Imagine for a second that you're taking your
car in for a routine tune -up. OK, sure. You
hand the keys over to your friendly, reliable
neighborhood mechanic. He's a guy you see every
week. He asks about your kids. He complains about
his bad back. He does really solid. honest work.
Right, just a normal part of your everyday routine.
Exactly. Now imagine waking up the next day turning
on the morning news and finding out that this
exact same mechanic, the guy who literally just
changed your oil, is secretly operating as a
highly feared political assassin on the weekends.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that is, I mean, that's just a
massive, almost incomprehensible mental leap
to make. It really is. You would immediately
ask yourself, like, how does a person even begin
to live that kind of double life? Well, it completely
shatters your baseline understanding of how society
operates. You know, you assume there's this massive
impenetrable wall between everyday blue collar
life and the high stakes violent underworld.
You'd think so, yeah. But historically, that
wall is actually incredibly porous. And that
porous wall is exactly what we are exploring
today. Welcome to today's deep dive. Glad to
be here. We are thrilled to have you listening
with us as we pull back the curtain on a truly
bizarre true crime trajectory. So our grounding
source for this entire discussion is a deeply
detailed Wikipedia article. Right. And it chronicles
the life, the rapid escalation and the incredibly
violent death of an Indian criminal. Yeah. A
guy known to the public simply as Weldon Kumar.
And our mission today is to track this man's
unbelievable transition from a working class
tradesman to a politically connected enforcer.
And finally to a ruthless kingpin operating a
deeply lucrative hustle behind bars. Oh, it's
just wild. It really is a story that forces you
to look at how crime actually functions in the
real world. We aren't just going to give you
a timeline of what this man did. Right. We want
to look at the mechanics behind his actions.
Exactly. We want to show you how his very specific
trajectory illustrates the invisible, tightly
woven ties between everyday manual labor, political
muscle, and the complex micro economies of the
maximum security prison system. Let's start by
establishing his baseline because on paper his
origins are just... Oh, they're so entirely unremarkable.
Yeah, he wasn't born into some notorious crime
family. Not at all. He was born Jack Kumar. He
lived on Navalar Street, which is near an area
called Kurukku Pettai in the city of Chennai.
A pretty standard background. Totally. And he
was a family man. He was married to a woman named
Shanti. And he was a father to a daughter Divya
and a son, Sushil Kumar. Right. And he started
his professional life with a legitimate physically
demanding trade. He was literally a welder. in
the Kandiyarpet neighborhood. Which is important
context because Kandiyarpet is traditionally
a very bustling industrial working -class hub
in northern Chennai. It's a tough area. It is.
It's the kind of place where you make your living
through sweat and physical endurance. So Jay
Kumar is operating in this environment building
a standard blue -collar life. Right up until
he isn't. Exactly. Because from that everyday
background Jay Kumar somehow amasses a rap sheet
of 25 different criminal cases. 25. It's a staggering
number. And we aren't talking about petty thefts
here. The source details that his record included
four murders. Four, yeah. It is just wild to
me that a man's legitimate blue collar trade
literally became his criminal moniker. Right,
he didn't get some nickname based on a physical
trait. Or like a scary mob alias. The underworld
just simply called him Welding Kumar. OK, let's
unpack this, because it is one thing to have
a rough background, but it's a totally different
thing to become a prolific killer. What's fascinating
here is the underlying sociology of that specific
leap. When we look at the evolution of organized
crime, especially in rapidly industrializing
urban centers, we often find that it heavily
recruits from working class trades. Really? Just
from normal trade? Yeah. I mean, think about
the raw skill set of a welder in a place like
Tondiarpit. It requires significant physical
strength, high endurance, and an extreme comfort
level with dangerous heavy tools. OK, I see where
you are. Plus, you just need a certain degree
of psychological grit to get through a grueling
workday in that heat. Wait, I have to push back
a little there. Go for it. I mean, a lot of trades
require physical endurance and grit. roofers,
bricklayers, dock workers. But 99 % of those
guys just go home tired. They don't become murderers
with 25 criminal cases. That's a very fair point.
So what is the specific mechanism that pulls
someone like Kumar over the edge into organized
crime? That is the crucial question. And the
mechanism is the patron client system of regional
politics and organized syndicates. OK, break
that down for us. Well, when corrupt political
figures or black market operators look for muscle
for people to physically enforce their will,
they don't look in corporate boardrooms. Right.
Definitely not. They need individuals who are
already accustomed to a hard physical reality.
A politician cannot afford to be seen threatening
a rival or a witness. Because of the optics.
Exactly. They need a of plausible deniability.
So, they essentially subcontract the violence
out. Wow. They find a local tough guy, perhaps
someone who got into a few street brawls and
proved he could handle himself, and they offer
him a premium to handle a problem. And for a
welder scraping by, that sudden influx of cash...
has got to be intoxicating. Intoxicating and
empowering. You suddenly become the insulated
weapon for someone much higher up the food chain.
And Kumar clearly embraced that role. I mean,
the Deccan Chronicle, which is a major English
language daily newspaper in India, literally
described him as a henchman for some Tamil Nadu
politicians. Which means it wasn't a secret.
No, he wasn't just a freelance thug. He was recognized
political muscle. and he built that reputation
with a terrifying level of escalation. Right,
his track record gets very dark, very fast. The
source material notes he was accused of killing
a man named Rajakrishnan in 1985 and another
individual named Lambamani in 1992. And those
fatal encounters were just the tip of the iceberg,
honestly. The way he operated on the streets
tells us a lot about his psychology. How so?
Well, the source details a pattern of incredibly
brazen assaults. For instance, he attacked a
figure known as Chara, and he did it inside a
court complex. Which is just staggering when
you think about it. It really is. If you've ever
been to a major Indian court complex, you know
it is crawling with police officers, judges,
lawyers, security. It's the literal physical
epicenter. of the state's law and order. Right,
so attacking someone there isn't just a regular
crime. No, it's a blatant disregard for the state's
authority. Exactly. It's performative violence.
It's about sending a message. Showing everyone
he's untouchable. Yeah. And he also attacked
a man named Viramani from Ayyotha Kuppam. Okay,
what's the significance of that area? So, for
context, Ayotthu Kupam is a neighborhood in Chennai,
historically a fishing hamlet, that at the time
had a very rough, formidable reputation of its
own. Oh, so going after someone from there is
a calculated show of dominance. Precisely. You
don't pick a fight there unless you want everyone
to know you're the biggest threat around. He
was also involved in an attack against a lawyer
named Vijan while that lawyer was simply on his
way to court. You can really see the pattern
forming here. He targets rivals and legal figures
in highly visible areas. Building that brand
of fear. Yeah. He becomes a known feared entity
on the streets. 25 cases. four murders. But usually
that level of violence, while completely horrific,
keeps you somewhat localized. Right. It makes
you a huge priority for the local police precinct,
but it doesn't necessarily make you a household
name across an entire state of millions of people.
Until you cross an invisible line. Exactly. Until
we hit the tipping point. This is the moment
where Kumar's violence intersected with the absolute
highest levels of regional government. May 30th,
1995. Yes. This is the attack on our Shanmugasundaram.
who was a lawyer for the DMK. Now the DMK is
one of the major regional political parties in
Tamil Nadu. And this wasn't just a random mugging
gone wrong? No. This specific lawyer was actively
preparing a case against the then chief minister
of the state, Jayalalitha, regarding something
called the Tanisai land scam. And just a quick
pause here for you listening, because context
is everything with this story. The Tanisai case
involved allegations regarding state -owned industrial
land, and it is a deeply complex, historically
charged issue in Indian politics. Very much so.
We want to make it incredibly clear that we aren't
here to take a political side on that scandal,
and we are remaining strictly impartial regarding
the intense rivalry between the DMK and Jayalika.
Our focus is purely on tracking how Kumar's violent
trajectory was deployed as a tool within this
massive political earthquake. Beautifully said.
The mechanics of the crime are what matter to
us today. Right. So Kumar attacks this lawyer
who is building a corruption case against the
sitting chief minister. He leaves the lawyer
severely injured. And as a direct result, the
entire state's legal apparatus goes into an absolute
uproar. You have to look at the cause and effect
here. When an enforcer attacks a lawyer who is
actively working on anti -corruption litigation
against the head of the state, it ceases to be
a street crime. It's an attack on the system.
Exactly. It becomes an assault on the democratic
and judicial process itself. The system simply
cannot ignore it. Here's where it gets really
interesting. Because the heat from this attack
brings in the CBI. The big guns. Right. The Central
Bureau of Investigation, which is essentially
India's premier federal investigating agency,
they step in and they put a bounty on Welding
Kumar's head. Which shows how serious this became.
But the source explicitly states the bounty was
for three thousand rupees. Now you have to help
me make sense of this because my first reaction
reading that. was to do a double -take. I don't
blame you. Even adjusting for inflation back
to 1995, 3 ,000 rupees does not sound like the
kind of massive set -yourself -up -for -life
reward you see in Hollywood movies. Was this
just a desperate scramble by the authorities
trying to squeeze out a quick tip? It is a brilliant
detail to highlight because it shows how law
enforcement actually disrupts criminal networks
on a budget. You are correct. Even in 1995, 3
,000 rupees wasn't a king's ransom. Right. It's
not retiring on a beach money. Not at all. But
you aren't trying to bribe a millionaire cartel
boss here. In the context of street level informants,
a bounty like that serves a highly specific surgical
purpose. OK, like what? It is designed to entice
the lowest level associates. The guy who buys
the burner phones, the guy who runs daily errands
people who might gladly turn on a scary colleague
to cover a month's rent or get some quick cash.
Oh, that makes total sense. It acts like a virus
in the network. Suddenly, Kumar can't trust the
people bringing him his food or driving his car.
Precisely. It injects paranoia into his daily
life. It signals to the entire underworld that
the federal state has made this individual a
priority target. And nobody wants to stand next
to the guy with the target on his back. Exactly.
In the criminal ecosystem, associating with a
priority target is incredibly bad for business.
It isolates him completely. And he was already
feeling the heat because the attack infuriated
the entire law community in Tamil Nadu. The source
notes it evoked statewide protests. Lawyers literally
took to the streets. And when lawyers protest,
the courts stop functioning. The justice system
just grinds to a halt. You don't physically assault
a lawyer building a case against the chief minister
and expect to go back to your safe house quietly.
The sheer audacity of the attack forced the Justice
Sister's hand. When you operate in the shadows,
you survive. When you spark statewide protests
by the very people who run the courts, the system
will mobilize every resource to process you.
And process him, they did. They absolutely did.
Kumar was convicted by a local court for the
attacks on both Radhakrishnan and the DMK lawyer,
Sharmugasundaram. The sentence was life in prison.
a ruling that was later upheld and confirmed
by the high court. Which usually, for like 99
% of the stories we cover, is the end of the
line. Right. Hearing a judge hand down a life
in prison sentence closes the book. The criminal
is removed from society, their influence is systematically
neutralized, and they fade into the gray background
of the penal system. They lose their agency entirely.
They become subjects of the state. But not Kumar.
No, definitely not him. For welding Kumar, the
prison walls didn't act as a deterrent. They
just provided him with a new highly concentrated
captive territory, which brings us to the final
and honestly the most mind bending chapter of
his life. His empire behind bars. Exactly. The
evolution from a political enforcer on the outside
to a monopolizing racketeer on the inside. The
source material mapping out his time inside is
Almost hard to believe. So he is serving a life
sentence. His life is theoretically over, but
he just keeps going. He doesn't slow down at
all. The Wikipedia article details that he attacks
a man named John Pandian while he is locked up
in Cuddalore jail. Right. Then he attacks a man
named V. McTuffin does on while he is locked
up in Salem jail. I have to ask this on behalf
of everyone listening right now. Go ahead. How
does a guy who is already serving a life sentence?
Someone who is globally known as a high -risk
offender for a massively high -profile political
attack Managed to keep assaulting high -profile
targets across multiple entirely different maximum
security facilities It sounds like he's on a
bizarre violent prison tour honestly really does
if we connect this to the bigger picture It reveals
a very harsh uncomfortable truth about the mechanics
of the penal system When an individual is serving
a life sentence, the traditional structural deterrence
of the justice system immediately lose their
power. Because what are you going to do threaten
a lifer with more life? Exactly. The currency
of time is worthless to them. Furthermore, Kumar
entered the prison system not as an anonymous
petty thief, but as a highly notorious enforcer
with confirmed ties to the highest levels of
state politics. Ah, so his reputation preceded
him. immensely. Inside the walls, that reputation
is tangible currency. Prison ecosystems are inherently
fragile. The staff are often underpaid, they're
vastly outnumbered, and they are managing incredibly
dangerous populations. A powder keg, basically.
Right. When you introduce a hyper -violent inmate
who fundamentally has nothing to lose and who
knows exactly how to leverage fear, they can
easily manipulate, bribe, or intimidate their
way into continuing their behavior. So they don't
even see the prison as a punishment? No. They
see it as a new marketplace with a captive customer
base. And it seems like the state's only solution
was to just keep moving him around, like a geographic
bandaid. Just passing the problem to the next
warden. The source tracks him from Cuddalore
to Salem to Coimbatore, and finally he gets transferred
to Poushal Prison. This transfer happens just
two months before his death. June 10th, 2009.
Yeah. When he's around 47 or 48 years old, Kumar's
violent journey finally ends. He is attacked
and killed by his fellow inmates inside Pusall
Prison. A brutal end to a remarkably brutal life,
but we really have to look closely at why he
was killed. Yes, because the motive provided
by the prison officials is what truly anchors
this entire story in the grim realities of organized
crime. It wasn't about his past. No, this detail
blew my mind. He wasn't killed over an old street
rivalry from his Tandiyarpit days. He wasn't
assassinated as political retribution for the
Tanisai case lawyer attack. None of that. Pooh's
Hall prison officials stated that his murder
was the direct result of hostility created by
a very specific lucrative racket he had forcefully
taken over. The mobile phone racket. Right. He
had forcefully monopolized a system where well
-to -do remand prisoners deposited their mobile
phones with convicts and they paid a premium
fee for the service. This is where we see the
absolute unfiltered microeconomy of the prison
system at work. Let's break down the mechanics
of this racket because it is deeply revealing
about human ingenuity and corruption. I'm all
ears. So you have remand prisoners. These are
individuals who are locked up, but they are still
awaiting trial. They haven't been officially
convicted of their current charges yet. Right,
they're in limbo. Exactly. And many of these
remand prisoners might be wealthy businessmen,
or they might be sophisticated syndicate leaders
who still have massive criminal empires to manage
on the outside. For those guys, being cut off
from communication isn't just an inconvenience.
It's a total operational collapse. A mobile phone
inside a prison is more valuable than gold to
them. It is their absolute lifeline. But I'm
guessing they can't just keep these contraband
phones sitting out on their beds. Oh, definitely
not. Remand prisoners are constantly moving.
They're being pulled out of their cells for interrogations.
They're being transported back and forth to court
hearings. And they are subjected to frequent,
rigorous shakedowns by the guards. So the risk
of confiscation is incredibly high for them.
Exactly. So what is the black market solution
to that problem? You outsource the risk? You
hit the nail on the head. It is remarkably similar
to modern offshore banking or unregulated cloud
storage, but applied to prison contraband. That's
a wild comparison, but it makes so much sense.
The remand prisoners pay a hefty recurring fee
to the convicts, the men like Kumar, who are
already serving long sentences. These lifers
have established routines. They have deeply hidden
stash spots. And they're probably not moving
around as much. Right. And in many cases, they
have compromised the guards on their specific
cell blocks. So the remand prisoners pay the
lifers to act as highly secure, walking safe
deposit boxes for their electronics. Wow. It
is a highly lucrative sophisticated fee -based
service industry operating entirely in the shadows
of the state. That is just brilliant in the darkest
way possible. It's unregulated venture capitalism
behind bars. It really is. And Kumar, having
spent his entire life dominating informal economies,
saw this massive pile of cash changing hands
and decided he needed to be the one controlling
it. He couldn't just be a participant in the
market. Exactly. He had to be the monopoly. He
applied the exact same ruthless enforcing tactics
that worked for him as a political henchman right
to the cell blocks of Pusall Prison. But that
was his fatal miscalculation. He completely failed
to read the new environment. How so? Well, on
the outside, when he was attacking people in
court complexes, he had the invisible backing
of political patrons to insulate him from the
ultimate consequences of his violence. The state
protected him. Right, until it couldn't. But
inside Pusall Prison, there are no politicians
to protect you. You're entirely on your own.
Precisely. Inside, he was dealing with a closed,
hyper -pressurized ecosystem of other hardened
criminals. When you disrupt a black market economy
that tightly, and you forcefully cut off the
income streams of other violent men who also
have life sentences and nothing to lose... Oh
yeah, that's not gonna end well. The market will
inevitably correct itself. In this closed system,
a market correction doesn't mean a lawsuit or
a bankruptcy. It means a targeted assassination.
Exactly. The black market corrects itself. That
is a chilling, perfect way to frame it. So what
does this all mean? When we ask you, the listener,
to reflect on this deep dive, it's really about
zooming out and looking at the entire arc of
this one Wikipedia article. From beginning to
end, we started with Jay Kumar, the everyday
welder from Taniyaket, a guy with a wife and
kids working a physically demanding, honest trade.
And we watched him realize that the physical
skills of his trade could be monetized in the
underworld. Leveraging that grit into a 25 case
rap sheet and becoming welding Kumar, the trusted
insulated muscle for powerful regional politicians.
And then we saw him completely shatter his own
ceiling by committing an act of performative
violence against a lawyer involved in a state
level corruption case. An act so brazen it brought
down the wrath of the federal government and
earned him a life sentence. And finally we saw
him die. Yeah, but he didn't die in a grand political
shootout or some wild escape attempt. He was
stabbed to death in a prison yard over the right
to hold contraband cell phones for wealthy inmates.
He spent his entire life trying to forcefully
bind his will to whatever environment he was
in. Much like his original trade. Exactly. Until
the pressure finally caused the whole structure
to violently collapse in on him, it forces you
to rethink the fundamental nature of these systems.
I agree completely. We often view crime as a
failure of society, right? An anomaly that just
needs to be locked away. But if you look at the
life of welding kumor, you see something entirely
different. Well, when the state locks a man away
in a maximum security facility to protect society,
yet he is able to seamlessly continue running
lucrative, fee -based rackets with the exact
same ruthless efficiency he used on the outside,
it leaves us with a genuinely provocative question
to mull over. It forces us to ask. If an informal
economy, whether it's on the streets of Chennai
or deep inside Puzhal prison, will always violently
correct itself to protect its profits and power
structures, our crime and corruption actually
anomalies in our society? Or are they just unregulated
capitalism working exactly as intended? Man,
that is a heavy, fascinating thought to walk
away with. Thank you so much for joining us on
this deep dive. We will catch you on the next
one.