NEW YORK - When Basdeo Somaipersaud's body was found in his favorite park in 1998, his family assumed he cracked his head during one of his drinking binges. But an autopsy detected small puncture wounds on his torso, and a sedative sometimes used to treat schizophrenia in his system.
Authorities now say Somaipersaud was injected with lethal doses of the sedative chlorpormazine while he was in a defenseless, drunken stupor _ and then his killers tried to cash in on his life insurance policy.
Two men from Somaipersaud's tight-knit Guyanese community in Queens face trial Wednesday on federal murder charges. They are accused of killing four people, but investigators have said several more may have died in a scheme to collect more than $1 million from life insurance policies the victims never knew about.
If convicted, Richard James, 46, and Ronald Mallay, 61, could face the death penalty.
Lead defense attorney Kenneth Kaplin denied the allegations, and claimed prosecutors built the case on the flimsy testimony of shady coconspirators who were "given deals by the government."
James _ a former insurance agent known for hosting a cable television show featuring Guyanese music and dance _ and Mallay, an ex-postal worker, have been formally accused in the poisoning and shooting deaths of four victims, two in the United States and two in Guyana since the 1990s.
Court papers allege $300,000 was collected from the death of Mallay's nephew in 1999 in Guyana, where he was killed with alcohol and ammonia. Two shooting deaths in the 1990s, one in Queens and another in Guyana, also were part of the conspiracy, investigators said.
In the case of Somaipersaud, MetLife paid out $84,000 in proceeds. Investigators say most of the money was secretly funneled back to James.
MetLife discovered the scheme after noticing that 21 death claims had been filed from policies written by James within a few years. The rate "was approximately 318 percent higher than expected (and) ... a large number of deaths were violent or under unusual circumstances," court papers said.
MetLife fired James in July 2000 and notified authorities, who put him under surveillance.
In 2002, investigators caught him on audiotape trying to pay an informant $25,000 to kill another victim with a mix of alcohol and drugs to collect insurance, court papers said.
"The higher the dose, the better," he allegedly told the informant.
Before the plot could be carried out, agents arrested James trying to flee to Guyana with a large amount of cash, authorities said. Both he and Mallay were ordered held without bail after pleading innocent to federal murder conspiracy charges.
Investigators say the murder-for-profit scheme mostly victimized down-and-out alcoholics such as Somaipersaud.
The second of 10 children and known as "Hilton," Somaipersaud was born into poverty in Guyana, his sister, Jasmatie Seejattan, told The Associated Press in an interview shortly after the arrests in 2002. In 1979, he arrived in New York, where he worked odd jobs and sent money to his wife and two children back home.
Somaipersaud's weakness was scotch. He would stash quart bottles in his pocket, then take drinks whenever "he got lonely," his sister said.
After Somaipersaud's family and some of his siblings followed him to New York, he began complaining to them about mysterious wounds, including needle marks.
"We didn't pay attention to him because he was drinking," she said.
Somaipersaud, 42, apparently didn't know James or Mallay. But authorities say James had covertly written an insurance policy on his life with a family member of the agent as beneficiary.
Another cooperator later told investigators that in 1998 he turned down $5,000 from Mallay to kill a "drunk" who hung out at Smokey Oval Park, court papers said.
A few days later, Somaipersaud was found dead there.
Okay, if you get a way with it once, why do you keep going? And policies with the same company, come on now.
Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 06:28 am Post Subject:
Sometimes you can't help appreciating the master mind of these scammers, though they may be scavenging on the ill-fated ones, like- Somaipersaud, but they also remind us of the fact that this world is no longer the good place to live. What else one can say after reading this........
Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 01:09 pm Post Subject:
These masterminds can not be happy with one big payday though, they always get caught because they want more money, hence take out another policy and kill another person.
What ever happened to get a job? These guys were just stupid and no ones life is worth money.
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 02:49 am Post Subject:
And if you think that's bad...
'NEW YORK — The cash-strapped regime of North Korea, which has a worldwide reputation for its criminal dealings in weapons sales, drugs and near-perfect counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, may have found a new illicit source of hard foreign currency: international reinsurance fraud.
A growing number of major underwriters around the world strongly suspect that communist dictator Kim Jong-Il's regime is running an elaborate major insurance and reinsurance scam on them, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars or more.
The alleged fraud involves a wide variety of North Korean industrial and personal calamities where insurers have been presented with perfect government-controlled documentation of accidents, including deaths, along with carefully gathered photographic evidence, all compiled in a startlingly brief time.
That paperwork is coupled with a resistance to letting foreign insurance adjusters examine some of the most crucial physical evidence, except after long delays and under a watchful eye, if at all.
The growing concern in the reinsurance industry is that the property damage being claimed is vastly overstated, and the circumstances of some alleged accidents may have been altered, or that deaths for which insurance payment is claimed may have had nothing to do with the accidents.
Massive Insurance Fraud Death is hardly a rare thing in North Korea, where millions are estimated to have expired from famine, flood and government repression in the past decade — but the number of apparently ordinary people in the dictatorship who have suddenly been found to have foreign-backed life insurance is raising insurers' eyebrows.
The chief concern is that only the Kim Jong-Il regime — a government that is known to be brutal, unscrupulous and desperately short of foreign currency — controls the information required to trigger the payments.
According to Michael Payton, a lawyer who represents several of the major insurers, the full extent of the reinsurance claims may involve more than $150 million. U.K. insurers facing these claims have only just begun to talk to each other about the potential scale of their North Korean losses.
North Korean insurance risk is also handled in a wide variety of other Western European markets, and as far away as Russia, India and Indonesia.
So far, there is little attempt to begin discussing the fraud possibilities across those national boundaries.
"I've never seen anything like it before," said Payton, senior partner in the London-based international law firm of Clyde & Co., which specializes in insurance law. "The apparent involvement of the state in every detail of these claims, coupled with the impossibility of obtaining the usual corroborative facts independent of the state, makes these claims unique, in my experience."
The suspected scam involves the huge international market for reinsurance, in which insurers reduce their risk on every kind of accident, from environmental catastrophes and crop failure to airline and auto crashes, by reselling much of their policy exposure to other syndicates of insurers outside their own countries. Huge sums are routinely covered in reinsurance; globally, the reinsurance market last year was valued at some $1.5 trillion.
One of the world's most important reinsurance markets is Lloyd's of London, some of whose syndicates are represented by Clyde & Co. But a number of major players in the global reinsurance market have exposure to North Korean claims.
The reinsurance industry has been badly staggered in recent years by huge claims from storms like Hurricane Katrina and terrorist disasters like the Sept. 11 attacks. In such a huge pool of often-complicated risk deals, North Korean reinsurance claims still represent only a drop in the bucket.
Nonetheless, it is a deeply troubling drop, because even though statistics are difficult if not impossible to come by, reinsurance industry sources believe there has been a recent sharp increase in claims coming out of North Korea.
The central focus of concern is the absolute control of ownership and information in North Korea by Kim Jong-Il and his regime. All North Korean insurance is controlled by one state-owned firm, the Korea National Insurance Corporation (KNIC), formerly known as the Korea Foreign Insurance Company, which in turn purchases reinsurance coverage abroad for risks that it has assumed in its domestic market.
Normally, most domestic insurers will use one, or at most two firms of brokers to obtain reinsurance. KNIC may use many, according to industry sources, and the brokers may well have no idea what business their colleagues are doing, or in what reinsurance markets.
"The North Koreans are extremely clever at spotting the gaps in the market," an industry source says. "There is no transparency."
Suspicions in London began to gel in July 2005, when North Korea reported that a medical rescue helicopter had crashed into a government-owned warehouse that authorities said was crammed with disaster relief supplies.
The entire contents of the warehouse, which ran to hundreds of thousands of items, were destroyed, KNIC said, submitting within 10 days a list compiled by the relief center of every single commodity that it said had been lost.
Along with the lengthy list came a reinsurance claim for more than 40 million euros, or almost $50 million at then-current rates, for 95 percent of the damages. The reinsurance was placed through London, but the risk was spread among reinsurers worldwide.
"They provided details including tens of thousands of children's gloves, handkerchiefs, leather gloves, toilet soap and washing soap, within 10 days," Payton said. "In the chaos which follows an accident of this kind, that is unheard of.
"A similar loss report in Britain might take months to compile."
The North Koreans also supplied photos of the devastation, which insurers turned over to leading experts at photographic estimates of fire damage. The experts concluded that the volume of debris remaining within the warehouse, as assessed from the photographs, did not support the high volumes of relief supplies that were claimed to be there before the fire.
"The North Korean claims are supported by meticulous paperwork, something at which the North Koreans excel," Payton said.
"For example, where death certificates and hospital reports are required, the regime's attitude is 'tell us what you want, we'll give it to you.'"
In the case of a ferry accident that allegedly took place last April, near the coastal city of Wonsan, North Korean authorities declared that 129 people had died aboard the vessel after it struck a rock about 1,000 yards off the Korean coast, and only about 100 yards from an island. All of them, the Koreans claim, had been automatically covered with life insurance when they bought their ferry ticket, and that insurance risk had been passed on to the London market through a common reinsurance product known as "excess loss personal accident reinsurance." Here the claims from reinsurers totaled about 5 million euros, or roughly $6 million.
The North Koreans claimed that most of the victims had died of hypothermia in the freezing water. Industry sources say that when insurance investigators discovered that weather conditions were warmer than claimed at that time, the North Koreans responded that severe winds were blowing from Siberia in the spring, making the water unusually frigid.
When insurers asked for permission to send an independent diver to inspect the ferry wreck, they were refused."
Of course...this is shocking story. North Korea is a rogue state that is quite opressive to its people.
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 05:17 pm Post Subject:
Sometimes you can't help appreciating the master mind of these scammers, though they may be scavenging on the ill-fated ones, like- Somaipersaud, but they also remind us of the fact that this world is no longer the good place to live. What else one can say after reading this........
Going as far as appreciating them is a little too far. Anyone who masterminds anothers death is a sick person. I agree this world is a sad place which revolves around untrusty governments and trying to earn a quick buck to survive, too.
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 02:37 am Post Subject:
There are still plenty of good people doing good things in this world, just does not make as good headlines as the bad...
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 03:03 am Post Subject: insurance
OHHH>>>>>>being in the military, I can tell ya a few 'good' ones!! My unit came back from Iraq, in April of 2004. We weren't back a few weeks when we heard on the news, of a unit, that arrived home, just HOURS before us. Anyway.......we were told a soldier ( from this OTHER company) was in "good health" when he arrived home. A week later, he was found dead in his home. The military 'put out' information, stating it was "possibly a chemical that was administered overseas." (That's scary to think about, since I just came home to my son!!) The soldier was still on 'Active Duty' status........he did not take 'Leave' while he was oveseas, so he took it when he got home. This makes the Military Insurance policy still 'active'. At the time, the $250.00 was 'in effect' if you were on Drill ( Reserve) weekends OR Active Duty status. Anyway......to make a long story short, there was 'foul play' involved. The WIFE of the soldier gave him lethal amounts of Arsenic ( I think it was..). In following 'updates', it was said that the wife was planning this all along. GOD.....it was a horrible story to hear!!
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 05:43 am Post Subject:
Jesus wept!
It is true that there is much evil among us, but I take heart in the fact that there are plenty of people willing to take a stand against such things. There has always been and always will be atrocities comitted by humans driven by greed and ambition but on there will also be people who stand up to put a stop to such things.
The sad truth is that most people go about their day to day lives unaware and blind to the evil around them untill they are pesonally confronted and affected by it.
Look at world war 2 where the world did not want to beleive the holocaust was happening, or at present day Sudan where most of the world turns a blind eye to the atrocities happening in Darfour, even though this is broadcast on television...
I still have hope that the world will stand up and put a stop to that, but I doubt it will happen untill Sudan produces something that threatens the outside world.
mac
Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 01:08 am Post Subject: insurance
I read my recent post and realized I made a BIG mistake!! I can't edit it, so I'll correct here. the Life Insurance was NOT $250.00.........it was $250,000.00. Sorry ya'll!!
Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 04:59 am Post Subject: fLwetOkkkQA
About4256.. May I repost it? :)
Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 11:42 pm Post Subject: insurance
Greed and death seem to go 'hand in hand'. I have 'clients' that, when they pass away, some of their "close family" seem to emerge. To alot of people, it seems the Elderly (especially) are just an Insurance policy. Sad to see. :(
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