KUALA LUMPUR: THE murders committed by infamous gangster P. Kalimuthu, or Bentong Kali, in the early 1990s sent many reeling in fear over the sheer violence of the gangland-style killings.
Drive-by shootings, gunfights and stabbings were his actions against those who defied his reign of terror, which mostly took root in Pahang, Selangor and Kuala Lumpur. He committed 17 murders between 1991 and 1993.
With a bounty of up to RM100,000 on his head, Kalimuthu's 'business' largely centred on drug production and trafficking, which courted rows or rivalry that ended in bloodbaths.
At the height of his criminal racket in mid-1993, he gunned down 13 people in that year. At least two deaths were attributed to him — drive-by shootings on a motorcycle in Kajang and Jalan Raja Laut, Kuala Lumpur.
"His gang members were just like thugs in movies — trigger-happy, boastful and hot-tempered. He was so arrogant, he even called my office in Bukit Aman to speak to me," said the then Federal Criminal Investigation Department director Datuk Zaman Khan, who was tasked with capturing Kalimuthu.
A life of crime and incarceration was not alien to Kalimuthu.
He was born in Bentong, Pahang, on Jan 22, 1961, and was the eighth child in a family of 11. After dropping out of school at 14, he became part of Gang 04, which was a spin-off from a Chinese triad.
Criminal activities had sent Kalimuthu behind bars for a year when he was 19.
In 1989, he had formed a new gang, 04, whose name was a nod to his first gang. With a mission to expand his influence in Kuala Lumpur, Kalimuthu based his operations in Jalan Klang Lama.
He had a vision of making his gang the most powerful and feared in the country.
To realise this, he turned to drug trafficking to expand his criminal group. It distributed drugs in Brickfields and Jalan Klang Lama.
The drug dealings were discovered during a raid on April 10, 1990, and he was subsequently arrested. But his case was withdrawn by the deputy public prosecutor's office due to a lack of evidence.
Nevertheless, he was arrested again in January 1991 under the Dangerous Drugs Act (Special Preventative Measures) and was sent for two years of restricted residence to Gopeng, Perak.
However, he returned to business in less than a year after he went missing in November 1991. Police believed he was rebuilding his network, which expanded to the borders of Pahang.
By then, he was known as the tiger general among his men.
Ruthless and vengeful, he armed himself with guns and hunted down former gang members he believed had betrayed him.
Police only rediscovered Kalimuthu's drug dealings during a murder investigation, when they found a drug laboratory and a large quantity of high-grade heroin in Balakong in 1993.
Police then investigated the murder of stallholder, K. Muthu, 24, who had chided Kalimuthu for urinating in front of his flat at Block AA, Tanming Jaya, Kajang.
Muthu was shot dead on June 11, 1993. It was learnt that Kalimuthu was hiding at the flat for almost five months.
On June 29, 1993, Kalimuthu, 32, and two members, S. Gunalan@Billard, 31, and T. Gugaran@Raub Guna, 32, were shot dead by a police special operations team in a skirmish in Medan Damansara.