It was a secret meeting between Shantakumaran Sreesanth and a key member of Dawood Ibrahim Syndicate involved in match fixing in a posh Ambience Mall in Gurgaon some 10 weeks ago. This meeting was the precursor to what was to be done by the bookies who were more interested in 'spot-fixing' as it paid rich dividends to them. Delhi Police Inspector Badrish Dutt had intercepted the conversation.
The bookie owing allegiance to the D-Company was obviously cock-a-hoop after Sreesanth readily agreed to the wishes of D-Company and made a call to Pakistan. The location of the caller was tracked to Gurgaon. The real-time tracking helped sleuths to zero in on the exact location of the caller and they identified the person sitting somewhere in Karachi, Pakistan and the ‘Operation to identify the spot fixers’ was launched by the Delhi Police. It took over 100 hours of intercepted conversation between the bookies and the three players of Rajasthan Royals and several weeks of painstaking investigation to unmask the ‘cheats’ who brought disrepute to Indian Cricket.
“It’s a world of sleaze, sex and the lure of ill-gotten easy money that made the players to agree to the unethical practice. Bookies used every trick in the book, including providing escorts and high-end call girls to entice Sreesanth and Ajit Chandila. Ankeet Chavan, who was allegedly foxed by Chandila to bowl that 2nd over against Mumbai Indians on Wednesday night match, did not accept girls from the bookies,” a police official said.
Special Cell sleuths then started tracking the phone conversations of these girls and women and that opened a can of worms. Investigations revealed that these call girls were also used to coerce the duo to coax others to join the party. Investigators have found that the two arrested bookies, Manan and Chand, reportedly provided calls girls to Sreesanth and Ajit Chandila on at least three occasions during their stay in Mumbai, Chandigarh and Jaipur.
A dedicated team of officers of Special Cell was following the leads. It was tasked to unravel the unholy syndicate of bookies and cricket player and an extensive electronic surveillance was mounted on Jiju Janardhan, a club lever of Ernakulam club, a bookie identified as Chandresh, alias Jupiter. It was Jupiter whose connections with the D-Company were established by the investigators.
His call details led the cops to Jiju Janardhan, who had played with the same Ernakulam club. Sleuths at Special Cell's lodhi Road office became more interested after they found that Jupiter was talking constantly to Jiju Janardhan, who was only a chum of Sreesanth and had produced a video album ‘Jaago India’ for Sreesanth. The recordings were then analysed by the investigators and the typical ‘modus operandi’ adopted by rogue D-Company and its stooges to tutor players was decoded.
The recordings made the task easier as the conversations were matched with the video footage of the three matches played by Rajasthan Royals with Pune Warriors India (PWI) on May 5, against Kings XI Punjab at Mohali on May 9 and against Mumbai Indians at Mumbai on May 15. Jupiter, now in the custody of Delhi Police, was operating for Sunil Dubai.
It would be interesting to mention here that one of the 11 bookies arrested by Delhi Police is Amit Singh, a cricketer who had played with Rajasthan Royals. He had played for Shilpa Shetty’s team from 2009 to 2012. He was released only last year by the Rajasthan Royals management. Amit Singh then turned a bookie and started using his connections with his former teammates to make quick bucks.
Just keep the money, don’t discuss source on phone, Chandila told wife
One of the calls intercepted by the police between Ajit Chandila and his wife has revealed that Chandila’s wife was surprised with the huge amount money being sent to home by him. “She questioned (on phone) Chandila and asked him how he is getting the money even before the IPl season is over. But he told his wife to just keep the money saying that few things couldn’t be discussed on the phone,” sources said.