In the 1980s, when Wayanad’s hills thrived on the spice trade, pepper and cardamom were more than crops. They were currency. Long before CCTV cameras and digital trails, policing here relied on instinct, legwork, and the sharpness of human memory.
A retired police officer, who began his career as a sub-inspector in Sultan Bathery, still remembers one case that captured the spirit of that era.
“It was one of my first major cases,” he recalled. “A wealthy farmer reported that 10 sacks of pepper and five sacks of cardamom had disappeared overnight from his godown. Each sack weighed about 50kg. That was a fortune.”
The pressure was immediate. In those days, missing spices meant serious money and influential voices. Senior officers wanted answers quickly.
“We reached the spot by around 11.30 am,” he said. The godown stood slightly away from town, ringed by arecanut trees. At first glance, nothing seemed amiss. But the lock told a different story. It was intact, with no sign of a break-in.
“That’s when we knew, the culprit wasn’t an outsider. It was someone who knew the place.”
Inside, the pattern was even clearer. Rice sacks, coir bundles, and other goods lay untouched. They took only pepper and cardamom. “Whoever did this came with a plan. They knew exactly what they wanted.”
The investigation narrowed to a familiar circle — workers who handled the stock, the night watchman who was found unconscious, and a lorry driver who had delivered goods the previous evening.
“With no cameras, we had to think differently,” he said. “Moving that much produce won’t go unnoticed. Someone, somewhere, would have seen it.”
So officers began checking petrol pumps, roadside tea stalls, and informal checkposts where drivers often stopped and left behind small, human traces.
The first real break came from a tea shop near Kalpetta.
“The owner remembered a jeep passing unusually late,” the officer said.
“Heavily loaded and covered with a tarpaulin, even though there was no rain. What stood out was the driver — he argued over the price of tea.”
That small, almost trivial detail became the thread that unravelled the case.
“By about 4 pm, we had identified the driver as Reghu, a local transporter who was no stranger to the godown,” he said. When police examined his jeep, they found what they needed-pepper grains lodged deep in the wooden floor gaps.
“That was enough to confront him.” Reghu denied it at first. But sustained questioning wore him down.
He had not even had time to clean the vehicle, as he continued his usual trips to avoid drawing attention. Eventually, he confessed and led the police to the insider.
Babu, a worker at the godown, had been watching the market closely. Spice prices were rising fast, which meant the stock would be moved sooner. Greed did the rest.
“He had managed to access the keys briefly and made a duplicate,” the officer said. “He then staged it as if the original key was accidentally misplaced and later found.”
On the night of the theft, he mixed a mild herbal sedative into the watchman’s coffee powder, exploiting his routine of drinking several cups through the night. From nearby bushes, he kept watch and alerted Reghu at the right moment.
Once the watchman lost consciousness, Reghu entered the compound from the rear, scaled the low boundary wall, and joined Babu inside. Together, they loaded the sacks quietly and drove them across the Karnataka border, where scrutiny was looser back then.
Recovering the loot was a challenge in itself.
“There was no instant coordination then — no alerts, no shared databases,” the officer recalled. “We had to travel ourselves, working with local police and persuading people to talk.”
By the time they traced the trail by late evening the next day, most of it was sold off. Only four sacks were intact. Looking back, the officer noted the case turned not on technology, but on mistakes.
“Babu’s mistake wasn’t stealing, but selling too fast. In small trade circles, word spreads quickly.”
“And Reghu”, he added with a faint smile, “made a smaller mistake. He argued over tea. That made him unforgettable.”
In an age without surveillance, it was memory that solved the crime.
“A tea shop owner’s recollection, a few grains of pepper, and a man who stood out for the wrong reason,” the officer said. “That’s all we had — and that’s all it took.”
