THE CON ARTIST

 

 Mumbai 2010

There was an artist on the street.

’Pakoda, garma garam Pakoda’

Screaming on the top of his voice the elderly man was trying to draw the crowds in. 

A black mole on his left cheekbone was very prominent. 

A vermilion tilak adorned his head.

The burly moustached street vendor went about frying and selling his ware.

He was in his makeshift shop which was a cart in a corner of the busy Mumbai street selling these pakoras.

The crowded street was hustling and bustling with activity.

The beautiful aroma of these savoury snacks filled the air 

The fried fritters were limited in variety to just three types Onion, sliced potato and spinach.

 Of the three, the Onion pakoras were the most popular. They sold like hotcakes.

The vendor gently dropped in small portions of the spiced onion, gram flour dough in the hot oil. Frying on medium heat stirring occasionally for even frying he would then scoop out golden fried pieces from the oil in the black cast iron kadai with the large perforated spoon.

Glancing at the teenage boy who operated the scam in the makeshift table beside his pakora cart on this busy street he burst into a smile.

It was an,‘I know it all, I did it all,’ smile. 

The pakorawala thought to himself.  

The boy’s scam was good but they were not as good as Natwarlal’s.  

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The boy was an artist. 

He was a confidence trickster 

As he was always dressed smartly he had managed to be ordained with a prefix -- Gentleman. 

Raju Gentleman was a con artist.  

The boy was in the middle of a Three-cup Scam.

He had a simple-yet-devious trick that involved placing a ball under a cup.

The three cups are then moved around a mat, and the customer guesses which cup the ball is under, with a cash prize at stake.

However, he used sleight of hand to remove the ball from the cup and so the guess was never right.

He often got his mates in on the act too.

They made the stall look busy to draw in ‘marks’ or targets.

They also acted as “winning customers”, provided distractions and acted as a lookout should the police appear.

As soon as the cops came the cups and ball with the bet money would be snatched up, the mat, the thin plywood top would be slipped off,  the light wooden table would be folded and he and his mates would disappear in a jiffy. 

This would leave the punters high and dry.

Raju Gentleman in league with the shill relied on crowd psychology to encourage other onlookers to try their hand in the game and win some money.

He had his shills working for him here as well. They pretended to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, while they were actually conspiring with Raju to cheat the mark. 

The poor man has no chance, whatsoever of winning, at any point in the game.

Raju had many scams up his sleeve. 

Apart from the Three-cup Scam, he loved to operate the Three-card Trick.

This was the confidence game in which the victims, or "marks", are tricked into betting a sum of money, on the assumption that they can find the "money card" among three face-down playing cards.

They eventually never won any money. They always lost big after winning few small hands against the con artist. 

The pakorawala thought to himself. All of this was minuscule compared to the scams carried out by Natwarlal the biggest known scam artist in the annals of Indian history. 

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Natwarlal is said to have duped hundreds of shop owners, jewellers, bankers, and foreigners of lakhs of rupees, using more than fifty aliases to disguise himself. 

His cons, high-profile crimes and prison escapes included having supposedly repeatedly "sold" the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and the Parliament House of India.

Natwarlal's high-profile crimes often got him major sentences, with his jail time reaching increasingly high numbers. Natwarlal faced charges of forgery and was arrested nine or ten times. He was awarded long prison sentences but most of these times, he was able to break out and escape. 

His escapes were often very cunning.

There was a well-discussed daring breakout in 1957.

Natwarlal escaped the Kanpur jail by donning a smuggled police uniform, bribing his cell guards with a suitcase full of money.

He then walking out the front gate, passing guards who saluted him. To the frustration of the guards, it was later found that the suitcase contained newspapers.

Due to his repeated escapes, it is believed he only spent 20 years in prison throughout his life.

He often used novel ideas to cheat people, such as one instance in the 1950s where he swindled the Punjab National Bank out of 6.5 lakhs of rupees in a scam involving rail freight and bags of rice. He was also proficient in forging signatures of famous personalities. He is said to have supposedly cheated several industrialists including the Tatas, the Birlas, and Dhirubhai Ambani, taking from them huge sums of money. 

A legend states that Natwarlal "sold" the Parliament House to a foreigner; included in the purchase were the members of parliament themselves.

The last time he was seen was when he disappeared at the New Delhi railway station while being taken to AIIMS under police escort from Kanpur jail for treatment.

In 2009, Natwarlal's lawyer requested that more than 100 charges pending against him be dropped, claiming that he died on 25 July 2009. 

However, Natwarlal's brother subsequently claimed to have cremated him in 1996, the year he last escaped, in Ranchi. 

For this reason, his precise date of death is uncertain.

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Mumbai 2010

’Pakoda, garma garam Pakoda’

The beautiful aroma of the onion pakoras filled the air. 

The, ‘I know it all, I did it all,’ smile was written on the Pakorawala’s face.

The boy was good but not as good as Natwarlal.

The pakorawala thought of how he had faked his death and fooled the world.

That would be a secret that he would take to his deathbed.

Mr Natwarlal the con- artist was smiling to himself.

Credit for image -- Internet.