Manhattan, NY - Prosecutors say it’s a $7 million insurance scam right out of Guy Ritchie’s movie “Snatch—” with a pair of desperately broke jewelers hiring thugs to dress as gun-toting Hasidic Jews and “rob” their foundering Diamond District business.
But the two jewelers went on trial today, insisting that the thugs—along with the entire New Year’s Eve, 2008 heist—were real.
“This was a real robbery,” Michael Bachner, lawyer for defendant Mahiveer Kankariya, told a Manhattan judge in opening statements for the non-jury trial.
“This is a theory without a case,” added Ben Brafman, lawyer for defendant Atul Shah.
Kankariya and Shah, U.S. citizens who were born and raised in India by old-money jeweler families, are related by marriage. They ran joint businesses in a warren of shared offices at 2 West 46th St., according to court papers.
Kankariya’s company, Real Creations, bought and sold jewelry to retailers. Shah’s company, Dialite, bought and sold loose diamonds under three carats.
At 3 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2008, as Kankariya was home in New Jersey, two men dressed as Hasids gained entry to the defendants’ offices by posing as customers—but pulled guns and tied up their captives shortly after they were escorted inside a back office.
The two thugs then used spray paint to black out the surveillance camera lenses, and poured a sticky brown liquid into the recording equipment in the office’s closet.
Trouble was, the liquid—Pequa Heavy Duty Drain Opener, an empty bottle of which was recovered from the trash—did not seep into the device’s mother board.
Prosecutor Eugene Hurley told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber that his evidence, including the recovered surveillance footage—shows the defendants conspired to pull the actual jewelry out of the safes and fill the safe with empty cardboard jewelry storage boxes prior to the robbery.
“They filled the safe with empty jewelry boxes so they could be strewn around the room by the fake robbers,” Hurley said in opening statements.
The footage also shows how inept the “hired” thugs were, Hurley said. “No real robbers would ever act like these guys,” he said.
The defendants allegedly unwittingly tipped off investigators with Lloyds of London by lying about details of the crime during civil depositions. The pair counter that they got rattled, 13 months after the robbery, by the aggressive insurance investigators and simply made honest misstatements.
They are charged with grand larceny and insurance fraud.
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