That was how it began. In the next few years Nero established a profitable sideline as the don’s money launderer and bagman. How did that happen? He just slid into it, driven by his obsession with the movie world. Stardust in his eyes, filmi glamour turning his head, and the money everyone made was crazy. Or, more accurately, there had always been a lawless side to him, the construction business was scarcely law-abiding, after all, it was crooked as corkscrews, as W. H. Auden might have put it. In those days the construction boom had begun and tall buildings, “matchbox houses,” were rising all around the city and Nero was at the heart of the transformation. In the new high-rise grab for the sky, how many laws were flouted or broken, how many pockets were lined to make troubles go away! The buildings went up and kept on going up beyond the number of floors authorized by the municipal corporation. Afterwards the electricity or water or gas authorities might threaten to cut off supply to the floors that should not exist but there were ways of smoothing those ruffled feathers. The movie star’s suitcase was by no means Nero’s first. It also happened that many of the new buildings were straightforwardly illegal, built without properly sanctioned plans, not conforming to the proper codes. Nero was guilty of such work also, but so was everybody, nobody was innocent, and like the other big builders he had friends in the other type of high places, so like everyone else he got away with everything he did. “The builder is the law,” he liked to say. “And the law is, keep on building.” Ethics? Transparency? Those were foreign words, words for people who didn’t understand the city’s culture or its people’s way of life.
That was who he was. He knew it, his sons knew it, that was the way of the world. His friendship with Don Corleone a.k.a. Sultan Ameer unlocked the door to the dungeon in which the deeper lawlessness was lurking, waiting to be set free. Now there were starlets at his parties and cocaine in the bathrooms and he had moved from being a straight, suited-and-booted, ditchwater-dull high-rise builder with a blueprint and a briefcase to becoming a figure in the city in his own right. And with status came more business, and with business came more status, and so on, around and around. During these years he developed the frankly vulgar self-promotional manner which still hung around him like a flashy fur coat in his New York years. He moved his family into the luxury Walkeshwar home. He bought a yacht. He had affairs. His name glittered in the night sky from Andheri to Nariman Point. Life was good.
There were many different ways in which money could be cleaned. For smaller sums there was smurfing, a way of breaking up dirty money into small amounts and using it to buy things like money orders or bankers’ drafts, which would later be redeposited in different banks, still in smallish amounts, and then withdrawn as laundered cash. Nero used this method for things like the money suitcases. But for larger projects, a larger-scale method was required, and the real estate business was the ideal vehicle. Nero became, to those in the know, the unacknowledged master of “flipping one” and “flipping two.” “Flipping one” was purchasing high-end, big-ticket real estate with black money and then quickly reselling it, usually for a profit, as prices were rocketing. The money from the sale was white money, clean as a whistle. “Flipping two” was buying property—with the seller’s agreement—for less than the market value, paying him the balance under the table in black money, and then proceeding to “flipping one.” Nero ran the largest real estate brokerage firm in the city and in underground parlance it became known as “Flipistan,” the country to which dirty money went for a vacation, to get cleaned up and come back with a nice honest tan. For a price, of course. Nero used Flipistan for his own black-money deals, but whenever members of S-Company asked for his services, he made a generous percentage on the deal.
Then the sky fell in on Don Corleone. The prime minister’s son Sanjay Gandhi, formerly his drinking buddy, went after Sultan Ameer during his mother’s years of authoritarian Emergency rule and the S-Company godfather was convicted in courts controlled by Sanjay, not by him, and he was sent down for a year and a half. Curiously, just as the Emergency ended and Sanjay fell from grace, the don was freed. But he was a changed man, had lost his nerve in prison and found God instead. Even though they were both of the same religious persuasion Nero was a Muslim in name only and this new devout Corleone was not to his liking. The don gave up gangsterism and tried, unsuccessfully, to enter politics; the two men drifted apart. In the 1980s Sultan Ameer was withered and all but forgotten, beginning his long struggle against the cancer that eventually claimed him, and Nero was a big wheel. But an even bigger wheel had begun to turn.