Petrzela says Banerjee"s lawyers tried hard to avoid the seizure of the enterprise, but to no avail. In October 1994, a day before he was to be sentenced, Banerjee killed himself in his jail cell."Very few Indian Americans know his story," says Anirvan Chatterjee, who organises a South Asian radical history walking tour in Berkeley. Banerjee"s life was "the funhouse mirror version of the standard 1990s Indian California business story", he says, and it contradicted every stereotype about the community.