End of 20-yr run for Delhi’s ‘Veerappan’

NEW DELHI: His father worked for the country and political leaders in Lok Sabha secretariat but he had other plans. Following in the footsteps of Veerappan, the king of red sandalwood smuggling, he started plying this illegal trade but with a crucial difference. He operated not in the forest but from the heart of the national capital.
At the young age of 21, Deepak Bhardwaj chose crime and became one of the biggest red sandalwood smugglers in the land.He smuggled it to China via Myanmar and hand business links with Naxalites. In fact, Chinese and Myanmarese buyers used to come to buy red sandalwood at his godowns in Delhi-NCR. Deepak (40) was wanted by eight states, including Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. His luck ran out on Thursday when a team of inspectors Badrish Dutt and Kailash Bisht and ACP Manishi Chandra arrested him from near Kashmere Gate with an associate, Vinod Kumar. At the time of his arrest, Deepak was going to meet his family in Noida, said officials.
Deepak had made so much money that he was currently in the process of laundering his ill-gotten gains in foreign countries along with his close associate K Maniappa, a native of Chennai. In fact, they had bought a hotel called Step on Batam Islands in Indonesia and were in process of investing more, said sources.
It is being suspected that he made several crores in his 20-year smuggling career. A resident of Jain Gali in Shakarpur, Deepak first started smuggling photo-chromatic eye glasses from Burma to India along with a friend, Manoj Roy, in 1993, where they came in touch with Maniappa. He sold these glasses in Ballimaran market in Delhi and in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh. Since then he has been on a roll. He has engaged in smuggling of drugs like ephedrine, which he used to buy from Delhi and Agra and send to China and Myanmar. He also started a business of illegally sending people to Gulf countries and Malaysia, Singapore and Russia on work permit. “He had many aliases and he managed to get two passports made in other names–Vikas Kohli and Amit Dhar—after Mumbai police seized his original document. In 2010, he travelled on these passports to Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia many times,” Sanjeev Yadav, DCP, Special Cell, said.
A source said that he was staying with his family till 1972 in R K Puram. His father Raghunath Prasad Sharma, a native of Garhwal, worked as section officer in Lok Sabha secretariat before retiring in 1990. Raghunath Prasad died in 2012 from cancer. “His two sisters work in Delhi and he has two sons,” said the source.