Dawood’s voice Fahim Machmach to surrender

While Machmach was entrusted with extortion calls and recruitment of frontline shooters, Parveen was coordinating with businessmen in Mumbai and Dubai about funds transfer through hawala.

From a skilled gunrunner in the backstreets of Mumbai to Dawood Ibrahim’s ‘Number Two’ in the D-Company, it has been a long run for Sheikh Fahim Ahmed, the ‘‘chatterbox’’—Machmach is underworld lingo for one who talks too much.

Informer-turned-gangster Parveen also rose from a tout to become one of Dawood’s lieutenants in Dubai. He jumped bail and escaped from the country in 2002.

Machmach is expected to fly down from Pakistan to Dubai to join Praveen whose wife flew into Mumbai late last week.

Dawood has been under pressure since the United States has named him in the global terrorist list and sources say he is now busy creating a base for his family and himself in Mumbai. His younger brother was earlier deported from Dubai.

Machmach had the uncanny skill to safely supply arms to Dawood’s frontline shooters in Mumbai in the early 1990s. This was despite the fact he had never fired a single round in his life.

The crime branch arrested him in connection with the murder of businessman Rajendra Gupta at Mahim in 1996 but he later went on to replace friend-turned-mentor Chhota Shakeel as in the underworld’s number two in the D-Company hierarchy.