Dawood Ibrahim
Mustachioed and portly, it's hard to imagine that Dawood Ibrahim is one of the most dangerous people in the world. Long heralded as the don of the Mumbai underworld, the shadowy Ibrahim went from being a classic extortionist huckster and gold smuggler in the Indian seaside metropolis to a man now implicated in a ring of global terrorist networks that include ties to al-Qaeda. Ibrahim is suspected as a potential suspect in masterminding a 1993 terror attack in Mumbai, which killed hundreds, and may have had a hand in the 2008 attacks on a number of prominent, ritzy Mumbai hotels. What adds to his mystique is that his whereabouts remain unknown — Indian intelligence officials suspect he is in Pakistan, possibly in the port city of Karachi, but the Pakistanis reject those claims. Some estimates of his wealth number into billions of dollars, tracing him to assets and properties from Malaysia to East Africa. In 2008, Forbes ranked him among the top 10 most wanted fugitives; the following year, Ibrahim made the magazine's list of the world's most powerful people.