A missing Deutsche Bank exec was buried in a pauper’s grave for 20 years because the city failed to properly investigate when his body washed up near his FiDi home, according to court papers.
Rand Kandoria, an operations officer for international settlements at the prestigious bank, was missing for nearly a week when a pal called the NYPD on Dec. 27, 2004 to report the British native’s disappearance.
Kandoria, 43, lived at 99 John St., where one-bedroom apartments now go for roughly $1 million.
His panicked family back home in the UK filed a missing person’s report and stayed in touch with investigators.
“For months . . . the family repeatedly contacted the NYPD and were repeatedly told that there were no updates,” they said in a Manhattan Supreme Court filing.
Two months after the banker went missing, a body surfaced near Pier 11 in the East River, about a half a mile from his home.
Like Kandoria, the body in the water was male, in his early 40s, and of north Indian descent.
But investigators allegedly failed to make the connection or even check if the missing man’s fingerprints matched the John Doe fished out of the river, the Kandorias claimed in court papers.
Instead, the city sent the anonymous corpse to its longtime land of lost souls: Hart Island.
More than 1 million people have been buried in the 45-acre spit of land off the Bronx, the city’s Potter’s Field for those too poor to afford a proper grave, or with no loved ones to give them a final goodbye.
“For 20 years, the Kandoria family was unaware of what had happened to Rand. They were unable to mourn or process their loss,” according to court papers seeking permission to file a lawsuit after legal deadlines had expired.
Determined to get to the truth, the missing man’s brother, Sham Kandoria, hired private investigator Rosanna Licitra in 2024. In January 2025 he again reached out to the NYPD along with the city Medical Examiner.
Two months later, an NYPD detective delivered the shocking news: Rand had actually been found decades ago.
A staffer in the Medical Examiner’s office told Sham she’d matched the fingerprints of the man in Grave 313 to what the city had on file for Rand. Last year Rand Kandoria’s remains were exhumed, and Sham Kandoria arranged for cremation.
“In August of 2025, Sham traveled to New York to collect his brother’s ashes and [brought] them back to the United Kingdom for a proper burial,” according to court papers.
“After 20 years, the family was finally able to [bury] . . . Rand Kandoria in February of 2026 and receive the closure they so desperately needed.”
It’s not the first time the city failed to realize it had wrongly buried someone on Hart Island.
Queens College student LaMont Dottin was 21 when he left his grandmother’s Hollis home on Oct. 17, 1995 to mail a package — and was never seen again.
Even though his body was found six days later washed up along the East River, and had been identified by the FBI via his fingerprints, no one told the NYPD and Dottin’s body was buried on Hart Island for three years before authorities finally exchanged information and learned the truth, according to reports.
