It's guaranteed: every time there's a story about the underworld's latest bit of drama in Bollywood, those stock phrases will have the mafia ‘rear its ugly head again', ‘surface once more' or ‘strike again' in the headlines. Expectedly, they cropped up in the recent news items which reported that producer-director Yash Chopra, the biggest daddy of 'em all in Bollywood, had complained to the police that the Ravi Pujari gang had been making threatening calls to the Yash Raj office, asking for Rs 50 lakh protection money.

Implicit in the-gangsters-are-back headlines is the assumption that the underworld has, of late, beaten an inglorious retreat of sorts from B-town's sets.

But who said the underworld ever went away? It's as wishful a thought as hoping that it will disappear one magical day in a hi-tech SFX effect. The ugly truth is that it won't. In fact, it has just got more discreet and installed a few degrees of separation between itself and the talkies.

For, three of the prime drivers of Mumbai's economy — in all its shades, going from white to grey to black — are real estate, the Bombay Stock Exchange (representing official commerce) and the underworld.

Bollywood's numbers are chickenfeed in comparison to those of the big three, but its glam quotient gives it an aura that they can't beat. And the underworld simply can't resist. Like so many NRIs who are homesick but not homesick enough to return to the motherland, the dons like to keep in touch with India via Bollywood. Beautiful people, wild lifestyles and scandals, lavish parties and non-stop machinations — they find it irresistible. Except in the dons' case, the experience, shall we say, can go beyond the vicarious.

Besides, there's money to be made... and spent. From film financing to stage shows to ‘private performances' to the pirated DVD business, the mafia has a hand in it all. The degree varies and can be disputed, but not the fact or the inevitability of it.

Not when the real estate, stock market and underworld businesses are now inextricably linked and the surplus from one spills over into the other in complicated ways that has the Income Tax department befuddled or perhaps blinded. Throw in the police and politicians and it's a nexus that's not going anywhere soon.

The recent CBI investigations in the 2G scam, naming A. Raja, Kanimozhi, DB Realty and Cineyug Entertainment, among others, are a sad illustration of this nexus. The CBI's supplementary chargesheet has it that Karim transferred funds to Kalaignar TV on behalf of A. Raja. And Bollywood is running scared. For Cineyug is run by the three Morani brothers Ali, Karim and Mohammed, long known as the industry's biggest organisers of stage shows for award nights, ‘world tours' and the like.

Rumours have swirled around the Moranis for some time now, especially after the eldest of the brothers, Ali, was one of the approvers who turned hostile in the much-publicised case against diamond merchant and film producer Bharat Shah in 2003. That case arose out of the financing of the film Chori Chori Chupke Chupke , starring Salman Khan, Preity Zinta and Rani Mukerji. The movie was said to be funded by Dawood Ibrahim aide Chhota Shakeel. Though most witnesses turned hostile, Preity courageously stuck to her guns, testifying that she had received a threatening call from the Chhota Shakeel gang.

Shah (who also produced the blockbuster Devdas ) was eventually put behind bars. His trial unearthed, or should we say confirmed, many more Bollywood links with the underworld, with the prosecution playing tapes of conversations they said took place between Shakeel and some film personalities, two of them being actor Sanjay Dutt and Mahesh Manjrekar.

Most observers agree that, for reasons economic, operational and political, the blatant flexing of money muscle on film sets is a thing of the past. In their heyday, gangsters dropped in uninvited on the sets, issued unwelcome ‘invitations' to Dubai, planted their favourites in the cast, had assorted ‘friends' given minor roles and ordered a shooting or two to keep the action going. Mercifully, shootouts like the horrific Gulshan Kumar episode are history now, thanks to the general crackdown on the underworld by the Mumbai police.

But the money keeps rolling in. As one insider explained, quite a bit of the protection money extorted by the underworld doesn't ever leave Indian shores. It is simply transferred to various other businesses, one of them being film financing — but much more discreetly now than in the mid-90s when the underworld had the film industry in its unhappy thrall.

One informed observer puts the current estimate as high as Rs 1,000 crore across films and stage shows. The film piracy business is worth much more of course. The syndicate, said to be controlled by Dawood Ibrahim's younger brother Anees and Chhota Shakeel, is believed to have ‘revenues' that run into thousands of crores.

With big money, glamour, and political connections arrayed before them, the dons have little reason or motive to exit the movie business. But with the entry of the corporates, the availability of legitimate funds and greater transparency in funding and budgets, the underworld has found fewer buyers willing to pay the price for their nefarious money.

But the shadow of the underworld refuses to go away, as Yash Chopra will attest to. Or perhaps not. News reports say he has denied the complaint though, strangely, the police confirm that they are investigating the matter. There's the inherent contradiction for you: B-town is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

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