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Back in the day, if a Twins player tossed a baseball into the crowd, he'd discover a deduction for $3.25 on his next pay stub.
If a Twins player threw a bunch of baseballs into the stands, he might find himself toiling in Kansas City or Washington, the baseball equivalents of hell on earth. Well, he might if he wasn't a very good player, at least.
Calvin Griffith had an eye for talent. But the point is Calvin could have traded or sold any player on a whim. Like dinosaurs, the owners ruled the earth. Free agency changed everything in the mid-1970s.
Even 20 years ago, it wasn't quite so hard to get things done. Former Twins general manager Andy MacPhail in 1994 traded Dave Winfield to the Cleveland Indians for "future considerations." Those future considerations amounted to dinner at the restaurant of MacPhail's choice the next time he came to Cleveland. Indians general manager John Hart paid up during the 1995 season.
Now trades usually involve lawyers, agents, accountants and sensitivity counselors.
This all comes to mind as the weather heats up, the baseball season chugs along and the Twins appear to have established themselves as also-rans. Michael Cuddyer, Jason Kubel, Matt Capps and, of course, Jim Thome are impending free agents. General manager Bill Smith also will have to decide whether to buy out Joe Nathan or bring him back for the final year of his contract.
Smith took over for Terry Ryan as vice president and GM following the 2007 season.
But one thing that jumps out is that Smith has had some bad luck. If he trades a shortstop, the team immediately develops a dire need for a shortstop. If he trades a catcher, the team suddenly becomes desperate for a catcher.
Since Smith took over, the Twins have been in contention. He has shown a willingness to trade prospects to help secure a pennant, which I think is good. After all, you only get so many chances to win. But peddling veterans near the trade deadline - selling instead of buying - is something else altogether. And we have no idea how Bill will do under such duress.
Here's a look at some of his higher-profile moves:
- Matt Garza and Jason Bartlett to Tampa for Delmon Young, Brendan Harris and Jason Pridie. The Rays reached the World Series with Garza and Bartlett before trading both last winter. The wildly inconsistent Young carried the Twins for long stretches last season. He is a liability in left field and still has some maturing to do. But he's just 25.
Conclusion: I know some will want to argue, but I'll wait to draw a conclusion. The Twins are weak hitting from the right side, so Delmon is a key player. But Bartlett would look very good at shortstop at Target Field.
- Yohan Pino to Cleveland for Carl Pavano. Pavano is the ace of the staff. Pino is a career minor leaguer. It was a deal that didn't seem very important at the time but really turned out to be something special.
Conclusion: A beautiful meshing of scouting reports and front-office execution.
- Wilson Ramos to Washington for Matt Capps. If this trade were a movie, it would be one of those convoluted Swedish art house dramas. There are so many elements at work here. This is where some of Smith's bad luck has come in. Capps has been a lifesaver two years in a row. Who knew Joe Mauer would physically collapse, leaving a giant hole at catcher?
Conclusion: The Twins would not have won the division last season without Capps, who is durable and uncomplaining. But if he leaves via free agency, it will sting to see young Ramos starring for the Nationals. But I'd still make this trade.
- Johan Santana to the Mets for Carlos Gomez, Philip Humber, Kevin Mulvey and Deolis Guerra. Early on, there was a bidding war between the Yankees and Red Sox. But Smith waited too long to pull the trigger on a deal. Then the Yankees and Red Sox reached a sort of detente - collusion, if you ask me - to where they both agreed to walk away from Santana. That left the Mets offering a bag of garbage.
Conclusion: Yes, Smith was able to trade a couple of those incoming players for temporary patches at other positions. But no matter how you slice this one up, Smith and the Twins took a royal hosing.
- Kevin Mulvey to Arizona for Jon Rauch. See above conclusion.
- Carlos Gomez to the Brewers for J.J. Hardy. See above conclusion.
- Hardy and Brendan Harris to the Orioles for Jim Hoey and Brett Jacobson. See above conclusion with the caveat that Hoey is awful and an unsuitable patch.
Tom Powers can be reached at email@example.com.


text:
A pay day loan can get you out of your financial bind, quickly and easily. If you have any query then you can directly contact their customer support associate. These are short term loans which would enable to pay off the bills till the next pay check.
With these profiles, you can easily access to apply this fiscal scheme to fulfill your urgency. After you experience our wonderful online cash advance loan process we are sure that you will rate Payday Cash Advance Loan as your cash advance company. In fact, they must be used at the time when you actually run out of money and are unable to meet your basic requirements such as utility bills, medical bills, and others. If the loan provider is satisfied with your application, you will be notified about the same, and money will be quickly wired in your checking account within a couple of hours.
The lender needs to have a license for the particular state to practice in the same. No credit check no fax payday loans as name signifies that this is a payday loan that helps you to gain caash without faxing any document. Now, a payday loan is also called by a few other names. High interest is attached to any remaining principle for each new pay period. Easy, fast and hassle free availability comprise some of the features that make these loans popular.
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This loan does not include credit check procedure. This loan will take you out of the problem you are in by providing you with small but significant cash amount. Payday loans with no faxing needed means just that.
You can go through all the details which you can find on their official websites. A Verified bank Account: Another significant factor for quick credits is a verified bank account. In this way, you could avert late payment fines as well.
Sometimes, the end caps promote a sale item, it catches our eye and feeds into our hunger while grocery shopping on an empty stomach. You will also find that your payday loan online has breathed life into you once more. It doesn't matter if they have to live with the help of instant online payday loans for a while. The ride itself is fast, furious and fun, but the climb back up the hill is slow and sometimes a struggle.
Usually bad credit is a result of defaults, late bill payments, CCJs, IVAs, bankruptcy, arrears or insolvency. Bad credit loans are specifically meant for those facing credit issues. They pay our bills and are themselves settled when our salary comes in. You have to check this out.

subset: commoncrawl


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Pumpkin Scissors
The Complete Series DVD
Includes: Eps 1-24
Rating: TV-14
Release Date: 8/25/2009
Market: $29.98
Price: $22.49 (25% savings)
In the wake of the Great War, Lieutenant Alice Malvin assumes command of the Imperial Army\'\s Intelligence Section III – a ragtag bunch of pencil-pushers used to spread military propaganda. But Malvin, an idealistic soldier who refuses to rest while her people suffer, yearns to cut through the thick skin of deception perpetrated by power-crazed nobles. When her investigation reveals a clandestine super-soldier program known as The Invisible Nine, she finds herself trapped in a whirlwind of deadly secrets.
The closer Malvin gets to exposing government corruption, the less likely her beloved IS3 is to survive. With the fate of the Empire hanging in the balance, Malvin turns to an unlikely ally – Randel Orland, a hulking veteran who may hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of The Invisible Nine. In a world where nobility and power make the rules, the truth can get an honest soldier killed.
- Includes: Eps 1-24
- Format: DVD
- Language: English,Japanese
- Subtitles: English
- Rating: TV-14
- Aspect Ratio: 16x9
- Main Feature Video: 480 Standard Definition
- Special Feature Video: 480 Standard Definition
- Main Feature Audio: English 5.1 Surround,Japanese Stereo
- Special Feature Audio: English Stereo,Japanese Stereo
- Main Feature Runtime: 600
- Special Feature Runtime: 18
- Region: 1
- Number of DVDs: 4
- Studio: FUNimation
- Textless Songs
- Trailers


text:
- Opening periods
- from Friday 5 February 2016 to Sunday 14 February 2016
- from Friday 5 February 2016 to Sunday 14 February 2016
- Address:
Place Sainte Croix 4
1050 Brussels (IXELLES)
- MAPS: Google Maps
Animation and cartoons, 2D and 3D, video clips, concerts, conferences and competitions... There's something for everyone at ANIMA! At Flagey in February 2015!
Anima is the unmissable event for animated film.
Brussels will not be the only place honouring this genre: several theatres in Belgium are partnering up with Anima to present some of the films (Liège, Charleroi, Namur and Mons, among others).
For this 33rd edition there will be no less than 15 feature-length films, 143 films from 30 countries, including 69 short films from international competitions and a selection specially conceived for the Animated night.
In addition to this, 20 films will be entered in a national competition, not forgetting the 15 or so Belgian films outside of the competition.
New in 2014!
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science has recently qualified the festival for the Animated Short Films category. This means that the winner of the Best Short Film competition can be entered in the 2015 Oscar® Best Animated Short Film category!
In short, Anima is:
- more than 100 films,
- an "animated" night and previews,
- video-clips,
- and for the grand finale the Golden Cartoon prize ceremony!
Experience a unique event of its type in Europe!
But that's not all!
- Retrospectives and exhibitions,
- conferences and concerts,
- and a series of workshops and "professional" encounters (Futuranima).
Anima is an enchanted land with a continuous series of colourful discoveries to the delight of young and old.
Let yourself fall under its charm!
Don't hesitate to join the Anima community on Facebook!
Practical information
Flagey Ticket Office open from Monday to Saturday from 9am to 7pm (+32 (0)2 641 10 20).
- tel. : +32 (0) 2 641 10 20
- Flagey (IXELLES)
Visit our partners' webpages
- The Tour & Taxis E-Experience
- Exhibition: The Awakening of Consciousness by Gao Xingjian
- WoW - "Wonders of Wildlife" exhibition in Brussels
- Sundays with the Family at the BELvue


text:
I have been doing a lot of research to better understand the relationships between site-store-gateways-merchant accounts. Here is what I think I know:
A: If you want to process credit cards on your site you need a PCI compliant server. For most small companies and certainly anyone using shared hosting that is not a viable option, so:
B: You could install a shopping cart on your site, but it would need to talk to a gateway to handle the secure part of the transaction - collecting and processing the credit card to the gateway who then passes it on to the merchant services provider. In this scenario you have to still be concerned somewhat with the security of the site and the shopping cart portion of it and you are going to pay both a gateways fees and your merchant services fees?
C: If you use Miva Merchant as your storefront then you really don't need to worry about the security on your site's server as you are going to hand off the store portion of your site to Miva and then Miva passes the purchase over to - and here is the part where I am a little confused -
Let's say I have Chase Paymentech - In this case Miva can talk directly to Paymentech (I guess they have their own built in gateway?) and I don't need a separate gateway provider?
Let's say I have another company for merchant services - will call it "Great Banking" for example. I am guessing great banking while providing merchant services doesn't have a gateway? Is this the point when you would need a company such as Authorize.net? I've been on their (Authorize.net) web site and I guess I don't entirely understand what they (or companies like them) do. They don't seem to be a store front like Miva nor do they appear to be a Merchant Services company. They also add a layer of cost. I think Authorize.net says they support Chase Paymentech but why would you need them? For stores that don't support Paymentech directly?
I think part of what is confusing is that all merchant services company seem to have some facility for communicating with online systems (an API) that allows gateways to interface but don't actually always have gateways themselves?
This seems like a puzzle in my understanding and I want to make sure I am properly grasping how it all works. So to summarize:
Store needs to talk to a gateway - some merchant services have a gateway built in but the store must be coded to work with it. If a store wants to just talk to popular gateways it's easier for them because they don't have to worry about communicating with all the individual merchant services providers, just the popular gateways. The gateways then do all the work of communicating with the various merchant services companies?
I hope I have been clear in my confusion - hoping someone can shed some light on all of this and let me know if my understanding is correct. Thanks for any provided enlightenment!


text:
- Filed Under
Re "Nurse practitioners step in to meet demand: Health reform law, doctor shortage are expected to increase the need for care," April 25 article:
I have been a family nurse practitioner for over 10 years, seeing patients ages 14 and up. Our practice offers primary, as well as pulmonary and sleep care, and my collaborating physician has been a great mentor to me.
The changes we see in health care are: many more patients entering the system; increased time spent authorizing even the most basic medications and tests; a shortage of primary-care providers; and less reimbursement for care.
Nurse practitioners are trained to diagnose, monitor, treat and recognize when specialized care is necessary. We collaborate regularly with those we work with every day, all specialists, radiologists, pharmacists, hospitalists, nursing home practitioners and palliative care specialists like hospice. This is key to optimum patient care.
The Nurse Practitioner Modernization Act is aimed at eliminating "mandatory" collaboration, which can be as minimal as an M.D. signing a few charts every few months. This "mandatory" rule in no way changes the quality of care given to patients by NPs.
However, it does restrict the autonomy of NPs and limits their ability to open NP-run clinics to help with this primary care shortage.
NPs are an ever-increasing member of the health care team since the 1970s. We believe in the "team" approach to health care. That is how we're trained. That will never change.
In this changing and challenging health-care environment, we believe patients come first.
Janet Barton
Cold Spring


text:
..the best view to enjoy watching the underwater habitat...
June 2010
Maria Suzette C
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text:
Faculty/Staff Member Name: *
Advisor's Email: *
Advisor's Department, Phone number and on-campus address: *
Chapter President: *
Nominator's Name and Chapter Affiliation: *
Nominator's Email and Phone Number: *
What has this faculty/staff member done in order to establish a positive and a caring relationship with the organization he/she advises?: *
How has this faculty/staff member gone above and beyond his/her call of duty to enhance the Greek community at the University of Hartford?: *


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This morning I received an email saying my April 7 order had been refunded. The message included a link to my invoice. There was no explanation. I've sent an inquiry, but in the meantime...has this ever happened to anyone else?
------Indecision may or may not be my problem. -Jimmy Buffet
I don't understand. Did they send you your order then refund you?
Or, are you saying they cancelled your order?
A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.
-Steven Wright
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/steven_wright.html#vyUOz6BGb3EYCGGS.99 - Steven Wright
Bernina 830LE - Brother Dreamweaver VQ3000 - Bernina B530 - Janome 6600P - Pfaff 1209 - Babylock Evolution - Janome 644 - Babylock Sashiko2 - Babylock BLCS-2
There's no indication it was shipped. Under Order Status on the invoice it simply says Refunded.
I have the Paypal receipt, so I know they were paid. -- Edited on 4/15/14 9:54 AM --
Sounds like a mix-up to me. Seems like you should just email them to let them know you're order shouldn't have been cancelled and you do want it.
I'm sure I'll hear back tomorrow. It's just annoying on two counts: I get really excited about receiving their patterns and there was no explanation for what happened.
That is really irritating! I've never had any mix-ups on my orders, so I'll be interested to hear how responsive they are to this issue. Hope you get it resolved quickly!
I've ordered lots of times, and never had that happen. Send her a quick email and ask.
They are a fabulous company, and I love their patterns.
------Sew on through all ups and downs. Remember--it is only fabric.
Sill working on Fabric stash reduction: Aiming to see the sewing room floor before 2009.
I'm surprised to hear this. I wonder what happened.
------Stash: 196 yds. @ 10.18.15
You didn't send the wrong currency or something did you?
I've worked for an online seller where we did this when occasionally the buyer picked the wrong currency on Paypal. But we always sent an email to explain, and asking them to re-submit the payment.
I'm sure you will get an email reply to sort out what has happened.
Mystery solved! Message received this morning says someone clicked the wrong button...refunded instead of shipped! Now I feel silly for stressing over it.
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text:
If you're driving on the highway and see orange cones, be sure to slow down or move over. There's an addition to a state law that drivers must follow that could be the difference between life and death for TxDOT workers
"They are out there building and maintaining our highways, and that's their office," said Deidrea Samuels with the Texas Department of Transportation.
TxDOT crews work around the clock to make sure our commute is as smooth and safe as possible; but, while workers are fixing road hazards, they are putting themselves in harm's way.
"It's pretty dangerous," said TxDOT employee Thomas Sheldon. "There is always a danger working a long side the freeway."
Sheldon has been working for TxDOT for nine years. He's a mechanic, but used to work out in the field.
Back on September 13, 2007, a tragic accident veered his career path off course, when a woman lost control of her car and plowed into him off 610 near Ella.
"We were a rolling operation, so we would work in one spot for five minutes and move to the next spot," said Sheldon.
Before he could get into his truck, he was blindsided.
"Whenever I stopped to turn around, the car was on top of me already," Sheldon said.
Now, there's a new law in place to help safeguard TxDOT crews.
The state's Move Over/Slow Down law was already in place for police officers and tow truck drivers, but now TxDOT crews will also benefit.
Effective Sept. 1, drivers must move over or slow down to 20 mph below the speed limit when approaching TxDOT workers and vehicles that are stopped on the side of the road.
Even though Sheldon made a full recovery, he hopes that what he went through won't happen to anyone else.
"It will help us do our job a little bit safer and keep other people safe that are on the road," he said.
There is one exception to the rule, if you are driving past a construction site and the workers are protected by a barrier, you do not have to move over.
According to TxDOT, if drivers are caught violating this law they could be fined up to $2,000.
Click here to learn more about Texas' Move Over/Slow Down law.


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Biomedical informatics and translational medicine
Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, & Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, College of Medicine, 89 Beaumont Ave, Given Courtyard N309, Burlington, VT 05405 USA
Journal of Translational Medicine 2010, 8:22 doi:10.1186/1479-5876-8-22Published: 26 February 2010
Biomedical informatics involves a core set of methodologies that can provide a foundation for crossing the "translational barriers" associated with translational medicine. To this end, the fundamental aspects of biomedical informatics (e.g., bioinformatics, imaging informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics) may be essential in helping improve the ability to bring basic research findings to the bedside, evaluate the efficacy of interventions across communities, and enable the assessment of the eventual impact of translational medicine innovations on health policies. Here, a brief description is provided for a selection of key biomedical informatics topics (Decision Support, Natural Language Processing, Standards, Information Retrieval, and Electronic Health Records) and their relevance to translational medicine. Based on contributions and advancements in each of these topic areas, the article proposes that biomedical informatics practitioners ("biomedical informaticians") can be essential members of translational medicine teams.


text:
Mike Napoli: Yu Darvish 'kept us in the game'; 'he's all up-hill from here'
ARLINGTON — Wearing a royal blue "Yu Darvish is my homeboy" t-shirt Monday night, Rangers catcher Mike Napoli sat at a postgame press conference and explained the debut had by the rookie right-hander.
Darvish, 25, struggled mightily in the first inning against the Seattle Mariners, allowing four earned runs and needing 42 pitches to record his first three outs. Not exactly what the 42,003 in attendance were expecting from a pitcher the Rangers paid over $107 million to play home games in Arlington for the next six years.
"Going through warmups he seemed fine," said Napoli, the player that caught Darvish for his 5.2 innings of work. "I think when he got out there he was a little over-amped. I don't think he was scared. He was just excited to be out there. It was his first start. He did well keeping us in the game. I think he's all up-hill from here."
Fortunately for the Japanese baseball icon, he settled in the third, fourth and fifth innings and his teammates provided an offensive explosion that helped Darvish earn an 11-5 victory.
"It was a little rough, but we were preaching to him that we have a good lineup and keep us there," Napoli said. "And he did that."
Darvish's biggest struggles came from his failure to throw first pitch strikes, something he accomplished only eight times against the first 20 hitters he faced.
According to Napoli, if Darvish can correct that, everything else will take care of itself.
"If you get strike one he can do whatever he wants," Napoli said. "With the type of stuff he has it would be pretty special if he gets strike one.
"He started doing that as the outing went on. Hats off to him. He kept us in the game and gave us a chance to come back and take the lead."
Of course, home runs from Nelson Cruz, Mitch Moreland and Josh Hamilton tremendously reduced the pressure on Darvish. The Rangers led 8-5 when Darvish exited.
Follow Jon Machota on Twitter: @jonmachota


text:
Welcome to APUG!
Roll the film up on the take up reel. Use the tape at the end of the roll to keep the film rolled up. Use Scotch tape or equivalent if necessary. Do not use a rubber band, because if the rubber band is a little too tight, it will leave marks on the film.


text:
Touch me
Now everyone is doing it. Asus has brought out a desktop version of the EeePC netbook with a 16 inch touch screen, the Asus Eee Top. Shuttle has also just bolted on a seven inch touch screen on to the front of one of their compact barebones boxes.
But these are just touch screens, which this column can testify are interesting but only for the first couple of minutes. Six months ago Dell brought out a real multi-touch screen on its Latitude XT which failed to impress but just now HP says its 12 inch TouchSmart tx2 twist-screen tablet will be out for Christmas. Its multi-touchness is akin to the Apple MacBook's multitouch trackpad gestures. Which means you can expand and contract and whirl around menus and, er, that's probably it.
You might have thought that such a tactile activity as architecture could think up a proper use for multitouch.
Have your say
You must sign in to make a comment.


text:
Ruth Pennebaker
By Ruth Pennebaker:
Pennebaker: Wendy Davis Needs to Take Back Her Story
Despair in Fashion
Justin Sewell isn't perfect. He admires "outliers" like Ralph Nader (even after my insistence that Nader can never, ever be forgiven for helping to botch the 2000 presidential election). So what? Perfection is boring and overrated. After visiting Sewell's office … Read More
Shut My Mouth
Since when did "uterus" become an offensive term—especially when you're talking about regulating abortion?
In the immortal words of the great Tammy Wynette, sometimes it's hard to be a woman. Anyway, that's the tune I've been humming — "Stand by Your Man," to be precise — while a torrent of anti-female legislation sweeps across … Read More
Bringing Up Baby
On a wintry day in February, I went to the Texas Senate to hear citizens and medical and legal experts testify about the sonogram bill. You know, the bill we've all been hearing about that requires a doctor to give … Read More
Unearthing Aurora
Lost Books of Texas "Terms of Endearment is a book?" a well-read friend asked recently. "I didn't know that. I thought it was just a movie." Hell yes it's a book, I said, and told her she should read it … Read More
What's in a Nombre?
All you have to do is move and you get this question 600 times a day: "What's your new address?" Funny they—the friends, the bankers, the credit-card callers, the movers, the shakers—should ask. Our new address is on San Jacinto … Read More
One Texan's Xmas List
I've finally learned that you have to ask for what you want in this life. I know, I know—getting what you want is another matter. But it's been a hard year, so leave me to my fool's paradise. Here's what … Read More
Bloody Bloody Tea Party
When I wasn't working on a migraine, when I wasn't despondent about the future of the world, when I was feeling halfway brave, I occasionally tuned in to TV coverage of the elections this fall. I watched the Tea Partiers … Read More


text:
I'm currently seeking a job. I've got a good CV, but little industry experience, and so my difficulty is that I'm not entirely certain what I'm looking for.
What I've done is a good BSc in Computer Science, and an extensive six-year stint as an all-purpose programmer in a military unit. I won't go into the details, but I've worked on a fairly large number of projects, with huge variety but each of fairly limited scope. I'm also, so far, very much a generalist - I don't have a specific domain I specialize in. What I've enjoyed most has been in the realm of design - the object-oriented design of modules, APIs, project architecture, what-have-ye. As an eventual goal I believe I'd like to see myself as a software architect. What I'd like right now is a position where the OOD features significantly - where I can learn and develop my skills, and eventually practice OOD at a rather larger scale than I have so far.
Obviously, nobody has pure OOD as a job description; that's not what I'm expecting and it's not what I'm looking for. But I'm somewhat unfamiliar with the major sub-fields of the software engineering job market, and I my knowledge of major current technologies is pretty basic. I'm finding it very hard to tell from a job description (and even from speaking to an interviewer) whether the job is likely to have a major design element. So many positions I see could involve lots of OOD, or none at all - or at least, so it seems to this inexperienced job-seeker. It seems to depend so much on the precise nature of the job, and on how precisely they use tech stacks I don't know (and won't even know the names of without serious digging, or accepting the job :P).
What can I look for in a position to find a job with a focus on OOD? Are there particular fields, company-types, or positions I should seek or avoid? Are there questions I can ask at interviews that will help me out?


text:
Friday, January 28, 2011
© Copyright 2015 Albany Herald
ALBANY, Ga. -- Everybody's got an animal story. They're usually heartwarming -- touching even -- and are followed by the obligatory "Awwws."
Susan Cronin's animal story could be a Disney movie.
The office administrator/interior designer met stray Jack Russell terrier Slim on a wet Wednesday afternoon in late November of last year. Within a whirlwind 24-hour period, she somehow managed to find not one, but two, of the dog's owners.
"I was on my way to Westover High School to pick up my son Evan, and it was pouring down rain," Cronin, one of those high-energy people whose enthusiasm for life is always bubbling near the surface, said over a cup of coffee. "I was in the Lake Park subdivision, and I saw the sweetest dog wandering in the rain. I got out of my car and called him, and he came right to me.
"I loaded him up in the car, and when we got to Westover, Evan opened the door and said, 'Mom, another one?'"
It seems Cronin had previously found and, for a time, taken care of cocker spaniel/dachshund mix William (who's still available on petfinder.com).
"I took (Slim) home, but our cats didn't want him there, so I decided to go back and drive around the neighborhood where I found him to see if anyone was out looking for him," Cronin picks up her story. "I couldn't believe a young mother actually opened the door for me at the first house I went to, but she had a 10-year-old who said, 'I think he lives that way.'
"I was cruising down an alley and pulled into someone's driveway to turn around. Before I could back out of the driveway, the homeowner came out of the house with a phone in hand. He did not look thrilled."
When Cronin explained her situation, the homeowner suggested she call a local animal hospital. She told him she had no phone with her, so the homeowner simply pushed a button and handed her the phone.
He had the facility on speed dial.
"This is where the story gets amazing," Cronin said. "It was 10 'til 6, and the girl at the vet's office told me they closed at 6. I told her my story and said I'd pay to board the dog. I could hear in her voice that she was going to say no, but she told me if I got there before 6 and paid up front she'd take the dog in.
"So I rushed there, and when I walked in the door with the dog, the receptionist gasped and called out to her co-worker, 'Come look at this dog and tell me who he looks like.' The other girl came out and said, 'It can't be.'"
The Jack Russell was a dead ringer for the young lady's family dog, which had gone missing two years earlier. She checked his back teeth and, sure enough, two of them were missing, just like her family's dog.
The young lady kept the dog at the office and didn't charge Cronin. The story, apparently, had its happy ending.
But the next morning, after taking Evan to school, Cronin, for some reason she couldn't explain, took a different route back toward their home. She was on Flamingo Road when she saw a notice posted on a stop sign. It was for a lost dog and, upon closer inspection, Cronin saw that the dog looked very familiar.
"It looked just like the dog I'd taken to the vet's the day before," she said. "I stopped to take down the number on the sign, and a vehicle drove by. The woman driving saw me, stopped and said, 'Are you the one who saved my dog?' "
The woman, who was so distraught over losing Slim she'd called her 21-year-old daughter home from Columbus College to help her look for him, had started calling veterinarians' offices to see if anyone had brought in her missing Jack Russell.
Slim, it turns out, had wandered off and had been missing for three days. She and Slim's previous owner at the vet's office discussed it and agreed the dog should stay with its new owner.
"A lot of times with stories like these, things just don't work out," Cronin said. "But in less than a day, I was able to find not just one but two of the dog's owners. And the story had a happy ending."
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PERHAPS THERE IS NO BETTER WAY to divine the significance of a regime change than to observe the reshuffling of courtiers who thrive off and influence power. For many journalists and political analysts, then, the high-profile guests entering the grounds of Lucknow's La Martinière Boys' College on 15 March 2012 revealed a lot about whom the new Uttar Pradesh government would smile upon, and how it would function, in the ensuing five years. Nine days earlier, the Samajwadi Party (SP) had won a majority in the state's 16th legislative assembly elections since Independence, and the scion of the party's ruling dynasty, Akhilesh Yadav, was preparing to be sworn in as the new chief minister. Hundreds of celebrating SP workers in red Gandhi caps danced and sang songs before a stage draped in flowers.
Sitting in a special enclosure were some of the country's most prominent politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, film stars and industrialists. The previous day, the Times of India reported that the Yadav family had "doled out invitations to every celeb known to them". When the billionaire mogul Anil Ambani showed up, SP supporters shepherded him to a seat next to Akhilesh's father, the party patriarch, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had led the state at three different points.
Ambani was also present at Mulayam's swearing-in ceremony for his third stint as chief minister, in 2003. The following year, Mulayam supported Ambani's successful bid for a Rajya Sabha seat, and granted him the rights to build a 3,500-megawatt power plant in Gautam Buddh Nagar district, where the Uttar Pradesh government had purchased land at cheap prices for "public purpose". The project had been stalled by farmers demanding higher compensation for the 2,500 acres making up the site, 40 kilometres from the national capital, but Ambani and Mulayam remained close.
Another billionaire, Subrata Roy, the chairman of Sahara India Parivar, was also spotted chatting with Mulayam and shaking hands with party leaders. Roy, who rose to prominence in Uttar Pradesh, acquired vast land holdings in the state during the third period of SP rule, which lasted until 2007.
Conspicuously absent from the roster of billionaires paying their respects at La Martinière was the liquor baron and real estate tycoon Ponty Chadha. Chadha had also been close with the Yadavs and, like Roy and Ambani, enjoyed great patronage under Mulayam's third government. But these old ties had been eclipsed by Chadha's subsequent association with Mayawati, the charismatic Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader who ousted Mulayam in 2007.
When Mayawati came to power, almost every top bureaucrat and police officer who had ties to the Yadavs was transferred out, and businesses that blossomed under the previous regime were stifled. Many believed that Chadha's fortunes would also take an ill turn. But he swung things in his favour. While Ambani and Roy saw various projects scuppered under Mayawati's rule, Chadha was awarded a monopoly over distribution for the state's Rs 14,000-crore liquor market. In addition, he was given control of 30 percent of the alcohol retailers across the state, and was allowed to purchase a number of distressed but viable state-owned sugar mills at a price below their fair-market value. He also received a Rs 10,000-crore contract for distributing food under the state's midday meals scheme for children and pregnant women—in violation of an earlier Supreme Court order—and landed vast tracts of prime real estate just outside Delhi at a loss to the public, state Congress leaders claimed, of Rs 40,000 crore. Both Chadha and the BSP government made enormous sums from the booze trade in particular—excise tax on the 10 million cases of liquor sold every year generated roughly Rs 10,000 crore annually for Mayawati's government—and within the state administration Chadha became known as "Mayawati's financier".
With the SP back in power, many believed Chadha would now suffer. After abandoning Mulayam for Mayawati, it was far from clear that Akhilesh would let him back into the SP fold. During poll stops, Akhilesh had frequently expressed his displeasure with the state's liquor policy, which had allowed Chadha to drive up retail prices. At a public meeting in Bhimnagar, he promised the crowds that he would cut the cost of their "shaam ki dawai" (evening medicine) if voted in.
In fact, the pressure on Chadha seemed to begin in the weeks leading up to the election. In January, the Comptroller and Auditor General issued a report saying Chadha's sugar mills had been auctioned off at a loss to the public of somewhere between Rs 1,200 crore and Rs 2,000 crore, and recommending that the case be taken up by the Enforcement Directorate. Then, on 1 February—the same day that Mayawati kicked off her re-election campaign at a huge rally in Sitapur—a group of roughly 20 officials from the Income Tax Department arrived at Noida's Centrestage mall, which is owned by Chadha's Wave Group. After flashing their identity cards and gaining access to the 350,000-square-foot building, the officials rushed into the basement, where they reportedly found a secret vault. At the same time, at least a hundred of their fellow officers were raiding 18 other Chadha-owned properties (including farmhouses, malls, and nightclubs) scattered across Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Delhi.
While the officials cut into the vault at Centrestage with a high-powered gas torch, 55-year-old Chadha—a tall, corpulent, grizzly bear of a man with close-cropped hair and beard—was having a drink with a friend at the friend's office in South Delhi's Defence Colony. He had been tipped off about the raid. "He was sitting in his office and we were exchanging poetry," the friend, who runs a petroleum business, told me. "I asked him whether he was worried about the raid and he said, 'I have seen such gimmicks long ago. I know where it's going to end.'"
Early news reports claimed that the tax officials had recovered Rs 100 crore from the vault, along with various unspecified documents. There were rumours in the papers that the cash had been laundered by family members through various companies in Dubai, where Chadha had properties and investments. If the confiscated paperwork could prove this, it might threaten Chadha's empire, which was valued at somewhere between $1 billion and $10 billion. And, intentionally or not, some of the blowback was bound to catch Chadha's political patron, Mayawati, as she mobilised her party ahead of the polls.
In the end, Chadha's equanimity seemed justified. Two weeks after the raids, newspapers reported that almost nothing was recovered from the mall. "There were only two Rs 50 notes in the vault," an Income Tax Department official told the Economic Times. Whatever the truth, the episode was an embarrassment for the department, and Chadha emerged unscathed. The week following the raid, he held a lavish wedding for his daughter Harleen, at which senior politicians from the SP and the BSP, and from Punjab and Delhi were in attendance.
Mayawati fared less well. The BSP lost 126 of their 206 assembly seats (out of a total of 403) and, with them, the chief ministership. There was a growing sense that, as the SP swept into power, those who had prospered (perhaps illicitly) under Mayawati, including Chadha, might be swept out.
SHORTLY AFTER AKHILESH TOOK THE OATH as chief minister and left the stage at La Martinière, ecstatic SP supporters stormed the platform and set fire to the dais. Many of the most important guests retreated to a grand after-party at Sahara Shahar, Subrata Roy's 375-acre Lucknow estate. En route to the bash, Akhilesh held a press conference at which he proclaimed, "Organised corruption as happened in the previous regime never took place in the state [before] … UP is now celebrating democracy." At Roy's, senior politicians, serving bureaucrats, stars and business moguls mingled. Imported whiskey was served all night, and several party leaders passed out on white couches spread across the property's lush lawns. They were later escorted home in white Mercedes sedans, the house transport.
At one point, a group of IAS officers gathered on the grass began chatting about the people who had vexed the Yadavs when they were out of power, those that had remembered the family and helped them win the election, and the candidates for top ministries and administrative posts. They also briefly discussed Chadha. Because of his closeness to Mayawati, the officers agreed that his ascendancy in Uttar Pradesh was coming to an end. But not all the signs pointed in this direction. It was rumoured that Chadha had, in fact, been invited to Akhilesh's swearing in. Chadha's son, Manpreet, who goes by "Monty", arrived late to the inauguration, but managed to show his face. (According to some reports, Monty had flown in to Lucknow on a private jet with a "well known Mumbai industrialist".)
The auguring of public appearances and celebrity guest lists aside, Chadha was, according to some, too big to fail. "Ponty always had a strange magnetic force that pulled him into relevant circles," SAT Rizvi, a former IAS officer who served in Uttar Pradesh for more than two decades, told me. "His ever-rising money and muscle power made him indispensable." Rizvi wasn't the only one who thought so. Within the wealthy and politically connected circles in which he moved, Chadha had gained a surpassing reputation for the kind of entrepreneurial success that is born of great intimacy with power. He built the bulk of his fortune in the span of two decades by forming close relationships with north India's ruling personalities on the promise of benefits that only liquor could bring. Booze dispensed on the campaign trail could more or less be counted on to deliver votes, and liquor sales were the easiest way to pump funds into government coffers. Across north India, excise duties on alcohol are the second largest source of state revenue (after sales tax), since most other taxes go to the centre. Illegal kickbacks from contracts in other industries might line the pockets of individual politicians, but nothing could rival booze for legitimately enriching an entire government—whether or not those funds were later siphoned off for less than official purposes.
All this gave Chadha more ballast against the shifting winds of political favouritism than many other magnates in India. Party leaders, serving legislators and bureaucrats from across the political spectrum wore expensive watches or hung their walls with paintings gifted to them by Chadha. "He even imported Scotch with his name, Ponty, inscribed on the bottles and gifted them to almost every politician, businessman, and friend in town," Tony Jesudasan, a spokesperson for Anil Ambani, told me. Political rivals would bump into each other when they attended Chadha's Gatsby-style farmhouse parties, to which they were sometimes flown at his expense on privately chartered planes. The former SP general secretary Amar Singh, who once wielded great influence with Mulayam, explained Chadha's political buoyancy to me in simple terms: "He gives 70 percent of his bribes to the party in power and 30 percent to the opposition." If you mattered and could help Chadha expand his interests, then he would throw his weight behind you—regardless of party, identity, or ideology.
Chadha's friends in public office proved more than willing to help pay him back. By 2012, his empire had expanded into an almost absurd array of enterprises. In addition to being a liquor baron, sugar miller, real-estate giant, and food distributor, he became a paper miller, soda bottler, large-scale poultry farmer, Bollywood film producer, public transport operator, hydroelectric dam builder, mall and multiplex erector, educationist, philanthropist and African-land speculator. He also owned a professional hockey team. "Ponty always saw three 50-paisa coins in one rupee," Mahesh Gupta, a former excise commissioner of Uttar Pradesh, told me. If in a few of his projects Chadha seemed to turn a profit only after assuming significant risks and benefitting the economy at large, many of his ventures got going through contracts effected by the state on ludicrously favourable terms.
That it was Chadha who eventually leveraged these advantages to obtain outrageous wealth might have come as a surprise. He was a college dropout contending with two brothers and a host of cousins for space in a family business that was itself subject to violent external competition. He was also an amputee—a childhood accident deprived him of his left arm below the elbow and left him with two partial fingers and part of a thumb on his right hand—who had to hold his own in the physically aggressive culture of Moradabad, western Uttar Pradesh, where he grew up. But he was intelligent, and later gained a reputation for his orderly mind. "He planned everything in his head and had this amazing memory power," Jesudasan said. "He would never forget his meetings or appointments. He had this clock constantly ticking in his head and it always alarmed him about his plans."
Chadha, who was universally known as Ponty—he once told a reporter that the nickname was given to him by his father, and he liked it because "it was easy to remember and gelled with the trade"—learned early on never to yield an inch. The common perception is that whoever got in his way was either induced into an alliance or pushed out of business. "His strength was that he was brutal on the street and very sober with the government," Gupta said. By the time he was killed, 10,000 armed men reportedly guarded the family's many enterprises. Some of Chadha's rivals had been murdered, and accusations of guilt were inevitably laid at his feet. The president of the Lucknow Sharab Association, Anil Agarwal, said Chadha had entered "the most outrageous domains of the liquor business", in which any act of violence was possible. At other times, Chadha showed a willingness to betray his own kin.
Chadha often compared himself with a lotus that bloomed from the mire. His closest aide, Sweety Singh, told me a story that he seemed to consider an illustration of this moral decency. One of Chadha's business rivals had hired a group of contract killers to assassinate Chadha. "The contract killers knew who Ponty was," Sweety said, brimming with pride. "They called him and revealed the name of their client and asked if Ponty wanted him killed once and for all. But Ponty is such a great man that he said, no, don't do him any harm. He was very kind-hearted."
One way or another, Chadha's interests were enforced. He eventually held sway over significant parts of the liquor business in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, and Chandigarh; had liquor operations in Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Chhattisgarh; and amassed a king's ransom through his other enterprises.
Following Akhilesh's appointment, it soon became clear which way the winds would blow for Chadha. A month after the swearing-in, Mulayam received Chadha for breakfast at his Lucknow home. The meal was dominated by silence: Mulayam spoke rarely, mostly complaining about his insomnia and other health problems; Chadha kept quiet. According to a senior SP leader who has been privy to many meetings between the two men, it was like a "father and son having a usual meal and communicating in hints and codes known only to them". You don't calculate the profits and losses at a meeting like that, the SP leader said. "You just need to convey that you are loyal to the politician—and Ponty had mastered that art."
In the following months, Akhilesh backtracked on his campaign promises, allowing the liquor distribution policy that Mayawati had instituted to Chadha's great advantage—and which she had renewed just months before the elections—to remain the law of the land. He then publicly denied that there were grounds for investigating the sugar mill auctions, effectively blocking an official probe; cleared all the Noida real estate projects that Chadha had initiated under Mayawati (which he had earlier promised to review); and renewed Chadha's monopoly over the distribution of midday meals.
Though Akhilesh's accommodations were a boon, Chadha was anything but complacent. At the same time that the new chief minister was applying more grease to the wheels of Chadha's various enterprises, Chadha and his son, Monty, were working hard to shed the less seemly aspects of the family's reputation, and to achieve a new respectability through enterprises such as their self-proclaimed "ultra-modern" real estate ventures.
But Chadha was not to see the full fruits of this labour. His attempts to refashion the family image were still underway in mid November 2012, when he was gunned down by his brother Hardeep in a shoot-out at one of the family's many Delhi farmhouses. It was a violent, high-profile end to a life that began rather modestly in post-Partition Uttar Pradesh, and it seemed to fix the liquor baron's reputation as a rags-to-riches gangster. But the killing, and the stories that emerged in its aftermath, also began to shed some light on how Chadha, largely a cipher to the public, had accomplished his remarkable rise.
MORADABAD IS A BATTERED CITY of small-time brass, copper, and steel producers about three hours east of Delhi. The small district centre of roughly 900,000 straddles a highway that runs from the capital to Jim Corbett National Park, along which a bunch of hotels, glittering with signboards, have recently sprung up. Once you enter the city, bicycles, scooters, cars and autorickshaws fight slowly through narrow roads. Driving past Moradabad's famous market for brass utensils, you hit dense neighbourhoods such as Adarsh Colony, where Ponty Chadha grew up, in the early years of Mulayam's ascent.
Ponty was born Gurdeep Singh Chadha, in Moradabad, on 22 October 1958. The town had a history of intense Hindu–Muslim rioting that stretched back at least a century, and many of the people Chadha grew up around had been scarred by the violence of Partition. The Sikh families who migrated from newly formed Pakistan were confined to a refugee settlement in Adarsh Colony. Those I spoke with said their community had always focused on business: they drove trucks, fixed cars and motorbikes, and opened small iron- and steel-producing units.
During Partition, Chadha's grandfather Gurbachan migrated to Moradabad from Rawalpindi, where he was forced to leave behind his livelihood: a herd of cattle and buffaloes. In the United Provinces, he somehow managed to acquire new stock, and began selling milk. Around the time that the state was renamed Uttar Pradesh, in 1950, he had enough capital to begin producing bhang and country liquor. He was known for his staunch faith in God and his acts of charity, and never turned away beggars desperate for a dram. For a single peg of desi whiskey, he would ask them simply to utter the holy word. A mendicant would shout "Satnam!" and Gurbachan would pour spirits into his cup.
Chadha's father and his two uncles took over the alcohol business in the early 1960s. The family—including the brothers' respective wives and about a dozen siblings and cousins—lived under one roof. From producing country liquor for a single local shop, they moved into buying alcohol from larger distilleries and wholesaling it to several small outlets. By the 1970s, the family controlled a major proportion of the liquor distribution in Moradabad town. Early on, they decided to restrict the operation to blood relatives. Chadha was sent to boarding school in Nainital along with his cousin Gurjeet, who was known as Teetu. "Ponty was good at mathematics and he enjoyed geometry," 61-year-old Gurdyal Singh, the Chadhas' next door neighbour in Adarsh Colony, said. "The family had great expectations from Ponty and Teetu both, but no one ever imagined that Ponty would go so far."
Teetu and Chadha were family, friends, and fierce competitors. Around the time they were 10, Teetu told me, they both nearly died in the accident that led to Chadha's disfigurement. One evening while the rest of the family was busy with prayers, they went up to the terrace of the house to challenge one another to a rock slinging contest. They tied a long string to a stone and took turns hurling it from the balcony. On his go, Chadha took a great swing, which was followed by a loud thud. Chadha had collapsed. A few moments later, Teetu fell unconscious. The string had tangled in a high-voltage power line and the cousins were electrocuted. "Look at this hand," Teetu said, holding up his left limb, which had only two fingers. "I got crippled, too."
After the accident, Chadha struggled with his handicap. Holding a spoon or holding a pen—he had to clasp his world between two fingers. He learnt to do it well: by his early twenties, he rode a gearless bike around Moradabad, played neighbourhood cricket, and kept guns. "He was a very good shooter," Darinder Singh, Chadha's school friend and neighbour in Moradabad, who is known as Para, said. "He loved hunting musk deer. We would often set up a barbeque and roast the prey." To hunt, Chadha wore an artificial arm with a sharp tip. He would rest the barrel on this arm and pinch the butt in his armpit. "Then he would pull the trigger with his two fingers," Para said. "Those two fingers were as strong as pliers."
After finishing high school in 1978, Chadha and Para enrolled in the undergraduate economics programme at HSB Inter College in central Moradabad. The majority of the students at the college were Hindu Jats. They teased Chadha for being crippled. "They called him loola, tunda," Para said. "In the beginning he ignored them but a few days later it started bothering him a lot." Chadha and Para hatched a plan to beat up the student who antagonised Chadha the most. They ambushed the student while he was having lunch inside a classroom. Chadha locked the door, and kicked the student's table so hard that he mangled it. Chadha then asked Para to grab the student. Para, who is still tall and muscular, held the young man from behind. "Then Ponty headbutted him a couple times," Para said.
News of the assault quickly spread, and soon a large group of Jats wielding knives, steel rods, and hockey sticks began searching for Chadha and Para. "We went into hiding," Para said. They sought help from Para's older brother, who ran a transport company in town and employed a few dozen Jats, and he negotiated with the leader of the Jat students. The price for Chadha's safety was that he never went back to college.
IF CHADHA'S FORMAL EDUCATION WAS AT AN END, a more important one was just beginning. He and Teetu spent much of the 1980s as enforcers in the family business, raiding retail liquor shops to execute embargoes on bottles smuggled in from the borders of Punjab and Haryana, where alcohol was cheaper than it was in Uttar Pradesh. Shops with which the Chadhas contracted could only stock brands the family distributed, and anyone who infringed this rule soon watched his entire supply dry up.
As the family expanded its distribution network, Chadha's remit grew. To help carry out his work, he founded a gang of informants, which he earnestly called "the vigilance team". "He developed a strong intelligence network of spies across the town," Mahinder Singh, the chief excise officer in Moradabad district, told me. Team members were given motorcycles to patrol the highways for smugglers, or bicycles to peddle from shop to shop as they kept a check on distribution. At the same time, Chadha was learning to use the local administration to his advantage. He was in close touch with Singh and other excise officers in Moradabad, and would tip off inspectors about smuggled liquor. "His team still shares its information with us," Singh said.
By 1987, Chadha was completely consumed by the family business, which was pulling in significant amounts of cash. Under the guidance of his uncle and Teetu's father, Harbhajan Singh, Chadha earned a decision-making stake. Chadha's overriding ambition, a neighbourhood friend named AK Khanna told me, was "to bring order to the liquor trade of Moradabad".
Harbhajan helped school Chadha in the value of political goodwill. He was the first in the family to establish contacts with Mulayam Singh Yadav, who became chief minister in 1989, at the head of the Janata Dal alliance. Since Independence, Uttar Pradesh had been largely dominated by the Congress party and its Brahmin hierarchs. Mulayam and his contemporaries represented a new breed of identity-based state politics in which muscular party leadership embodied hopes of caste empowerment. Yadavs, a peasant and pastoral caste who were seen by upper castes as uncouth and lacking in respect for the law, soon gained the whip hand in the state. Accusations of bribery, extortion, kidnapping and murder were common.
Chadha was eager to form his own links with these new powers. As a reward for his dedication to the family business, Harbhajan sent him on an important errand in advance of the 1989 elections: delivering Rs 8 lakh (worth roughly Rs 27.5 lakh or $45,000 today) to Mulayam. "The elections were close and Mulayam needed that cash," Teetu's son chipped in when I asked his father about the incident. When Mulayam defeated the Congressman ND Tiwari, and entered into a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party to form a government, Chadha brought him another present. "Mulayam didn't have a car back then," a close associate of the Chadha family told me. "Ponty gifted him one."
After taking over as chief minister, Mulayam enacted a policy of "caste-based business tenders" that gave lower-caste communities living on riverbanks the exclusive right to extract sand and pebbles for resale. Thickets of new commercial and residential buildings were sprouting up along the north-western edge of Uttar Pradesh, where Delhi was expanding eastward into Noida, and the projects (which would soon be fertilised by economic liberalisation) required massive amounts of sand for concrete. Govind Pant Raju, a senior journalist based in Lucknow who was then a small-town newspaper reporter covering the operations of local mafias, said that Chadha "immediately pounced on this policy" and was awarded a claim. "Everyone wondered how he managed to get this contract from the government," Raju said. "The policy was meant for lower castes living along rivers and there was no scope for subcontracting."
The sand mines were a boon for the liquor business. "We made good profits," said Teetu, who would accompany Chadha to his extraction sites, spread along the Gola river in Nainital district. "In return, we just had to give the government some royalty." Chadha pumped revenues from the mines back into his liquor distribution network, which needed capital in order to spread to other markets, where the established players were backed by vicious gangs. He also began to cultivate a relationship with western Uttar Pradesh's most powerful liquor baron, Kishan Lal Wadia. "Ponty was a small-time operator of Wadia in the early nineties," a senior SP leader told me. "It was from Wadia that Ponty learned to cajole politicians, and it's because of Wadia's liquor money that Mulayam managed to influence the politics of western Uttar Pradesh." Wadia's backing gave Chadha the confidence to expand into the northern part of the state, which later became Uttarakhand.
Before he could push north, however, Chadha required muscle, and that muscle required leadership. "He first employed a group of notorious criminals," the senior SP leader said. "Then he needed someone to lead these criminals." In 1993, a violent dispute broke out in northern Uttar Pradesh between Harbhajan Singh Cheema (a politician who was also in the mining business) and Gurbachan Lal Sharma (a well known and deeply feared gangster) over a few acres of land. For the next two years, the two waged a bloody gang war in which dozens of men were killed. As a politician, Cheema had to appear frequently in public and needed a bodyguard. Sukhdev Singh Namdhari, a man with a reputation for violence, took the job.
In February 1995, Sharma was murdered by unidentified gunmen. Police arrested Namdhari, but he was quickly bailed out. "The common perception was that Namdhari gunned down Sharma," Raju, the journalist, said. Here was Chadha's much-needed man. Later that year, Chadha hired Namdhari—who eventually had 15 cases registered against him for crimes including criminal intimidation, dacoity and murder—to oversee his liquor and sand extraction projects in the north. Under the tutelage of Wadia, and with Namdhari by his side, Chadha expanded his distribution network from Moradabad to 18 districts in western and northern Uttar Pradesh—an achievement that would soon seem modest.
CHADHA'S UNCLE HARBHAJAN, a stout, turbaned man with a well waxed snow-white beard, is still a wholesaler of foreign liquor in Moradabad. Sitting in his office, a small room with finely polished walnut furniture on the first floor of a two-storey cinema hall that the family built in the 1970s—the first big investment the Chadha family made outside the liquor trade—he seemed to me to be frozen in that earlier era. Devotional songs played from somewhere beneath his desk. (He said he always listens to holy music at work.) The building, now drab, was veined with cracks.
Behind Harbhajan's desk there was a glass cupboard. Inside, a framed picture showed two young men—Harbhajan and Mulayam. When I asked him whether he was still in contact with the SP leader, he said he wasn't: "I lost touch with him because of Ponty. One day he told me that since he and Teetu were taking good care of business, I should stay away from Mulayam. He said, 'Mulayam doesn't like to entertain too many people for one purpose.'" Harbhajan then told me how Chadha, as he expanded into northern Uttar Pradesh in the mid 1990s, broke away from parts of the family. "He betrayed me," Harbhajan said. "He took a 40 percent share from Moradabad and refused to give me anything from Uttarakhand."
The mid 1990s marked the beginning of Chadha's decade-long ascension from a small if politically well connected regional player to a shaping force in north India's politics. This coincided with a period of radical upheaval that threw Uttar Pradesh open to new alignments of power. As the old order of the Congress was overturned by the identity politics of the SP, BSP, and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, opportunities arose for local interests that had been outside Congress coteries to gain influence and office. Bitter contests broke out over control of the lucrative machinery of the state. Between 1993 and 2003, there were eight chief ministerships and three periods of president's rule, all of which were accompanied by intense administrative churning. In 1995, the year that Mayawati first came to power, at least 500 officials were transferred around—or out of—the state bureaucracy; when she came back to power in 1997, after a year and a half of president's rule, she transferred nearly 800.
In time, Chadha took advantage of many of these new alignments. His first order of business in the late 1990s, however, was to keep expanding his liquor operations, laying the groundwork for the distribution monopoly that he would later achieve.
State policy was to auction off wholesale liquor licenses on an annual basis. The number of outlets a wholesaler could serve was strictly limited, so in order to bag large numbers of licenses at a single go, Chadha pioneered a system called "playing proxy": gather as many trustworthy people as possible and load them up with cash to outbid rivals. Through these cartels, which became known as "liquor syndicates", Chadha snapped up most of the alcohol distribution licenses in western Uttar Pradesh.
More territory meant Chadha could harness his liquor business to forge new political alliances, reaching out not only to Mulayam and Mayawati, but also to Rajvir Singh (son of the two-time BJP chief minister Kalyan Singh), whom he reportedly made a partner in the liquor distribution of Aligarh district (where his father's constituency was). (Rajvir denied this association with Chadha, telling me, "I have never worked with him. He had his own contacts and people like me never mattered to him. He was better off without the support of my father. He had already gained enough power in previous regimes.")
Chadha also hoped to push his distribution network and its influence into other parts of the state but, for the time being, he was blocked by equally powerful rivals, such as the Mulayam supporter (and future SP politician) Jawahar Lal Jaiswal. Instead, he found a frontier in Punjab, where a tussle over liquor and politics had erupted between Sukhbir Singh Badal (son of the chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal) and his brother-in-law, Adesh Pratap Singh Kairon. In 2001, with the elder Badal's five-year term nearing its end and fresh assembly elections around the corner, the family's Akali Dal party began searching for new candidates.
In business and in politics, Sukhbir supported the Akali Dal old guard, which was affiliated to the biggest liquor distributor in Punjab, Jagdish Singh Garcha, who also served as the state's minister for technical education. Kairon, who was the excise and taxation minister, lobbied to get party tickets for business associates who wanted to enter politics, but were frozen out by Garcha's control over liquor distribution. Kairon's candidates could only woo voters if he tapped his own booze supplies. "To break Garcha's monopoly," said KS Chawla, a journalist based in Ludhiana who has covered the Badal–Kairon row, "he brought Ponty to Punjab."
A couple of months before the elections in early 2002, there was to be an auction of Ludhiana retail liquor shops at which Garcha and Chadha were expected to face off as agents for Sukhbir and Kairon. Chief Minister Badal postponed the auction three times, hoping that he could arbitrate a truce between his son and son-in-law. But the clashes persisted, and the auction was eventually held, in nearby Patiala. It was Chadha's first foray into Punjab. Bidding liberally, he and his syndicate snaffled up shops worth Rs 16 crore per year. "Ponty never cared about the market," Garcha, now in his late 70s, told me. "For a liquor shop worth 10 lakh rupees, he would propose 50 lakh." After acquiring large wholesale licenses, Chadha would then co-opt the small middlemen who connected distributors to hole-in-the-wall shops. "He was loaded with a lot of money and he bought almost every small-time contractor," said Garcha, who for a while managed to hold on to half the district's retail stores.
As it turned out, neither Garcha's liquor and Sukhbir's votes nor Kairon's votes and Chadha's liquor could keep the Akali Dal in power, and Sukhbir's father was shunted out of office by the Congress politician Amrinder Singh. This didn't seem to matter much to Chadha, however. He now had a foothold in Punjab and set about playing the game he had mastered in Uttar Pradesh: massaging politicians' egos while aggressively pursuing market share. He quickly established a strong bond with the chief minister, with whom he socialised frequently. On one occasion, Singh, after disappearing from Punjab without alerting even his own security officers, suddenly issued a press statement from Dubai announcing that he was attending the wedding of someone close to Chadha. But Chadha's influence was also percolating down through the state's liquor apparatus: excise officers overseeing local auctions would hold the bidding for hours if Chadha needed to turn up late. Over the course of the next three years, Chadha poached almost all the contractors from Garcha's network.
In the late summer of 2005, in the middle of Singh's reign in Punjab, Chadha attended golden jubilee celebrations for Dhudial Khalsa Senior Secondary School in Patiala, where he had won his first retail shops. There, a politician from the Akali Dal who was close to Kairon baited Chadha by accusing him of running a liquor mafia in Punjab. Ponty answered politely, "The mafia doesn't care about generating revenue for the government. In my case, I care a lot about the government. I run this business and add huge sums to the state exchequer." Here, distilled, was the political genius of Chadha's enterprise. Before leaving the event, he announced that he would renovate the school, which was dilapidated, and build it a new storey.
IN 2003, as Chadha was taking advantage of his opening in Punjab and raking in cash through his monopolies in Uttarakhand and western Uttar Pradesh, a BSP-BJP coalition government under the leadership of Mayawati, which had come to power following a remarkably close election the previous year, was struggling to maintain its integrity. In late August, the BJP withdrew its support for the chief minister, and the coalition crumbled. Amid calls for dissolution of the assembly, Mulayam rallied, gathering enough support to stave off fresh elections and regain power in Lucknow.
Shortly afterwards, Mulayam and Amar Singh, the SP party general secretary, began distributing favours to their dearest benefactors. Singh lobbied on behalf of the real estate dealer Ashok Chaturvedi, who was given a large tract of land in Noida. "The arrangement between Singh and Mulayam was that except for [the industrialist] JP Gaur and Chaturvedi, no one would ever enter into the real estate sector in Noida," a close associate of Singh's told me.
In addition to trying to bolster his friends, Singh hoped the agreement would stifle Chadha, who had just begun to funnel profits from his liquor empire into other industries, including real estate. "Amar tried his best to turn Mulayam against Ponty," the former SP leader told me. "He would often say, 'Why are we helping this man? He changes his colour like a chameleon.'" But Mulayam and Chadha went back to the days of NE 1000, and the chief minister soon publicly inaugurated one of Chadha's first real estate projects, the 314,500-square-foot Wave Mall in Lucknow, one of five Wave malls that Chadha would eventually build.
Singh, his close associate said, was "disgruntled", but the chief minister proved indifferent to his constant grumblings against Chadha. "Mulayam doesn't care a damn about loyalties," the former SP leader said. "All he cares about is his own share—and when it comes to distributing money, Ponty's record was always clean." Singh confirmed this view of Chadha, telling me that Chadha was a "transparent and honest creator, distributor and maintainer of ill-gotten wealth". (When I asked him about Chaturvedi, he said he knew him and other players from a distance: "Chaturvedi would come and meet me just like anyone would meet me. These guys—Ashok, Ponty and JP Gaur—they had direct contact with Mulayam. I was never part of that circle.")
Chadha did well under Mulayam, but the real explosion in his wealth took place when Mayawati came back to power. Propelled by a number of convenient decisions by her BSP government, Chadha was able to force out his remaining opponents in Uttar Pradesh's alcohol distribution market, bag a significant portion of the state's retail liquor shops, massively extend his real estate ventures, and gather into his ever expanding arms a whole range of new enterprises, including the sugar mills and food distribution contracts. A hallmark of several of these endeavours seemed to be vertical integration: liquor sold in his new Model Wine shops was supplied by his distribution company; instead of small change, Model Wine customers were given little snack packets made by his new food processing plant; and the Bollywood films he produced were distributed through his new film distribution company and shown at his 11 Wave multiplexes. Every link in these chains could be exploited to disguise profits through financial misreporting of one kind or another. For example, Chadha quickly developed a reputation for distributing some of the country's worst movies (such as Jism II); it was easy to claim that such tripe sold poorly at the box office, especially when Chadha was the one collecting the ticket stubs, but a senior SP leader told me that the films earned more than critics or tax collectors ever thought.
If malfeasance fuelled much of this acceleration in Chadha's interests, scandal was its inevitable by-product. One of the most significant of the improprieties that emerged from Mayawati's association with Chadha at this time involved the sugar mills. In 2010 and 2011, her government held auctions of 21 under-performing state-owned refineries, 16 of which were bought by seven firms that turned out to be a cartel controlled by Chadha. Many of these companies had common shareholders and directors, shared a single address, and paid to participate in the auctions using demand drafts with consecutive serial numbers issued by the same bank branch on the same day. This lack of competition alone cost the state an estimated Rs 200 crore, according to the CAG report later filed in the case. Although the details are complex, at least a dozen improprieties were identified in the sale of the mills, including undervaluation of the land and other assets, and disclosure of the minimum acceptable bid. In total, the CAG said that the state lost more than Rs 2000 crore through its illicit management of the auctions.
In another high-profile case, the Mayawati government violated a Supreme Court ruling in order to permit Chadha's Great Value Foods to become the sole supplier of lunches for the state's midday meal scheme. The supply contracts, which were supposed to go to certain kinds of local community groups and feed more than 2 crore children and pregnant women, were worth roughly Rs 10,000 crore. Later, it turned out that the food Chadha was providing fell far below the prescribed nutritional standards.
The biggest bonanza to which Mayawati helped Chadha was in the liquor trade. The year after she was appointed as chief minister, the state's liquor distribution policy was changed to ban wholesalers from directly purchasing liquor from distilleries. Instead, the government handed over wholesale and distribution rights for the entire state to the government-owned Uttar Pradesh Cooperative Sugar Factories' Federation, which in turn subcontracted the job to Blue Water, a private beverage company whose ownership ultimately answered to Chadha. "The government did not advertise the subcontracting, and the entire trade was handed over to Ponty," said SP Singh, the president of the Lucknow Wine Association and a distant relative of Chadha's, who became a staunch adversary of the baron after Chadha shafted him in a distribution deal. "The lifeline of every distributor was in his hands. It was his wish to choke us, drown us or simply ignore us. He played those games very well."
Chadha used his new monopoly to add 10 to 15 percent to the maximum retail price of liquor—a levy that became known as "Ponty prasad" or "Ponty tax". This allowed him to generate his own substantial profits while at the same time pumping money into the state exchequer and rewarding Mayawati for her patronage. Between 2008 and 2012, state revenues on liquor excise increased more than 70 percent to Rs 8,139 crore. (One Lucknow liquor distributor who worked under Chadha told me that price hikes always work, because "people need alcohol like cars need petrol.")
Perhaps understandably, the excise commissioner of Uttar Pradesh during much of this period, Mahesh Gupta, saw Chadha in a somewhat rosier light than SP Singh. Soon after Gupta took up his post in 2008, Chadha came from Delhi to pay his respects in person at Gupta's official residence in Lucknow, and the two men visited with one another on several subsequent occasions. "He was a very careful human being," Gupta said. "He would fix an appointment with you, though he could have simply called and met us whenever he felt like it. But he would always follow proper procedure."
The "proper procedures" became even more lucrative for Chadha after Mayawati changed the retail rules so that he could corner all the liquor shops in the western part of the state. Chadha could now buy alcohol from distilleries and sell it direct to consumers at his own shops. Allegedly, Chadha also cut a number of backroom deals to boost his profits; according to SP Singh, he made a secret agreement with Vijay Mallya to promote the latter's Kingfisher beer and McDowell's No. 1 whiskey over other brands. Before Chadha's death, Singh said, "you couldn't find Radico Khaitan in the market. Their 8PM brand had become a dream."
The takings from these monopolies were a boon for Wave Infratech, Chadha's real estate business, which initiated three major projects in Noida during the period of Mayawati's reign, including two commercial complexes of more than 2 million square feet each. A fourth project, Ghaziabad's Wave City, was officially launched only two months after her tenure as chief minister came to an end. In all of these cases, Mayawati was accused of selling the land off to Chadha at absurdly low rates.
In Moradabad, Chadha's uncle Harbhajan told me that, to his death, Chadha continued to exclude him from the conspicuous riches that these new projects had brought. "I met him a thousand times over the issue—that my son's heart burns when he sees your shopping malls and wealth; you should give us our share," Harbhajan said. "Even his father agreed that we deserved an equal share, but Ponty kept playing with me by delaying the proceedings."
CHADHA'S DISPUTE WITH HARBHAJAN was by no means the most heated, or the most intimate, of the family arguments that seemed to come to a boil as the Chadha fortune grew. In 2010, Chadha's brother Hardeep began pressuring their father, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease, to dictate that the family's holdings be evenly split between Chadha, Hardeep, and their third brother, Rajinder, according to a report later published in India Today. Chadha bristled: it was his leadership that grew the family's alcohol distribution network from a single small town in western Uttar Pradesh into the largest liquor monopoly in north India; it was his hard graft that pushed the frontiers of their empire into other lucrative industries, such as sand mining and real estate; and it was his influence that seeped behind the lace curtains and into the back seats of cherry-topped Ambassadors in Dehradun, Chandigarh, Lucknow, and Delhi.
Hardeep eventually prevailed on their ailing father, and Chadha felt compelled to accede to his dying wishes. But he did so in bad faith: when their father passed away, in April 2011, Chadha reneged on the deal. For the next 16 months, the brothers argued face-to-face and through intermediaries over what they were each due. According to Balbir Singh Kohli, a close relative of the Chadha family, Chadha felt Hardeep was being manipulated. "Some people are misleading him against me," Chadha told Kohli. "I want him to understand that."
If 45-year-old Hardeep was susceptible to manipulation, perhaps it was because he ached to step out of Chadha's shadow. "Wherever Hardeep went, people always recognised him as Ponty's brother," Ravi Sodhi, a spokesperson for Chadha's largest company, Wave Group, told me. "He wanted his own identity." As a result, he became increasingly imperious. "Hardeep would shout and yell at his servants just to say that he was someone important in the family," Sodhi said. He had also taken to stroking a cat while sitting in a throne as he received guests at the Chhatarpur mansion he shared with the family and, on a recent occasion, he had inexplicably set fire to carpets worth lakhs of rupees. "After every passing month, the dispute grew bigger," Kohli said.
The brothers' larger quarrel over the family's empire soon began to centre on a pair of farmhouses that Hardeep intended to dispose of against his brother's wishes. Chadha, who was magnanimous with friends and enemies alike but could brook no impudence, was furious. Although the homes were a negligible part of the fortune he had accumulated over his two and a half decades of canny business leadership and oily political lobbying, he had resolved to keep them in the family.
On 15 November 2012, with the brothers' acrimony reaching a fever pitch, family members prevailed on them to meet at a Delhi gurdwara. Remarkably, a second settlement was reached: according to India Today, Chadha agreed to buy Hardeep out of the business for something between Rs 400 crore and Rs 1,200 crore. It must have seemed like a small price to pay to rid himself, and the empire he built, of his brother's meddling. But whatever relief there was didn't last long. The next day, another meeting was called between Chadha and his brother. Hardeep, reportedly hectored by the people counselling him against Chadha, annulled the payout deal. It was the final nail.
Shortly after 9.50 a.m. on Saturday the 17th, Chadha convened a meeting of armed men at his family's Chhatarpur mansion, on Delhi's south-western outskirts, where he lived with his mother and both his brothers. In attendance was his long-time henchman, Sukhdev Singh Namdhari (who was now serving as Uttarakhand's minorities commissioner), as well as at least 11 others. According to chargesheets later filed in a Delhi district court, Chadha divided his and Namdhari's men into two detachments and directed them to storm the contested properties, forcibly evict anyone present, and seize control, while he and Namdhari stayed back and waited for news.
Arriving at 42 DLF Farms, the squad assigned to the property overturned a white Maruti parked in front of one of the property's several gates, and then set about smashing all the gate locks. They rushed onto the grounds and busted into the house, viciously beating as many of the staff and security guards as they could find, stripping them of their mobile phones, and then forcing them off the property. According to statements made by several of the staff members, there were 30 to 40 men in the raiding party, which carried rifles, pistols, revolvers, hockey sticks, dandas and swords. After seizing the farmhouse, new locks and cans of black paint were distributed to some of the men. They painted over a "for sale" sign that Hardeep had put up and a plaque outside the house that bore his name, then secured all the gates. But one of the staff members who had been assaulted managed to escape with his mobile phone and get word to Hardeep, who was soon racing to the property from his office in Noida.
Once the house was locked down, Chadha and Namdhari were called. At 12.30 p.m., they reached the locked rear entrance in a dark green Toyota Land Cruiser. Sachin Tyagi, a 27-year-old Uttarakhand police constable assigned to Namdhari as a personal security officer was in the front next to the driver, strapped with a nine-millimetre carbine rifle. One of Chadha's aides, Narender Ahlawat, soon arrived to open the gate. Just as he popped the lock, Hardeep charged up in a Mercedes. According to witness statements, Hardeep sprung out of the car brandishing a pistol, and approached Ahlawat, hurling abuses. Then he shoved Ahlawat, and shot him in the leg.
Chadha began to climb out of the Land Cruiser, but Hardeep was now facing him. Hardeep cursed his brother, then pumped seven shots into his legs, abdomen, back and chest. He then turned towards the open gate. Namdhari levelled his pistol—a .30-bore that he had licensed illegally using a forged ration card—at Hardeep. Tyagi, too, put Chadha's brother in his sights. Then they opened fire, hitting him twice. A slug that entered through Hardeep's back tore a track through his lungs, filling them with blood, before exiting briefly through his right armpit and then boring clean through his arm.
Chadha was haemorrhaging wildly, but he was apparently still alive. Namdhari and Tyagi secured him in the Land Cruiser as Hardeep, suffocating with his own blood, took shelter in a guardhouse by the gate, where his body was later found. The Land Cruiser then tore off in the direction of Fortis Hospital, in Vasant Kunj, with Chadha bleeding out in the back seat. At 1.05 p.m., doctors at the hospital declared him dead on arrival.
BY THAT EVENING, hastily reported accounts of the fratricide were vying for air on prime-time news shows with obituaries of the Shiv Sena demagogue Bal Thackeray, who died in Mumbai that afternoon. As word of the killings spread, Chadha-controlled businesses across north India closed their doors amid uncertainty over what would befall the decapitated empire in the coming hours and days. Wave cineplexes ceased screenings, Wave malls were emptied out, and police officers were dispatched to stand guard by shuttered Model Wine shops across Uttar Pradesh. Allegations of conspiracy soon began to emerge, with some claiming that Namdhari had orchestrated the shoot-out in order to expropriate millions of rupees that Chadha had invested in his name.
Namdhari was arrested in Uttarakhand two days after the killing, at a press conference where he was pleading innocence in the shootings. In the next two weeks, Delhi police detained 20 more people in connection with the crime. Three chargesheets have since been filed, but the case remains sub-judice, and Namdhari continues to maintain his innocence. For its part, the Chadha family seems convinced that, in effect, brother killed brother. "It's just two minutes of anger has destroyed a beautiful family," Paramjeet Singh Sarna, a close relative, told me. He said the fraternal dispute over money and influence within the family was almost resolved.
Two days after Chadha and Hardeep's deaths, it was announced that Chadha's son, 33-year-old Monty, would take the reins of the company. A high-school dropout who seems to have passed much of his youth behind the red-velvet cordons of Delhi's most expensive night clubs, Monty had spent the past couple of years trying to help his father slough off the Chadha family's notorious reputation. When the Wave City project was conceived, the company made Monty the face of it, and he became the man journalists wanted to interview. Chadha handled the backend operations, keeping tabs on the money and clearing up a million little hurdles the government puts in the way. Following the tax department raids, it was Monty's idea to hire the spokesman Ravi Sodhi, who had previously worked for Anil Ambani, and to set up the Wave Group's first public-relations department. Monty now works closely with his childless uncle, Rajinder, who was immensely loyal to Chadha, but Sodhi told me that Monty's decisions are final.
Earlier this year, I went to the Wave Group's Noida headquarters to meet Monty and ask him about his father and the future of his father's empire. As I entered the office, a multi-storied glass building inaugurated a few months after Chadha's death, two big garlanded portraits of Chadha and his late father, Kulwant, welcomed me. Sodhi appeared and shepherded me through a long corridor that led to a thick metal door, where he stopped to scan his fingerprint on a small box. The door opened, and we walked into another corridor, by a meeting room labelled "Chanakya." Suddenly, a door to the room slid open. Inside, Monty, in a maroon turban and plush-looking brown shoes, was sitting at a round table with one of his employees, whose name and job description I never got.
During our conversation, Monty, with his alert eyes and softly rasping voice, discussed the sense of great responsibility with which his father's sudden death left him. At present, the company's main target is to finish its ambitious Wave City project, which Monty pitched to me as "something like downtown Manhattan". The first phase, which is presently under construction, has 1,400 apartments, two office buildings, and a shopping mall. Monty's top priority, he said, is to finish this project by 2016. He then asked me why I was interested in writing about his father, and listened quietly to my response with his head down. When I finished, Monty raised his head and said that he would discuss the matter with his senior officers. "Sorry," he said, offering me a firm handshake. "We want some time to think." He never got back to me.
Although the killing of Chadha and Hardeep seemed to cement the less admirable qualities of Chadha's reputation, it may also have freed Monty from the legacy of his father's corruption. Shortly after Chadha's death, Akhilesh Yadav quashed all outstanding investigations into Chadha's business dealings, leaving Monty free to pursue greater respectability. But the Uttar Pradesh chief minister renewed the Chadhas' liquor monopoly in early summer, projecting record-high excise revenues for the state. Regardless of where Monty says he wants to focus the family business, the economics of the liquor industry and the political conditions out of which the Chadha empire grew persist, and isn't clear that anyone who finds his hand on the tap and his mouth at the spigot can find the will to let go.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that the car Ponty Chadha allegedly presented Mulayam Singh Yadav had the number plate "NE 1000". This has been changed online.
Mehboob Jeelani is a former staff writer at The Caravan. He is currently studying for an MA in journalism at Columbia University. He has extensively covered the Kashmir conflict, and has contributed to the leading English dailies of Jammu and Kashmir.


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comScore: Android near 44% share but slowing down
updated 02:10 pm EDT, Wed October 5, 2011
comScore August 2011 hints Android slowing down
Android hit a new high in the US this August but has mostly steadied, comScore found in its latest results. Google's platform was up to 43.7 percent of smartphones, a new high, but it grew roughly as much as had in July. Most of the share came from BlackBerry converts, as the platform had lost two points just in the past month to hit 19.7 percent, or five points back from where it was in May.
Apple also continued to defy presumptions that it was losing share. The iPhone only gained 0.3 percent, but at 27.3 percent had still been growing for the past several months and now had nearly an eight-point gap over RIM.
Microsoft also had a rare element of good news for its market share. At 5.7, it saw a rare instance of Windows Phone and Windows Mobile market share remaining steady from month to month instead of the constant decline of the past. Symbian as an officially outgoing platform was down slightly to 1.8 percent.
In absolute cellphone share, Apple advanced further, hitting 9.8 percent. Samsung was still extending its lead at 25.3 percent, while LG, Motorola, and RIM all slipped.
Trends in the August data should continue through to September. Although RIM now has much more competitive hardware in phones such as the BlackBerry Bold 9900, new Android models like the Motorola Droid Bionic may have negated the near-term advantage.
October results are much less predictable. The month will not only see the kickoff of the iPhone 4S but see the iPhone on Sprint for the first time. Many expect a repeat of what happened at former Android safe haven Verizon, where the iPhone almost immediately became the most popular smartphone on the network and slowed down Android growth. It will also mark the first instance of Verizon customers getting a genuinely new iPhone on launch instead of an adaptation of an older model.


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What unfolded in New Castle early Sunday evening sounds like a parent's worst nightmare.
A 6-year-old girl, with other children on a playground at a local apartment complex, was snatched by a stranger who insisted he wanted to show her his "new kitten."
According to police reports, the man pulled the child, by her wrist, to his second-floor apartment, where he quickly shut and locked his front door. ...