Part Two: India's Most Famous Con-Man

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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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. 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 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 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.

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 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

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

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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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

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 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