It may not be another Monica Bedi-Abu Salem story, but budding South starlet and TV anchor Leena Maria Paul, who was arrested from a posh south Delhi farmhouse last week for aiding her fraudster beau pull off some audacious con jobs, may have been a victim of her own ambitions.
The Chennai Police are grilling her now to get to her lover, Sukesh Chandrasekhar Balaji, who fled in a Land Cruiser when the police closed in on their Delhi hideout last week.
Leena, who trained to be a dentist in Bangalore but was smitten by cinema and TV, did bit roles in a few Malayalam movies as well as part-time anchoring for a Malayalam TV channel. She was keen on Bollywood; the only break she got was another bit role in John Abraham's yet to be released Madras Café. According to the Bangalore Police, Leena ran into the suave and intelligent Chandrasekhar - he is two years younger than her - while she was studying in Bangalore, away from her NRI parents in Dubai where she grew up.
The son of a car mechanic in Bangalore who toiled to put him through Baldwin's Boys High School, Chandrasekhar was a brilliant young man with big ambitions. He had dropped out of school while in Class X and police sources say Leena and he fell in love rather quickly. "It's still not clear if Leena actually knew and abetted his early capers," a police officer says.
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Police sources say Chandrasekhar began his conman career early, and was first arrested two years ago when he was barely 21. That was when he convinced a Chennai businessman that he was DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi's grandson, and could swing a state government deal for him.
The businessman paid him Rs.1.49 lakh only to soon realise that he was duped. Chandrasekhar was arrested on April 6, 2011 and spent a few weeks in jail before he obtained bail, only to vanish.
The case (Crime No. 82/ 11, booked at Cubbon Park Police Station) is still pending trial.
Police sources add the young con artist also conned a Bangalore hosiery businessman convincing him that he was Janata Dal leader and former Karnataka CM H.D. Kumaraswamy's son.
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He had also staged his act in Hyderabad, passing off as the nephew of late chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy.
In many of his later capers, his victims did not even get to see him. Big cars, costly couture and luxury watches were always his pet obsessions.
In Delhi last week, the Chennai and Delhi Police whom he gave the slip, found nine luxury cars in his driveway, and no less than 81 watches costing crores in his rented farmhouse.
But Leena was apparently of a different cut. Some of her former co-workers say Leena has always been a down- to- earth girl who struggled hard for a foothold in TV and films but never made it big. Even while her hooded arrest pictures and film stills flashed across TV and newspaper pages, very few in Kerala realised that an important Malayalam TV channel, Amritha TV, was then airing a half- hour woman- oriented show called Snehitha that she anchored, for a content provider called Mother Media. She had figured in some 250 episodes, but was on the screen for barely a couple of minutes in each. The channel later replaced her with another anchor after her arrest.
"We were shocked. We could not imagine her as a fraudster, maybe her live-in partner Chandrasekhar trapped her into it," suggests an insider in her production team.
Leena was not making big money, she was paid a piddly Rs.750 per episode. "Her presentation was limited to just one or two minutes in each episode and she used to record some 10 episodes at one go, often making Rs.7500 for a day's work," a production team source said.
A female anchor of a Malayalam news channel says, "Chandrasekhar used to accompany her to the recording studios, hang around and fawn over her.
She was so infatuated with him, and he was so possessive about her, that I once asked Leena how she hoped to cope up with such a fiercely possessive chap." Leena and Chandrasekhar had gone off the radar in Kerala for a few months after a prominent silk showroom in Kochi, Emmanual Silks filed a case against Chandrasekhar for cheating, after he took ` 20 lakh from them promising to bring Bollywood actor Katrina Kaif for a promotion event. It was only after Chandrasekhar got a stay order from the Kerala High Court against his arrest that Leena got back for anchoring.
Their courtship could have paled any of the sugary flicks she had appeared in. An anchor recalls how Chandrasekhar pulled a distraught Leena back from depression, when a lifestyle show that she anchored was abruptly pulled off air for want of sponsors. "Chandrasekhar then organised an expensive candle- lit party in a five- star hotel in Kochi just to humour her. She too was equally in love with him. Once someone on the movie set accidentally broke a pink cellphone Chandrasekhar had gifted her. She wept inconsolably.
"She was a very simple and humble girl," a friend said.
Those who knew her in Malayalam moviedom say she was introduced to them by a fashion coordinator in Kochi. Leena was then modelling for hoardings of the public sector Meat Products of India Ltd and a matrimony website. "She told us her roots were in Angamali of Thrissur and her parents and brother were working in Dubai. It was only once that we saw her mother at the production house. It was Chandrasekhar who was always with her," a source says, adding, "he was crass and boastful."
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