The Idol Thief.(Vaman Narayan Ghiya)

Early one morning in June, 2003, two dozen police officers drew their guns and prepared to raid a stately three-story brick-and-concrete home on a corner lot in Everest Colony, a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Indian city of Jaipur. Several khaki-clad officers scaled the imposing stone wall surrounding the house, disarmed a guard, and opened the gate. Under the gaze of a security camera, the rest of the team filed silently onto the property. The raid was the culmination of a yearlong investigation and months of surveillance, during which officers had posed as vagrants and fruit peddlers. They had timed the strike for dawn, hoping to startle the inhabitants.

The officers called out, "Open the door!" and banged on the locked front entrance. They waited, but no one came. Then someone spotted smoke billowing from a third-floor window. The superintendent of police, Anand Shrivastava, ordered his men to break down the door. They ran upstairs to the master bedroom, where they found the owner, Vaman Narayan Ghiya, standing in his pajamas, hurriedly throwing documents into an improvised fire on the floor.

"How dare you?" Ghiya shouted. "How could you enter my house?" He cursed at the officers who rushed to restrain him, struggling and shouting, "You cannot touch me!"

The police led Ghiya away, and gathered his wife, son, and two daughters, who had been awakened by the raid. Then Superintendent Shrivastava and his men searched the house, spending hours rummaging through the elegant rooms. Behind the wood panelling of Ghiya's private study, the officers discovered a set of secret cupboards, which held hundreds of photographs of ancient Indian sculptures: graceful stone figures of the deities Vishnu, Shiva, and Parvati and Parvati's elephant-headed son, Ganesha; Jain Tirthankaras and Chola bronzes; dancing goddesses with many arms and melon breasts, festooned with delicately rendered ornaments. The photographs were color snapshots, and the objects pictured sat outdoors, in patches of grass or mud. Many evidently had been roughly pried away from temple walls and were missing limbs or heads. The police also discovered sixty-eight glossy auction catalogues from Sotheby's and Christie's in London and New York.

This stash seemed to confirm Shrivastava's suspicion that Vaman Ghiya operated one of the most extensive and sophisticated clandestine antiquities rings in history, and that he had grown rich in the past three decades by smuggling thousands of Indian antiques to auction houses and private collectors in the West. The police found no sculptures in Ghiya's home. But, in the days that followed, Shrivastava's men raided half a dozen properties that Ghiya owned around Jaipur, his farm outside the city, and various godowns, or storage facilities, in Mathura and Delhi. They discovered antique paintings, swords and shields, marble panels, stone pillars, three hundred and forty-eight pieces of sculpture, and a dismantled Mogul pavilion the size of a small house.

Vaman Ghiya was an enigma in Jaipur's tight-knit art world. A handsome man with silvering hair, small, nervous eyes, and an aloof, imperious manner, he wore elegant suits and conducted business in Jaipur's nicest hotels. People who know him say that he spent much of the year travelling and maintained a single-minded focus on business. He distrusted even his closest associates. "He wouldn't make small talk. He just wanted to do the deal," one of his buyers told me. "He was totally opaque."

Ghiya's legitimate business was the Crafts Palace, a colossal handicrafts showroom on Jaipur's Amer Road. Jaipur is a prosperous city of nearly three million people, the capital of the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. With its picturesque old quarter--known as the Pink City, for its grapefruit-colored architecture--and elaborate Rajput palaces in the surrounding countryside, Jaipur has long been a major stop on the tourist route through India. It is the center of India's gemstone industry, and of a flourishing trade in handicrafts--small, mass-produced brass animals and other figurines that are sold to tourists and exported in bulk.