A pair of debt-ridden Diamond District jewelers were found guilty today of using thugs dressed as Hasids to fake a $7 million robbery.
Jewelers Atul Shah and Mahaveer Kankariya were undone by the very video security equipment they’d bunglingly 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 men, in finding each of them guilty of seven counts of grand larceny, insurance fraud and other crimes
Shah, 49, and Kankariya, 44, face up to 15 years prison when sentenced in the New Year’s Eve, 2008 heist. The judge was still working out pre-sentencing bail details for the two — including a possible monitoring bracelet arrangement — before lunch.
The hoax Hasids hired for the heist have never been located, but their use inspired comparison to the Guy Ritchie movie “Snatch,” in which the same ploy was used.
The pair had wrongly believed they’d destroyed the video surveillance recorder in their W. 46th St. offices by pouring drain cleaner into the device three hours before the robbery, prosecutor Eugene Hurley had argued.
The recorder did die midway through the robbery, but not before essentially recording its own death and implicating Shah and Kankariya.
It captured the pair going into the kitchen — where the device, called a “DVR,” is stored — three hours before the heist, and immediately afterward, one of four monitor images begins flickering.
It would continue to flicker until the machine went dead, but meanwhile, it still recorded the incriminating fact that nobody else, including the “robbers,” enters the kitchen to mess with the device before it dies.
Meanwhile, the traitorous machine dutifully recorded footage of Shah and Kankariya methodically emptying trays out of their safe just two hours before the robbery.
“It was telling evidence of guilt, it seems to me,” Farber said in rendering his decision.
And in capturing the beginning of the robbery itself, it shows Shah blythely buzzing the two Hasids into the jewelry offices without so much as an inquiry into who they were, and even leaving them briefly alone in a room with an unlocked safe.
“The rest of the robbery, frankly, looks like a joke,” Farber said.
The pair — unaware that the device had survived to incriminate them — then lied to cops and insurance investigators, claiming they’d not gone in the safe that day.
Oddly, they’d also claimed they believed the Hasids were “couriers,” a claim Farber called “Frankly ridiculous,” give the Hasidic garb and the rolling suitcase one of them was dragging.