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police made a weak case against him and let him off.
    Chikna Johnny, the Casanova of the family, became the ringleader of his own fledgling gang. His story ended when he failed to return from a picnic with his girls. He had gone to the Gorai beach with some girlfriends and drowned while swimming. With even the runt of the family gone, the gang ceased to exist and its members switched loyalties and merged with other gangs like the Jaunpuri gang, the Kashmiri gang, and some other stray ones.
    Meanwhile, Ibrahim Dada was arrested on murder charges in another case and convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Maria continued to live in his house at Sankli Street and gave birth to his son. With Ibrahim Dada behind bars, Johnny Dada doing the disappearing act, and the neutralisation of other gangs, the star of the Allahabadi gang of Nanhe Khan was on the rise again. The gang had grown in size, numbers, clout and money, and came into focus.
    Kamathipura, incidentally, has attracted gangsters for business as much as for pleasure. The red-light district housed a Kashmiri betting club run by one Sumitlal Shah who was the personal secretary of Habib Kashmiri, head of the Kashmiri gang. Ahmad Kashmiri, Ayyub Lala, and Feroz Lala too were part of the gang that operated out of Kamathipura.
    Ayyub, incidentally, was also a police informant, much to the chagrin of his gang members. Once a fight ensued between him and Habib with the latter reprimanding him for telling on the other gangs. Ayyub on his part, was justifying that he did so only to remain in the good books of the cops. However, no consolation would placate Habib and they soon split their gangs.
    What followed was a constant battle for one-upmanship that resulted in Ahmad kidnapping Ayyub’s lover and Ayyub retaliating by having Ahmad killed. While much of the gang’s time was spent dealing with internal rivalry, elsewhere in Bombay, legendary gangsters were gaining their hold on the city.

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    Bombay’s Midas
    M astan Haider Mirza was born on 1 March 1926 into a farmer’s family in Panankulum, a small village 20 kilometres away from Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu. Mastan’s father, Haider Mirza, was a hardworking but impoverished farmer who moved to Bombay with his son after miserably failing to make ends meet in his hometown. Arriving in 1934, they tried their hand at various odd jobs, finally managing to set up a small mechanic shop where they repaired cycles and two-wheelers in Bengalipura, near Crawford Market. The father-son duo laboured hard from eight in the morning till late in the night. But 8-year-old Mastan soon realised that even after all this toil, he could only make a meagre 5 rupees a day.
    As he walked home to his basti from Crawford Market, he would often walk past the grandiose southern Bombay area of Grant Road, which housed those marvellous theatres, Alfred and Novelty. Every time he noticed a huge, sparkling car whizz past him or walked by the plush Malabar Hill bungalows, he would look down at his dirty soiled hands and wonder if a day would come when he would be able to own these cars and bungalows. This, more than anything else, stirred a certain feverish desire in him to think of ways and means to become bigger, richer and more powerful. But uneducated and unskilled, with the additional burden of supporting his family, Mastan could see only a bleak road ahead of him.
    When the boy turned 18, he boldly decided to quit the cycle repairing business for good to try his hand at something else. Mastan’s father Haider was a very religious man and had always taught him to be honest and industrious. While allowing him to join the workers at the Bombay docks, he reminded Mastan that he had brought him up right and that he would not be around forever to supervise him all the time; hence Mastan must refrain from stealing, fighting, and using dishonest means to better himself.
    In 1944, Mastan joined the Bombay dock as a coolie. His job was to unload huge boxes