The staged bomb scare that backfired on Mumbai’s notorious cops

At the height of the pandemic, when many people in Mumbai were staying home, Ramvinder Singh Gill noticed a strange car parked near the residence of the city’s richest man. A 53-year-old ex-colonel in the Indian special forces, Gill held one of the most important bodyguard jobs on the subcontinent, overseeing a 300-person security force responsible for protecting the billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani and his family. The focus of their work was Antilia, the Ambanis’ 27-story vertical mansion, equipped with three helipads, yoga and dance studios, and a “snow room” chilled to frigid temperatures. To avoid exposing their clients to Covid-19, bodyguards would spend 15 days quarantined at a nearby hotel before beginning monthlong shifts inside.

The car that piqued Gill’s interest that day in February 2021 was a green Mahindra Scorpio, an Indian-made sport utility vehicle. Right away, Gill noticed that though the car was coated in grime, its license plate looked spotless, as though it had just been screwed in. When he ran the number, he found something even stranger: The plate matched the registration of a Range Rover used by Ambani’s wife, Nita. Alarmed, Gill called the Mumbai police, who sent a team to search the vehicle. Inside a blue backpack branded with the logo of an Ambani-owned cricket franchise, they found a bag of industrial explosives. The explosives weren’t connected to a detonator, but whoever placed them had left a chilling handwritten note. “Next time the wires will be connected,” it read. “We have made arrangements to blow up your entire family.”

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Ambani had accumulated his share of enemies while his sprawling conglomerate, Reliance Industries Ltd., built dominant positions in everything from petrochemicals to retail and made him a crucial partner for Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister. But it soon became apparent that Ambani hadn’t been threatened by a business rival looking to shove him aside or a terror group enraged by his support for Modi. Instead, the events at Antilia were part of one of the most extraordinary scandals in the history of Mumbai, India’s financial capital. One person involved has turned up dead; another, an elite detective named Sachin Waze (pronounced VAH-zey), is in jail awaiting trial for charges including criminal conspiracy, extortion and murder. The ensuing uproar claimed the career of the city’s police commissioner, drove a senior state government minister into hiding and contributed to the diminishment of Shiv Sena, the political party that had dominated Mumbai since the 1990s.

The Antilia affair also exposed, in spectacular fashion, an uncomfortable truth about India’s economy: The law enforcement bodies policing it are in many cases rotten. According to a 2019 survey by anticorruption group Transparency International, at least half of all Indians pay a bribe each year, and the police, who look to supplement their meager pay by extracting cash wherever they can, are among the most common recipients. Cops have their own bribes to cover; many take out loans to secure postings in lucrative locations. This pervasive graft poses a severe threat to the competitiveness of a country that investors are counting on to power global growth. Businesses large and small are routinely shaken down by corrupt officers, and even powerful international companies dread any trip through the sclerotic courts, which have a backlog of 40 million cases.

Various politicians have pledged to reform Indian law enforcement, in tandem with broader efforts to modernize the economy. Yet rooting out dirty cops, not to mention the officials who many citizens assume are profiting from their activities, might be a more complicated problem than building highways or power plants. “It’s extremely politicized,” says Devyani Srivastava, the head of the police reform program at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi. The Antilia case, she says, is “a classic example of the kind of corruption racket that’s so entrenched.”

Mukesh Ambani towers over the business landscape of Mumbai. His father, Dhirubhai, who founded Reliance in 1973, is a legend in India, one of the first private-sector entrepreneurs to tap the potential of the country’s vast population. After taking control of the family empire in the 2000s, Mukesh continued to build on its traditional strengths in petrochemicals and textiles while leading an aggressive expansion into new sectors. Today, Ambani controls the world’s largest petrochemical refining complex, India’s top mobile network, a physical retail empire and a rapidly growing e-commerce and media business that’s drawn investment from Google, Meta Platforms and Microsoft.

A threat to Ambani was, almost by definition, a threat to Mumbai and its economy. Only a few hours after Gill called the police about the suspicious car, the case was assigned to Waze, the head of the Mumbai force’s elite Crime Intelligence Unit. At first it seemed the investigation would be brief. On the messaging app Telegram, an account purporting to represent a little-known jihadist group called Jaish Ul Hind claimed responsibility. But just a day later, the same organization denied any involvement, saying in a statement that it “has no fight with Indian business tycoons.”

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Waze’s superiors wanted to see results, and they had every reason to expect he would deliver them. Then 52, Waze had joined the state police force of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, in his early 20s. Like many young officers, his first posting was to the hinterland—in Waze’s case, a forested district called Gadchiroli. He was transferred after about a year to Mumbai, which presented a very different set of law enforcement challenges. With more than 20 million residents packed onto a crowded, claw-shaped peninsula, the city encompasses all of India’s extremes. Billionaires’ mansions sit a stone’s throw from dense slums; on newspaper front pages, Bollywood award galas vie for column inches with religious ceremonies.

As India began to liberalize its economy in the 1980s and 1990s, the new money tended to be made first in Mumbai, setting off a sustained boom. The city’s underworld grew alongside its legitimate businesses, feeding the operations of crime bosses such as Dawood Ibrahim, a drug kingpin who was once one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives. Businesspeople and politicians who refused to do their bidding could meet grisly ends. In 1995 airline founder Thakiyudeen Abdul Wahid was gunned down by hit men associated with another mobster, Chhota Rajan, who suspected Wahid of aiding Ibrahim.

Soon after arriving in Mumbai in 1992, Waze worked his way into a group of officers determined to take a harder line against criminality than was strictly permitted by law. They were known as “encounter specialists,” a euphemism for cops who carried out what were, in effect, summary executions. Indian journalists extensively documented their tactics: After dispatching a target, they would often place a gun in his hand and scatter some shell casings, creating the appearance of a shootout that allowed them to claim they’d acted in self-defense. “The whole Dirty Harry image had a strong, strong attraction,” says Shirish Thorat, a former officer who trained with Waze and became a close friend. “And I guess when you want it bad enough, you go and get it.”

According to ex-officers, the killings were quietly tolerated by police brass, who were under pressure to contain organized crime. They also earned a degree of thanks from ordinary Mumbaikars. Gangs were a source of danger and fear for millions, and delays in the legal system meant the courts could do little to punish their members. With enough procedural maneuvering an accused killer could win bail, then drag out his case indefinitely. In that environment, some officers found that cutting corners—whether by gunning down a suspect in his living room or torturing him to death in a darkened cell—could even make them heroes of a kind. Daya Nayak, a musclebound detective who boasted of killing no fewer than 83 people, was the subject of three Bollywood movies and served as a consultant on several more.

Waze, who didn’t respond to interview requests sent to his lawyer, has never denied being an encounter specialist. On the contrary: He’s publicly claimed to have racked up 63 kills, and in 2011 he told the Guardian that “every one of them deserved to go.” Friends and colleagues describe him as brooding and highly intelligent, with a ferocious temper that can drive him to acts of extreme violence. That was a useful quality for someone in his profession—at least until the early 2000s, when a series of scandals forced Mumbai’s politicians to rein in police excesses. Waze was suspended indefinitely in 2004, following the death of a terrorism suspect in his custody. While he wasn’t fired, he couldn’t persuade his superiors to let him back onto the force. To keep himself afloat he wrote three books and attempted to break into the film industry. But according to one associate, who asked not to be identified describing private discussions, he found that “a lot of these things just didn’t pay.” Bollywood didn’t need Waze to tap into the world he’d inhabited. Instead, “other people had lived off his life, his adventures, and had become, in his mind, hugely successful.”

In 2020, 16 years after being taken off the streets, Waze got a lifeline: A review committee headed by Mumbai’s chief of police offered him his old job back. Soon after accepting, Waze was appointed head of the Crime Intelligence Unit. His reinstatement was ostensibly because of a pandemic-related shortage of officers. The political context may also have played a role. Waze was a member of Shiv Sena, the right-wing party that governed Maharashtra. It was embroiled in a power struggle with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, and unlike many officers, Waze didn’t hesitate to make politically charged arrests. In late 2020, for example, he detained Arnab Goswami, a popular pro-BJP news anchor, on charges of abetting a suicide. (Goswami was released on bail after his lawyer argued that the arrest was “a smokescreen to teach the man a lesson.” Republic World, the TV channel he leads, didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

The Antilia case landed on Waze’s desk only a few months later. His return had been controversial, with the mother of the terror suspect who’d died under his supervision calling for charges to be filed against the police chief. Getting to the bottom of a crime involving Mumbai’s most powerful citizen was a chance for Waze to prove that he deserved to be back—and that he was still one of the city’s top cops.

According to legal filings, one of the first people he interviewed was Mansukh Hiran, the registered owner of the Scorpio found outside the Ambanis’ home. A middle-aged car accessories salesman from the suburb of Thane, Hiran had no obvious connection to any criminal or terrorist group. When questioned, he informed Waze that his vehicle had broken down near an expressway one evening in mid-February. He said it had been late, so he’d hailed a cab home, intending to return the next morning to tow it for repairs. But when he came back, the car was gone. Hiran told Waze he had no idea how it had gotten to Antilia, about 25 miles away, and denied having anything to do with the threat to the Ambanis.

Waze’s colleagues weren’t convinced by Hiran’s denials. In early March, a week after the Antilia incident, Hiran left home, telling his family he’d been called to a police station for another round of questioning. When he didn’t return, they filed a missing person report. The morning after he disappeared, police found a bloated body in a creek not far from his house. The man’s face was covered with a headscarf, and he had no wallet or other identifying documents. Six handkerchiefs had been stuffed into the back of his mouth, blocking his airway. A post-mortem examination confirmed that it was Hiran.

His death set off a frenzy. Waze, who’d built a large network of media contacts over the years, speculated to some of them that Hiran might have killed himself, driven over the edge by the pressure of being investigated. But Hiran’s wife, Vimla, told detectives a different story. Her husband wasn’t just a random citizen, connected to the events at Antilia only by his car, she said. In fact, he was acquainted with Waze, who she said had been regularly borrowing Hiran’s SUV for several months prior to its discovery outside the Ambani home. Vimla was convinced that Waze was involved with Hiran’s murder.

Waze’s political allies rushed to his defense. Uddhav Thackeray, Maharashtra’s then-chief minister, declared in the state assembly that “Waze is not Osama bin Laden.” The allegations nonetheless made it impossible for Waze’s superiors to keep him on the case. They transferred him out of Mumbai and handed the Antilia file to the National Investigation Agency, India’s equivalent of the FBI.

As the suspicions about Waze grew, some of his colleagues noticed that he’d changed his status on WhatsApp, posting a cryptic statement that seemed to draw parallels to his 2004 suspension. “History is going to repeat,” it read. “I think the time to say goodbye to the world is coming closer.”

Nine days after Hiran’s body was discovered, a team of NIA officers arrested Waze. Working from phone records and surveillance footage, they turned the focus of the Antilia investigation to the man originally charged with leading it. Everything about Waze’s behavior before and after the bomb was found suggested to the NIA that he had something to hide. For one thing, he’d been using more than a dozen burner SIM cards to communicate with eight other men, including several current or former police officers.

On Feb. 17, 2021, the NIA found, Waze had picked up the keys to the Scorpio from Hiran. After fitting it with a forged license plate—the one that matched a car used by Nita Ambani—he drove south, into the heart of Mumbai. It was early in the morning when he reached the leafy streets of Cumballa Hill, entering an area known as Billionaires’ Row. He parked by an apartment block on Altamount Road, about 1,000 feet from Antilia. Wearing personal-protective gear that obscured his face, Waze left the vehicle and its explosive cargo behind, then climbed into a white Toyota and drove away. In charging documents, NIA investigators said they believed that his primary motive was self-promotion: to stage a high-profile crime that only he could solve and thus regain his status as an “ace detective.”

It appeared that Hiran was central to his strategy. As Waze’s bosses pushed him to find a culprit, he told Hiran that he should take responsibility for planting the explosives. Hiran would get bail immediately, Waze claimed. After that, delays in the Indian courts would ensure he didn’t face trial for many years, if ever. But Hiran said no. According to the NIA, his resistance made Waze nervous. Not only was Hiran refusing to take the fall; he knew what Waze had done.

Soon after Hiran’s refusal, Waze got in touch with another former encounter cop, Pradeep Sharma. At a charity office in the city’s eastern suburbs, he allegedly handed Sharma a bag stuffed with 500-rupee notes, worth about $6 apiece, and asked him to hire a crew to deal with Hiran. One of the men Sharma recruited contacted Hiran on the night of March 4. Posing as a police officer, he offered to help Hiran lie low until the Antilia case faded from the headlines. As Waze busied himself with a midnight raid on a local bar—a solid alibi, should one be needed—the accomplice called Hiran from a burner number and instructed him to head toward a water park.

There, according to the NIA, Hiran got into a white Volkswagen and was driven to a rendezvous point 5 miles away. He then entered another vehicle, a large red car. More of the group Sharma had assembled were waiting for him inside. One of them took Hiran’s phone. While the driver cruised along Mumbai’s darkened streets, they smothered Hiran to death, investigators found. Stopping on a bridge, they tossed his body into the polluted water below. It was found just over half a mile downstream.

The NIA tracked down and interrogated the man who’d procured SIM cards for Waze and the others, along with hundreds of potential witnesses. Analyzing WhatsApp chats and mobile phone location data, agents gradually pieced together the identities of the alleged culprits. By June 2021, three months after Waze had been taken into custody, they’d arrested Sharma and seven others suspected of involvement in Hiran’s death. (All deny the charges, which include murder, criminal conspiracy, kidnapping and destruction of evidence.)

The case became a citywide scandal. Seeking to contain the damage, Anil Deshmukh, then the state minister responsible for law enforcement, removed the police chief who’d rehired Waze. But the chief, Param Bir Singh, didn’t go down without a fight. Singh publicly accused Deshmukh of being at the top of a major shakedown racket, which he said extracted as much as $3,600 a month from each of more than 1,000 bars, restaurants and other establishments. According to Singh, Waze was the central player in the operation, making sure every business paid up—or faced the consequences.

The allegations rocked Maharashtra’s government, which ultimately fell apart after the BJP threw its support behind a group of breakaway legislators. Deshmukh, who denies wrongdoing, disappeared from public view for months. Waze is now a cooperating witness in a corruption case against him.

Waze arriving at the Mumbai police commissioner’s office in March 2021. Credit: Bloomberg

Mumbai’s police headquarters are located in a gloomy Victorian building a short distance from the central train station. During a visit last year, reporters for Bloomberg Businessweek awaited an audience with the force’s top officer in an airless reception area. Constables carrying Kalashnikov rifles roamed around; a sign forbidding the use of mobile phones was widely ignored.

Policing a city as large and chaotic as Mumbai is a demanding job, and orderlies filed in continuously during a short interview with Commissioner Sanjay Pandey, requesting his signature on one document or another. He was the second person to hold the role since Singh, whose immediate successor had been moved to a different government job. A cop since the mid-1980s, Pandey explained that law enforcement priorities had changed dramatically. In today’s Mumbai, he said, the main concerns are less about violent crime. Rather, the biggest problems are online scams and offenses such as property fraud, encouraged by a stunning increase in real estate prices.

The gangsterism that fueled the rise of the encounter specialists is now “not here at all,” Pandey said, and those officers’ very existence, along with scandals like the one that began at Antilia, should be seen as an “aberration.” Mumbai police “don’t have a license to kill,” he said. “A few of them have acted in a manner that was not quite legal, so be it. That doesn’t mean the 99% are not working within the law.”

Pandey retired in June. Two months later, investigators in India’s Directorate of Enforcement, which probes financial crime, made clear that they didn’t see him as one of the 99%. They arrested him on suspicion of money laundering, in connection to a case involving the alleged surveillance of employees at the BSE stock exchange. Pandey is free on bail and didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Ambanis have never publicly commented on the controversy that briefly connected them to one of Mumbai’s fiercest enforcers—except to say they were cooperating with police and to deny media reports that they were planning to relocate out of the city. The potential threats to their safety go beyond the Antilia explosives. In early October, a man was arrested after a hospital funded by Reliance received two phone calls threatening to blow up the facility, along with the Ambanis’ home. Should they decide to spend more time elsewhere, they have options. In recent months the Ambanis have moved to set up a family investment office in Singapore and concluded Dubai’s largest-ever residential property transaction, spending close to $250 million for a pair of beachfront villas. Reliance also made a $79 million deal to acquire Stoke Park, a vast golf course and estate outside London.

Waze’s present circumstances couldn’t be more different. Denied bail, he’s been confined since his arrest to Taloja Central Jail, on the outskirts of the metropolis he once policed with ruthless zeal. He’s tried to use the political controversy surrounding his arrest to his advantage, notably by agreeing to testify against Deshmukh. But in almost any scenario for what comes next, he’ll spend years in detention before getting a chance to clear his name. As Waze knows better than anyone, the wheels of justice in India turn slowly.