How a Rs 30 lakh burglary at Opera house inspired making of Special 26

On the afternoon of March 19, 1987, Arvind Inamdar received an urgent phone call at his office at the Police Headquarters in Mumbai. Inamdar would retire in 2000 as director-general of police for Maharashtra, but he was in the crime division then and this call was about something odd happening in Opera House where Mumbai's most exclusive jewellery stores were located.



Inamdar was told that a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raid had taken place at Tribhovandas Bhimji Zhaveri (TBZ), the most prestigious jeweller of them all.

They came in, pulled down the shutters, ordered customers and staff to wait and took the registers," recalls Inamdar. All that was standard for the CBI, the feared criminal investigation agency, but what happened next was not. "We were told they had taken a lot of jewellery and decamped," says Inamdar.

What the police found was even stranger. The 'CBI team' that staged the raid was still there, except for their leader, who they knew as 'Mohan Singh'.

He had met the team members after placing a classified ad in the March 18 issue of The Times of India, asking for "Dynamic Graduates for Intelligence Officers Post and Security Officers Post".

Applicants were told to come to the Taj Intercontinental, the city's premium hotel, between 10 am and 5 pm. Twenty-six were finally selected, some of them, the Times report would note, already government servants presumably looking for more prestigious jobs.

The team had been told to report to the Taj the next day at 11 am, where Singh had given them their CBI 'identity cards'.

An hour later, they boarded a luxury coach that Singh had hired through the Taj and taken on what they were told was a trial raid.

The target was TBZ and matters went as planned, with Pratap Zhaveri, the owner, and his staff too scared of the CBI to raise any protest or ask for proof. They said later that Singh and his team acted "in perfect raid-like attitude" (whatever that means, as the Times wrote in an incredulous edit after the episode). Singh had then gone around the showcases picking up jewellery as 'samples'. They were placed in polybags and stapled with slips showing a government seal.




Then Singh told the staff to wait as he had to visit another shop, and walked out. He got in the bus and went back to the hotel. The police later found he took a taxi from there, and then, at one point, got into an auto. But there the trail went cold. "We never found a trace of him after that," says Inamdar.

It was not for want of trying. The police put out a nationwide alert, sent a team to Kerala, since Singh had checked into the Taj saying he was from Trivandrum. A man named George Augustine Fernandes was arrested there, but he turned out to be a petty thief. Inamdar says police informers were pumped for possible gang connections, but these did not seem to exist.

They followed up the obvious thought that he was a CBI officer gone rogue, but Inamdar says they did extensive checks of CBI records and discounted that possibility. "We even sent a team to Dubai, because we heard he might be there, but got nothing," he says. Singh appeared to have acted alone and left no traces. "You could say it was the perfect crime," says Inamdar.

Neeraj Pandey read about this story many years later. "I think it was in 2000-01, and it caught my attention because it seemed like such a great story," he says. He kept it in his head and years later, as a filmmaker with the success of his first film A Wednesday under his belt, he set out to make a movie inspired by this story.

The result, Special 26, with Akshay Kumar in the con artist's role, has been one of the first Bollywood hits of the year. It is not a direct reconstruction of the TBZ heist, since it pulls its own confidence trick on the viewers, taking the story in an unexpected direction. But the germ of the idea came from that day in 1987.

Could such a con be pulled off today? It might seem unlikely given the ubiquity of cellphones, CCTV cameras and other security measures. Yet, as we know from stories of email frauds and computer crimes, con artists simply move blithely to appropriate new technology.

The con artist is always with us, and the game the police play in tracking him down, always looking for that tell-tale slip, the one con too far, the trace you can't help leaving behind. And this perhaps is why when Inamdar is asked how he would react if, so many years later, he got another call, from the mysterious Singh, just to touch base with his opponent, he says: "I would ask him how he managed to vanish so perfectly."
ET