Five-foot-five and average of build, forty-something Subodh Singh barely looks the role he embodies — a notorious and dreaded mastermind at crime.

Yet, with a phone in hand, this Moriarty from Bihar has from his prison cell in Patna been allegedly running a crime empire across multiple states, including Bengal, like a
puppet show for the past six years.

Whether the back-to-back heists at two jewellers’ in Raniganj (West Burdwan) and Domjur (Howrah) last month, or the volley of bullets at a businessman’s Volvo in Belghoria three weeks ago, or the series of extortion and threat calls to the state’s businessmen — they are all connected to Subodh, Bengal police say.

Subodh, whom the Bengal CID took into custody from Beur jail in Patna about a week ago, was first arrested in Chhattisgarh in 2005 — he got bail soon enough — and the second time in Bihar in 2018.

Since then, he has been operating from inside jail, assigning robberies to small, handpicked teams he has recruited in multiple states, mostly in Bihar, Bengal and Jharkhand, officers say. “These teams don’t know one another,” a senior officer said.

Apart from these teams — which together have about 200 members — Subodh has a core gang, several of whose members too are lodged in Beur.

A native of Chistipur village in Nalanda district, Subodh drifted into the world of crime in his teens and faces criminal cases — including murder and attempt-to-murder cases
— in Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, among others.

Several businessmen in Bengal who have received threat calls from him say these were made over the Internet.

Officers said they were trying to ascertain the number of crimes across Bengal that Subodh and his gang members were involved in.

So far, the CID has identified at least five robberies in North 24-Parganas
alone, committed since 2007, that officers say bear the signature of Subodh
and his gang.

“Subodh’s primary interest is in gold and gold ornaments, and he uses the minimum violence while raiding jewellery stores. No one in his gang is encouraged to fire unless forced to,” an officer said.

Subodh has been involved in at least seven robberies, mostly targeting jewellery stores and mostly recent — in other parts of south Bengal such as Howrah, Raniganj and Asansol, officers say.

While the Bengal CID has Subodh’s custody, the Barrackpore police commissionerate has brought over one of his henchmen, Roshan Yadav, from Beur jail for questioning. A police team from Barrackpore arrested Sahil, another gang member, in Chapra, Bihar, on Saturday and is bringing him to Bengal.

“We brought Roshan after his name surfaced in several cases of extortion calls to businessmen in Barrackpore,” an officer at the commissionerate said.

“Subodh and his gang appear to be involved also in the October 2020 murder of Manish Shukla in North 24-Parganas. Roshan is alleged to be among those who shot Manish at very close range.”

Police sources said Manish, a BJP youth leader, was involved in crimes and became a victim to gang warfare in the Barrackpore industrial belt.

Goldfinger

Officers said Subodh had amassed around ₹200 crore worth of gold. Investigations have revealed that some of the gold went to Nepal directly through a gang different from the teams he uses to commit the robberies — in keeping with Subodh’s preference for working on a need-to-know basis.

Subodh would send some of the stolen gold jewellery to Samastipur in Bihar for melting and conversion to bars before being smuggled to Nepal, the officers added.

That Subodh was continuing his criminal operations from jail became known first a few months after his arrest. While investigating a robbery at a gold-loan finance company in Kota, Rajasthan, in 2018, the state police connected it to a similar robbery at a finance company in Jaipur the previous year, in which Subodh was already a suspect.

In November 2022, Subodh’s gang allegedly pulled off one of its biggest heists, robbing a jewellery store in Katni, Madhya Pradesh, of gold ornaments worth nearly ₹8 crore.

Six months later, in May 2023, an armed gang robbing a jewellery store in Barrackpore fired and killed the owner’s son, while leaving the owner and an employee injured, after facing resistance – a rare instance of violence in an alleged Subodh heist.

“I have been told that Subodh Singh’s gang was involved in the robbery,” said Ajay Mandal, the Barrackpore-based realtor whose Volvo was sprayed with bullets last month in Rathtala, Belghoria.

“I had no clue about his existence until about a year ago when some of his men turned up and said ‘Dada’ wanted to talk to me,” Mandal told The Telegraph.

Officers said that after gold robberies, Subodh was planning to foray into real estate development with his focus on parts of Barrackpore, Titagarh and Sodepur in North 24-Parganas.

An officer said the firing on Mandal’s car was not meant to kill him, and hinted that it was just eyewash. “Subodh wanted to use Mandal to set up a new ‘syndicate’ that would call the shots in real estate development in the industrial hinterland of North 24-Parganas,” the officer said.

“Subodh fired on Mandal’s car to help him obtain police security -- which he has been given now – thus making it easier for Mandal to run the syndicate on his behalf with impunity.”

The police plan to question Roshan and Sahil how Subodh identified his targets in Bengal for extortion calls.

“Subodh once told me he needed close to Rs 2 crore to fight cases for several of his accomplices who are now in jail. He didn’t demand that amount from me, though,” Mandal said.