Nothing that J Dey did could be taken on a face value. In fact those who knew him or worked with him would only expect that the seemingly apparent is in fact nothing but just a cover.
I worked with J Dey in 2001 as a cub reporter in the Indian Express. J Dey was one of my reporting heads. But it was much later that i understood why J Dey never used the regular work station which was surrounded by work stations of other Express reporters, why J Dey never socialized much with anyone, why J Dey preferred standing in a corner and just keep observing. Why J dey always ate his snacks alone in the canteen. Much later did i understand J Dey = Secrecy.
And today as i went about gathering information on the progress in J Dey murder case investigation for Rediff.com, an additional commissioner level officer told me, “those who think they knew J Dey closely also knew only ten per cent of what he was..!!!’
I wasn’t surprised. Having worked with him i knew it was just not in Dey’s character to share any information with anyone. Even the editors only knew that he was working on ‘something’. They would get the whole story only when he was done working on it. Till then he demanded and got ‘non-interference’
But what’s really baffling the investigators is the level of secrecy that J Dey maintained. As investigations make headway, officers are stumbling upon some new information about the ‘gentle giant’ almost on an hourly basis. While it may not surprise us, it definitely intrigues many of us here in Mumbai’s crime reporter’s community.
He operated 4 email accounts and ensured never to send mails from one account to another, a practice that several of us follow. He had two cell phones, but almost always made certain that he never spoke long over the mobile. For longer conversations, he would use the public phone. He however received international calls. One may ask why would an over cautious man like J Dey avoid conversations from local numbers and talk at length on international calls? For one, those international calls were made using a VOIP facility. Secondly, as another IPS officer puts it, in most cases it was J Dey who was getting information (or instructions?)
That he made trips to United Kingdom and in specific to Ireland and Scotland was known only to very few people in his inner circle. But his information was shared only a couple of days before he embarked on the trip. He made no exception for his wife either.
Any spy agency in the world would have been proud of the spook that J Dey would have made.
When one is investigating and reporting on the murder of a seasoned crime reporter, one tends to get a lot of information. Information that is murky, suspicious, shocking, surprising, and even sensational among other things. While we reporters only get our tit bits of information as hearsay from the officers, it the cops who harbour every single piece of information. There are times when even the most seasoned investigator finds it difficult to draw lines. There are times when all bits of information is inter related. And i do get sense (mind you it’s only a hunch and not evidence) that the cops are struggling to view his professional and personal lives apart and independent of each other. For every new revelation on J dey’s professional life, there appears to be a corresponding development in his personal life. It is like a dominoes effect of one secret leading into another, another secret leading into yet another and soon the space is filled with revelations each leading from and on to the other secret.
While i refrain from commenting on J dey as a reporter, i can claim with certainty that his secrecy was legendary.
And it’s here that my math is bang on target J Dey = Secrecy.
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