Atul Shah (Steven Hirsch)
BOGUS: Video shows men dressed as Hasids in a heist staged by Kankariya and fellow jeweler Atul Shah, who is also now in jail.
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Two bungling Diamond District jewelers — already awaiting sentencing for hiring fake robbers dressed as Hasids to stage a $7 million insurance-job robbery — are back in jail after one of them asked how to bribe the judge.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber tossed both jewelers in the Tombs last week after one asked his bail bondsman, “Is there any way I can bribe the judge?”
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Luis Onativia of Empire Bail Bonds testified, recalling his conversation with Mahaveer Kankariya, who, with co-defendant Atul Shah, had at that point been allowed to remain free pending sentencing.
“And he tells me, ‘Well, if I tell my attorney to tell him,’ and I am like — excuse the language — I said, ‘What the f- -k are you talking about?’ I am like, ‘You know what you are saying?’ ” Onativia said, according to a transcript.
“And he says, ‘No, because in my country [India], you know, we normally do that,’ and I am like, ‘Dude, you are f- -king crazy,’ and he is like, ‘Oh, oh, I am sorry. Don’t take it, you know — I am just asking the question — I don’t want you taking it serious.’ ”
Kankariya, who court papers say has been in the United States for 26 years, soon made matters worse, Onativia testified, by asking whether there was a way to remove his monitoring bracelet.
Onativia promptly returned both defendants from their homes in Bergen County, NJ, to the jail in lower Manhattan.
Farber ordered them held without bail, but noted that even had he set higher bail for the two men, “I doubt very much they could find a bonds person — either one — at this point.”
Kankariya, 44, and Shah, 49, will face up to 15 years when sentenced April 29 for the New Year’s Eve 2008 hoax heist that played out like one in the Guy Ritchie movie “Snatch” — right down to the gun-toting thieves in black hats and bogus beards.
“This is an unfortunate situation in which a clash of cultures between the United States and India misled Mr. Kankariya, and he is regretful and remorseful for that,” his lawyer, Michael Bachner, told The Post.
Added Shah’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, “It’s unfortunate, but I want to be clear that Mr. Shah had nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with this.”