Super Maria: The cop who has witnessed Mumbai's darkest crimes

Since his days as deputy commissioner of police (detection), crime branch, Rakesh Maria, has had no qualms of getting his hands dirty. It is said that he is one police officer who, despite being an IPS officer, does not mind getting into the cauldron of crime and catastrophe. If looks can kill, Maria uses his big, round, "dangerous" eyes to force the person facing him into capitulation.

In fact, the sensational Neeraj Grover murder case was cracked with one cryptic, but loaded statement which Maria had casually tossed at Kannada actress, Maria Susairaj, who had gone to him with a missing person's complaint about Grover, along with others. Susairaj: "Sir, do you have any suspects?"

Maria looks into her eyes and says, "You are one of my suspects."

Within days, Susairaj was arrested along with her boyfriend Jerome Mathew for hacking Grover to death. Maria was not born a Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes he has been simply lucky. For instance, during the March 1993 Mumbai blasts, Tiger Memon's men, in last minute panic, had left a van near Siemens in Worli. The rest is history. Maria's career graph has seen a steady rise since then. Following the Mumbai terror attack on November 26, 2008, he got some flak from Vinita Kamte, the widow of Ashok Kamte, the police officer who died in action during the attack, but that did not stop him from taking over the late Hemant Karkare's chair as the Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief.

Once he became the ATS chief, he made fighting urban terrorism his forte. He busted the growing menace of the Indian Mujahideen (IM), and sleeper cells of homegrown terrorists who had gone on a bombing spree in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Varanasi, Mumbai and others. Maria managed to gain success in some measure as he arrested several top killers including the dreaded Feroz Sarguroh alias Feroz Konkani and averted several terror strikes when his men chased Riyaz Bhatkal and Yasin Bhatkal.

Actually, very few people know that since his teenage years, Maria aspired to emulate the famous hero from Frederick Forsyth's thriller novel, The Day of the Jackal, Claude Lebel, who pursued and arrested a killer, and John Preston from another of Forsyth's novels The Fourth Protocol who doggedly investigated to foil major a terror attack in London. As in Hindi movies, he became the cop and chased Bollywood. And Maria became Sanjay Dutt's nemesis.

The reign of terror that the Mumbai underworld had unleashed on the city could be checked only with Maria's aggressive policing and an unbeatable Khabri (informer) network, the likes of which no police officer could boast of after his exit from the crime branch. People tremble when they speak of his interrogation techniques and his skills in outmanoeuvring even the most hardened criminal.

They say he is a supercop. In my interactions with him, I liked the way he handled the mafia. He studies his subjects well and once when I had visited him for a profile on Ravi Mallesh Bora, alias DK Rao, a lieutenant of underworld don Chhota Rajan, he filled me in on all the details of the man, his career graph, his strengths and weaknesses. And then he called him the "Black Mamba".

Maria is due for a career elevation as director general of police this month. And already the chief minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, is scratching his head, as it would be difficult to fill Maria's shoes.