“Fake” Robbery Leads to “Real” Jail Time

Picture this: robbers come into your jewelry store to rob you of your precious jewelry. They have beards that hide their faces, they have guns to point at yours, and they take the gems out of your safe in a back room. This could prove to be a very scary experience, had you not prepared in advance and hired the guys yourself.

According to the Associated Press, this is what happened when Mahaveer Kankariya and Atul Shah –two diamond dealers in New York- staged a complex, fraudulent heist in the hopes of getting millions of dollars in insurance money to save their business.

Insurers and authorities became suspicious as it emerged that the businesses were in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Ultimately, the security camera told what prosecutors cast as a damning tale: Shah and Kankariya had replaced many of the jewels in the safe with empty boxes just hours before the supposed hold-up.

The heist occurred on New Year’s Eve of 2008 after Kankariya and Shah hired thugs dressed as Hasidic Jews to barge into their store and fake a robbery. The real-life footage however was captured on a recording device in the store. Manhattan state Supreme Justice Thomas Farber said it was “clear to me that this is a conspiracy.”

As reported in the New York Times, prosecutor Eugene Hurley said that the jewelers poured drain cleaner into the video-surveillance recorder three hours before the robbery, which made them believe that they had had destroyed the device. And while the recorder did die midway through the robbery, it was able to catch the essential footage needed to implicate Shah and Kankariya.

When the verdict was read, more than a dozen of their relatives had packed into the courtroom. One of those people was so overcome that she even needed brief medical attention in a courthouse hallway. Even the judge appeared to get emotional over the case, saying that delivering the verdict was “the most difficult thing I have done in my career.”

The jewel dealers’ lawyers said the men were truly robbed, and the case was fueled by their insurer’s reluctance to pay the claim. The dealers often moved jewels in and out of the safe, and they were guilty of nothing more than misremembering in denying they’d removed many gems from the safe before the incident, the lawyers said. Farber called it “not conceivable” that anyone would forget that.

The two men remain free on $750,000 bond until their sentencing, which is set for April 29^th. They are required to wear ankle monitors to track their location however.

The men face at least a year and as many as 25 years in prison at their sentencing.

The thugs-for-hire who were involved in the heist still remain at-large.