Karim Lala — The Don of Mumbai

Who Was Karim Lala?

Karim Lala was born Abdul Karim Sher Khan in the Kunar district of Afghanistan, in the region that is now the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, around 1911. He was a Pashtun — specifically from the Afridi tribe, a people with a formidable reputation for toughness and independence. He migrated to Bombay (now Mumbai) as a young man, part of a wave of Pashtun migrants who settled in the city’s working-class neighbourhoods and found work as money lenders, enforcers and strongmen.

Bombay in the 1940s and 1950s was a city of extraordinary opportunity for a man willing to use violence strategically. The film industry was booming, the docks were handling enormous volumes of goods, and a vast urban population needed credit, entertainment and protection that the formal economy couldn’t or wouldn’t provide. Karim Lala recognised this and built his empire methodically across three decades.

He controlled the gambling dens of central Bombay, ran sophisticated smuggling operations through the port, and extracted protection money from businesses, film producers and construction contractors. He was feared but also, in the way of powerful dons everywhere, relied upon — a fixer, a lender of last resort, a man who could resolve disputes that the courts couldn’t or wouldn’t touch.

What distinguished Karim Lala from many of his successors was his adherence to a personal code. He reportedly refused to participate in communal violence, declined to allow his organisation to be used for political killings, and is said to have maintained a genuine commitment to protecting the Pashtun community that had migrated to Bombay alongside him. This reputation made him not just feared but genuinely respected in a way that later Mumbai dons rarely achieved.

Building the Bombay Underworld

Karim Lala’s criminal operations were centred on the Dongri and Nagpada neighbourhoods of central Bombay — the same areas that would later become the power base of Dawood Ibrahim. He controlled matka gambling, the numbers racket that was the primary form of illegal gambling for Bombay’s working class throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The operation was vast — thousands of people placed bets daily, and the proceeds funded everything else.

His smuggling network operated through Bombay’s port, bringing in gold, electronics and consumer goods that were heavily taxed or restricted under India’s protectionist trade policies of the era. This was not petty smuggling — it was an industrial-scale operation that required the cooperation of dock workers, customs officials and shipping agents, all of whom Lala cultivated over decades.

By the 1960s and 1970s, Karim Lala was also deeply embedded in the Bollywood film industry — providing financing for films, offering “protection” to producers and studios, and extracting percentages from box office receipts. This connection between the Mumbai underworld and the film industry would persist for decades after his death, becoming one of the defining features of Indian organised crime.

The police largely tolerated his operations during his peak years, in part because of his code against political violence and in part because of the practical reality that Lala controlled the streets in ways that made certain forms of law enforcement easier, not harder. He was arrested on several occasions but never served significant prison time.

The Three Dons of Bombay

Karim Lala is often discussed alongside two other figures — Haji Mastan and Varadarajan Mudaliar — as the three founding dons of organised crime in Bombay. Each controlled different territories and different criminal specialities during the city’s post-independence decades.

Haji Mastan was a Tamil Muslim who built his wealth through gold smuggling and became famous for his flamboyant lifestyle and close connections to Bollywood. Varadarajan Mudaliar, known as Vardha, was a Tamil Hindu who controlled the dock areas and was famous for his extreme violence. Karim Lala, the oldest of the three and in many ways their prototype, controlled the central city and the Pashtun criminal network that underpinned the gambling and protection rackets.

Together, and sometimes in rivalry, these three men shaped the criminal infrastructure that the next generation — most notably Dawood Ibrahim — would inherit, expand and transform into a genuinely international criminal organisation. Dawood himself reportedly showed considerable respect to Karim Lala in his early career, though their relationship became complicated as Dawood’s ambitions grew beyond anything Lala’s generation had contemplated.

Decline and Legacy

By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Karim Lala’s power was in gradual decline. A new generation of criminals — younger, more violent, more willing to engage in political killings and terrorism — were displacing the old order. Dawood Ibrahim’s rise in the 1980s represented a fundamental transformation of the Mumbai underworld: where Lala’s empire had been primarily local and operated within understood limits, Dawood’s became international and operated with a ruthlessness that Lala had deliberately avoided.

Lala reportedly retreated from active criminal operations in his later years, living quietly in Bombay as the city transformed around him. He survived into old age — remarkable for a man who had spent decades at the centre of one of Asia’s most violent criminal ecosystems.

Karim Lala died on February 19, 2002, aged approximately 90. His death was noted in Indian newspapers as the passing of an era — the end of the first generation of Bombay dons who had built the city’s criminal infrastructure almost from nothing in the decades after Indian independence.

His legacy is complex. He was a criminal who caused real harm — the gambling rackets he ran extracted money from the city’s poorest residents, and the protection economy he built corrupted police and politicians for decades. But he was also, by the standards of his world, a man who operated within limits that his successors did not, and who is remembered with a degree of nostalgic respect in the city he once controlled.

Frequently Asked Questions — Karim Lala