Two debt-ridden Diamond District jewelers were found guilty yesterday of using thugs dressed as Hasids to fake a $7 million robbery.
Atul Shah and Mahaveer Kankariya were undone by the very video-security equipment they had ineptly tried to destroy, according to the verdict, rendered by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber following a three-week bench trial.
“It’s clear to me that this was a conspiracy,” the judge told the two jewelers in finding each of them guilty of seven counts of grand larceny, insurance fraud and other crimes
Shah, 49, and Kankariya, 44, will face up to 15 years in prison when sentenced for the New Year’s Eve 2008 robbery.
The hoax Hasids hired for the heist have never been located.
The jewelers had believed that they had destroyed the video-surveillance recorder in their West 46th Street offices by pouring drain cleaner into the device three hours before the robbery, prosecutor Eugene Hurley said.
The recorder did die midway through the robbery, but not before essentially recording its own death and implicating Shah and Kankariya.