‘Snatch’ and grabbed
As jewel heists go, this one was a real fugazi.
The owners of a Diamond District wholesaler were arrested yesterday in charges of staging a bizarre New Year’s Eve robbery straight out of the movie “Snatch” in which two men disguised as Hasidic Jews “made off” with nearly $10 million worth of jewels.
Atul Shah, 48, and Mahaveer Kankariya, 43, owners of Dialite Imports on West 46th Street, were more than a million dollars in debt and concocted the elaborate hoax to collect on a massive insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London, authorities said.
“The whole thing was set up,” said a law-enforcement source.
The robbery mimicked the opening scene of the 2000 Guy Ritchie film “Snatch,” in which Benicio Del Toro and a gang of diamond thieves pose as Hasids.
In the real-life version, when the jewelry-store owners reported the bogus Dec. 31, 2008, heist, they claimed that two men — sporting black coats, hats and beards — pulled guns after being buzzed into the store and appeared to make off with a startling haul of precious stones from the safe.
The “Hasids” — who had actually been hired by the store owners — were caught on building surveillance entering in their costumes, then spray-painting the camera lenses to make them useless.
Surveillance cameras inside the store, however, showed the owners clearing all the bling out of the safe two hours before the alleged robbery. The owners thought they had disabled those cameras.
Drain cleaner was later poured inside the computer where the store’s surveillance data was stored. It was unclear whether it was done by the jewelers or the faux Hasids.
When the owners reported the so-called theft, investigators thought their story was suspicious and took the store’s surveillance-data hard drive for forensic analysis, sources said. They found that the drain cleaner hadn’t destroyed all of the data recorded by the video camera.
The restored video allegedly showed Shah and Kankariya removing the supposedly stolen gems from their safe and putting them into a bag.
The jewels — which the two men had insured for $9.2 million — have not been recovered. Neither man has collected any of the insurance cash.
Shah and Kankariya, who both live in Brooklyn, are charged with grand larceny, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. They were ordered held on $750,000 bail.
Their lawyer, Sherwood Allen Salvan, said at the arraignment that his clients were being judged too quickly. “They’re good men with families that need them,” he said.
Additional reporting by Amanda Longobucco
