Wedding ‘planner’ was madam in city brothel

Chennai: The 48-year-old woman, Rekha Savitri, arrested by the Tambaram police for kidnapping a retired bank staff member to extort Rs 30 lakh from him, was running a prostitution racket in the guise of a massage parlour, the police said.

She was once before arrested for similarly robbing an elderly man after setting up a honey trap in the same way.

The accused, who also called herself Radhika and Vaishnavi, was nabbed with two of her associates, Muthukumar and Ilavarasan, for the kidnap of retired bank staff Ramamoorthy (62).

“She usually targets elderly men who seek a bride or companion. She establishes contact with them through phone and later meets them in a public place, like a like temple or hotel. Once she is convinced that the men are rich, she alerts a few rowdies who kidnap the victim for extortion. Many silently pay, fearing the stigma of it all on exposure,” said a senior police officer.

Savithri was convicted in 2008 for an extortion case, filed by the Pallikaranai police. “There were incidents where she used to extort money from aged men visiting her massage parlours. She first lured them over the phone with sexed-up conversations that would be recorded. Later, she blackmailed them with those conversations, saying that she would inform their families. Fearing a family backlash, not many men would lodge a police complaint,” the police said, adding that they had traced a few such cases against her in Chennai and the neighbouring districts.

In the latest case, Ramamoorthy, a retired cashier from Lakshmi Vilas bank, was asked to meet her at a temple at Poonamallee. They had even exchanged horoscopes. Two days later, she asked him to come to Koyambedu to interact with her ‘relatives’. When he reached there, the gang she had hired abducted him. Ramamoorthy managed to escape when he was taken to the Lakshmi Vilas Bank to withdraw Rs 30 lakh that the men demanded, and lodged a police complaint at the Tambaram police station.