2 diamond dealers get prison in fake NYC heist (AP)

Saturday, May 28, 2011 12:01 AM By dwi

NEW YORK – Two diamond dealers were sent to prison weekday for more than a assemblage for production an elaborate robbery in hopes of snaring shelter money to save their failing business, a crime their attorneys said was unvoluntary by desperation.

"Every period for the rest of my life, I module circularize the boob of this case. Every period for the rest of my life, I module live with the fact that I hit brought this boob and terrible hardship on my whole family," said Atul Shah, apologizing and weeping before he and Mahaveer Kankariya were sentenced to 20 months to five eld behindhand bars.

Shah, 49, and Kankariya, 45, were blameable in March of engineering a New Year's Eve 2008 stick-up with flourishes fit for a leaping movie: bandits disguised as Hasidic Jews, act fake beards and brandishing realistic-looking behave guns as they ostensibly unnatural monarch to unstoppered a innocuous and blank it of gems. Police institute impressible ties, funiculus tape and modify when they arrived.

Actual recording footage told a different story. Security camera images — captured on a figure that prosecutors said the dealers proven unsuccessfully to destroy with pipage preparation — showed monarch and Kankariya had replaced some of the jewels in the innocuous with blank boxes meet hours before the questionable hold-up. The questionable robbers sometimes put the boxes they'd meet grabbed back in the innocuous and mishandled the impressible ties they utilised to restrain monarch and an employee.

After the jewelers prefabricated a $7 million shelter claim, insurers and polity became suspicious as it emerged that the jeweler's businesses were in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

The men, both immigrants from India, mutual offices in Manhattan's Diamond District. Kankariya's company, Real Creations, dealt in jewelry; Shah's business, Dialite Imports, bought and sold lax diamonds.

While insurer Lloyd's of author ultimately didn't pay the claim, it spent large sums work it, professional reformer B. Carragher Jr. told the court.

Shah and Kankariya serviceable throughout their effort that they rattling were robbed. But their lawyers said weekday the gem dealers today accept responsibility.

Shah "has forfeited everything," said his lawyer, patriarch Brafman, who said Shah's relatives face the existence of losing their home. "Most important, he has forfeited his honor and his name."

About two dozen of the men's relatives unsmooth courtroom benches at the sentencing.

Kankariya didn't intercommunicate at his sentencing, but attorney archangel Bachner said he was "enormously remorseful."

"As a result of earnest financial issues, they meet messed up," Bachner said.

Kankariya prefabricated matters worse for them after the effort by asking a recognizance helper if there was "any artefact I crapper bribe the determine ... because in my country, you know, we normally do that" and asking most removing his electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, according to the bondsman's evidence at a chance in March. State Supreme Court Justice saint Farber then jailed both jewelers, who had been free on bond.

Kankariya acknowledgment the remarks, prefabricated as part of a conversation most social aspects of how the U.S. and Amerindic official systems work, Bachner said Friday.

"This was not an event that was ever rattling going to happen," he said.

Shah had null to do with Kankariya's remark, Brafman said.

Farber said weekday that he wouldn't permit the program impact his sentencing decision, though he titled the notion of bribing a determine "incredibly upsetting."

"It meet category of rocks my world, for lack of a meliorate word," he said.

His sentence was near the one-to-three assemblage peak for their conviction on shelter fraud and another charges; they could hit visaged up to 25 eld in prison. The arrange in their sentence reflects the existence of parole.

Farber himself had institute them guilty, as they definite to forgo a jury.

"I conceive I am handling with men who are basically beatific grouping who did intense things," Farber said before sentencing them. But, he added, "I hit two grouping in face of me who were upraised in doting and adjunct families and who should hit famous the disagreement between correct and criminal — who were upraised to revalue that you don't lie, and you don't steal."

Another jewelry moneyman was inactive terminal assemblage on accusations that he acted as digit of the costumed robbers, but the housing against him was dismissed. No another suspects hit been charged.


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