underworld like never before. With its authoritative voice and an insider’s perspective, this book will grip you to the very end.
419 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 29, 2025
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November 28, 2025
Whew!! Just ended this today morning. Maria comes at you with the force of a city remembering its own buried heartbeat, that muffled thud under layers of cement, politics, folklore, movie myth-making, and the quiet dread of knowing that the past is never really past in a city like Bombay—Mumbai—this great, contradictory, shape-shifting metropolis where the sea doesn’t just lick the shore, it chews it, spits it out, and then demands another story.
And Maria, with his almost uncanny talent for pulling at the city’s hidden seams, steps into that role with the confidence of someone who has not only lived inside these stories but has breathed them, interrogated them, chased them down dark lanes and darker memories, and has returned with a sense of narrative duty that feels both archival and strangely intimate.
From the opening chapters, Maria gives the sense of a man peering through old files not just to retell what happened but why it happened that way, why certain lives among the shadow-people of India’s urban underbelly took the turns they did, why a dockworker suddenly morphs into a bootlegging baron, why a kid running errands for moneylenders grows into a syndicate loyalist, why one gang dissolved almost overnight and another became legend.
The book reads like watching a time-lapse of the city growing under your feet—the chawls thickening, the mills humming, the trains bursting with ambition and deprivation in equal parts. There’s a fascinated urgency to the way he narrates the early decades, the 1920s and 30s, when Bombay’s underworld wasn’t yet “Bollywooded,” when the mythology wasn’t cinematic but closer to the street-level truth of broken homes, migration, class fractures, police incompetence or collusion, and the slow but steady rise of entrepreneurial crime.
These were the years when the underworld wasn’t spectacular but desperate, and Maria is superb at capturing that desperation without romanticising it.
What’s especially striking is how deeply this book is aware that Indian modernity is inseparable from its criminal histories. Every nation has a hidden autobiography; for India, much of that autobiography sat in police files, newspaper clippings, and the crumbling notebooks of crime reporters who treated the streets as sacred texts.
Maria brings that material together with the care of a scholar and the instinct of a detective. It reminded me strongly of certain sections of Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction—particularly ‘The Imam and the Indian’—where the archival impulse is not academic dryness but a search for how common people survive within the crush of political and economic forces. Maria has that same sense of layered time. He’s looking backward not to memorialise but to decode.
There is, of course, the inevitable comparison with other underworld chronicles. Hussain Zaidi is the obvious figure here, a man who essentially created the modern literary template for documenting Mumbai’s criminal universe. Yet Maria does not compete with Zaidi—he dismantles the scaffolding entirely.
Zaidi’s gaze is outsider-insider, journalist-observer, myth-weaver. Maria’s gaze is insider-insider: the cop who played chess with the streets, who felt the tremors of underworld politics before they reached the newspapers. And because he’s writing not about his own cases but about the eras ‘before’ his time, he allows himself a more contemplative space—he’s reconstructing origins. He’s almost like a palaeontologist dusting off the bones of a half-forgotten ecosystem. If Zaidi’s world is a gangster movie with documentary bones, Maria’s is a forensic x-ray, tracing how the bones grew in the first place.
According to me, the most powerful portions of the book, though, are the quietest. The sections where he discusses forgotten gang leaders from the 1940s and 50s—men who aren’t remembered in popular imagination because Bollywood never latched onto them—are the parts where you feel the city exhale its truths. There were petty smugglers who turned into neighbourhood guardians, charitable extortionists, fierce protectors of their communities, and equally fierce exploiters of the same. Crime wasn’t always a binary; it was a gradient, a social function almost, performing roles that state institutions neglected.
The moral complexity is staggering. One minute you’re judging a man harshly, the next minute you’re seeing his childhood scarcity open up like a wound that never healed. Maria is excellent at this humanisation—not to justify crime but to make it comprehensible as a social product.
I greatly appreciate the narrative rhythm here: it is like reportage but also like an elegy. There’s a sombre nostalgia threaded through. Not for the criminals themselves but for a time when Bombay’s underworld wasn’t yet corporatised into massive cartels.
These early decades were handmade crime, artisanal crime—if I may playfully borrow the Gen Z love for “artisanal everything.” Men made their names through brute labour, street reputation, and community ties, not multinational-scale narcotics networks or Dubai-based command centres. It was small-scale, brutal, often silly, sometimes almost Shakespearean in its petty ambitions.
Speaking of Shakespeare—this book hums with the same tragic arcs. Not in style, but in trajectory. Ambition, betrayal, rise, fall. A gangster in Maria’s pages could easily walk into ‘Julius Caesar’ as a minor conspirator or into ‘King Lear’ as the fool who suddenly grasps the moral collapse around him.
The comparative angle comes alive when you place this book alongside the broader global literature on crime syndicates. Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ gave the West a mythic understanding of mafia honour codes. Roberto Saviano’s ‘Gomorrah’ tore open the violent capitalist machinery of the Camorra. Japan’s yakuza memoirs add notes of ritual and clan loyalty. China’s triad histories reveal generational continuity.
However, Maria’s book sits among them as a uniquely Indian counterpart—one where crime grew not only from poverty and ambition but from colonial residue, communal tensions, labour upheavals, dockyard smuggling routes, and the hybrid social life of a port city. Bombay wasn’t just a city; it was a global artery, and arteries attract blockages and parasites and unregulated flows. The underworld wasn’t an anomaly—it was an inevitability. Maria makes that very, very clear.
There are also deep political shadows running through the book, though he never turns it into a partisan exercise. Instead, he shows how policies—liquor prohibition, customs crackdowns, wartime shortages, licensing regimes—accidentally fertilised the soil in which crime flourished.
When state control over goods tightens beyond necessity, black markets sprout like weeds. And in a country learning its way through colonial rule, independence, and industrialisation, those weeds often became forests. One could almost read this book as an unintended commentary on state formation, a study of how governance gaps produce parallel ecologies of power.
What gives the narrative particular emotional strength, though, is that Maria writes with the melancholy of someone who has seen the fruits of these early decades—the bloody 80s and 90s—firsthand. He knows the violent crescendo. He knows where the story leads. And so when he’s chronicling a 1930s smuggler or a 1940s gambler, there’s a subtle premonition in his voice—like a man watching an innocent child knowing the destructive adult he will later become. It’s almost tragic.
What perhaps surprised me most was the emotional architecture of the book. Maria, despite his reputation as a hard-nosed police officer, is attentive to small details—how a gangster tended to stray dogs, how a neighbourhood trusted a smuggler more than a municipal worker, how a young pickpocket’s first stolen rupee funded his sister’s schoolbook.
These are not embellishments; they’re the sociological fibres of the story. And in that sense, this book is far more humane than many crime chronicles pretending to be “gritty.” It has grit, yes, but also grief, empathy, bewilderment, and an almost academic fascination with cause and effect.
Reading it in 2025 feels especially relevant because the India of 1920–1980 doesn’t feel like a bygone era—it feels like the prequel to everything we’re still grappling with: the politics-crime nexus, the urban-rural economic divide, the seduction of quick wealth, the media’s role in myth-making, the question of who gets to tell whose story.
In that sense, this book is not just about the past—it is about the infrastructure of our present anxieties.
What makes it uniquely compelling is that Maria never simplifies. He never imposes a single lens. He allows contradiction to breathe. A gangster may be both a tyrant and a protector. A policeman may be both corrupt and sincere.
A politician may condemn violence publicly while using it privately. This refusal to flatten reality gives the narrative a moral complexity that aligns it more with serious literary nonfiction than with sensational crime writing.
If I were to situate this book in my personal reading journey—my love of literature, my engagement with Tagore, Proust, Dostoevsky, my profound relationship with phonetics and textual criticism—it becomes clear why it hit hard. Because at its heart, this book is about origins, about the roots of behaviour, about the small phonemes of human intention that lead to the large utterances of destiny.
The book ends up becoming something more than its summary—a kind of sociological memoir of a city’s subconscious.
And in a way that only the best nonfiction can achieve, it reintroduces you to the world you thought you already knew.
Above all, it reminds us that history doesn’t just happen in parliament or in textbooks—it happens in back alleys, railway platforms, smoky bars, dockware godowns, and the invisible transactions between human need and human opportunity.
And Maria, with the steady gaze of someone who has seen too much to be naive, tells it like a story that must be preserved lest the next generation forget what shaped them.
This is why the book lingers. It doesn’t just inform. It reshapes your mental map of the city, of crime, of society, of cause and effect. And just like the best literature, it reminds you that the truths that matter often hide in shadows.
Most recommended for all fans of true crime.
And Maria, with his almost uncanny talent for pulling at the city’s hidden seams, steps into that role with the confidence of someone who has not only lived inside these stories but has breathed them, interrogated them, chased them down dark lanes and darker memories, and has returned with a sense of narrative duty that feels both archival and strangely intimate.
From the opening chapters, Maria gives the sense of a man peering through old files not just to retell what happened but why it happened that way, why certain lives among the shadow-people of India’s urban underbelly took the turns they did, why a dockworker suddenly morphs into a bootlegging baron, why a kid running errands for moneylenders grows into a syndicate loyalist, why one gang dissolved almost overnight and another became legend.
The book reads like watching a time-lapse of the city growing under your feet—the chawls thickening, the mills humming, the trains bursting with ambition and deprivation in equal parts. There’s a fascinated urgency to the way he narrates the early decades, the 1920s and 30s, when Bombay’s underworld wasn’t yet “Bollywooded,” when the mythology wasn’t cinematic but closer to the street-level truth of broken homes, migration, class fractures, police incompetence or collusion, and the slow but steady rise of entrepreneurial crime.
These were the years when the underworld wasn’t spectacular but desperate, and Maria is superb at capturing that desperation without romanticising it.
What’s especially striking is how deeply this book is aware that Indian modernity is inseparable from its criminal histories. Every nation has a hidden autobiography; for India, much of that autobiography sat in police files, newspaper clippings, and the crumbling notebooks of crime reporters who treated the streets as sacred texts.
Maria brings that material together with the care of a scholar and the instinct of a detective. It reminded me strongly of certain sections of Amitav Ghosh’s nonfiction—particularly ‘The Imam and the Indian’—where the archival impulse is not academic dryness but a search for how common people survive within the crush of political and economic forces. Maria has that same sense of layered time. He’s looking backward not to memorialise but to decode.
There is, of course, the inevitable comparison with other underworld chronicles. Hussain Zaidi is the obvious figure here, a man who essentially created the modern literary template for documenting Mumbai’s criminal universe. Yet Maria does not compete with Zaidi—he dismantles the scaffolding entirely.
Zaidi’s gaze is outsider-insider, journalist-observer, myth-weaver. Maria’s gaze is insider-insider: the cop who played chess with the streets, who felt the tremors of underworld politics before they reached the newspapers. And because he’s writing not about his own cases but about the eras ‘before’ his time, he allows himself a more contemplative space—he’s reconstructing origins. He’s almost like a palaeontologist dusting off the bones of a half-forgotten ecosystem. If Zaidi’s world is a gangster movie with documentary bones, Maria’s is a forensic x-ray, tracing how the bones grew in the first place.
According to me, the most powerful portions of the book, though, are the quietest. The sections where he discusses forgotten gang leaders from the 1940s and 50s—men who aren’t remembered in popular imagination because Bollywood never latched onto them—are the parts where you feel the city exhale its truths. There were petty smugglers who turned into neighbourhood guardians, charitable extortionists, fierce protectors of their communities, and equally fierce exploiters of the same. Crime wasn’t always a binary; it was a gradient, a social function almost, performing roles that state institutions neglected.
The moral complexity is staggering. One minute you’re judging a man harshly, the next minute you’re seeing his childhood scarcity open up like a wound that never healed. Maria is excellent at this humanisation—not to justify crime but to make it comprehensible as a social product.
I greatly appreciate the narrative rhythm here: it is like reportage but also like an elegy. There’s a sombre nostalgia threaded through. Not for the criminals themselves but for a time when Bombay’s underworld wasn’t yet corporatised into massive cartels.
These early decades were handmade crime, artisanal crime—if I may playfully borrow the Gen Z love for “artisanal everything.” Men made their names through brute labour, street reputation, and community ties, not multinational-scale narcotics networks or Dubai-based command centres. It was small-scale, brutal, often silly, sometimes almost Shakespearean in its petty ambitions.
Speaking of Shakespeare—this book hums with the same tragic arcs. Not in style, but in trajectory. Ambition, betrayal, rise, fall. A gangster in Maria’s pages could easily walk into ‘Julius Caesar’ as a minor conspirator or into ‘King Lear’ as the fool who suddenly grasps the moral collapse around him.
The comparative angle comes alive when you place this book alongside the broader global literature on crime syndicates. Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ gave the West a mythic understanding of mafia honour codes. Roberto Saviano’s ‘Gomorrah’ tore open the violent capitalist machinery of the Camorra. Japan’s yakuza memoirs add notes of ritual and clan loyalty. China’s triad histories reveal generational continuity.
However, Maria’s book sits among them as a uniquely Indian counterpart—one where crime grew not only from poverty and ambition but from colonial residue, communal tensions, labour upheavals, dockyard smuggling routes, and the hybrid social life of a port city. Bombay wasn’t just a city; it was a global artery, and arteries attract blockages and parasites and unregulated flows. The underworld wasn’t an anomaly—it was an inevitability. Maria makes that very, very clear.
There are also deep political shadows running through the book, though he never turns it into a partisan exercise. Instead, he shows how policies—liquor prohibition, customs crackdowns, wartime shortages, licensing regimes—accidentally fertilised the soil in which crime flourished.
When state control over goods tightens beyond necessity, black markets sprout like weeds. And in a country learning its way through colonial rule, independence, and industrialisation, those weeds often became forests. One could almost read this book as an unintended commentary on state formation, a study of how governance gaps produce parallel ecologies of power.
What gives the narrative particular emotional strength, though, is that Maria writes with the melancholy of someone who has seen the fruits of these early decades—the bloody 80s and 90s—firsthand. He knows the violent crescendo. He knows where the story leads. And so when he’s chronicling a 1930s smuggler or a 1940s gambler, there’s a subtle premonition in his voice—like a man watching an innocent child knowing the destructive adult he will later become. It’s almost tragic.
What perhaps surprised me most was the emotional architecture of the book. Maria, despite his reputation as a hard-nosed police officer, is attentive to small details—how a gangster tended to stray dogs, how a neighbourhood trusted a smuggler more than a municipal worker, how a young pickpocket’s first stolen rupee funded his sister’s schoolbook.
These are not embellishments; they’re the sociological fibres of the story. And in that sense, this book is far more humane than many crime chronicles pretending to be “gritty.” It has grit, yes, but also grief, empathy, bewilderment, and an almost academic fascination with cause and effect.
Reading it in 2025 feels especially relevant because the India of 1920–1980 doesn’t feel like a bygone era—it feels like the prequel to everything we’re still grappling with: the politics-crime nexus, the urban-rural economic divide, the seduction of quick wealth, the media’s role in myth-making, the question of who gets to tell whose story.
In that sense, this book is not just about the past—it is about the infrastructure of our present anxieties.
What makes it uniquely compelling is that Maria never simplifies. He never imposes a single lens. He allows contradiction to breathe. A gangster may be both a tyrant and a protector. A policeman may be both corrupt and sincere.
A politician may condemn violence publicly while using it privately. This refusal to flatten reality gives the narrative a moral complexity that aligns it more with serious literary nonfiction than with sensational crime writing.
If I were to situate this book in my personal reading journey—my love of literature, my engagement with Tagore, Proust, Dostoevsky, my profound relationship with phonetics and textual criticism—it becomes clear why it hit hard. Because at its heart, this book is about origins, about the roots of behaviour, about the small phonemes of human intention that lead to the large utterances of destiny.
The book ends up becoming something more than its summary—a kind of sociological memoir of a city’s subconscious.
And in a way that only the best nonfiction can achieve, it reintroduces you to the world you thought you already knew.
Above all, it reminds us that history doesn’t just happen in parliament or in textbooks—it happens in back alleys, railway platforms, smoky bars, dockware godowns, and the invisible transactions between human need and human opportunity.
And Maria, with the steady gaze of someone who has seen too much to be naive, tells it like a story that must be preserved lest the next generation forget what shaped them.
This is why the book lingers. It doesn’t just inform. It reshapes your mental map of the city, of crime, of society, of cause and effect. And just like the best literature, it reminds you that the truths that matter often hide in shadows.
Most recommended for all fans of true crime.
January 9, 2026
“My sole aim has been to preserve a history that was in danger of being erased – not from paper but from consciousness.”
‘When it all Began’ by Rakesh Maria is an encyclopaedic treatise on the rise of the underworld in Bombay (now Mumbai).
The roots were pre-independence … finding and digging their way through Kunar, Peshawar, then onto Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay to culminate in the rise of Bombay’s first don. Karim Lala.
The book begins with an intriguing introduction to the dark underbelly of Dongri and a surprising, humane introduction of the man who would rule the underworld for decades to come. The author has taken great effort to dig into the past and draw a historical line to define and introduce the reader to the notorious underworld of Bombay.
By the end of chapter 4, stories of Karim Lala, Vardarajan, and Haji Mastan are outlined, establishing a springboard to catapult the story of the dark and criminal to another level.
Narrating sordid stories of the underworld and its intricate intertwining with the country’s political situation and the law enforcers, the book is an intense document of the intergang rivalry and between the gangs of the Pathans and Konkani Muslims.
Ibrahim Kaskar was a cop living in Dongri playing a tight, but easy rope between the underbelly surroundings of his home and the profession he was employed in. But, he was unable to rein in his two sons, who thrust themselves onto the gang lord scene with a ruthless ambition to be the leaders. Dawood and Sabir.
The new generations of the gang lords were in no mood to preserve the ethics. Rivalry for their turf, and vendetta for murders became the mainstay, creating a vicious and cruel terrain, which the police force was finding it tough to fight on.
Dawood Ibrahim fled to Dubai in 1986. A man whose self-preservation instinct made him take the call, but his proxy wars continued on the streets of Mumbai, ruling over and fighting for all the turf.
The book is racily written like a thriller, keeping the reader engaged. The mention of actresses, Helen and Suraiya, on pages 78 and 90 brings to light the intertwining of Bollywood and the underworld long before the 80s brought it to light.
Julio Riberio and Y C Pawar. Illustrious names who fought with immense courage and fearlessness to bring a semblance of ‘rightness and law’ onto the landscape of Bombay. The book points out many such names of police super cops who fought valiantly to make the city a safer place to be in.
‘When It All Began’ outlines the fearlessness and dares of the criminality which pervaded the streets of Bombay and the desperate, sometimes successful, and sometimes helpless acts of the police in trying to contain it.
The courtroom killings. The revenge murders. The attempts at rapprochement. The police’s frustration and helplessness amid ‘police not allowed’ posters in Dongri. The lusty murders of rival gangs.
Rakesh Maria has written an extremely detailed book outlining the illicit, vicious underside of the city. Drawing heavily on his personal experience, official records, oral accounts, and published material, the book will definitely be referred to as a textbook on the rise of the underworld in the future.
However, it is a little confusing to keep track of the timelines…as to which year was the chapter all about. Also, the names and connections of the dons’ sons and nephews kept cropping up, which was a little difficult to keep track of. A chart in this regard would have helped.
But the book is a must-read. The book ends in 1988 with Arun Gawli coming to the fore to take revenge for the gang killings. “Enter an entirely new star cast, deadlier and greedier with ambitions that made their predecessors look ridiculously childish and their dreams almost innocent.”
Another saga is surely yet to be written.
‘When it all Began’ by Rakesh Maria is an encyclopaedic treatise on the rise of the underworld in Bombay (now Mumbai).
The roots were pre-independence … finding and digging their way through Kunar, Peshawar, then onto Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Bombay to culminate in the rise of Bombay’s first don. Karim Lala.
The book begins with an intriguing introduction to the dark underbelly of Dongri and a surprising, humane introduction of the man who would rule the underworld for decades to come. The author has taken great effort to dig into the past and draw a historical line to define and introduce the reader to the notorious underworld of Bombay.
By the end of chapter 4, stories of Karim Lala, Vardarajan, and Haji Mastan are outlined, establishing a springboard to catapult the story of the dark and criminal to another level.
Narrating sordid stories of the underworld and its intricate intertwining with the country’s political situation and the law enforcers, the book is an intense document of the intergang rivalry and between the gangs of the Pathans and Konkani Muslims.
Ibrahim Kaskar was a cop living in Dongri playing a tight, but easy rope between the underbelly surroundings of his home and the profession he was employed in. But, he was unable to rein in his two sons, who thrust themselves onto the gang lord scene with a ruthless ambition to be the leaders. Dawood and Sabir.
The new generations of the gang lords were in no mood to preserve the ethics. Rivalry for their turf, and vendetta for murders became the mainstay, creating a vicious and cruel terrain, which the police force was finding it tough to fight on.
Dawood Ibrahim fled to Dubai in 1986. A man whose self-preservation instinct made him take the call, but his proxy wars continued on the streets of Mumbai, ruling over and fighting for all the turf.
The book is racily written like a thriller, keeping the reader engaged. The mention of actresses, Helen and Suraiya, on pages 78 and 90 brings to light the intertwining of Bollywood and the underworld long before the 80s brought it to light.
Julio Riberio and Y C Pawar. Illustrious names who fought with immense courage and fearlessness to bring a semblance of ‘rightness and law’ onto the landscape of Bombay. The book points out many such names of police super cops who fought valiantly to make the city a safer place to be in.
‘When It All Began’ outlines the fearlessness and dares of the criminality which pervaded the streets of Bombay and the desperate, sometimes successful, and sometimes helpless acts of the police in trying to contain it.
The courtroom killings. The revenge murders. The attempts at rapprochement. The police’s frustration and helplessness amid ‘police not allowed’ posters in Dongri. The lusty murders of rival gangs.
Rakesh Maria has written an extremely detailed book outlining the illicit, vicious underside of the city. Drawing heavily on his personal experience, official records, oral accounts, and published material, the book will definitely be referred to as a textbook on the rise of the underworld in the future.
However, it is a little confusing to keep track of the timelines…as to which year was the chapter all about. Also, the names and connections of the dons’ sons and nephews kept cropping up, which was a little difficult to keep track of. A chart in this regard would have helped.
But the book is a must-read. The book ends in 1988 with Arun Gawli coming to the fore to take revenge for the gang killings. “Enter an entirely new star cast, deadlier and greedier with ambitions that made their predecessors look ridiculously childish and their dreams almost innocent.”
Another saga is surely yet to be written.
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