Karim Lala

Karim Lala (1911? - February 19, 2002), born as Abdul Karim Sher Khan in Kunar province of Afghanistan, was popularly known as the 'don of Mumbai' in India. He is widely recognized as the founder and pioneer of the Indian mafia in the Mumbai area. He went to work in Mumbai’s docks in the early 1940s via Peshawar, but his rise to prominence, along with Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar, is now part of Bollywood film lore.

Karim Lala and his fellow mafia leaders were based in Mumbai. They were involved in smuggling jewelry, running gambling and liquor dens, extortion rackets and selling Hashish. Karim Lala was an ethnic Pashtun, he died on February 19, 2002, at the age of 90.

References

* [http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/02/20/stories/2002022001861300.htm The Hindu - Online edition of India's National Newspaper] , Wednesday, Feb 20, 2002.

Articles from times of india

Mumbai: Karim Lala, who died of a heart attack here late on monday night, was the last of the dons from an era when smuggling was the only crossborder activity associated with gangsters. like Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar, with whom he formed a Troika in the sixties and seventies, Lala (82) died of a heart attack. Varadarajan was the first one to go in 1988 at the age of 62 in Chennai, while Mastan expired in Mumbai six years later at the age of 68. Little is known about Karim Lala’s origins except that he was born Abdul Karim Sher Khan in a mountain village in the Kunar district of Afghanistan and that he came to work in Mumbai’s docks in the early 1940s via Peshawar. But his rise to prominence, along with Haji Mastan and Varadarajan, is now part of filmlore. It is said that Sher Khan, the Pathan character played by Pran in the Bachchan-blockbuster Zanzeer, was modelled on Karim Lala. The film Deewar is said to be loosely based on the life of Haji Mastan. Much later, Nayakan was made on the life of Varadarajan. unlike the Nri dons of today, Karim Lala and his fellow gang leaders were rooted in Mumbai. They were into smuggling gold, running gambling and liquor dens, extortion rackets and selling charas. Lala was the godfather of the Pathan mafia which had the strongest men. The barrelchested Lala with his piercing eyes was himself a formidable figure. However, dons in those days did enough to earn the gratitude of a sizable number of the poor. Several migrants from Tamil Nadu were beholden to Varadarajan, who settled them in the slums at Antop Hill. Haji Mastan floated a political outfit, Dalit Muslim Suraksha Mahasangh, after he and his fellow dons renounced crime under Jayaprakash Narayan’s influence in 1977. Lala donated to charitable causes in central Mumbai, where he lived. He was also active in forming an association of Pathans in Maharashtra and made it a point to meet Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan when he visited Mumbai in the early eighties. Karim Lala was picked by the police whenever the Pathan gang, led by his nephew Samad Khan, created major trouble for the law-enforcers. In fact, he was arrested as late as 1995 for threatening a woman in a property dispute. However, like the other two dons, he was never ever convicted of any crime. Had Dawood Ibrahim, the son of a Konkani police constable, been able to control the Pathan gang, he would have remained a petty criminal. But the killing of Dawood’s brother Shabbir by the Pathan gang at Prabhadevi in 1981 started a spiral of violence which ended with the decimation of the Pathan gang. The last to be killed was Rahim Khan, Karim Lala’s brother, in 1986. After that incident, Karim Lala bought peace with Dawood and took voluntary retirement. “However powerful Dawood and other gangsters like Chhota Rajan are in comparison with Karim Lala et al, they cannot expect a peaceful death given the amount of hostility evoked by them,’’ a police officer observed.