On an evening in the late 1990s, when Abdul Karim Telgi spent more than Rs 80 lakh, an amount enough to buy twenty kilograms of gold at that time, on a dancer in a Mumbai dance bar, the police, politicians and the underworld immediately took notice. Who was this person? What business did he own? How had a man who was selling peanuts on a railway station a few years ago become so rich?

In 2001, when Telgi was arrested by Mumbai Police, his fake stamp paper scam was arguably the biggest in Indian history, at an estimated Rs 30,000 crore. As Sanjay Singh, then a young

reporter with NDTV-who eventually exposed the scam in 2003-discovered, there was more to it than just the mindboggling numbers. The quality of the stamp papers, which were printed on 'obsolete' machines reportedly obtained from the government's closely guarded security press in Nashik, was so good that it was difficult to tell them apart from the real ones.

Crafty and resourceful, Telgi kept the racket flourishing for more than a decade by involving not just government officials but also management executives who 'professionally'

expanded his network.