Team Herald
PANJIM: When the Hyderabad police arrested Pritesh Borkar alias Kali originally from Ponda on August 3, the Hyderabad press thought they were called for a routine press briefing. Little did they expect the Police Commissioner himself to address it and categorically stated that Borkar, whose family filed a missing complaint to look for him on August 1, was one of the big drug dealers who supplied drugs in bulk to Hyderabad customers.
He then named Edwin who according to Borkar was his “boss”. The names of big time Goa-based drug dealers who supplied drugs to one Goa resident Manzoor Ahmed who in turn supplied them to Pritesh Borkar was revealed by the Hyderabad Police, in an official note. They were 1) 1. Thukaram Salgovkar @ Nana, 2. Vikas Naik @ Vicky, 3. Ramesh Chowhan, 4. Steve, 5. Edwin and 6. Sanja Gowekar.
For 8 years these persons have been selling the drugs in Anjuna Beach and in Telangana & AP States.
Borkar was taken into custody by the Nallakunta Police Station in a drug case registered on March 31.
Borkar’s family and team kept insisting that they have CCTV footage of him being taken from Goa in a car.
This is a matter of investigation.
Herald during the course of its own ground level reportage and investigation has come to understand and learn that the Hyderabad Narcotics Enforcement Wing (H-NEW), was given the task of cleaning up the supply chain of the Goa drug mafia which had a growing list of Hyderabad customers for drugs ranging from Meth to cocaine, LSD bots to MDMA and all other substances.
With a clear mandate from the Telangana Chief Minister, K Chandrashekhar Rao and the overall supervision of the Hyderabad Police Commissioner CV Anand, the team got to work. The mission had three components and execution plans
1) Get drug customers to help the investigation and become decoys
H-NEW worked with old drug customers, some of whom were under their radar already picked up. They were told to help the investigation
2) The SMOKE them out strategy:
a) These drug customers then started getting in touch with their drug suppliers on messaging apps groups by inducing them with offers of bulk orders. “Firstly, the decoy customers told their drug supplier contacts that it would not be possible for them to come to Goa from Hyderabad. They then started placing orders. The drug suppliers came and affected delivery and got paid. In some cases, the decoy customers order a couple of times more, increasing the order to build confidence. Then they were finally picked up’, said reliable insiders in Telangana
b) With the help of some of the decoy customers they managed to access the dark web. (The dark web is part of the internet that isn’t visible to search engines and requires the use of an anonymizing browser called Tor to be accessed) The dark web is used mainly for illicit transactions like credit card numbers, all manner of drugs, guns, counterfeit money, stolen subscription credentials, hacked Netflix accounts and software that helps you break into other people’s computers.
H-NEW managed to smoke out three parallel and different cartels that operated through this dark web, including one drug dealer who ran his online store from the handle “Zambada cartel. Many of the payments made even for deliveries done either by the bigger suppliers or just runners, were done through Cryptocurrency.
c) Sustained interrogation of customers and arrested drug suppliers has led to a master list of 174 people ranging from kingpins to big deals to peddlers.
The focus is not only on these 174 along with some more of the bigger fish who are operating with impunity in Goa. H-New has also confirmed that some of the big fish in Goa live in palatial homes for which they pay Rs 3 lakh and more as rent. These homes are also used to store drugs.
The crackdown on drugs is important because all major cases including deaths are connected to this. There are sections of the media which are deliberately taking an angle that the Sonali Phogat case was a pre-mediated murder case. While investigations have only just begun it is clear that this line is only to dilute the drug angle i.e. that the ecosystem of easy access to a network of suppliers and dealers and places where drugs could be consumed could have led to drug overdose being the main cause.
The Hyderabad Police’s H-NEW wing has cracked open Goa’s murky drug underworld like no agency before. That is sending shivers down the spine of Goa’s drug mafia.
