“Goa gaye aur Curlies nahi gaye toh kya Goa dekha (If you have gone to Goa and not been to Curlies, then you haven’t really seen Goa)." This is a familiar saying for tourists visiting the coastal state. Curlies, a private shack located on Anjuna beach, is not just popular among tourists for its food and music but has also had its share of infamy because of drug busts and two very sensational police cases.
Fourteen years ago, before the shocking death-turned-murder investigation of BJP leader and social media star Sonali Phogat brought Curlies into the spotlight, a British teenager named Scarlett Eden Keeling’s death drew international attention to the place.
Both cases have similarities: they were first declared cases unrelated to drugs, but later reopened to reveal a possible murder conspiracy.
Scarlett Keeling’s case indicated that the victim had spent her last few hours at Curlies before her body was found face down on the beach nearby.
Sonali Phogat, the 42-year-old actor-politician, was last seen alive at Curlies before being pronounced dead at St Anthony Hospital in Anjuna the following morning. Her autopsy report showed signs of blunt force trauma on her body, which her family had pointed to. CCTV footage from the previous night released by Goa police shows her unable to walk as she heads to the bathroom assisted by one of the accused.
The police faced a lot of flak when they at first did not take the complaint filed by Phogat’s brother, who alleged it was a case of murder and not heart attack as initially declared by authorities. The autopsy and subsequent police investigations revealed that the BJP leader was forced to take synthetic drugs by two of her associates, Sukhwinder and Sudhir, who are the main accused in the case.
The Scarlett Keeling case
In the Scarlett Keeling case, the teenager’s bruised and half-naked body was found near Curlies after a Valentine’s Day beach party. At first, the Goa police said Scarlett’s death was accidental drowning, but a second autopsy revealed that she had been drugged and raped. Scarlett’s mother alleged that her daughter had told her she had been to Curlies before she was sexually assaulted and “left to die on the beach".
In 2008, Keeling, who hailed from Devon, England, had come to India on a six-month holiday along with her family that included her mother, Fiona MacKeown, her boyfriend, siblings, and half-siblings. Her family, who had been touring across the coastal region, had been in Gokarna in February of that year when Scarlett told her mother she wanted to return to Goa to attend a Valentine’s Day party at Curlies. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.
Mackeown told PTI when the case was being heard in court that evidence on record showed that the teen was taken to Curlies before she arrived at Lui’s Shack, where she finally died.
“The evidence also showed that she might have already been drunk with deadly substances before coming to Lui’s Shack," advocate Vikram Varma, a lawyer who represented the deceased’s mother, told PTI. It was also later submitted to the court that Keeling had sent an email to one of her friends in Spain that while she was at Curlies, some boys had shown her porn clips and tried to rape her.
As investigations into her death were re-opened, a witness revealed to the court how they had seen Keeling at Curlies on the fateful night. However, a key witness, Michael Manion, another British national, had at first told the police that he had last seen Keeling lying in a car park near Lui’s Shack with a local bartender lying on top of her. Manion turned hostile and did not testify in court.
After Scarlett’s mother insisted on a second post-mortem, traces of ecstasy, cocaine, and LSD were found in the teenager’s body. Nearly five cuts and an equal number of bruises were also seen that indicated sexual assault. One of the witnesses later told the court that they had seen Keeling with the two men, Samson D’Souza and Placido Carvalho, both bartenders, hours before her body was found face down on the beach.
In 2019, Samson was sentenced to ten years of rigorous imprisonment and convicted of culpable homicide, criminal assault, outraging a woman’s modesty, drugging and sexually assaulting Keeling, along with the destruction of evidence. Incidentally, a Goa children’s court made the grave mistake of acquitting the accused—giving D’Souza the benefit of doubt. But the Bombay high court overturned the ruling, which led to his sentence.
Drug busts at Curlies
Over the years, Curlies has been under police scrutiny and also raided for drug peddling. The owner of Curlies, Edward Nunes, has been arrested several times after police raids for drug peddling, holding rave parties, and other nefarious activities.
“Each time he has managed to continue to run his business and escape conviction," said senior police officers close to the investigation.
Nunes is known to be highly influential and connected in political circles. A local political heavyweight himself, he was the sarpanch of Anjuna when the Keeling incident took place. Even today, he is very powerful, and the fact that he has managed to continue to keep Curlies open as a successful establishment shows how the law is unable to touch him with a barge pole, say officials. “The government will ultimately crack down, but the mafia that exists has been almost impossible to penetrate," said a Goa BJP leader who did not want to be named.
While investigating the Phogat case, 2.2 g of meth was found in the toilet of this famous shack. Along with Nunes, a drug dealer, Dattaprasad Gaonkar, has also been arrested by the Goa police after he allegedly supplied psychotropic drugs or the “dangerous concoction of drugs" to the two accused in the Phogat case—Sudhir Sangwan and Sukhwinder Singh.
In another sensational drug bust in 2017, several beach shacks were raided under the instructions of then Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar. This came after two young men, Pravin Sundaram and Nidan Abdullah, who came out of separate parties in Anjuna, complained of uneasiness and then died due to a drug overdose. Their bodies were found close to the beach shacks the following morning. That year, during the raids at Curlies and nearby shacks, the police arrested a native of Kerala, Joe Raymond Junior, for illegal possession of 11.04 g of charas worth Rs 12,000 and 0.8 g of MDMA worth Rs 28,000. At Curlies, a waiter, Manjunath Anverikar, was found in possession of 7.3 g of charas worth Rs 7,500 on the premises when the raid took place. Though the raids revealed small amounts of drugs, they indicated that drugs were being sold only in such establishments.
Goa a drug haven despite zero-tolerance policy
At the Sunburn Electronic Dance Music Festival held in Goa in 2019, three people died. Though the probe continues, the opposition has pointed towards drugs and narcotics as the probable suspects behind these deaths.
While the Goa government claims to have a zero-tolerance policy against drug possession, trafficking, and consumption, people who travel to the state know that, apart from the sun, sea, and sand, it is also a coastal haven for narcotics. Several discussions on the floor of the Goa assembly have been held to discuss the police-drug mafia nexus and the need to root out the narcotics network. However, the state continues to be a hub for such nefarious activities.
One classic case that exposed this nexus was that of an Israeli drug dealer, Yaniv Benaim, alias Atala. His girlfriend, Lucky Farmhouse, recorded Atala bragging about his links with the Goa police and how some of them even provided him with large quantities of drugs that were confiscated during raids. The Goa Crime Branch arrested a police inspector, Ashish Shirodkar, for his alleged links with Atala. The drug lord is heard naming him in the video. Shirodkar, along with four other officers, was suspended but later reinstated.
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