THE DARK METAL

India's ever-growing appetite for gold is driving commercial fraud and activating old smuggling routes and creating new ones. THE WEEK unravels the seamy underbelly of India's illicit gold economy 

- NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA

Lights dim in Dongri, the bustling port town in Maharashtra that was once home to smuggler-gangsters Karim Lala, Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim. As crowds leave the market streets, shutters are rolled down and gunnysacks are heaved into cars, carts and two-wheelers.

Sleuths of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence make frequent visits to the deserted alleys at this hour, hoping to stumble upon consignments of gold, that might have escaped the airports and seaports of the financial capital. In January alone, the Mumbai airport customs seized gold worth more than 03 crore in different cases—gold wired in trolley bags and inner wear in flights from Jeddah, and gold dust from Dubai. The identity of the suppliers and whether the gold was meant to be sold in shops dotting Dongri have become a matter of investigation.

What the customs caught is just a drop in the ocean. Dongri made a rude comeback on the smuggling map in 2019 as the melting pot for smuggled gold from around the globe. In April that year, as much as 4,522.75kg gold worth 01,473 crore was seized from just one Dongri-based syndicate. It was the largest such cache seized from a smuggling group in recent history. 

The DRI said the Dongri operation employed 18 Sudanese women. They were arrested while trying to evade scanners at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. The women carried gold worth 010 crore each—as gold dust and paste on skin, and gold capsules in body cavities. They did not know each other. Their mission: obtain Customs clearance and contact a handler, who would extract the gold, melt it and hand it over to a middleman—Yunus Shaikh in Dongri. Yunus, in turn, would deliver it to a jeweller at Kalbadevi.