Dawood Ibrahim's Aide Black Scorpion Tells All About Mumbai Underworld

New Delhi: Shyam Kishore Garikapati, a former associate of Dawood Ibrahim and alleged sharpshooter who once moved through the darkest corridors of Mumbai's organised crime, has broken his silence in a new book that promises to challenge long-held narratives about the city's underworld.

Black Scorpion: To Hell and Back, written and self-published by journalists Vijay Shekhar, Raju Santhanam and Calvin Joshua, is a true-crime narrative based on the life and testimony of Garikapati, known within the underworld as Black Scorpion.

Set against the backdrop of Mumbai in the 1980s and 1990s, the book revisits an era marked by gang wars, shifting loyalties and brutal killings involving some of the most notorious names in organised crime, including Dawood Ibrahim, Chhota Rajan, Karim Lala, Varadarajan Mudaliar and Arun Gawli.

The book offers a first-person insider's view, drawn from Garikapati's experience, court records and over 100 hours of taped interviews conducted by the authors.

Garikapati spent more than 12 years in prison and was among the earliest accused to be tried under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). He has been incarcerated in Tihar, Arthur Road, Nashik and Yerawada jails, where he also encountered the likes of Charles Sobhraj and terrorist Masood Azhar, as well as Kiran Bedi, who inspired him to change his life.

"What makes 'Black Scorpion' both controversial and compelling is that it does not deny the past. Instead, it challenges official and popular narratives where they diverge from lived reality, reopening uncomfortable questions about the gang wars of the 80's right up to post-1992 gang wars, suggesting that misinformation, mistrust, and impulsive decision-making, rather than ideology or long-term strategy, drove some of Mumbai's bloodiest episodes," the authors said in a statement.

Garikapati witnessed the killing of many of his close friends and associates and lived to tell his tale in the book that strips organised crime of its cinematic glamour, "portraying it as a pressure-filled world governed by fear, suspicion, and sudden violence". Moving beyond violence, the 226-page book also dismantles the myth of the born gangster.

Garikapati who was originally from Hyderabad, came from a bureaucratic family, and had qualified for the National Defence Academy with aspirations of joining the Indian Air Force, before a brief foray into the cassette-trading boom of the early 1990s pulled him into an underworld he found far harder to escape than to enter.

Among the book's most striking disclosures are accounts of the internal functioning of Dawood Ibrahim's network, the criminal get-togethers organised by Dawood to call a truce among feuding groups, the failed plan to assassinate Chhota Rajan, the secret tapes that reveal the reason behind Dawood-Rajan rift, and the infamous attack on JJ Hospital to avenge the killing of Dawood's brother-in-law which landed Garikapati in jail.