Behind the Bastards - Part Two: India's Most Famous Con-Man

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Robert is joined again by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the tale of Natwarlal, India's greatest con-man. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's shireening my Loni unises? I'm trying to figure what the plural would be. Would it be shereen's Loni unis like attorneys general? I think the last name is uni. I mean, I accept it. I was literally only going to call you shireenas from now on. I'm just letting you know. I love it so. Grant Taylor in middle school coined the nickname shireeny weeny. I've embraced. What was his name, shireen? Grant Taylor. Oh, I thought you were going to say Brent Taylor, who's the shuttiest cop in Portland, who got removed from the riot team for shooting too many people with grenades for no reason. Oh, Jesus. I'm going to say shireen. That would have been amazing. That's not a creative like insult nickname. That's right. Right. Right. Right.

Is beneath you. Yeah. That person's trash. You know who is also kind. Well, I don't know. We'll decide if he's trash. You're probably going to like this guy, too. But we're going to talk about a very special con artist today, a fellow named Nat Warlal, who was India's greatest con man. 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 like broadly credible websites that have stories about him on there. But like, fuck, it is hard to find shit about this dude that is not like some weird

little listicle 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 going to, we're going to, we're going to, I did the best job I could and we're going to talk about. It seems like a through theme with some con artists, right? Right. It's, you don't know what's true. If you are someone who spends in this guy's case, like literally like 60 straight years lying to people and conning people, it's going to be hard to tell what was true about your life. You're going to have very little in the way of hard details. But what we have about this dude is fascinating and it's going to be a fun short little story. So Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava,

Srivastava was born in the village of Bangra in a place called Bihar, India at some point in between 1912 and 1925, which is a pretty wide margin to not know exactly when this guy was born. It is one of those things. 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, this big celebration they do every 12 years called the Kumbh Mela. I mean, they do it every four years, but every 12 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 120 million people came at the last Mela in Allahabad, which I was at. When I was there,

it was about 30 or 40 million people at a time in a tent city. Like it's, it's incredibly, it's just this unbelievably massive thing. Sorry, am I dumb? What is it? What is, what is it for? It's, it's, it's a religious celebration. It's a, it's a Hindu religious celebration. And it's so many people go that every year about 30,000 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. Like they, 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, 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 1912 and some or, or 1925, sometime in between there in some little village. We have very little about his actual early life, about his like government identity or whatever, which is part of what enables him to do the conning he does, right? Things are very chaotic in India during the period where he's growing up. This is like, he kind of comes into his early adulthood during the period where like the British government gives up controlling India. So like this guy, part of why he's able to get away with so much is he, he lives during a very chaotic time in India. 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 1932 when he was a ninth grader at Patna High School. Shrivastava was not a good student, particularly when it came to mathematics. 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 Shrivastava's father hit him was also the last. Shrivastava fled home the very next day, eventually resurfacing in the nearby city of Calcutta. This is one version of his story, and it is the version that paints the most sympathetic picture of young Shrivastava.

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. Shri copied their signature and later used it to withdraw a thousand rupees from their account. According to this version of events, Shri'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. Don't really know which one is true. I mean, either one, I feel like, I don't hate, it's not like, yeah, one is more like he's addicted, but the other one, he's desperate and also, you know, like who cares? Yeah. I mean, it's there are both good con artist origin stories, right? Yeah. So at that time, Calcutta was the capital of the British Raj. And it was a city defined by its almost unbelievable gap between the colonial rich, their fortunate chosen Indian allies and employees and a seething mass of starving urban poor. It's not for nothing. This is where Mother Teresa has her like her setup. 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 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 befriend a businessman, Seth Keshav Ram, who became his first mark. Seth was in the market for a private tutor for his children. Shravastava 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 duly

impressed by how highly recommended this young man was. And he hired Shravastava to teach his son and daughter for 30 rupees per month. Shravastava 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 a while, 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 Shri against all rich people. He quit his job and discussed and he set to work getting revenge. First, he forged another set of fake credentials and used them to get a job as the headmaster of a school that Seth's kids attended. Seth was impressed when Shravastava 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 of high quality cloth. Shri told Seth that he had a relative who'd just come from Bombay with 200 bales of cloth that he wanted to sell on the black market. For the low, low price of 4.5 lock of rupees or $450,000, the cloth could be Seth's. A lock is like an Indian unit of measurement. It means about like 100,000 or so. How do you spell it? Is it just lock? L-A-K-H. L-A-K-H, okay. Yeah. There's this cloth shortage and Shri is like, hey, I got my guy coming in. He's got a bunch of this cloth. He's going to sell it to you for 450,000 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 Shrivastava had proven himself legitimate, Seth was willing to trust the man with hundreds of thousands of rupees, where he'd once been unwilling to trust him with hundreds. So he agreed to the deal. Once he did, Shrivastava informed him that the situation had changed. His relative had returned to Bombay. But if Seth would send the cash to that city, he, Shrivastava, would personally guarantee the delivery of the bales to Calcutta. Seth was willing to do this, but he insisted. Shrivastava would have to go to Bombay with the money and one of Seth's agents in order to make sure the deal went through properly.

Shri agreed and he traveled to Bombay with Seth's man. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in India today here. On the journey, Shrivastava 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 Shrivastava to leave him behind and take the money himself to purchase the cloth. Shrivastava agreed and departed with the 450,000 rupees. He never returned. Instead, he arrived in Patna a few days later and proudly handed his father 100,000 rupees as a gift. He told his father that he had become a major shareholder in a big company in Calcutta. Shrivastava

returned to Calcutta the same week, but Seth had heard of his arrival and sent hired thugs to retrieve the money. Shrivastava spun them a sob story about being chased by the police and having to abandon the money. But Seth was unconvinced. He gave Shrivastava four days in which to find the money, failing which he threatened to have him murdered. The moment Seth left, Shrivastava rushed to the police station where he lodged a complaint against Seth, alleging Seth had threatened his life for refusing to become his agent for black market deals. Shrivastava also gave the police a detailed count of Seth's clandestine criminal deals. So, steals half a million rupees from this guy and then turns him into the police when he threatens to murder him. So, yeah.

That's a pretty good move. That's what you do, bro. Yeah, that's what he did. It's also like, who are you going to 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. And since Seth was not a really nice guy, his men have no loyalty to him. So, they immediately confessed to planning a murder. 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 Shri had been

trying to set up an illegal black market cloth deal. So, the cops arrest Shri too. And in December 11, 1937, he goes to jail for the first time. Yeah, you know, that's how this starts. Yeah, yeah. You go to the cops. That's what happens. Right. So, he gets sentenced to a six month imprisonment. Young and at that point, not as savvy as he would later be, Shri 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 shit he got up to. He gets caught a 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 Natwarlal, a name under which he would become one of the most famous people in modern Indian history. Now, the Madras police record just one crime by Natwarlal in their files, another suspected fraud. The fact that they only caught him once suggests that he'd gotten savvier after his second arrest, because if we know one thing about Natwarlal at this point in the story, it's that he cannot stop himself from conning people. By 1939, he had returned to Northern India and for several years, he roams from city to city,

conning businessmen out of their also ill-gotten gains. None of his subsequent grifts were as ambitious as his theft from Seth. He steals $20,000 rupee from a con in Fakharabad, $40,000 from a con in Asmgar. The cases are individually smaller, but there's a ton of them. He's just constantly scamming tens of thousands of rupees out of people, and it's more than the law can keep up with. What kind of people is he scamming? Businessmen. 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 thing, and then he skips town. That's the way this guy works. 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. Exactly. He wants to compromise them, so they can't ever turn him in. So Sardar, he's very fast. He's constantly skipping cities. He's in 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 in the city called Lucknow, like just becomes very dedicated to capturing this guy. He's probably the first person to report on the budding con man's MO in a concerted way. And I'm going to 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. 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, Netwarlal would withdraw his bank account and on the same day, buy 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 from the city and another page will be added to the Netwarlal legend. So pretty not not super ambitious cons here, but very smart. You know, he's, he's, you, it's the same thing. You establish a baseline of trust,

you get them to think that your money is good and then you steal. You know, right? Yeah. That's how it works. He keeps this up for half a decade. And in 19 until in 1944, 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 Amidabad in 1945 and released on bail this time. And then he's re-arrested in Varanasi a few weeks later in connection to a series of forged receipts issued at a railway station. This con represented an evolution for Netwarlal. 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 absolute minimum he could for the smallest amount of space he could book in their freight section. Then he would 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 me the money. Here's the slit. The train's going to arrive in another day. He would show them the fake

receipts as proof that he had the goods. And when they paid him, he would take the money and run. And when the buyers arrived at the train station to pick up their commodities, they'd find only a few bags of sand and bricks. So he's gotten a lot more ambitious here. He's diversified as all con men need to do. And not while all had a few different schemes. He had to run a bunch of different scams at any given time to stay solvent, because all of these cons required 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. 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 they 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 business is. I'll have the cash for you soon. And the bankers would always say yes, they would allow him to withdraw huge sums of money on credit. Because 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 wines and dines them, you get their trust.

He gives them a little dish with the same amount of seeds. You give them a little, then you take a lot. He has the basic amount of credibility to get away with the drift. Okay. And it's the same thing way Trump works, right? Trump is like, oh, it's like $700 million 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 bank's 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 1953. 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 shit out of all of his guards. He continued in this vein for more than a decade, carrying out countless countless cons in more cities than most people ever visit in their lifetimes. He was arrested again in March of 1956 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 35 police departments in different cities for different schemes. So this is his first big

bust and he serves 10 months in prison in Mirut before being transferred to Lucknow to begin serving time for his crimes in that city. Wait, so 10 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 Lucknow. And one of the cops, Sardar Singh, the detective who's obsessed with him, works in Lucknow. And he gets to know this guy he's been following during the time when Natwarlal is in jail there. And Sardar claims that Natwarlal 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. I respect that. Yeah. That's a flex. That's a solid flex. Yeah. Robert, you know what else is a solid flex? That was beautiful. That the R9X knife missile. So he just went down in my heart melted. I didn't get you, Shreem. Well, check out these products and services that probably won't go to jail in India. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the

FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without

parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So Net Warlow's in jail. He's a kingpin there. He's got a special cook. 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 appear mysteriously at 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. But how does he still have access to all this gripped in money? I mean, he's got a fuckload of half of his schemes involved creating a ton of bank accounts. He has actual bank accounts for his money. He's probably got people that are better on the outside. He's a good scammer. That's how you do it. Taking advantage of his privileged position in the jail, Net Warlow hatched a scheme to escape. In February of 1957, 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 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 man draft letter and used it to withdraw twenty thousand rupees he'd never actually had. By the early 1970s, the list of criminal cases tied to Net Warlow had had risen to nearly 200. He was caught again in the city of Kakanada and jailed in 1975. Net Warlow 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 Net Warlow escape, he realized that only the bills on the outside of the packet were real and the rest were blank

paper. Well, yeah, he's a slick guy. In 1980, Net Warlow was arrested yet again in Bombay. He was jailed and immediately started complaining that he was ill. He was taken to the hospital where he was treated for a kidney disorder and a urethral problem. After two weeks in the hospital, he left at midnight with a single police constable. Somewhere along the way, he escaped again, probably via bribery. Now, there are rumors that Net Warlow was something of a Robin Hood figure in his native village of Bahar. There are stories of him bestowing fortunes on poor people and over the years a mystique formed around him, helped by the fact that he seemed to only con the wealthy and powerful. Net Warlow was said to have once hosted a feast for everyone in his hometown of

Bangra, 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 boy Floyd that he would, while he was on the run, wind up at some poor old lady's farmhouse and she would feed him and put him up for the night. 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 that's probably true. You just said pretty boy Floyd and that was. That was his name. Yeah. Okay, cool. He was one of the great bank robbers of the gangster era. And also related to Robert. Yeah. Yeah, but you said it's just

like my cousin pretty boy Floyd. My great-grandma that he was a cousin to, his last name was Barnes, but 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 AP English in, I think, a 11th grade, we were doing the Great Gatsby. And so we had like a unit on like the 30s, the gangster era, 30s, 30s. Yeah. And I mentioned that she like 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, he's my cousin. And she's like, really? He shot my grandpa in the leg during a bank robbery. Holy shit. 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 grandpa moved. So he shot him in the leg. She was like, he deserved it. Yeah. 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 stories about con men and gangsters and stuff about how generous there would be. A lot of these Robin Hood stories. And a lot of them are true in that they did bribe poor people because, number one, it's cheap to bribe poor people. And number two, it's smart because poor people can hide your ass. You know, if you're going to be going to ground a lot, if you're going to 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 Nat Warlall did have some Robin Hood shit. I'm sure it was also mainly so that he didn't get caught. You know? Yeah, it was like self-serving. It was generally pretty self-serving. Symbiotic relationship. Like they liked him because he would seem to be against the man. Yeah. And he liked them because it's really easy to bribe poor people. Yeah. Like a hundred rupees is not a ton of money. So whatever the truth of why he was giving them cash, a lot of poor people in India believed him a hero. A statue was even erected in Bangra to honor him. I'm going to quote from an article in the Times of India Crest edition here. Shandrabali Yadav, a native of

Bangra 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 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 Sudhasan Kumar, who grew up on Nat Warlall's stories. The legend, if anything, has only grown. Panmati Devi says that he had even helped people who have dropped Nat Warlall's name without really knowing him. Recalling an often told incident, 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 belong to Nat Warlall's village? Suddenly his demeanor changed and he said, oh, you hail from Nat Warlall's village, then you can travel without a ticket. No problem. Wow. So who knows if that's true. This guy is huge in at least certain parts of India. He becomes a folk. By the 70s, he's a folk hero. He has 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. But people who aren't cops like him. People who aren't cops are rich like him a lot. By 1979, he was famous enough to have a

major Bollywood production made about his life, a movie called Mr. Nat Warlall. 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. He is still conning in 1979, which is a great position to be in as a con man. He's like a full bonafide folk hero by this point in time. It's so funny that the movie was made and he was still doing it. It's like expensing it and then he's still going. Yeah, still going. After breaking out of Kakkanada jail in 1980, Nat Warlall traveled to a different Indian city whose name I'm not even going to try to pronounce. Like I know my limits on this stuff. He adopted a new fake name Lakshmi

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, Nat Warlall put in an order for 82,000 rupees worth of sugar. He asked it to be delivered to his address in Bombay and paid a 4,000 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 Granani, president of the local Sugar Merchants Association. He somehow managed to convince Mohan that he was a close friend of Mohan's recently deceased uncle. Now that they were buds, Nat Warlall told Mohan, Hey, I got all his sugar for sale. You want it?

Mohan said yes. So Nat Warlall sold him the sugar and took a 60,000 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, if you look up Nat Warlall 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 lipstick in this because they both sold 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. He sold the Indian House of Parliament. He's very famous for this.

The parliament line is 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, Shareen? Raytheon. I was just going to say capitalism in general, fucking incredible con and ad breaks. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass. And you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev.

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So the story of how Nat Warlul sold the Taj Mahal. So unfortunately, for as wild as the 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 bun he sold. We don't know how many times he sold the Taj Mahal. 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 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 bitch to upkeep. It's very expensive keeping this Taj Mahal thing going. You're like, even the Red Fort, you take 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 want to, I mean, you know, we could sell this to you if you're willing to like put down a down payment right now. Like this could be yours. You could make all of this tourism money, a little bit of upkeep,

and it'll be profitable again. And this works a bunch. Yeah, this works a bunch. And he also at some point sells the Indian House of Parliament and most versions of the story say he sells it complete with parliamentarians. I honestly have no idea what that can mean. Maybe like, yeah, it's one of those things. There's so many stories about this guy. He definitely conned some rich people into buying the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort and some other, I don't know about the parliament thing. There's just not enough details about it, or at least not that I can find in English. I mean, you've got to respect conning dumb rich people. It's beautiful. Yeah. That's it. You get a Bollywood movie made about it. Yeah. Yeah.

So depending on where you read about Net War Law, you'll either hear that he had 10 successful jail breaks or the firing of things 60. In 1984, he was caught again, this time because he literally bumped into the director of police for the city of Indore at a train station. He was arrested and charged for three pending cases in that city and sentenced to 26 years in prison. So he was supposed to be like, this, the story of this escape is he was supposed to be transferred from Lucknow 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 con 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 pharmacy nearby and pick up some medicine because I'm like, I'm sick right now. And I'll pay you guys back later. And the soldier goes to get the medicine and a couple of cops stand there to guard him while the soldier's gone. And then Net War Law asked one of the cops to go get water for him. And then while like, so eventually he basically sends each of these guys away one after the other. And then just like fucking runs off, goes into the crowd and escapes. And all three of the policemen, it's probable he just bribes them again. Like none of the versions of this escape make much sense. I think he's paying these guys off. They all get fired. It's always the money.

Money talks again. 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 1990s. And he was well into his 80s at this point. He goes to trial and he's brought before a judge who clearly somewhat starstruck asks him how he's convinced so many successful people to part with their money. Net War Law replies, your honor, I charge a fee to teach people. Give me a hundred rupees that I will be glad, happy to tell you the secret of how I caught. So the judge hands him the money and smiles and tells him that's how you do it. Oh my God. So beautiful. Yeah, everybody likes him, you know. Yeah. I don't know. I'm like 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. But didn't people know what was going for anything or no? And he's good at disguise. Yeah, he had something like 60 different aliases. He's disguising himself and stuff. He will usually find out later. I got by Net War Law, you know? Right. Wow. And 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 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 a folk hero in India, you know? He's definitely a real guy, definitely con to people. Hard to say exactly what he did. He's like the Aesop of Indian con.

He escaped for the last time in 1996 when he was being 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 Net War Law 84, who had been brought up from Kanpur jail to the jet capitals, all India Institute of Medical Sciences for a checkup, seized his 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 simply vanished. We don't know when Net War Lull died. His brother claims 1996.

His lawyer claims 2009. He was 84 during his last prison escape. So he's certainly dead. He was 84. He was 84. And he doesn't get caught again. So he dies a free man, you know? I respect that so much. You got to respect the guy. I mean, as little as we know about him. He was 84 years old man. Yeah. And he fucking does it. He still got it. I respect that. What a hero. You got to respect Net War Law, at least based on the little we know about him. He died a free man in the end. He died a free man, probably. Which only, honestly, the fact that we don't know for sure just enhances the legendariness of it all. Absolutely. Yeah, that you get two different people who should know the

truth telling different stories. Great. Wow. Well, Shereen, that's the end of our quick little tale about Net War Law. How are you feeling? Thank you so much for it. Yeah. Honestly, the last, I got to tell you. I said this last time, last time as far as the previous episode that we just did. But it's very, these ones were fun. 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 a very intense time. But this was so fun. I almost want to come back again. Well, next time it's going to be like genocide or child molestation or child molesting genociders. I will promise you that. All right, friends and enemies.

Shereen, where can people follow you on the interwebs? Right. Well, you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter if you'd like. My Instagram is ShiroHeroS-H-E-E-R-O-A-P-R-O. And then Twitter is ShiroHero666. That person hasn't given up ShiroHero yet on Twitter. But also, I'm leading into the 666. I like it. Yeah, it's on brand. Now's the time, if there's any. Also, Bishareen is a book of poetry. Oh, thanks. It's on Amazon. I don't want to support Amazon. So if you want a copy, you can venerate me with something. I can send you a PDF. But I'm working on another one right now. Hopefully, I can publish it soon.

Hopefully. Anyway. Bye. Thanks again. Bye. Bye. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space,

with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.