April 1, 2021 • 35 mins
Robert is joined again by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the tale of Natwarlal, India's greatest con-man.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What sharining my lonnie unuses? Would I have? I have?
I'm trying to figure out what the plural would be.
Would it be Sharene's Lanna units like attorneys general? I
think the last name is you and I. You know,
Sharne's Lana and I sharenus Is, I mean accepted. I'm
(00:29):
literally we're gonna call you sharenus Is from now on.
I'm just letting you know I love it. Grant Taylor
in middle school coined the nickname Sharnie Weenie. I've embraced
what was it? What was his name? Sharie Grant Taylor? Oh,
are they're gonna say Brent Taylor, who's the chuttiest cop
in Portland who got removed from the riot team for
shooting too many people with grenades for no reason? Oh jesus,
(00:52):
I'm gonna say that would have been amazing, not a
creative like insult nickname. That right is beneath you. Yeah,
that person is trash. You know who is also kind
of well, I don't know, we'll decide if he's trash.
You're probably gonna like this guy too. Um, we're gonna
talk about a very special con artist today. A fellow
named not war Lal, who was India's greatest con man.
(01:15):
Now I want to start this by saying, I can't
tell you how accurate most of this is. There are
very few English language sources on his life, and I
couldn't even find a lot of online like Hindi sources
that I could translate. There's very little about this guy
that is credible. There's a couple of like India today,
a couple of like broadly credible websites that have stories
about him on there, but like fuck, it is hard
(01:36):
to find ship about this dude that is not like
some weird little listical or basically there was a Bollywood
movie made about his life that is completely inaccurate. Hard
to tell what is true about this guy, but it's
a fun story. So we're gonna, we're gonna, We're gonna.
I did the best job I could and we're going
to it seems like a through fee with some con artists, right,
like right, it's you don't know what's true. If you
(01:58):
are someone who spends this guy's case, like literally like
sixty straight years lying to people and conning people, it's
gonna be hard to tell out what was true about
your life. You're gonna have very little in the way
of heart details. Um, but all we have about this
dude is fascinating and it's gonna be a fun, short
little story. So Mithilesh Kumar Shrivastava. Srivastava was born in
(02:20):
the village of Bangarra in a place called Bihar, India,
at some point in between nineteen twelve and nineteen twenty five,
which is a pretty wide margin to not know exactly
when this guy was born. Um, it is one of
those things. He's he's he grows up in a small
village in India in the like more than a century
ago and like to this day. So there's this thing,
(02:41):
this big celebration they do every twelve years called the
kumb Mela. I mean to do it every four years,
but every twelve years it's in Allahabad. And every time
it's in Allahabad, it's like the largest gathering of human
beings for any purpose in human history. Like a hundred
and twenty million people came at the last Mela in
Allahabad which I was at. Um when I was there
was about thirty or forty million people at a time
in intensity like it's it's incredibly it's just this unbelievably
(03:03):
massive thing. Sorry, mind dumb. What is it? What is
what is it for? It's it's a it's a religious celebration.
It's a it's a it's a Hindu religious celebration. And
it's so many people go that every year about thirty
thousand or so people disappear. And when I say disappear,
I mean these are people who live in villages so
isolated and so small that they don't have government documents
(03:24):
like that. Their only identity is as a part of
this village, and they get separated from their people and
they're just like people without like a legal life. Like
that still happens in India. That's why this guy. Part
of why this guy's like this, Like we don't have
like government documents about this dude's early life, right, Like
he's born in nineteen twelve and some or or sometime
(03:45):
in between there and some little village. We have very
little about his actual early life about is like government
identity or whatever, which is part of what enables him
to do the conning he does. Right, things are very
chaotic and India during the period where he's growing up,
this is like he kind of comes in his early
adulthood during the period where like the British government, UM
gives up controlling India. So like this guy. Part of
(04:07):
why he's able to get away with so much is
he he lives during a very chaotic time in India
UM and as a result, we know very little about
his early childhood. One version of his story states that
the inciting incident that kind of led to his break
from mainstream society occurred in nineteen thirty two, when he
was a ninth grader at Patna High School. Travastava was
not a good student, particularly when it came to mathematics.
(04:30):
His teachers noted to his parents that he was extremely intelligent,
which led Shrivastava's father to the conclusion that his son
was simply refusing to work hard. Lectures from his dad
turned into yelling and eventually to physical abuse. The first
time Shravastava's father hit him was also the last. Shravastava
fled home the very next day, eventually resurfacing in the
nearby city of Calcutta. This one version of his story,
(04:53):
and it is the version that paints the most sympathetic
picture of young Trevastava. Another version of the story states
that as a preteen, he realized he had the ability
to almost perfectly forge the signature of any person he chose.
One day, a family friend asked him to deposit some
money in a nearby bank. Sharik copied their signature and
later used it to withdraw a thousand rupees from their account.
(05:14):
According to this version of events, Shari's crime was found
out and he was exiled from his village and forced
to flee his home at any rate. By the time
he was in his late teens, he was a lone
and unsupported in Calcutta, So we don't know exactly how
he gets there. There's kind of two versions of the story.
One is his dad beats him and he flees. That's
obviously the more sympathetic. One is he steals from a
family friend and he gets kicked out of the village.
(05:36):
I don't really know which one is true. I mean,
either one I feel like, I don't hate, like it's
not like, yeah, one is more like he's a victim,
but the other one he's desperate and also you know,
like who cares. Yeah, I mean it's they're both good
con artist origin stories. So uh. At that time, Calcutta
was the capital of the British raj and it was
(05:57):
a city defined by its almost unbelievable gap between the
colonial rich they're fortunate chosen Indian allies and employees, and
a seething mass of starving urban poor. It's not for nothing,
that is where Mother Teresa has her like her set up.
She's a problematic figure, but she's there because there's so
much poverty in Calcutta. Few cities in history have been
harder places for a young pubescent boy with no money
(06:20):
to survive. And yet somehow Shravastava managed. He enrolled in
a Bachelor in Commerce to graduate course at Calcutta University,
presumably after lying about his age. We don't know how
he supported himself. He had no relatives in the city,
but somehow he got by long enough to meet and
befriended businessman Seth keshav Ram, who became his first mark.
(06:41):
Seth was in the market for a private tutor for
his children. Servastava knew he could do the job. He
just needed to convince Seth of that. So he produced
a series of testimonials from satisfied parents by forging signatures
and different handwriting styles to make them look like genuine
notes from actual people who actually existed. Seth was only
impressed by how highly recommended this young man was, and
(07:03):
he hired Travastova to teach his son and daughter for
thirty rupees per month. Travastava did this job for several months,
teaching this rich man's children god only knows what, because
he did not have much of an education himself. After
he'd been on the job, awhile Shri asked Seth for
a loan so he could purchase some books. Seth said no.
Depending on who you believe, this was the inciting incident
that really turned Shre against all rich people. He quit
(07:26):
his job and discussed, and he set to work getting revenge. First,
he forged another set of fake credicials and used them
to get a job as the headmaster of a school
that sets kids attended. Seth was impressed. When Srivastava got hired.
He apologized to his former employee and hired him back
as a private tutor for much more money. Shri took
the job, but he had not yet gotten his revenge.
At the time. In Calcutta, there was a serious shortage
(07:48):
of high quality cloth. Shri told Seth that he had
a relative who just come from Bombay with two hundred
bales of cloth that he wanted to sell on the
black market for the low low price of four point
five lack of rupees or four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The cloth could be sets. A lock is like an
Indian unit of measurement that means better a hundred thousand
or so l a k h L. There's this cloth
(08:13):
shortage and Shri is like, hey, I got my guy
coming in. He's got a bunch of this cloth. He's
gonna sell it to you for four hundred fifty thousand rupees,
which is cheap, and you can sell the cloth back
for much more money. Being a businessman, Seth couldn't pass
up the opportunity to make some black market bucks. And
now that Shravastava had proven himself legitimate, Seth was willing
to trust the man with hundreds of thousands of rupees
where he had once been unwilling to trust him with hundreds,
(08:36):
So he agreed to the deal. Once he did, Trevastava
informed him that the situation had changed. His relative had
returned to Bombay, but if Seth, if Seth would send
the cash to that city, he Shravastava would personally guarantee
the delivery of the baals to Calcutta. Seth was willing
to do this, but he insisted Trevastava would have to
go to Bombay with the money and one of Seth's
(08:56):
agents in order to make sure the deal with through properly.
Shri agree and he traveled to Bombay with Seth Man
and I'm gonna quote from a write up in India
today here. On the journey, Shrevastava had cleverly though casually
regaled the agent with stories of Bombay's tough police force
and the ruthless elements in the underworld who had no
compunctions about dispatching any outsider who dared to poach on
their preserves. Understandably nervous, the agent begged Shravastava to leave
(09:20):
him behind and take the money himself to purchase the cloth.
Shravastava agreed and departed, with the route be four hundred
and fifty thousand rupees. He never returned. Instead, he arrived
in Patna a few days later and proudly handed his
father a hundred thousand rupees as a gift. He told
his father that he had become a major shareholder at
a big company in Calcutta. Shravastava returned to Calcutta the
(09:40):
same week, but Seth had heard of his arrival and
sent hired thugs to retrieve the money. Shravastava spun them
a sob story about being chased by the police and
having to abandon the money, but Seth was unconvinced. He
gave Shravastava four days in which to find the money,
failing which he threatened to have him murdered. The moment
Seth left, Shravastova rushed to the police station, where he
lodged a complaint against Seth, alleging Seth had threatened his
(10:02):
life refusing to become his agent for black market deals.
Servastava also gave the police a detailed count of Seth's
clandestine criminal deals. Steals half a million rupees from this
guy and then turns him into the police when he
threatens to murder him. Um so yeah, yeah, I mean
that's what Yeah, that's what he did. It's also like
(10:26):
who are who are you? Who you gonna trust? Right
like the this foreigner you know? Yeah, I mean they're both.
I think it's one of those things. This doesn't wind
up working out for him. So snitching worked at first,
because Seth and his goons get immediately arrested by the
police and taken into custody. Uh. And since Seth was
not a really nice guy, has men have no loyalty
to him, so they immediately confessed to planning a murder.
(10:49):
So now Seth is fucked no matter what, because he's
just been caught attempting to murder somebody, and he decides
to at least take Shri down with him, and he
tells the police that Shar had been trying to set
up an illegal black market cloth deal. So the cops
arrest Tree too, and in December eleven seven, he goes
to jail for the first time. Um, yeah, you know
that's that's that's that's how this started. Yeah, yeah, you
(11:12):
go to the cops, that's what happens. So he gets
sentenced to a six month imprisonment, young and at that point,
not as savvy as he would later be. Sri served
out his whole sentence. He was released and immediately committed
more fraud. We don't know the precise nature of this crime,
but given the stories it's gone so far, it doesn't
take a whole lot of imagination to guess what kind
of ship he got up to. He gets caught a
(11:33):
second time, almost immediately in a sentence to eight more
months of hard labor. He serves his time again and
he decides, after two sentences behind bars, it's time for
him to move his base of operations away from Calcutta.
They know him too well there, so he moves to
Madras and he changes his name to not war Lal,
a name under which he would become one of the
most famous people in modern Indian history. Now, the Madras
(11:55):
police record just one crime by nut war Lal in
their files, another suspected fraud. The fact that they only
caught him once suggest that he'd gotten savvy er after
his second arrest, because if we know one thing about
not war Lala at this point in the story, it's
that he cannot stop himself from conning people. By ninety nine,
he had returned to northern India and for several years
he roams from city to city, conning businessmen out of
(12:16):
there also ill gotten gains. None of his subsequent grifts
were as ambitious as his staff from seft. He steals
twenty thousand dollars rupee from a Khan and for Karabad
forty dollars from a khan and Asamgar. The cases are
individually smaller, but there's a ton of them. He's just
constantly scam scamming tens of thousands of rupees out of people,
and it's more than the law can keep up with.
(12:37):
What kind of people is he scamming? Businessman? It's it's
always like, Hey, I've got some sort of a deal.
I've got this black market deal. You give me the cash,
I'll get this thing, I'll get this study and then
he skips town. You know, that's the way this guy works.
Um and again it's the same kind of thing as
Victor Lustig, where a lot of it's like, I don't
want you to go to the cops, so I'll make
sure you're agreeing to break the law first. Yeah, he
(12:57):
wants to compromise them so they don't. Yeah, they can
ever turn him in, So Sardar, he's he's very fast.
He's constantly skipping cities. Isn't like dozens of cities at
this point scamming people, So the cops are always a
few steps behind him, but he leaves enough of a
pattern that at least one detective becomes obsessed with him.
This guy, Sardar Hari Singh, who's the inspector of police
(13:19):
in a city called Luck now like just becomes very
dedicated to capturing this guy. He's probably the first person
to report on the budding con man's m O in
a concerted way. And I'm gonna quote from India today again.
His initial operations involved the swindling of goods from jewelry
stores in large department stores in the cities he visited.
He would first open a bank account in a large bank.
(13:40):
He would then win the confidence of the shopkeepers by
paying for his purchases by checks, which were promptly cashed.
Once he had earned their trust, that Warlow would withdraw
his bank account and on the same day by large
amounts of jewelry and expensive items from the stores, which
he could sell later. He was careful, though, to limit
his purchases to a few thousand rupees so as to
combat any suspicion that might arise. He would then disappear
(14:01):
from the city and another page will be added to
the neat war law legend. So pretty not not super
ambitious cons here, but very smart. You know, he's it's
the same thing. You establish a base line of trust,
you get them to think that your money is good,
and then you steal right. That's how it works. So
he keeps this up for half a decade, uh and
(14:22):
in nineteen until in nineteen forty four, he is arrested
for more fraud, this time in a city called Gorekpor.
Now we don't know how he gets out, but this
arrest marks the first time that he busts himself out
of prison, and it's not going to be his last.
He's re arrested at a metabad in nineteen forty five
and released on bail this time, and then he's re
arrested in Varanasi a few weeks later in connection to
(14:44):
a series of forged receipts issued at a railway station.
This con represented an evolution for net war law. See.
The idea was that he would book railway wagons, posing
as a businessman who needed to transport sugar or some
other commodity. He would actually pay the train company the
salute minimum he could for the smallest amount of space
he could book in their freight section. Then he would
(15:04):
doctor the receipt that he'd given them and make it
look like he had rented much more space on the
train so that he would be able to claim that
he had a lot more sugar or whatever than he
actually had. Then he would travel ahead to the destination
city of the train and he would sell the cargo
to speculators there. So he actually books a tiny amount
of space on the train. He makes it look like
he's booked a lot. He's like, I've got all this
sugar coming in. You want to buy it? You give
(15:26):
me the money. Here's the slit. The train's gonna arrive
in another day. He would show them the fake receipts
is proof that he had the goods, and when they
paid him, he would take the money and run. And
when the fires arrived at the train station to pick
up their commodities, they find only a few bags of
sand and bricks. He's gotten a lot more ambitious here.
He's diversified. As all con men need to do um
(15:46):
and not. Marlow had a few different schemes that one
had to. He had to run a bunch of different
scams and given time to stay solving because all of
these cons require that he have upfront money in order
to make more money later. One of his scams was
to open multiple bank accounts in a city under the
name of a fake company. He would lease office space,
purchase expensive looking furniture, and hire attractive secretaries to staff it.
(16:08):
He would then befriend several bank managers in the city
and wine and dine them, making sure to show off
both his offices and his sexy employees. Once they trusted
him and believed his business was genuine, he would request
to be able to make a large overdraft, so like
basically like, hey, I don't have the money now, I
need you guys to give me a loan and it'll
like you've seen how successful my businesses. I'll have the
cash for you soon. Uh. And the bankers would always
(16:30):
say yes. They would allow him to withdraw huge sums
of money on credit once he had because he's he's
done business with them before he sets up accounts. He
puts money in their banks. It makes it look like
it's a real business. He winds and dines them. You
get there like you give them a little and you
take a long. He has the basic amount of credibility
to get away with. And it's the same thing why
(16:52):
Trump works, right. Trump is is like its like seven
million dollars or something right, because rich guys trust other
rich guys, and that's the way being rich works. You
don't put your own money up for risk. You get
the banks money and like, yeah, so, but he just
takes the money and runs and he abandons the city,
his employees and whatever office he'd rented in the process.
He was caught for one of these schemes in nineteen
(17:13):
fifty three. The Punjab National Bank is the bank that
he conned. In that instance, he was arrested, but he
escaped custody. He was later locked up in Delhi for
the same crime, but disappeared mysteriously again. Details are thin
on a lot of his escapes, but it's generally accepted
that he would just bribe the ship out of all
of his guards. He continued in this vein for more
than a decade, carrying out countless, count countless cons in
(17:35):
more cities than most people ever visit in their lifetimes.
He was arrested again in March of nineteen fifty six
in the city of Mirut, and once the cops who
caught him realized who they had, they started reaching out
to other police agencies across India. After a few days
of phone calls, they realized the man in their charge
was wanted by no fewer than thirty five police departments
and different cities for different schemes. So this is his
(17:58):
first big bust. And he serves ten months in prison
in the rout before being transferred to luck Now to
begin serving time for his crimes in that city. Wait,
so ten months and then what was the rest of
the sentence. I think he's got like another year or
something that he's got to do, But he doesn't do
that year, So he gets transferred to luck Now. Um,
and one of the cops started saying, the detective who
(18:18):
obsessed with him works in luck Now and he gets
to know this guy he's been following during the time
when not Warlal is in jail there, and Sardar claims
that not war Laal immediately established himself as a kingpin
in the jail. He kept access somehow to a huge
amount of grifted cash, and he was able to hire
a special cook who made him all of his meals,
so he has his own private chef in prison. Yeah, yeah,
(18:40):
that's Alex. That's a solid plack, Robert. You know what
else is a solid plex? Uh? That was beautiful that
the RN x knife missile mean my heart melted. Well,
check out these products and services that probably go to
(19:01):
jail in India. Ah, we're back. So that Warlow's in jail.
He's a kingpin there. He's got a special cook his
He convinces his guards to give him the right to
move freely anywhere in the jail he wants to go.
Bottles of liquor were noted to appeariod appear mysteriously at
(19:23):
his dining table in the private cell that the guards
had issued him and his guards refer to him by
his first name because he is paying all of them
very well. Taking have access to all this grouptin money.
I mean, he's you know, he's got a half of
his schemes involved creating a ton of bank accounts. He
has actual bank accounts for his money, but are on
(19:44):
the outside. He's a good scammer, that's how you do it.
Taking advantage of his privileged position in the jail, that
Warlow hatched a scheme to escape. In February of nineteen
fifty seven. He managed to steal an inspector's uniform and
literally walk out the front door of the jail. Guards
saluted him on the way out he disappeared, escaping the
city and somehow traveling to Allahabad, where he checked into
(20:06):
a hotel and then opened an account in a local
bank with a thousand rupees he'd gotten from some forgotten
con Once he had a bank account, that Warlow forged
a demand draft letter and used it to withdraw twenty
thousand rupees he'd never actually had. By the early nineteen seventies,
the list of criminal cases tied to Nat Warlole had
had risen to nearly two hundred. He was caught again
in the city of Kakanada and jailed in nineteen seventy five.
(20:29):
Now Warlole offered the guard keeping him locked in a
ten thousand rupees to help him escape. The guard agreed,
but when he opened the bundle of cash he'd been
given after letting that Warloal escape, he realized that only
the bills on the outside of the packet were real
and the rest were blank paper. Yeah, he's he's He's
a slick guy. In nineteen eighty, Nat Warlow was arrested
yet again in Bombay. He was jailed and immediately started
(20:52):
complaining that he was ill. He was taken to the
hospital where he was treated for a kidney disorder and
the urethical problem. After two weeks in the hospital, he
left in night with a single police constable. Somewhere along
the way he escaped again, probably via bribery. Now there
are rumors that Warlow was something of a robin Hood
figure in his native village of Bihar. There are stories
of him bestowing fortunes on poor people, and over the
(21:14):
years a mystique formed around him, helped by the fact
that he seemed to only conn the wealthy and powerful. Now,
Warlole is said to have once hosted a feast for
everyone in his hometown of Bungara, funded it by his pillages,
and then handed ten thousand rupees to each poor villager
and disappeared into the night before the cops could catch him.
It's impossible to say if this is true. Again, there's
a lot of similar stories about like my cousin pretty
(21:35):
Boy Floyd, that he would while he was on the run,
wind up at some poor old ladies farmhouse and she
would feed him and put him up for the night,
and in the morning she would wake up, he'd be gone,
and there'd be like a hundred dollar bill under his
plate or something, and said that you just said pretty
boy Floyd and that was that was that was his name. Yeah, okay,
was one of the great bank robbers of the gangster
era and also related to Robert Yeah. Yeah, but you said,
(21:58):
it's just like my cousin pretty my grandma great grandma
that he was a cousin to. His last name was Barnes.
But um, what do you think your name is? What
do you think pretty boy Floyd calls you? I have
one good story about him, which is that when I
was in a p English and I think eleventh grade,
we were doing The Great Gatsby and so we have
like a unit on like the thirties, the gangster era, thirties,
(22:22):
and I mentioned that she likes asked if anyone like
knew any famous gangsters other than like al Capone, and
I mentioned pretty boy Floyd. She's like, how do you
know about him? I was like, well, heast my cousin.
And she's like, really, he shot my grandpa in the
leg during a banker opery holy sh it. And I
was like, oh god, I'm so sorry, and she's like, oh, no,
don't be. He's told him not to move, and my
(22:44):
grandpa moved, so he shot him in the leg. She
was like he deserved it. I mean it was a
bank robbery, you know, it was an insured bank. Well,
machete man, Robert, you can continue now, okay, So um yeah, again,
there's a lot of story is about con men and
gangsters and stuff about how how generous. There would be
a lot of these robin Hood stories, and a lot
(23:05):
of them are true in that they did bribe poor
people because number one, it's cheap to buy bribe poor people,
and number two, it's smart because poor people can hide
your ass. You know, if you're gonna be going to
ground a lot, if you're gonna have the cops always
looking after you, you want little people with farms and
like slums and stuff to want to hide your ass,
you know. So again, I'm sure, now Warlald did have
(23:26):
some robin Hood ship. I'm sure it was also mainly
so that he didn't get caught, you know, like that's
it's generally a pretty self served symbiotic relationship. Like they
liked him because he would seem to be against the man,
and he liked them because it's really easy to bribe
poor people, Like a hundred rupees is not a ton
of money. Um, So whatever the truth of why he
(23:49):
was giving them cash. A lot of poor people in
India believed him a hero. A statue was even erected
in Bongara to honor him. I'm gonna quote from an
article in The Times of India Crest edition here. Chandraballa YadA,
a native of Bongara and currently working in the Ministry
of Commerce in New Delhi, is happy to learn of
the development of the statue that they're building. He was
a real hero, he says. He duped hundreds of people
(24:11):
for scores of rupees, but he helped the poor and
spent the entire money on them. It's a sentiment that
finds an amazing echo. It's a matter of privilege for
us that he was one of us, said sud Hasanu Kumar,
who grew up on nt war Lal stories. The legend,
if anything, has only grown. Pan Madi Devi says that
he has even helped people who have dropped nut War
Law's name without really knowing him. Recalling an often told incidents,
(24:32):
she says, once I was traveling in a train from
Allahabad and the train police was after my life because
I was traveling in an express train while I had
a passenger train ticket. He rejected my pleas and was
adamant that he would have to find or detain me.
Then I told him, don't you know I belonged to
that war law's village. Suddenly his demeanor changed and he said,
oh you hail from that war law's village, then you
(24:52):
can travel without a ticket, no problem. Well, so who knows?
That's like? That's that's the like this guy is is huge,
and that certain parts of India like he is. He
becomes a folk by by the seventies, he's a folk
hero um, and he has like a reputation. People respect him,
people respect him, they like him. Cops don't like him,
and cops are not happy when he gets a statue.
(25:13):
But people who aren't cops like him. Um. People who
aren't cops are rich like him a lot. By nineteen
seventy nine, he was famous enough to have a major
Bollywood production made about his life, a movie called Mr.
Nat Warlow, and the movie bears only the vaguest resemblance
to his actual life. It was basically in a complete
work of fantasy, but it was a huge hit and
it cemented the con man's image in popular culture, and
(25:36):
he is still conning in nineteen seventy nine, which is
a great position to be in as a con man
um that like you're he's like a full bona fied
folk hero by this point in time. That's so funny
that the movie was made and he was still doing
it like it's like exposing it and then he's still going, yeah,
still going. After breaking out of Kakanada jail in nineteen eighty,
not Warlole traveled to a different Indian city whose name
(25:58):
I'm not even going to try to pronounce, Like I
know my limits on this stuff. He adopted a new
fake name, Lakshman Narayan and started pretending to be a
businessman from Bombay. He found a new mark, a sugar dealer,
and gradually befriended him. Once they established some trust, not
Warlow put in an order for eighty two thousand rupees
worth of sugar. He asked it to be delivered to
(26:19):
his address in Bombay and paid a four thousand rupee
deposit for the sugar. He promised to pay the rest
upon delivery. It should be obvious at this point that
he had no intention of paying his friend back. Instead,
he traveled to Bombay and met a guy named Mohan Garnani,
president of the local sugar Merchant's Association. He somehow managed
to convince Mohan that he was a close friend of
Mohan's recently deceased uncle. Now that they were buds, nett
(26:40):
Warlow told Mohan, Hey, I got all this sugar for sale.
You want it? Mohan said yes, So nett Warlow sold
him the sugar and took a sixty thousand rupee advance.
When the rest of the sugar arrived, he waived the
remainder of the fee that he'd agreed upon, telling Mohan
that they were going to do more business together and
he could just adjust the extra into that. Then he
fled town and continued his conning career for four more years. Now,
(27:01):
if you look up net Warlow online, you'll find that
he is most famously referred to as the man who
sold the taj Mahal, Which is why I'm putting him
with listing in this because they both sold a bunch
of a bunch of like. He didn't just sell the
taj Mahal. He sold the Red Fort, which is this
massive beautiful building in Jaipur, and he sold the Indian
House of Parliament Um, he's very famous for this, and
(27:23):
that is I wanted that the parliament was pretty interesting
to me. But yeah, they both sold these like world wonders. Yeah,
it turns out to be a great con, and we
will talk about how they did it. But first, you
know what else is a great con? Sharine, I was
just gonna say, capitalism in general, fucking incredible con and
ad breaks. We're back. So the story of how net
(27:48):
Warl sold the taj Mahal. So unfortunately, for as wild
as a story as this is, there's not a whole
lot of hard details. It seems to have been. This
is a con he pulled off, a butt he sold.
We don't know how many times he sold the tosh
the Hall. He did it regularly. This was like a
thing that he would do. So he would he would
dress up as a government official and he would find
wealthy foreign tourists on vacation going to like see the
(28:09):
taj Mahal, and he would have like meals with them
and launch into conversations with them, and then he would
he would kind of do the Eiffel Tower thing, like yeah,
it's pretty, but it's a bit to upkeep. It's very
expensive keeping this taj Mahal thing go on, like keeping
the red for it. It It takes so much money. We're
kind of looking to offload it. You think it's pretty right.
You look like you got some money. Do you wanna?
I mean, you know we we could sell this to
you if you're willing to put down a down payment
(28:31):
right now, like this could be yours. You can make
all of this tourism money a little bit upkeep and
it will be profitable again. Um. And it just works
a bunch. Yeah, this works a bunch. Um. And he
also at some point sells the Indian House of Parliament,
and most versions of the story sell say he sells
it complete with parliamentarians. I honestly have no idea what
that can mean. Um, maybe that like, yeah, it's one
(28:54):
of those things. There's so many stories about this guy.
He definitely con some rich people into buying the taj
Mahal all in the red Fort and some other I
don't know about the parliament thing. There's just not enough
to tails about it, or at least not that I
can find in English. I mean, you gotta respect conning
dumb rich people. It's it's it's beautiful. Yeah, that's how
you get a Bollywood movie made about Yeah. So depending
(29:16):
on where you read about nat War Lal, you'll either
hear that he had ten successful jail breaks. At the
Firing of Things sixty in nineteen four, he was caught again,
this time because he literally bumped into the director of
police for the city of Indoor at a train station.
He was arrested and charged for three pending cases in
that city and sentenced to twenty six years in prison.
(29:37):
So he was supposed to be like this. The story
of this escape is he was supposed to be transferred
from luck Now to the old Delhi rail station and
there was a big crowd at the station because he's
famous and they all want to see this famous Khan
man get led away to prison. So he's also a
kind of a sicker old man at this point, and
he asks the soldier guarding him to get a medicine
pill from like to go get like, like, I don't
have any money, I need you to go to the
(29:58):
pharmacy nearby and pick up some medicine because I'm like,
I'm sick right now. Uh, And I'll pay you guys
back later um. And the soldier goes to get the medicine,
and a couple of cops stand there to guard him
while the soldiers gone. Um, and then that Wila asked
one of the cops to go get water for him. Um.
And then while like so eventually basically sends each of
these guys away, one after the other, and then just
(30:19):
like fucking runs off, goes into the crowd and escapes
and all three of the policeman It's probably he just
bribes them again. Like, none of the versions of this
escape make much sense. I think he's paying these guys off.
The talks money talks, and I think that yeah, and
the con man walks, and he walks again. He was
finally caught for the last time in the mid nineteen nineties,
(30:42):
and he was well into his eighties at this point.
He goes to trial and he's brought before a judge,
who clearly somewhat star struck, asks him how he convinced
so many successful people to part with their money. Now,
wil replies, your honnor, I charge a fee to teach people.
Give me a hundred rupees that I will be glad
happy to tell you this secret of how I caught him.
(31:03):
So the judge. The judge hands him the money and
that Alo smiles and tells him that's how you do it.
Oh my god. Yeah, yeah, everybody likes him, you know. Yeah,
I don't know if baffled that after the movie came out,
he was still able to calm people. Yeah, because the
movie didn't tell any of his real cons like oh
(31:25):
but but but yeah, he had something like sixty different aliases.
He's he's disguising himself and sight he will usually find
out later. I got I got by net Warlow, you know,
and I don't. I don't know. Yeah, I can't confirm
that the story with the judge is true. I found
it on a blog, but it's clearly it's a story
(31:45):
that I found on a couple of sketchy blogs. So
it's a story people tell about him, you know, Like,
I don't know. He's a legend at this point. He's
he's a folk hero in India. You know. He's definitely
a real guy, definitely conned to people. Hard to say
exactly what he did. He's like the ASoP. He's like
the ASoP of of Indian con He escaped for the
last time in nineteen nineties six, when he was being
(32:07):
taken to the hospital again He was wheelchair bound at
this point, and he wound up again at the Delhi
train station, so he shouldn't have been able to escape,
but he did. And I found a contemporary India Today
article that explained in as much detail as I've been
able to find, how Warlow eighty four, who had been
brought up from Kanpoor Jail to the Jet Capitals All
India Institute of Medical Sciences for a checkup, seized his
(32:29):
chance when only the jail sweeper was left to guard him.
After the policeman went to deposit his wheelchair, he asked
for tea, and when the sweeper went to get a cup,
he's simply vanished. We don't know when nat Warloal died.
His brother claims nineteen ninety six. His lawyer claims two
thousand nine. He was eighty four during his last prison escape,
(32:50):
so he's certainly deaf. Eighty four. He doesn't get caught again,
so he dies a free man. You know, I respect
that so much. You gotta respect the guy, I mean,
old man. Yeah, and he still doesn't it still got it?
I respect that. What a hero. You gotta respect that Warlow,
at least based on honestly the fact that we don't
(33:14):
know for sure, just enhances the legendariness. Absolutely. Yeah, that
you get two different people who should know the truth,
telling different stories. Well, Sharie, and that's the end of
our quick little tale about not Warlow. How are you feeling?
Thank you so much for the last I gotta tell
you I said this last time last time as far
(33:37):
as like the previous episode that we just did, but
I'm it's very These ones were fun. You know, every
time we do the show, I'm low key terrified because
I don't want to sound dumb. But also last time, no,
two times ago it was it was very intense time,
but this was so fun. I almost want to come
back again. Next time it's gonna be like genocide or
(34:02):
child molestation or child molesting genociders. Um, I will promise
you that. All right, friends and enemies follow you on
the interwebs, right, Um, well, you can follow me on
Instagram and Twitter if you like. My Instagram is Shiro
Hero s h E E R O A p r
oh and then uh Twitter is shier Hero six six
(34:26):
persons thant give enough Shero Hero yet? But also I
kind of I'm leading into the six six six. I
like it so yeah, yeah, it's it's now's the time
if there's any Also, by Strains, a book of poetry.
Thanks Amazon. I don't want to support Amazon, so if
you want a coffee, you can like vendle me something
(34:47):
and I can send you a PDF. But I'm working
on another one right now. Hopefully I can publish this
scene hopefully. Anyway, thanks again, imm
What sharining my lonnie unuses? Would I have? I have?
I'm trying to figure out what the plural would be.
Would it be Sharene's Lanna units like attorneys general? I
think the last name is you and I. You know,
Sharne's Lana and I sharenus Is, I mean accepted. I'm
(00:29):
literally we're gonna call you sharenus Is from now on.
I'm just letting you know I love it. Grant Taylor
in middle school coined the nickname Sharnie Weenie. I've embraced
what was it? What was his name? Sharie Grant Taylor? Oh,
are they're gonna say Brent Taylor, who's the chuttiest cop
in Portland who got removed from the riot team for
shooting too many people with grenades for no reason? Oh jesus,
(00:52):
I'm gonna say that would have been amazing, not a
creative like insult nickname. That right is beneath you. Yeah,
that person is trash. You know who is also kind
of well, I don't know, we'll decide if he's trash.
You're probably gonna like this guy too. Um, we're gonna
talk about a very special con artist today. A fellow
named not war Lal, who was India's greatest con man.
(01:15):
Now I want to start this by saying, I can't
tell you how accurate most of this is. There are
very few English language sources on his life, and I
couldn't even find a lot of online like Hindi sources
that I could translate. There's very little about this guy
that is credible. There's a couple of like India today,
a couple of like broadly credible websites that have stories
about him on there, but like fuck, it is hard
(01:36):
to find ship about this dude that is not like
some weird little listical or basically there was a Bollywood
movie made about his life that is completely inaccurate. Hard
to tell what is true about this guy, but it's
a fun story. So we're gonna, we're gonna, We're gonna.
I did the best job I could and we're going
to it seems like a through fee with some con artists, right,
like right, it's you don't know what's true. If you
(01:58):
are someone who spends this guy's case, like literally like
sixty straight years lying to people and conning people, it's
gonna be hard to tell out what was true about
your life. You're gonna have very little in the way
of heart details. Um, but all we have about this
dude is fascinating and it's gonna be a fun, short
little story. So Mithilesh Kumar Shrivastava. Srivastava was born in
(02:20):
the village of Bangarra in a place called Bihar, India,
at some point in between nineteen twelve and nineteen twenty five,
which is a pretty wide margin to not know exactly
when this guy was born. Um, it is one of
those things. He's he's he grows up in a small
village in India in the like more than a century
ago and like to this day. So there's this thing,
(02:41):
this big celebration they do every twelve years called the
kumb Mela. I mean to do it every four years,
but every twelve years it's in Allahabad. And every time
it's in Allahabad, it's like the largest gathering of human
beings for any purpose in human history. Like a hundred
and twenty million people came at the last Mela in
Allahabad which I was at. Um when I was there
was about thirty or forty million people at a time
in intensity like it's it's incredibly it's just this unbelievably
(03:03):
massive thing. Sorry, mind dumb. What is it? What is
what is it for? It's it's a it's a religious celebration.
It's a it's a it's a Hindu religious celebration. And
it's so many people go that every year about thirty
thousand or so people disappear. And when I say disappear,
I mean these are people who live in villages so
isolated and so small that they don't have government documents
(03:24):
like that. Their only identity is as a part of
this village, and they get separated from their people and
they're just like people without like a legal life. Like
that still happens in India. That's why this guy. Part
of why this guy's like this, Like we don't have
like government documents about this dude's early life, right, Like
he's born in nineteen twelve and some or or sometime
(03:45):
in between there and some little village. We have very
little about his actual early life about is like government
identity or whatever, which is part of what enables him
to do the conning he does. Right, things are very
chaotic and India during the period where he's growing up,
this is like he kind of comes in his early
adulthood during the period where like the British government, UM
gives up controlling India. So like this guy. Part of
(04:07):
why he's able to get away with so much is
he he lives during a very chaotic time in India
UM and as a result, we know very little about
his early childhood. One version of his story states that
the inciting incident that kind of led to his break
from mainstream society occurred in nineteen thirty two, when he
was a ninth grader at Patna High School. Travastava was
not a good student, particularly when it came to mathematics.
(04:30):
His teachers noted to his parents that he was extremely intelligent,
which led Shrivastava's father to the conclusion that his son
was simply refusing to work hard. Lectures from his dad
turned into yelling and eventually to physical abuse. The first
time Shravastava's father hit him was also the last. Shravastava
fled home the very next day, eventually resurfacing in the
nearby city of Calcutta. This one version of his story,
(04:53):
and it is the version that paints the most sympathetic
picture of young Trevastava. Another version of the story states
that as a preteen, he realized he had the ability
to almost perfectly forge the signature of any person he chose.
One day, a family friend asked him to deposit some
money in a nearby bank. Sharik copied their signature and
later used it to withdraw a thousand rupees from their account.
(05:14):
According to this version of events, Shari's crime was found
out and he was exiled from his village and forced
to flee his home at any rate. By the time
he was in his late teens, he was a lone
and unsupported in Calcutta, So we don't know exactly how
he gets there. There's kind of two versions of the story.
One is his dad beats him and he flees. That's
obviously the more sympathetic. One is he steals from a
family friend and he gets kicked out of the village.
(05:36):
I don't really know which one is true. I mean,
either one I feel like, I don't hate, like it's
not like, yeah, one is more like he's a victim,
but the other one he's desperate and also you know,
like who cares. Yeah, I mean it's they're both good
con artist origin stories. So uh. At that time, Calcutta
was the capital of the British raj and it was
(05:57):
a city defined by its almost unbelievable gap between the
colonial rich they're fortunate chosen Indian allies and employees, and
a seething mass of starving urban poor. It's not for nothing,
that is where Mother Teresa has her like her set up.
She's a problematic figure, but she's there because there's so
much poverty in Calcutta. Few cities in history have been
harder places for a young pubescent boy with no money
(06:20):
to survive. And yet somehow Shravastava managed. He enrolled in
a Bachelor in Commerce to graduate course at Calcutta University,
presumably after lying about his age. We don't know how
he supported himself. He had no relatives in the city,
but somehow he got by long enough to meet and
befriended businessman Seth keshav Ram, who became his first mark.
(06:41):
Seth was in the market for a private tutor for
his children. Servastava knew he could do the job. He
just needed to convince Seth of that. So he produced
a series of testimonials from satisfied parents by forging signatures
and different handwriting styles to make them look like genuine
notes from actual people who actually existed. Seth was only
impressed by how highly recommended this young man was, and
(07:03):
he hired Travastova to teach his son and daughter for
thirty rupees per month. Travastava did this job for several months,
teaching this rich man's children god only knows what, because
he did not have much of an education himself. After
he'd been on the job, awhile Shri asked Seth for
a loan so he could purchase some books. Seth said no.
Depending on who you believe, this was the inciting incident
that really turned Shre against all rich people. He quit
(07:26):
his job and discussed, and he set to work getting revenge. First,
he forged another set of fake credicials and used them
to get a job as the headmaster of a school
that sets kids attended. Seth was impressed. When Srivastava got hired.
He apologized to his former employee and hired him back
as a private tutor for much more money. Shri took
the job, but he had not yet gotten his revenge.
At the time. In Calcutta, there was a serious shortage
(07:48):
of high quality cloth. Shri told Seth that he had
a relative who just come from Bombay with two hundred
bales of cloth that he wanted to sell on the
black market for the low low price of four point
five lack of rupees or four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The cloth could be sets. A lock is like an
Indian unit of measurement that means better a hundred thousand
or so l a k h L. There's this cloth
(08:13):
shortage and Shri is like, hey, I got my guy
coming in. He's got a bunch of this cloth. He's
gonna sell it to you for four hundred fifty thousand rupees,
which is cheap, and you can sell the cloth back
for much more money. Being a businessman, Seth couldn't pass
up the opportunity to make some black market bucks. And
now that Shravastava had proven himself legitimate, Seth was willing
to trust the man with hundreds of thousands of rupees
where he had once been unwilling to trust him with hundreds,
(08:36):
So he agreed to the deal. Once he did, Trevastava
informed him that the situation had changed. His relative had
returned to Bombay, but if Seth, if Seth would send
the cash to that city, he Shravastava would personally guarantee
the delivery of the baals to Calcutta. Seth was willing
to do this, but he insisted Trevastava would have to
go to Bombay with the money and one of Seth's
(08:56):
agents in order to make sure the deal with through properly.
Shri agree and he traveled to Bombay with Seth Man
and I'm gonna quote from a write up in India
today here. On the journey, Shrevastava had cleverly though casually
regaled the agent with stories of Bombay's tough police force
and the ruthless elements in the underworld who had no
compunctions about dispatching any outsider who dared to poach on
their preserves. Understandably nervous, the agent begged Shravastava to leave
(09:20):
him behind and take the money himself to purchase the cloth.
Shravastava agreed and departed, with the route be four hundred
and fifty thousand rupees. He never returned. Instead, he arrived
in Patna a few days later and proudly handed his
father a hundred thousand rupees as a gift. He told
his father that he had become a major shareholder at
a big company in Calcutta. Shravastava returned to Calcutta the
(09:40):
same week, but Seth had heard of his arrival and
sent hired thugs to retrieve the money. Shravastava spun them
a sob story about being chased by the police and
having to abandon the money, but Seth was unconvinced. He
gave Shravastava four days in which to find the money,
failing which he threatened to have him murdered. The moment
Seth left, Shravastova rushed to the police station, where he
lodged a complaint against Seth, alleging Seth had threatened his
(10:02):
life refusing to become his agent for black market deals.
Servastava also gave the police a detailed count of Seth's
clandestine criminal deals. Steals half a million rupees from this
guy and then turns him into the police when he
threatens to murder him. Um so yeah, yeah, I mean
that's what Yeah, that's what he did. It's also like
(10:26):
who are who are you? Who you gonna trust? Right
like the this foreigner you know? Yeah, I mean they're both.
I think it's one of those things. This doesn't wind
up working out for him. So snitching worked at first,
because Seth and his goons get immediately arrested by the
police and taken into custody. Uh. And since Seth was
not a really nice guy, has men have no loyalty
to him, so they immediately confessed to planning a murder.
(10:49):
So now Seth is fucked no matter what, because he's
just been caught attempting to murder somebody, and he decides
to at least take Shri down with him, and he
tells the police that Shar had been trying to set
up an illegal black market cloth deal. So the cops
arrest Tree too, and in December eleven seven, he goes
to jail for the first time. Um, yeah, you know
that's that's that's that's how this started. Yeah, yeah, you
(11:12):
go to the cops, that's what happens. So he gets
sentenced to a six month imprisonment, young and at that point,
not as savvy as he would later be. Sri served
out his whole sentence. He was released and immediately committed
more fraud. We don't know the precise nature of this crime,
but given the stories it's gone so far, it doesn't
take a whole lot of imagination to guess what kind
of ship he got up to. He gets caught a
(11:33):
second time, almost immediately in a sentence to eight more
months of hard labor. He serves his time again and
he decides, after two sentences behind bars, it's time for
him to move his base of operations away from Calcutta.
They know him too well there, so he moves to
Madras and he changes his name to not war Lal,
a name under which he would become one of the
most famous people in modern Indian history. Now, the Madras
(11:55):
police record just one crime by nut war Lal in
their files, another suspected fraud. The fact that they only
caught him once suggest that he'd gotten savvy er after
his second arrest, because if we know one thing about
not war Lala at this point in the story, it's
that he cannot stop himself from conning people. By ninety nine,
he had returned to northern India and for several years
he roams from city to city, conning businessmen out of
(12:16):
there also ill gotten gains. None of his subsequent grifts
were as ambitious as his staff from seft. He steals
twenty thousand dollars rupee from a Khan and for Karabad
forty dollars from a khan and Asamgar. The cases are
individually smaller, but there's a ton of them. He's just
constantly scam scamming tens of thousands of rupees out of people,
and it's more than the law can keep up with.
(12:37):
What kind of people is he scamming? Businessman? It's it's
always like, Hey, I've got some sort of a deal.
I've got this black market deal. You give me the cash,
I'll get this thing, I'll get this study and then
he skips town. You know, that's the way this guy works.
Um and again it's the same kind of thing as
Victor Lustig, where a lot of it's like, I don't
want you to go to the cops, so I'll make
sure you're agreeing to break the law first. Yeah, he
(12:57):
wants to compromise them so they don't. Yeah, they can
ever turn him in, So Sardar, he's he's very fast.
He's constantly skipping cities. Isn't like dozens of cities at
this point scamming people, So the cops are always a
few steps behind him, but he leaves enough of a
pattern that at least one detective becomes obsessed with him.
This guy, Sardar Hari Singh, who's the inspector of police
(13:19):
in a city called Luck now like just becomes very
dedicated to capturing this guy. He's probably the first person
to report on the budding con man's m O in
a concerted way. And I'm gonna quote from India today again.
His initial operations involved the swindling of goods from jewelry
stores in large department stores in the cities he visited.
He would first open a bank account in a large bank.
(13:40):
He would then win the confidence of the shopkeepers by
paying for his purchases by checks, which were promptly cashed.
Once he had earned their trust, that Warlow would withdraw
his bank account and on the same day by large
amounts of jewelry and expensive items from the stores, which
he could sell later. He was careful, though, to limit
his purchases to a few thousand rupees so as to
combat any suspicion that might arise. He would then disappear
(14:01):
from the city and another page will be added to
the neat war law legend. So pretty not not super
ambitious cons here, but very smart. You know, he's it's
the same thing. You establish a base line of trust,
you get them to think that your money is good,
and then you steal right. That's how it works. So
he keeps this up for half a decade, uh and
(14:22):
in nineteen until in nineteen forty four, he is arrested
for more fraud, this time in a city called Gorekpor.
Now we don't know how he gets out, but this
arrest marks the first time that he busts himself out
of prison, and it's not going to be his last.
He's re arrested at a metabad in nineteen forty five
and released on bail this time, and then he's re
arrested in Varanasi a few weeks later in connection to
(14:44):
a series of forged receipts issued at a railway station.
This con represented an evolution for net war law. See.
The idea was that he would book railway wagons, posing
as a businessman who needed to transport sugar or some
other commodity. He would actually pay the train company the
salute minimum he could for the smallest amount of space
he could book in their freight section. Then he would
(15:04):
doctor the receipt that he'd given them and make it
look like he had rented much more space on the
train so that he would be able to claim that
he had a lot more sugar or whatever than he
actually had. Then he would travel ahead to the destination
city of the train and he would sell the cargo
to speculators there. So he actually books a tiny amount
of space on the train. He makes it look like
he's booked a lot. He's like, I've got all this
sugar coming in. You want to buy it? You give
(15:26):
me the money. Here's the slit. The train's gonna arrive
in another day. He would show them the fake receipts
is proof that he had the goods, and when they
paid him, he would take the money and run. And
when the fires arrived at the train station to pick
up their commodities, they find only a few bags of
sand and bricks. He's gotten a lot more ambitious here.
He's diversified. As all con men need to do um
(15:46):
and not. Marlow had a few different schemes that one
had to. He had to run a bunch of different
scams and given time to stay solving because all of
these cons require that he have upfront money in order
to make more money later. One of his scams was
to open multiple bank accounts in a city under the
name of a fake company. He would lease office space,
purchase expensive looking furniture, and hire attractive secretaries to staff it.
(16:08):
He would then befriend several bank managers in the city
and wine and dine them, making sure to show off
both his offices and his sexy employees. Once they trusted
him and believed his business was genuine, he would request
to be able to make a large overdraft, so like
basically like, hey, I don't have the money now, I
need you guys to give me a loan and it'll
like you've seen how successful my businesses. I'll have the
cash for you soon. Uh. And the bankers would always
(16:30):
say yes. They would allow him to withdraw huge sums
of money on credit once he had because he's he's
done business with them before he sets up accounts. He
puts money in their banks. It makes it look like
it's a real business. He winds and dines them. You
get there like you give them a little and you
take a long. He has the basic amount of credibility
to get away with. And it's the same thing why
(16:52):
Trump works, right. Trump is is like its like seven
million dollars or something right, because rich guys trust other
rich guys, and that's the way being rich works. You
don't put your own money up for risk. You get
the banks money and like, yeah, so, but he just
takes the money and runs and he abandons the city,
his employees and whatever office he'd rented in the process.
He was caught for one of these schemes in nineteen
(17:13):
fifty three. The Punjab National Bank is the bank that
he conned. In that instance, he was arrested, but he
escaped custody. He was later locked up in Delhi for
the same crime, but disappeared mysteriously again. Details are thin
on a lot of his escapes, but it's generally accepted
that he would just bribe the ship out of all
of his guards. He continued in this vein for more
than a decade, carrying out countless, count countless cons in
(17:35):
more cities than most people ever visit in their lifetimes.
He was arrested again in March of nineteen fifty six
in the city of Mirut, and once the cops who
caught him realized who they had, they started reaching out
to other police agencies across India. After a few days
of phone calls, they realized the man in their charge
was wanted by no fewer than thirty five police departments
and different cities for different schemes. So this is his
(17:58):
first big bust. And he serves ten months in prison
in the rout before being transferred to luck Now to
begin serving time for his crimes in that city. Wait,
so ten months and then what was the rest of
the sentence. I think he's got like another year or
something that he's got to do, But he doesn't do
that year, So he gets transferred to luck Now. Um,
and one of the cops started saying, the detective who
(18:18):
obsessed with him works in luck Now and he gets
to know this guy he's been following during the time
when not Warlal is in jail there, and Sardar claims
that not war Laal immediately established himself as a kingpin
in the jail. He kept access somehow to a huge
amount of grifted cash, and he was able to hire
a special cook who made him all of his meals,
so he has his own private chef in prison. Yeah, yeah,
(18:40):
that's Alex. That's a solid plack, Robert. You know what
else is a solid plex? Uh? That was beautiful that
the RN x knife missile mean my heart melted. Well,
check out these products and services that probably go to
(19:01):
jail in India. Ah, we're back. So that Warlow's in jail.
He's a kingpin there. He's got a special cook his
He convinces his guards to give him the right to
move freely anywhere in the jail he wants to go.
Bottles of liquor were noted to appeariod appear mysteriously at
(19:23):
his dining table in the private cell that the guards
had issued him and his guards refer to him by
his first name because he is paying all of them
very well. Taking have access to all this grouptin money.
I mean, he's you know, he's got a half of
his schemes involved creating a ton of bank accounts. He
has actual bank accounts for his money, but are on
(19:44):
the outside. He's a good scammer, that's how you do it.
Taking advantage of his privileged position in the jail, that
Warlow hatched a scheme to escape. In February of nineteen
fifty seven. He managed to steal an inspector's uniform and
literally walk out the front door of the jail. Guards
saluted him on the way out he disappeared, escaping the
city and somehow traveling to Allahabad, where he checked into
(20:06):
a hotel and then opened an account in a local
bank with a thousand rupees he'd gotten from some forgotten
con Once he had a bank account, that Warlow forged
a demand draft letter and used it to withdraw twenty
thousand rupees he'd never actually had. By the early nineteen seventies,
the list of criminal cases tied to Nat Warlole had
had risen to nearly two hundred. He was caught again
in the city of Kakanada and jailed in nineteen seventy five.
(20:29):
Now Warlole offered the guard keeping him locked in a
ten thousand rupees to help him escape. The guard agreed,
but when he opened the bundle of cash he'd been
given after letting that Warloal escape, he realized that only
the bills on the outside of the packet were real
and the rest were blank paper. Yeah, he's he's He's
a slick guy. In nineteen eighty, Nat Warlow was arrested
yet again in Bombay. He was jailed and immediately started
(20:52):
complaining that he was ill. He was taken to the
hospital where he was treated for a kidney disorder and
the urethical problem. After two weeks in the hospital, he
left in night with a single police constable. Somewhere along
the way he escaped again, probably via bribery. Now there
are rumors that Warlow was something of a robin Hood
figure in his native village of Bihar. There are stories
of him bestowing fortunes on poor people, and over the
(21:14):
years a mystique formed around him, helped by the fact
that he seemed to only conn the wealthy and powerful. Now,
Warlole is said to have once hosted a feast for
everyone in his hometown of Bungara, funded it by his pillages,
and then handed ten thousand rupees to each poor villager
and disappeared into the night before the cops could catch him.
It's impossible to say if this is true. Again, there's
a lot of similar stories about like my cousin pretty
(21:35):
Boy Floyd, that he would while he was on the run,
wind up at some poor old ladies farmhouse and she
would feed him and put him up for the night,
and in the morning she would wake up, he'd be gone,
and there'd be like a hundred dollar bill under his
plate or something, and said that you just said pretty
boy Floyd and that was that was that was his name. Yeah, okay,
was one of the great bank robbers of the gangster
era and also related to Robert Yeah. Yeah, but you said,
(21:58):
it's just like my cousin pretty my grandma great grandma
that he was a cousin to. His last name was Barnes.
But um, what do you think your name is? What
do you think pretty boy Floyd calls you? I have
one good story about him, which is that when I
was in a p English and I think eleventh grade,
we were doing The Great Gatsby and so we have
like a unit on like the thirties, the gangster era, thirties,
(22:22):
and I mentioned that she likes asked if anyone like
knew any famous gangsters other than like al Capone, and
I mentioned pretty boy Floyd. She's like, how do you
know about him? I was like, well, heast my cousin.
And she's like, really, he shot my grandpa in the
leg during a banker opery holy sh it. And I
was like, oh god, I'm so sorry, and she's like, oh, no,
don't be. He's told him not to move, and my
(22:44):
grandpa moved, so he shot him in the leg. She
was like he deserved it. I mean it was a
bank robbery, you know, it was an insured bank. Well,
machete man, Robert, you can continue now, okay, So um yeah, again,
there's a lot of story is about con men and
gangsters and stuff about how how generous. There would be
a lot of these robin Hood stories, and a lot
(23:05):
of them are true in that they did bribe poor
people because number one, it's cheap to buy bribe poor people,
and number two, it's smart because poor people can hide
your ass. You know, if you're gonna be going to
ground a lot, if you're gonna have the cops always
looking after you, you want little people with farms and
like slums and stuff to want to hide your ass,
you know. So again, I'm sure, now Warlald did have
(23:26):
some robin Hood ship. I'm sure it was also mainly
so that he didn't get caught, you know, like that's
it's generally a pretty self served symbiotic relationship. Like they
liked him because he would seem to be against the man,
and he liked them because it's really easy to bribe
poor people, Like a hundred rupees is not a ton
of money. Um, So whatever the truth of why he
(23:49):
was giving them cash. A lot of poor people in
India believed him a hero. A statue was even erected
in Bongara to honor him. I'm gonna quote from an
article in The Times of India Crest edition here. Chandraballa YadA,
a native of Bongara and currently working in the Ministry
of Commerce in New Delhi, is happy to learn of
the development of the statue that they're building. He was
a real hero, he says. He duped hundreds of people
(24:11):
for scores of rupees, but he helped the poor and
spent the entire money on them. It's a sentiment that
finds an amazing echo. It's a matter of privilege for
us that he was one of us, said sud Hasanu Kumar,
who grew up on nt war Lal stories. The legend,
if anything, has only grown. Pan Madi Devi says that
he has even helped people who have dropped nut War
Law's name without really knowing him. Recalling an often told incidents,
(24:32):
she says, once I was traveling in a train from
Allahabad and the train police was after my life because
I was traveling in an express train while I had
a passenger train ticket. He rejected my pleas and was
adamant that he would have to find or detain me.
Then I told him, don't you know I belonged to
that war law's village. Suddenly his demeanor changed and he said,
oh you hail from that war law's village, then you
(24:52):
can travel without a ticket, no problem. Well, so who knows?
That's like? That's that's the like this guy is is huge,
and that certain parts of India like he is. He
becomes a folk by by the seventies, he's a folk
hero um, and he has like a reputation. People respect him,
people respect him, they like him. Cops don't like him,
and cops are not happy when he gets a statue.
(25:13):
But people who aren't cops like him. Um. People who
aren't cops are rich like him a lot. By nineteen
seventy nine, he was famous enough to have a major
Bollywood production made about his life, a movie called Mr.
Nat Warlow, and the movie bears only the vaguest resemblance
to his actual life. It was basically in a complete
work of fantasy, but it was a huge hit and
it cemented the con man's image in popular culture, and
(25:36):
he is still conning in nineteen seventy nine, which is
a great position to be in as a con man
um that like you're he's like a full bona fied
folk hero by this point in time. That's so funny
that the movie was made and he was still doing
it like it's like exposing it and then he's still going, yeah,
still going. After breaking out of Kakanada jail in nineteen eighty,
not Warlole traveled to a different Indian city whose name
(25:58):
I'm not even going to try to pronounce, Like I
know my limits on this stuff. He adopted a new
fake name, Lakshman Narayan and started pretending to be a
businessman from Bombay. He found a new mark, a sugar dealer,
and gradually befriended him. Once they established some trust, not
Warlow put in an order for eighty two thousand rupees
worth of sugar. He asked it to be delivered to
(26:19):
his address in Bombay and paid a four thousand rupee
deposit for the sugar. He promised to pay the rest
upon delivery. It should be obvious at this point that
he had no intention of paying his friend back. Instead,
he traveled to Bombay and met a guy named Mohan Garnani,
president of the local sugar Merchant's Association. He somehow managed
to convince Mohan that he was a close friend of
Mohan's recently deceased uncle. Now that they were buds, nett
(26:40):
Warlow told Mohan, Hey, I got all this sugar for sale.
You want it? Mohan said yes, So nett Warlow sold
him the sugar and took a sixty thousand rupee advance.
When the rest of the sugar arrived, he waived the
remainder of the fee that he'd agreed upon, telling Mohan
that they were going to do more business together and
he could just adjust the extra into that. Then he
fled town and continued his conning career for four more years. Now,
(27:01):
if you look up net Warlow online, you'll find that
he is most famously referred to as the man who
sold the taj Mahal, Which is why I'm putting him
with listing in this because they both sold a bunch
of a bunch of like. He didn't just sell the
taj Mahal. He sold the Red Fort, which is this
massive beautiful building in Jaipur, and he sold the Indian
House of Parliament Um, he's very famous for this, and
(27:23):
that is I wanted that the parliament was pretty interesting
to me. But yeah, they both sold these like world wonders. Yeah,
it turns out to be a great con, and we
will talk about how they did it. But first, you
know what else is a great con? Sharine, I was
just gonna say, capitalism in general, fucking incredible con and
ad breaks. We're back. So the story of how net
(27:48):
Warl sold the taj Mahal. So unfortunately, for as wild
as a story as this is, there's not a whole
lot of hard details. It seems to have been. This
is a con he pulled off, a butt he sold.
We don't know how many times he sold the tosh
the Hall. He did it regularly. This was like a
thing that he would do. So he would he would
dress up as a government official and he would find
wealthy foreign tourists on vacation going to like see the
(28:09):
taj Mahal, and he would have like meals with them
and launch into conversations with them, and then he would
he would kind of do the Eiffel Tower thing, like yeah,
it's pretty, but it's a bit to upkeep. It's very
expensive keeping this taj Mahal thing go on, like keeping
the red for it. It It takes so much money. We're
kind of looking to offload it. You think it's pretty right.
You look like you got some money. Do you wanna?
I mean, you know we we could sell this to
you if you're willing to put down a down payment
(28:31):
right now, like this could be yours. You can make
all of this tourism money a little bit upkeep and
it will be profitable again. Um. And it just works
a bunch. Yeah, this works a bunch. Um. And he
also at some point sells the Indian House of Parliament,
and most versions of the story sell say he sells
it complete with parliamentarians. I honestly have no idea what
that can mean. Um, maybe that like, yeah, it's one
(28:54):
of those things. There's so many stories about this guy.
He definitely con some rich people into buying the taj
Mahal all in the red Fort and some other I
don't know about the parliament thing. There's just not enough
to tails about it, or at least not that I
can find in English. I mean, you gotta respect conning
dumb rich people. It's it's it's beautiful. Yeah, that's how
you get a Bollywood movie made about Yeah. So depending
(29:16):
on where you read about nat War Lal, you'll either
hear that he had ten successful jail breaks. At the
Firing of Things sixty in nineteen four, he was caught again,
this time because he literally bumped into the director of
police for the city of Indoor at a train station.
He was arrested and charged for three pending cases in
that city and sentenced to twenty six years in prison.
(29:37):
So he was supposed to be like this. The story
of this escape is he was supposed to be transferred
from luck Now to the old Delhi rail station and
there was a big crowd at the station because he's
famous and they all want to see this famous Khan
man get led away to prison. So he's also a
kind of a sicker old man at this point, and
he asks the soldier guarding him to get a medicine
pill from like to go get like, like, I don't
have any money, I need you to go to the
(29:58):
pharmacy nearby and pick up some medicine because I'm like,
I'm sick right now. Uh, And I'll pay you guys
back later um. And the soldier goes to get the medicine,
and a couple of cops stand there to guard him
while the soldiers gone. Um, and then that Wila asked
one of the cops to go get water for him. Um.
And then while like so eventually basically sends each of
these guys away, one after the other, and then just
(30:19):
like fucking runs off, goes into the crowd and escapes
and all three of the policeman It's probably he just
bribes them again. Like, none of the versions of this
escape make much sense. I think he's paying these guys off.
The talks money talks, and I think that yeah, and
the con man walks, and he walks again. He was
finally caught for the last time in the mid nineteen nineties,
(30:42):
and he was well into his eighties at this point.
He goes to trial and he's brought before a judge,
who clearly somewhat star struck, asks him how he convinced
so many successful people to part with their money. Now,
wil replies, your honnor, I charge a fee to teach people.
Give me a hundred rupees that I will be glad
happy to tell you this secret of how I caught him.
(31:03):
So the judge. The judge hands him the money and
that Alo smiles and tells him that's how you do it.
Oh my god. Yeah, yeah, everybody likes him, you know. Yeah,
I don't know if baffled that after the movie came out,
he was still able to calm people. Yeah, because the
movie didn't tell any of his real cons like oh
(31:25):
but but but yeah, he had something like sixty different aliases.
He's he's disguising himself and sight he will usually find
out later. I got I got by net Warlow, you know,
and I don't. I don't know. Yeah, I can't confirm
that the story with the judge is true. I found
it on a blog, but it's clearly it's a story
(31:45):
that I found on a couple of sketchy blogs. So
it's a story people tell about him, you know, Like,
I don't know. He's a legend at this point. He's
he's a folk hero in India. You know. He's definitely
a real guy, definitely conned to people. Hard to say
exactly what he did. He's like the ASoP. He's like
the ASoP of of Indian con He escaped for the
last time in nineteen nineties six, when he was being
(32:07):
taken to the hospital again He was wheelchair bound at
this point, and he wound up again at the Delhi
train station, so he shouldn't have been able to escape,
but he did. And I found a contemporary India Today
article that explained in as much detail as I've been
able to find, how Warlow eighty four, who had been
brought up from Kanpoor Jail to the Jet Capitals All
India Institute of Medical Sciences for a checkup, seized his
(32:29):
chance when only the jail sweeper was left to guard him.
After the policeman went to deposit his wheelchair, he asked
for tea, and when the sweeper went to get a cup,
he's simply vanished. We don't know when nat Warloal died.
His brother claims nineteen ninety six. His lawyer claims two
thousand nine. He was eighty four during his last prison escape,
(32:50):
so he's certainly deaf. Eighty four. He doesn't get caught again,
so he dies a free man. You know, I respect
that so much. You gotta respect the guy, I mean,
old man. Yeah, and he still doesn't it still got it?
I respect that. What a hero. You gotta respect that Warlow,
at least based on honestly the fact that we don't
(33:14):
know for sure, just enhances the legendariness. Absolutely. Yeah, that
you get two different people who should know the truth,
telling different stories. Well, Sharie, and that's the end of
our quick little tale about not Warlow. How are you feeling?
Thank you so much for the last I gotta tell
you I said this last time last time as far
(33:37):
as like the previous episode that we just did, but
I'm it's very These ones were fun. You know, every
time we do the show, I'm low key terrified because
I don't want to sound dumb. But also last time, no,
two times ago it was it was very intense time,
but this was so fun. I almost want to come
back again. Next time it's gonna be like genocide or
(34:02):
child molestation or child molesting genociders. Um, I will promise
you that. All right, friends and enemies follow you on
the interwebs, right, Um, well, you can follow me on
Instagram and Twitter if you like. My Instagram is Shiro
Hero s h E E R O A p r
oh and then uh Twitter is shier Hero six six
(34:26):
persons thant give enough Shero Hero yet? But also I
kind of I'm leading into the six six six. I
like it so yeah, yeah, it's it's now's the time
if there's any Also, by Strains, a book of poetry.
Thanks Amazon. I don't want to support Amazon, so if
you want a coffee, you can like vendle me something
(34:47):
and I can send you a PDF. But I'm working
on another one right now. Hopefully I can publish this
scene hopefully. Anyway, thanks again, imm
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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