EXPLORING THE MIND OF A CON MAN , THE DIAMOND HEIST AT ZAVERI BAZAR - CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL
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His movie with Naomi Campbell was shelved
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As you can see in the picture above , he is a piece of shit with a PIGEON CHEST -- still he produced a child with Miss France.
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TO BE CONTINUED-
Hundreds of con men have walked this planet.
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In this post I intend to explore the mind of a con man — and underscore the unique psychology which drives him.
Con men force you to hand over your moolah at your own free will. He does NOT use violence or force.
All con men are bound by a tight set of rules and it is so dang easy to spot them , before they do the damage.
Con men are like rats who shit in the same place , the same time – once you recognize their methods it is so easy to ambush and bushwhack them.
A Bollywood movie “Special chabbis" produced by Ekta Kapoor, directed by Neeraj Pandey , starring Akshay Kumar is being made , based on a sensational true heist at the diamond store of Tribovandas Bhimji Zaveri at Hermes House Charni road on 19th March 1987.
This Indian con-man gets my prize for circumventing the usual con man’s run of the mill method.
This suave guy had his own style and did everything with panache. Usually con men get caught—this man just walked away into the sunset with the moolah leaving an entire nation red faced.
A mystery man called Mohan Singh, checked in at Taj Intercontinental at 5.30pm on March 17 1987 and said he was coming from Trivandrum. Within 48 hours he would scoot with 35 lakhs worth of cash and jewellery.
Just before arrival at the 5 star hotel hotel he inserted a classified advertisement in The Times of India seeking "50 dynamic graduates" for the posts of RAW intelligence and CBI security officers.
The squeamish snooty hotel did NOT allow such a large scale interview, but this man appeared to be well prepared. He shifted the interview to Mittal House Nariman Point , as per plan B.
He interviewed more than 100 candidates , out of which he selected only 28. They were recruited as 'junior CBI officers' on 18th March .
After a pep talk he ordered to come to the hotel again today at 11am on 19th March 1987. They were NOT to reveal the selection or the programme to any friend of relative owing to the "secrecy" of the task.
By noon, Mohan checked out of the hotel.
He had booked a luxury coach through Taj hotel. The recruits and the con man proceeded towards Chowpatty in the coach at 12.30pm. Mohan Singh stopped the bus and told the driver and cleaner to wait while he took his staff towards the beach ostensibly to have soft drinks and a pep talk.
Mohan Singh distributed identity cards and at Chowpatty briefed them about the mock raid operation.
The bus then stopped in front of Charni Road railway station and the “CBI team” foot slogged to the jewellery shop.
The arrived at the jewellery shop around 2.15 pm.
The mastermind strode straight with a swagger to owner Pratapbhai Zevari, introduced himself as CBI officer Mohan Singh, and flashed a partly printed, partly handwritten authentic looking search warrant.
With a practiced air, he ordered that the close-circuit camera be shut and that the jeweller surrender his licensed revolver.
No telephone calls were allowed as the recruits took samples of ornaments for investigation. The jeweller was told that the CBI was investigating the quality of gold sold in such shops.
One eager beaver probationer was even asked to put up a board at the entrance stating that a raid was on.
The jeweller accompanied Singh and the others as they picked up assorted jewellery before sealing it in plastic packets with CBI seal and Ashoka insignia on it. Money was also collected from the cash counter and stashed into briefcases.
35 minutes later, Singh asked two men to keep the heavy black resin bags into the waiting bus. The rest of the 26 officers were asked to guard the shop and continue searching for incriminating documents as our con man Mohan Singh left to 'supervise' another imminent raid.
After four anxious hours, the sweating shop owners ,the junior officers , 70 odd staff and 30 customers realized that they had been duped. The jeweller immediately called the D B Marg police station.
The owner was all the time suspecting something amiss considering Mohan Singh wore a natty 3 piece suit but had on, cheap bumpkin shoes.
The suspicious owner had wanted to know why the jewellery was being taken away. In a well-rehearsed reply, Mohan Singh replied knee jerk , that section 22 of the jewellers' constitution ( sic) , gave CBI officers the right to seize ornaments in order to check their purity—all bull.
The driver of the luxury bus when arrested said that the conman was dropped behind Taj hotel, ( of Bade Mian sheek kabab and baida roti fame ) following which he vanished into the hot afternoon .
Mohan Singh had got off the bus went to the hotel , asked the bell boy to call a taxi, and put the bags inside the vehicle. The taxi headed towards Vile Parle where he got down and melted into the crowd with his bags .
A massive manhunt was launched for him . The entire episode bore close resemblance to a pulsating crime fiction.
The suspect appeared to be from Kerala in his early forties, dark-complexioned, with a thick rnoustache. He spoke good English with an unmistakable YEM YO YET YENTHER YO YEM south Indian accent.
The only thing the harried police learnt was that a certain Mohan Singh had booked a room 415 at the The Taj Mahal hotel.
Let me now introduce to you another con man Christopher Thierry Rocancourt.
He made 40 million dollars by scamming affluent people by masquerading as a French member of the Rockefeller family. Actually Rockefeller was the agent of big brother Rothschild who had a bloodline branch in France.
His mother was a French prostitute and his father was an alcoholic house painter who took Christopher to an orphanage in Saint-Germain-Village when the boy was 5, and then froze to death on the streets .
Young Chris ran away and made his way to Paris where he pulled his first big con, faking the deed to a property he didn't own, then "selling" the property for USD $1.4 million.
Making his way to the United States, Rocancourt used at least a dozen aliases. He got the rich and powerful to invest in his schemes. He tapped into their inherent greed.
Thinking he was a blue blood Rockefeller, the moneyed elite flocked to Christopher, begging him to invest their fortunes for them. Christopher complied, pretending he could double everyone's money in less than two weeks, as long as they supplied him with a cash advance.
He convinced them that he, too, was rich by paying for their lavish dinners in cash, sometimes as large as 80000 dollars . He travelled in stretch limousines ,often with police escort that made others say, “That guy’s gotta be a VIP.”
He would say “ The name is Rockefeller,” when asked his name, adding quickly and casually — “But please, call me Christopher.”
His movie with Naomi Campbell was shelved
Rhonda Rydell, his gorgeous playboy model girlfriend says “ He would just walk into a room and everyone at the table, who were high, influential people, would drool and gush “Oh, Christopher’s here.”
The new money wannabes were thrilled to be rubbing elbows with an old money name
Even in the image-conscious Hamptons, Christopher, who always had a gorgeous woman leaning on his arm, a splash everywhere On a whim, he would charter a chopper to race him out to a seaside estate he said he was thinking of buying. He was so rich, he could get away with his favorite uniform— jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap worn backwards— even in the fanciest places.
The tabs topped out at thousands of dollars. Christopher always picked up the bill and always paid cash.The bubbly flowed, as did Christopher’s non-stop chatter about his incredibly fabulous world. He had jets, he had yachts, he had women coming from Monaco… and the cellphones were going off—the Kennedys are on the line, and Prince Albert was in that weekend.
As you can see in the picture above , he is a piece of shit with a PIGEON CHEST -- still he produced a child with Miss France.
He always had plenty cash money in his pocket. He passed out $100 bills to the waiters to the bartenders, to the valet parkers, to the press ... for them he was more than royalty. “Christopher,” the paparazzi would scream when they wanted a picture of him leaving the clubs late at night.
Rocancourt—the French Rockefeller with an accent so thick you sometimes need subtitles to understand him explains “They smell ze money like the shark smell ze blood. Nothing else”.
In Los Angeles, he pretended to be a movie producer, ex-boxing champion or venture capitalist. He dropped names like "his mother" Sophia Loren or "his uncles" Oscar de la Renta and Dino De Laurentiis and was associated with various celebrities.
He married Playboy model Pia Reyes; they had a son, Zeus. He lived for a time with Mickey Rourke and apparently convinced actor Jean-Claude Van Damme to produce his next movie.
In Paris, Christophe Rocancourt lived with former Miss France Sonia Rolland. They had a daughter together, named Tess.
Most children enjoy playing make-believe, but Rocancourt made a profitable career of it. He sold high-end real estate he didn't actually own.
His house of cards began to collapse in 1997, and in 2002, he pleaded guilty to theft, bribery and other charges.
In March 2002 he was extradited to New York and pleaded to charges of theft, grand larceny, smuggling, bribery, perjury and fraud against 19 victims. He was fined $9 million, was ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution and sentenced to five years in prison.
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Now let me introduce a celebrated con man Frank William Abagnale, Jr whose life has been made into a Hollywood movie “Catch Me If You Can” in 2002, where he is played by actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Abagnale himself makes a cameo as a French police officer.
Frank William Abagnale, Jr was a con man of the first order.
He became one of the most famous impostors ever, claiming to have assumed no fewer than eight separate avatars as an airline pilot, a doctor, a U.S. Bureau of Prisons agent, and a lawyer. He escaped from police custody twice (once from a taxiing airliner and once from a U.S. federal penitentiary), before he was 21 years old.
Abagnale was one of four children and spent the first sixteen years of his life in Bronxville, New York. His French mother, Paulette, and father, Frank Abagnale Sr., divorced when he was 16. At the divorce hearing, Abagnale ran away never to see his father again.
His first con act was to screw his own father . His father gave him a gas credit card and a truck to assist him in commuting to his part-time job. Frank Jr. devised a scheme to help pay for his dates with women. He used the credit card to "buy" tires, batteries, and other car-related items at gas stations. He made a deal with the attendants in which they gave him cash in return for them keeping the products. Ultimately, his father was liable for a bill of several thousand dollars.
Abagnale's first confidence trick was writing personal checks on his own overdrawn account. This, however, would work for only a limited time before the bank demanded payment, so he moved on to opening other accounts in different banks, eventually creating new identities to sustain this charade.
Over time, he experimented and developed different ways of defrauding banks, such as printing out his own almost-perfect copies of checks, depositing them and persuading banks to advance him cash on the basis of money in his accounts.
Abagnale decided to imitate a pilot because he wanted to fly throughout the world for free. He got a uniform by calling PanAm, telling them that he was a pilot working for them who had lost his uniform, and going to get a new one with a fake employee ID. He then forged an FAA pilot's license.
Pan American World Airways estimated that between the ages of 16 and 18, Abagnale flew over 1,000,000 miles (1,600,000 km) on over 250 flights and flew to 26 countries, at Pan Am's expense, by deadheading. He was also able to stay at hotels for free during this time. Everything from food to lodging was billed to the airline company. Abagnale stated that he was often invited by actual pilots to take the controls of the plane in-flight.
He forged a Columbia University degree and taught sociology at Brigham Young University for a semester, working as a teaching assistant by the name of Frank Adams.
For eleven months he impersonated a chief resident pediatrician in a Georgia hospital under the alias Frank Conners.. After befriending a real doctor who lived in the same apartment complex, he agreed to act as resident supervisor of interns as a favor until the local hospital could find someone else to take the job.
The position was not difficult for Abagnale because supervisors did no real medical work. . He was able to fake his way through most of his duties by using humor management and letting the interns handle the cases coming in during his late-night shift, setting broken bones and other mundane tasks.
Abagnale forged a Harvard University law transcript, passed the bar exam of Louisiana and got a job at the Louisiana Attorney General's office at the age of nineteen. . After making a fake transcript from Harvard, he prepared himself for the compulsory exam.
Despite failing twice, he claims to have passed the bar exam legitimately on the third try after eight weeks of study, because "Louisiana at the time allowed you to take the Bar over and over as many times as you needed. It was really a matter of eliminating what you got wrong. You get an idea now how stupid the US law system is , right?
He was also known to use disguises as part of a ruse and was a master of manipulation; he once even eluded capture by posing as a federal agent. One of his most famous cons was using a security guard uniform to steal cash meant to go into drop boxes in which companies placed their proceedings, having put a sign on the box saying it was out of service and telling attendants to hand the money bags to the attending security guard
He later pondered aloud "How in the name of Charles Bronson, can a drop box be out of service?"
Beats me too!
Abagnale was eventually caught in France in 1969 when an Air France attendant he had dated in the past recognized him and notified the police.
After his release he approached a bank with an offer. He explained to the bank what he had done, and offered to speak to the bank's staff and show various tricks that "paperhangers" use to defraud banks. His offer included the condition that if they did not find his speech helpful, they would owe him nothing; otherwise, they would owe him only $500 with an agreement that they would provide his name to other banks. With that, he began a legitimate life as a security consultant.
He later founded Abagnale & Associates, which advises businesses on fraud. Abagnale is now a millionaire through his legal fraud detection and avoidance consulting business based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Abagnale also continues to advise the FBI, with whom he has associated for over 35 years, by teaching at the FBI Academy and lecturing for FBI field offices throughout the country. According to his website, more than 14,000 institutions have adopted Abagnale's fraud prevention programs.
Abagnale also continues to advise the FBI, with whom he has associated for over 35 years, by teaching at the FBI Academy and lecturing for FBI field offices throughout the country. According to his website, more than 14,000 institutions have adopted Abagnale's fraud prevention programs.
I guess this is what David Headley too has done— get on the right side of the US law, never mind that 164 people were shot down in India by Pakistani terrorists with his assistance.
“Con man” is short for “confidence man”… a guy or a gal who will go to extreme lengths to gain your confidence so that you’ll be easier to scam. First he gains your trust, then he takes your money. The whole modus operandi boils down to this.
You are promised a certain product, service, or outcome which is close to your heart , but it is never delivered. Which means that a con man does fraudulent business.
So what is the thumb rule? Whenever somebody flatters you, watch your wallet or your belongings . Flattery is normally a prelude to an unusual or out-of-the-ordinary request, which will follow. So next time a stranger or even a friend is EXTRA sweet to you, it is time to ponder- what is the fu#kin’ catch?
Flattery makes you feel all puffed up and great about yourself. You feel like the cat’s whiskers . But this is a set up so you’ll agree more easily to whatever corny request or proposal which will comes next.
You are more likely to make a bad decision when you are sort of feelin’ overconfident. Flattery is one sure way to build your confidence. Old women are more vulnerable to this.
A con man will build up a need in you. And the funny part is you would have never felt this need till then.
TO BE CONTINUED-