More than fifteen years after he walked out of Indian cricket, Lalit Modi has delivered his most detailed and unfiltered account of what actually drove him away from the sport he helped transform. The founder and first Commissioner of the Indian Premier League spoke across two separate interviews — one with ANI and another on Wisden Cricket’s podcast The Scoop — describing a sustained campaign of underworld intimidation, international assassination plots, a dramatic midnight confrontation with a fugitive gangster over a satellite phone, and a family kidnapping he had never previously disclosed.
Settled in London, and not running from anything
The question of Modi’s long-term residency in London has followed him for years. Speaking on Wisden Cricket’s podcast The Scoop, he addressed it directly and without hesitation. “I’m settled here. I have no cases against me anywhere. Yeah, I never had a case against me. I wish there was one. I could tell everybody I’m running away because there was a case against me. I mean, you can be a fugitive only if you have a case against you and you run away. Not a single case has ever been filed against me, except for an FIR by Srinivasan. Nothing else. No government agency has ever done anything. I paid all my taxes. There’s nothing outstanding as far as I’m concerned. We have lots of business in India. But today, I’m very well settled here. My children are living here. At the end of the day, I have nothing to do with the IPL or the BCCI. As far as going back into business is concerned, I’m already way past the age of retirement. Okay. I’m not one of those types of people who, even if there is family wealth and family ownership, hold on to it. I’ve given it all to my children.”
When the conversation turned to whether any threat on his life remained active, Modi was brief. “No, no, that was past. Okay. That is the past,” he said — a response that gained considerably more context from everything that followed.
A clean tenure, and the price of keeping it that way
Modi’s time running the IPL between 2008 and 2010 is central to everything he has since alleged. Speaking to ANI, he pointed to the absence of any fixing scandal across his three seasons at the helm. “You didn’t hear of a single incident during my three years as IPL commissioner and chairman, nor a single investigation involving match-fixing during my time,” he said.
That record, he alleged, came at an enormous personal cost. Criminal syndicates with a direct financial interest in manipulating match outcomes approached him repeatedly, and repeatedly he refused. “They offered me hundreds of millions of dollars to look the other way,” he added.
His refusal to accommodate those approaches, combined with his active efforts to bar suspicious individuals from IPL venues, put him in direct and sustained conflict with organised crime networks that had expected to profit from the tournament’s early years.
Three hits, one fugitive, and a war that crossed continents
The consequences of that refusal, Modi alleged, were swift and global. Dawood Ibrahim — the fugitive organised crime figure wanted in India on multiple charges including the 1993 Bombay bombings — personally ordered three separate attempts on his life. “He took three hits at me. Dawood himself said this. He missed three times,” he told ANI.
The alleged attempts stretched across three countries. Mumbai Police intercepted communications linked to the threats and escalated Modi’s protection to the highest available tier. “Bombay police recorded everything. Bombay police put me on Z security… There was a shootout outside my house in Bombay. There was a hit for me in Johannesburg when I was in Cape Town, which was picked up by the South African government. There was a hit on me in Montenegro, which was picked up at the Croatian border,” he added.
Then came the disclosure Modi said he had kept private until now. “My son was kidnapped in London. I have not told this story to anybody,” he said. He offered no further detail, but the weight of the statement was unmistakable within the broader account he was building.
The South Africa move that ignited the underworld
Modi identified a specific operational decision as the moment that sharpened the criminal networks’ hostility toward him most acutely. When the 2009 IPL season clashed with India’s general election schedule, he relocated the entire tournament to South Africa at short notice — a move that caught illegal betting syndicates completely off guard. “They accused me of moving IPL to South Africa when they thought it’s not ever going to move because they ate the bets up,” he said.
The financial fallout was enormous, and those who lost money wanted it recovered from Modi directly. “So they lost a lot of money apparently. They wanted me to make good that money. I didn’t ask them to take the bet,” he added.
The midnight call: Dawood on speakerphone in a London penthouse
The most extraordinary episode in Modi’s account unfolded in London in 2012. He was contacted late at night by a fixer and pressured into visiting a penthouse apartment belonging to an intermediary known only as Baba. Once inside, the intermediary walked onto the terrace, dialled Dawood Ibrahim on a satellite phone, and put the call on speaker with Modi present.
“I pissed in my pants, I’ll tell you this. Without doubt. Right there and then,” he said. Modi noted that British MI5 security personnel were stationed downstairs at the time of the encounter.
Dawood’s message, when it came, was short. “He simply says, ‘Abhi se tumhara sab kaam khatam’ (From now on, all your work is finished) and put down the phone,” he added. That encounter, Modi alleged, opened the door to weeks of follow-up demands — financial compensation and a request that the syndicate be handed control of an IPL franchise.
The exit from cricket as the final bargain
Modi’s account of how he eventually came off the syndicate’s active target list was no less striking than everything that preceded it. His complete withdrawal from cricket was the bargaining chip that ended the campaign against him, and the syndicate publicly confirmed the resolution on his behalf. When asked whether he had resolved the situation himself, his answer was unambiguous. “I didn’t [resolve it]. I just said I will retire from cricket. I gave my word. I will retire,” he said.
Modi confirmed the broader picture plainly when pressed on whether Dawood Ibrahim was the primary driver of his exit from the sport. “It’s one of the biggest reasons,” he said. He went further, connecting the same criminal network to subsequent corruption cases in cricket. “And I pointed it out. The same people who tried to fix it with me — Chhota Shakeel and Dawood. The same people got involved with (Gurunath) Meiyappan. It wasn’t me because I didn’t look the other way. And that’s why they went after me. So when they said I was making it up, was I making it up? Simple as that. My son got kidnapped. There was a hit on my life across the world. They went after me. They’re not easy people. So why would I want to go back and touch something that is toxic? It is toxic. Betting is toxic. The underworld is toxic,” he said on Wisden Cricket’s podcast The Scoop.
Fixing in cricket today: sophisticated, widespread, and concentrated in the small leagues
Modi drew a careful distinction between the IPL and the broader cricket ecosystem when addressing the current state of match manipulation. “They’re fixing in cricket. It has gone to a very sophisticated level. Whether it’s in the IPL, I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know. And I can’t tell you because I genuinely don’t know. But I’m sure it exists everywhere; every sport has its issues. I can’t give you a yes-or-no answer, to tell you the truth. And I would like you to play all of this. Don’t cut out this portion because otherwise people will take it the wrong way. Because I’m telling you very clearly: I do not know. I don’t think it would be happening in the IPL because the money has become so big. It is so big that there is no reason for players to fix because they have too much to lose,” he said on The Scoop.
The risk, in his assessment, sits overwhelmingly in the tier below the major competitions. “But I can tell you for a fact that in many of the smaller leagues, you will see games being manipulated. Not in the main leagues, but in the smaller leagues, and especially in the bachha leagues, it’s all about fixing. You’ll see so many entrepreneurs launching these small inter-city leagues, inter-area leagues and interstate leagues. There is no corporate governance there. There is nothing out there. You don’t even see television coverage. It’s all about satta baazi,” he added.
He closed with figures that underline the scale of what is at stake. “And if you look at the satta baazi market today, it’s massive. If you have Rs 40,000 crore being bet per day — not per season, per day — and you have 100 games, it’s a $40 billion industry in cricket alone, a number nobody is talking about. It is huge, and something that huge tends to have problems. Cricket lends itself to ball-by-ball betting, with odds changing every delivery. For lack of a better word, that’s the reality. And the smaller leagues are toxic. Very toxic,” he noted. The BCCI handed Modi a lifetime ban from cricket administration in 2013 following an internal inquiry into financial and administrative irregularities during his tenure — allegations he has consistently denied.
