Editorial: To catch a thief

The case has all the makings of a potboiler, and it’s no wonder that Sukesh Chandrashekhar’s story is now making its way to celluloid. 

The conman — who enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, with souped-up cars and a penchant for designer goods and Bollywood stars — will possibly go down in history as the country’s most silver-tongued hustler, and in all likelihood, sign a deal with a major production house for a no-holds-barred biopic.

Sukesh, the main accused in a Rs 200 crore money-laundering case, has been in the business of swindling since he was a teenager. A Class 12 drop-out, Sukesh is a Bengaluru boy who discovered that he could make more money using his gift of the gab at the age of 17. 

The seemingly ordinary youngster started his career as a fraudster by cheating people, impersonating government officials on the phone. He managed to dupe over 100 people before finally getting arrested by the Bengaluru police in 2007. However, the arrests didn’t deter him, and he continued his double-dealings and slowly expanded his network to unbelievable proportions.

Tamil Nadu was one of the first to wake up to the scale of his operations when he was named in a bribery case involving AIADMK’s two leaves symbol. Allegedly acting on the behest of TTV Dinakaran, he is said to have taken huge amounts of money promising to swing the party symbol in favor of Sasikala’s faction. 

That sent him to jail, but his ‘business’ flourished behind bars and he continued to run an audacious extortion racket from within Delhi’s Rohini jail. While incarcerated, he not only managed to connect with but also extorted huge sums of money from Aditi Singh, the wife of a former promoter of Ranbaxy. He greased the palms of the jail staff to allow him a free run inside the prison, and as per reports, Sukesh met with at least 10 actors while he was out on bail.

Sukesh’s case has caught the public imagination — not just for the quantum of money involved, but for the deep rot in the bureaucracy that it has laid bare. If a teenager can make a living and a name out of impersonation and bribery, then one can’t help but wonder about how many more illegal activities are going unchecked at all levels of government operations. To be able to drop names of ministers, one must be somewhat familiar with their networks and operations and this is unlikely to happen without the help of people in high places – quite often directly working out of the offices of people the conman claimed to know.

Last week, one of the actors who was accused of receiving gifts from Sukesh turned witness in his case, but this development is unlikely to yield much information. The real mastermind here is Sukesh, who has managed to inveigle a place for himself through corruption and loopholes. 

It’s very unlikely that he managed to do so with no inside help whatsoever. If the ruling party and the law-enforcement agencies are serious about the crackdown on corruption, it won’t be a bad idea to get Sukesh to give them a crash course on how to work the system, getting him to spill the beans on those who aid such wrong-doings. As it is famously quoted, it takes a thief to catch one.