Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

While most of us have been busy reading up on NFL free agency this week, some others have been doing some other heavy reading – specifically, studying up on the all-time greats of the scam game. Dear listener, your ears have been blessed with the soothing sounds of my voice for the past ten weeks, but this week, I have a real treat for you. I think it’s safe to say that our Hall of Famer this week is a one-man masterclass in the art of the scam – an all-around savant in conning people. He’s the sum of every single technique you’ve learned thus far, polished and honed to a keen shine. Listen on, faithful customers…

NATWARLAL: REALTOR, TRAIN FAN, AND ESCAPE ARTIST

BORN: 1912, Bangra, Bihar, India

DIED: July 25, 2009 (whereabouts unknown)

As a con artist, it’s very important that you know your market before you embark on making a living. Without the proper knowledge at hand, you’ll never have what it takes to be a closer. This week’s Hall of Famer was a real closer – real estate scams are incredibly difficult to pull off, but it’s clear that our subject had some dynamite ability to close a deal – no matter the legality of it.

Our scammer was born as Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava in the small village of Bangra in the state of Bihar, in northeastern India. As one of the more impoverished parts of the country, many residents end up moving to other locales for education and economic opportunities – a trend which has existed since the arrival of the British East India Company in the mid-18th century. For Natwarlal, his departure was necessitated due to a forgery. As a young man, Natwarlal was asked to take some of his neighbor’s bank drafts to the bank for him – and after realizing he was skilled at forging the neighbor’s signature, made off with a thousand rupees. He ran off to Calcutta, far away from the scene of the crime, where he enrolled in a bachelor of commerce program and worked part-time as a stock broker. Shortly after completion of his studies, he went to prison for six months for stealing nine tonnes of iron… and his story really kicks into high gear after that.

When “poisoning” prostitutes with tainted liquor (no, they didn’t die… at least most of them, I think) to steal their jewelry and cash became too risky, he tried to enter the textile industry – with a (somewhat) legit business. That didn’t work either, but did give him the nickname Natwarlal, which would become nationally renowned due to his outrageous exploits in the decades to come. This came from assuming the identity of one of his close associates, who tried to swindle fabric dealers out of large orders of cotton.

After school, stockbroking, scamming prostitutes, and trying to sell fabric, Natwarlal returned to his usual trade of pulling off serious cons. Armed with a university education, financial skill, and an incredibly impressive knowledge of the Indian national railway system (as his father was a station master in Bihar), Natwarlal was able to step up his scamming game in a major way. His skill as a forger allowed him to create hundreds of fake documents and over fifty fake identities, which helped to bilk hundreds of thousands of rupees out of unsuspecting victims. He wore disguises. He forged celebrity signatures. He did just about every single thing that could have ever possibly been done in order to con people out of cash, bank drafts, jewelry, watches, and much more.

Some of Natwarlal’s all-time greatest cons:

• He scammed wealthy business families like the Tatas (founders of multinational conglomerate, including Tata Motors), Birlas (wealthy industrialists who traded in everything from poppy seeds to gunny sacks to cars to silk to aluminum), and Ambanis (founder of Reliance Industries, the largest publicly traded company in India) out of hundreds of thousands of rupees.
• He sold the Taj Mahal – allegedly three separate times!
• He sold the Red Fort (home of the Mughal Emperors of India pre-East India Company.
• He sold the Rashtaprati Bhavan (official residence of the Indian president);
• He sold the Parliament House of India – along with all of the members of Parliament!

Natwarlal was the subject of over a hundred separate criminal cases, and racked up, at the bare minimum, at least 113 years’ worth of prison time for his crime (just in the state of Bihar alone – that’s not counting charges from every other state of India!). Nobody is actually quite sure, as a number of police records in some Indian states were lost in severe flooding back in the 1950s… the likelihood is that the actual total is astronomically higher. However, due to his skill as a con artist (and his propensity for charm, bribery, and disguises), he escaped eight separate times from various prisons across the country. All in all, he spent, in all likelihood, only about 20 years of his life in prison – a remarkably low number considering the extent of his crimes.

When it comes to prison escapes, absolutely nobody on Earth had as much as flair as Natwarlal. Of all of his escapes, his break out of the Kanpur prison in 1957 is probably the greatest the world’s ever seen. For this escape, he had an associate smuggle a police officer’s uniform into his cell; to get out of his cell, he bribed the guards with a briefcase full of cash. Once out of the cell, he simply walked out of prison; the remainder of the guards took him to be a cop, and let him waltz off into a waiting car. When the car broke down, Natwarlal simply commandeered a hearse and continued on his journey. Better yet – when the bribed guards opened the briefcase… it was filled with newspapers. And then it spontaneously combusted.

In another memorable prison break in Mumbai in 1980, he faked kidney pain in order to be taken to the hospital. While in the cop car, he bribed the cop to take him to a hotel, needing more money to pay for his doctor’s visit… and while at the hotel, managed to escape.

Natwarlal’s final escape happened in 1996, when he was 84 years old. Despite being frail and forgetful, confined to a wheelchair, he managed to escape police custody yet again, sneaking away as he was escorted to medical care by prison staff. He was never seen again.

True to form, nobody’s even sure the exact year of his death, due to his success in evading the cops so well. His lawyer lists his death as having occurred on July 25th, 2009, but Natwarlal’s brother claims that he was cremated in 1996. Regardless of his fate, what is entirely clear is that he was a legendary figure in Indian history; back home in his village of Bangra, townspeople revere him as a Robin Hood-like figure due to his generosity – he was quick to share his fortune with those who were less fortunate. While he spent lavishly on others, he typically dressed quite modestly – in part to avoid attracting attention, but also due to a propensity for living simply. Also, that whole plausible deniability thing too – who knows? By targeting only the wealthy, and not using violence in his scams, Natwarlal’s legend will live on for quite some time – he’s even been the subject of Bollywood blockbuster films “Mr. Natwarlal”, released 1979 (starring the legendary Amitabh “Big B” Bachchan), and referenced heavily in “Raja Natwarlal”, released 2014. Even today, Indian con artists tend to see themselves compared to Natwarlal – his influence remains so vast in India that he continues to inspire thousands of criminals across the globe.

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You want some quotes from the man? Have I got some goddamn quotes for you. “Leave me free for an hour and I’ll get thousands and thousands of rupees from the same street where I took money. And the people would give it to me willingly.” Holy shit. “As long as there is one dishonest cop, I will always find a way to get out [of prison].” THAT is Hall of Fame scammer material right there, people.

The man was the Tom Brady of the scam game. We’ll never see the likes of him again. What a legend. What a thrill. I get chills just even mentioning his name. Until next time, everyone – gotta get back to forging coaching contracts, in the hopes that some team somewhere won’t pay attention to the fax machine and will give me a job as a quality control coach. God, I miss being on staff. Remember, dial 1-900-FAST-BUX now and you’ll get fifty cents off for every minute you spend on the phone with me – listen to some more super-exclusive content straight away!

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.