Tag: arrested
Ex-Chicago Official Held In Pakistan

Ex-Chicago Official Held In Pakistan

By John Byrne and Aoun Sahi, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — Former Chicago Comptroller Amer Ahmad has been taken into custody in Pakistan, where he apparently fled ahead of his sentencing in a federal fraud case in Ohio.

Ahmad was arrested at an airport in Lahore when he was trying to enter the country using a forged Mexican passport and a forged Pakistani visa, said Usman Anwar, director of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency in Punjab province.

“Our officers at the airport found that his passport and visa were forged,” Anwar said. “We also recovered his original American passport, which he tried to hide. Then we searched his history on Google and found that he was guilty of fraud in U.S. and wanted (by the) FBI.

“We have arrested him under (a) passport and visa fraud case, which carries a punishment of seven years of imprisonment in Pakistan.”

Ahmad’s apprehension comes about a week after his wife filed a request for an order of protection in Cook County in which she alleged he was seeking a fake passport to go to Pakistan.

Samar Ahmad said her husband called April 23 and told her to get him a fake birth certificate from Pakistan so he could get a passport. When she refused, Samar Ahmad said her husband “became irate and threatened that if I didn’t do this he intimated that he would ruin or hurt me,” according to the court document.

Samar Ahmad also said in the written request that she was “very concerned” her husband “will kidnap our children and take them to Pakistan.”

“He believes that (he) is not guilty (and) deserves a life with the children and repeatedly gets very angry if I say anything, abusive and slapped me when we had gotten into an argument and he became irrationally angry,” the request for an order of protection reads.

“He threatened to take my daughter and he told her that she would never see me or her siblings ever again and that they were going to see Allah,” the document reads.

The U.S. Marshals Service announced last week they were looking for Ahmad on an arrest warrant for violating terms of bail in the case, in which he pleaded guilty to participating in a kickback scheme while deputy state treasurer in Ohio before being hired by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel as comptroller in 2011.

Ahmad pleaded guilty in December to bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery, money laundering and wire fraud, months after he abruptly stepped down from his top job in the Emanuel administration. Ahmad was indicted weeks after he resigned.

Federal prosecutors in Ohio alleged while he was deputy state treasurer there, Ahmad gave state investment work to a former high school classmate in exchange for having $400,000 funneled to a landscaping company in which Ahmad was a part owner. An additional $123,000 was funneled through a friend and business associate of Ahmad’s, prosecutors said.

Asked about his former aide’s arrest Wednesday, Emanuel said he has been too busy with other issues to spend much time thinking about it.

“I’ve got to be honest, sorry about this, but let me give you this sense of reaction: I was thinking about plastic bags before Amer. I was thinking about petcoke regulations before Amer. I was thinking about how proud we all are of the Whitney Young basketball team, of their accomplishments on the court and in the classroom,” Emanuel said. “That all came before that, so, gives you some sense of perspective on it.”

After Ahmad was indicted, Emanuel brought in an outside law firm and an accounting business to audit his work for the city. A report issued by those firms last year said there was no indication Ahmad committed any wrongdoing at Chicago’s City Hall. Ahmad’s attorney declined to comment on reports of Ahmad’s apprehension.

afp.com / Arif Ali

Man Charged With Capital Murder In Kansas Shooting Rampage

Man Charged With Capital Murder In Kansas Shooting Rampage

By Tony Rizzo, The Kansas City Star

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Johnson County prosecutors on Tuesday filed two types of murder charges against a 73-year-old avowed racist and anti-Semite in the shootings deaths of three people outside Jewish facilities in Overland Park.

Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., better known as F. Glenn Miller, is charged with one count of capital murder in the killings of 69-year-old Overland Park doctor William Lewis Corporon and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, outside the Jewish Community Center where Reat was auditioning for a talent contest.

A capital murder conviction carries a life sentence without parole unless prosecutors seek the death penalty, Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe said. Under Kansas law, Howe doesn’t have to make a decision on seeking the death penalty until after a preliminary hearing.

Miller is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Terri LaManno, 53, a Kansas City mother of three who was shot outside Village Shalom senior living facility, where she had gone to visit her mother.

A first-degree murder conviction carries a life sentence with no parole possible for at least 25 years.

Miller, who was arrested about 20 minutes after the first shootings, is being held in lieu of a $10 million bond.

Though the killings happened at Jewish facilities, all three victims were Christians.

Howe announced the charges at a Tuesday morning press conference. He was accompanied by Barry Grissom, U.S. attorney for the District of Kansas. who said he does not anticipate any federal charges to be filed within the next week.

“Before I make any decision, I want all the facts,” said Grissom, who said that he is comfortable at this point with moving forward on federal hate crime charges.

A federal conviction could carry a death penalty, depending on what charges are filed and whether the Department of Justice decides to seek the death penalty — a decision that would be made in Washington, Grissom said.

One criteria that makes a case eligible for a federal death penalty is if a convicted felon uses a weapon in a hate crime, Grissom said.

Miller was convicted of a federal felony on weapons charges in the 1980s.

Since Johnson County filed state charges before the filing of any federal charges, Miller will be tried in state court first, Howe said.

The case remains under investigation, Howe said. There is a good possibility of additional state charges being filed, he said.

Capital murder is the most serious charge a person can face in Kansas, which does not have a hate crime charge.

Under Kansas law, the intentional and premeditated killing of more than one person “as a part of the same act or transaction or in two or more acts or transactions connected together or constituting parts of a common scheme or course of conduct” is one of the limited circumstances that capital murder applies.

Though two people were killed outside the Jewish Community Center, only one charge was filed in their deaths because the deaths occurred as part of the same act.

Howe said he would consult with members of the victims’ families before deciding whether to see a death sentence.

“I don’t plan to make a knee-jerk decision on that,” he said. “I want all the facts.”

Howe and Grissom declined to talk about evidence in the case. Neither would discuss a possible motive.

Aided by tips from witnesses, two Overland Park police officers spotted Miller inside the car he had driven away from the shooting scenes. The officers ordered Miller to surrender and he did without incident, said Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass. Several weapons were recovered, including a shotgun and handgun, Douglass said.

Miller, of Aurora in southwest Missouri, is scheduled to make his first appearance in Johnson County District Court Tuesday afternoon.

Tammy Ljungblad/Kansas City Star/MCT

Man, 73, Charged In Bank Robbery, Is Arrested Again

Man, 73, Charged In Bank Robbery, Is Arrested Again

By Mark Schipper, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — The 73-year-old man at the Chicago Transit Authority bus stop caught the attention of police officers last month as they approached the 5700 block of North Ashland Avenue in their cruiser. Wearing a black coat and winter hat, he matched surveillance photos from an attempted bank robbery a few blocks away just 45 minutes earlier.

“I’m already in trouble,” Roosevelt Gordon announced to officers when asked where he was coming from, according to the arrest report. “I took some money from a bank a couple of months ago.”

In fact, five months earlier, a federal judge had given Gordon a break by releasing him to home detention after his arrest in connection with one bank holdup and two attempted robberies. Now authorities say Gordon — once an ordained minister, according to his family — is suspected in two additional attempted bank robberies last month while out on bond. He is being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago.

At a detention hearing in October, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cole implored Gordon to stay out of trouble when he ordered him released to home with electronic monitoring. Prosecutors had sought detention, but Cole appeared to make up his mind after Gordon first appeared in his courtroom a day earlier.

“Please, I’m begging you. Just stay home, enjoy your wife, stay out of her way, whatever you need to do,” the judge said. “But don’t do anything wrong. You can’t violate any state, federal or local law. And you can’t have guns and you can’t have liquor to excess and you can’t use narcotics. It’s real common sense.”

Gordon’s brother Otis, who has talked to him only a few times in the last few years, said he and the rest of his large extended family — their parents had 13 children — learned of Gordon’s arrest last fall on TV. He hadn’t heard of the two most recent robbery attempts until a reporter talked to him last week.

“Shocked, the whole family,” the brother said from the living room of his house in the Austin neighborhood. “The whole family was calling each other. We would have put him up, whatever, would have paid his rent, but he was used to money. He wanted to live that lifestyle, but he didn’t have to do that. That was his pride. That’s what pride will get you.”

Gordon had been a trucker by trade in addition to his work as a minister, according to his brother. He had come into a substantial amount of money from an insurance settlement after a trucking accident and spent freely until it was gone, said his brother, who has had limited contact with him since 2012.

“He was a really good person. He shared money with the family when we, you know, we was not destitute but struggling,” Otis said. “But he lost a lot of money … He liked Cadillacs. He was definitely used to having money.”

After his first arrest last fall, Gordon told FBI agents that he decided to rob a bank after he and his wife were evicted from their apartment several months earlier, the charges alleged. Police records show he was convicted of aggravated battery in the 1990s and was sentenced to probation.

Two separate criminal complaints against Gordon paint a picture of an ineffective bank robber. A number of tellers didn’t take him seriously when he announced a robbery despite his indications in some cases that he was armed. In his last holdup attempt, he implied he had a handgun concealed under a stocking cap pulled over his left hand. Another time he threatened to kill a teller, according to the charges.

When tellers hesitated, Gordon usually mumbled something about being in the wrong bank and calmly walked out empty-handed, the charges allege. He left four of the five robberies without any money, authorities said.

His only successful holdup occurred Sept. 24 at a BMO Harris Bank branch on West Monroe Street, 10 minutes after he failed to rob another downtown bank, authorities said. Even then, the teller asked him, “Are you serious?” Assured he was, the teller removed all the loose cash in the drawer. Gordon, wearing a baseball cap and blue button-down shirt, tucked the $3,721 in cash into a jacket pocket and coolly said goodbye to the unsuspecting security guard as he walked out, according to the complaint.

He was arrested Oct. 16 while waiting to catch a CTA bus after an unsuccessful attempt to hold up a nearby Bank of America branch at on North Racine Avenue., according to the charges.

After his release Oct. 18 under the electronic monitoring program, Gordon was allowed to leave his home to attend church, visit doctors, shop for groceries and collect his Social Security check. He was also cleared to attend mental health counseling in November.

Gordon apparently heeded the judge’s advice and stayed out of trouble, but for only a few months.

On March 17, the charges allege, he tried to rob the Albany Bank and Trust in the 3400 block of 3400 West Lawrence Avenue but left without any cash. Three days later, he was arrested at a bus stop shortly after he attempted to hold up a Fifth Third Bank branch on North Ashland Avenue without success, authorities said. Officers found no weapon on him.

Not surprisingly, Gordon’s lawyer this time didn’t attempt to win his release from custody.

In October, the judge made it explicitly clear to Gordon what would happen if he got in any kind of trouble while out on bail. If Gordon was late for or missed an appointment with officials in the same courthouse the next day, he would be jailed again, Cole warned.

“I’ll be here,” Gordon said.

AFP Photo/Frederic J. Brown

Bachmann Evangelical Staffer Was Arrested For Terrorism In Uganda

One of Michele Bachmann’s top Evangelical organizers that helped her cruise to victory in Ames on Saturday was arrested for arms dealing in Uganda right before elections there in 2006:

Peter E. Waldron spent 37 days in the Luriza Prison outside Kampala, where he says he was tortured, after being arrested along with six Congolese and Ugandan nationals for the weapons, which were described variously in news reports as having been found in his bedroom or a closet in his home. The charges, which could have led to life in prison, were dropped in March 2006 after a pressure campaign by Waldron’s friends and colleagues and what Waldron says was the intervention of the Bush administration. He was released and deported from the east African nation, along with the Congolese. On Saturday, Waldron told The Atlantic in Ames that he was a staffer for Bachmann and responsible for her faith-based organizing both in Iowa and South Carolina. But he also declined repeatedly to give his name.

Asked about Waldron’s role and background, Alice Stewart, the press secretary for the Bachmann for President campaign, replied in an email: “Michele’s faith is an important part of her life and Peter did a tremendous job with our faith outreach in Iowa. We are fortunate to have him on our team and look forward to having him expanding his efforts in several states.”

At the time of his arrest, Waldron was hailed on one right-wing blog as being “an arms dealer of the Lord” and “the latest victim of Christian persecution in Africa.” But his allies seeking to free him said he was being persecuted for his reports in the “Africa Dispatch” newsletter about Ugandan opposition activities, and that he denied that he owned or was storing weapons.