#Gold smuggling

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Bullion Hidden In Washer," Montreal Star. October 8, 1943. Page 21. --- VANCOUVER, Oct. 8 - (C. P.)-- How $10,000 worth of gold stolen from the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation was shipped from the Klondike to nearby Mission, B.C., concealed in the gears of a washing-machine, was disclosed yesterday by Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Donald William Duncan, who shipped the machine to his wife at Mission, was convicted Wednesday at Dawson, Y.T., of stealing the gold and sentenced to four years in penitentiary, police said.

His wife knew nothing of the case, they said, and the machine was still in the crate in which it had been shipped south.

Police said further arrests are expected at Dawson and at Whitehorse, Y.T. Inspector James Fripp. of the R.C.M.P., said information leading to the discovery of the cache of gold at Mission was given by Duncan following his arrest at Dawson.

Police found 300 ounces of gold in four sacks stuffed in the gears of the washing machine. Several pounds more gold, were found in Duncan's baggage when he was arrested, police said.

[siliconpalms]

Russia’s Growing Influence in African Gold Mining and the Dubai Connection

Since 2014, Russia has been steadily expanding its presence in Africa’s gold mining sector, establishing strongholds in countries like Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR). This increased involvement coincides with Russia’s broader geopolitical ambitions on the continent and its desire to secure valuable resources. What’s even more intriguing is the connection between Russia’s African gold…

[kathmandutimesnews]

Rohan Adukia arrested in gold smuggling case

Businessman Rakesh Adukia’s son Rohan Adukia has been arrested in connection with the recent gold smuggling case.

According to a source, the Department of Immigration (DoI) arrested Adukia from the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) in Kathmandu upon his return from India on Friday.

The DoI had blacklisted Adukia on the request of the Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI).

The source said that the DoI is preparing to hand him over to the DRI.

Police had raided Rakesh Adukia’s house some days ago.

Also on Friday, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal Police arrested two Chinese nationals -- Li Jialin and Liu Fuyan -- from the TIA at 8 AM. The two were scheduled to fly to China by a Himalaya Air flight at 9 AM.

The CIB of Nepal Police had earlier written to the Department of Immigration to blacklist them.

The CIB arrested them from the airport after receiving information that they were about to fly to China. Their role in the gold smuggling case has not been disclosed yet.

With Adukia’s arrest, the number of people arrested in the case has now reached 21. Among them, customs agent Rukmina Subba has been released on guarantee as she suffers from cancer and needs to undergo treatment.

The DRI had arrested Suresh Tamang, known as Naresh, on July 26 and Belgian national Dawa Tsering on July 30.

Three staffers of Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) Customs Office – Santosh Chand, Kumar Dhakal, and Saroj Shrestha – have also been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the scam. The Department of Customs had already suspended them citing negligence before the DRI arrested them.

Customs agents Yadav Shankar Parajuli and Sudarshan Gautam, Global Pvt Ltd promoter Pushkar Raj Bhatta, Krishna Shrestha, Rajan Shrestha, taxi driver Ashok Lama, customs agent Rajendra Rai, Ready Trade Pvt Ltd promoter Dilip Bhujel and his maternal uncle Ram Kumar Bhujel, Harka Raj Rai, Indian national Thapten Tsering and Chinese national Lin Zeqiang have also been arrested in the case.

The DRI was investigating them under the Revenue Leakage (Investigation and Control) Act. It has handed over the case to the CIB.

A DRI team had confiscated a huge quantity of gold during a cargo inspection on July 18 after it had passed undetected through the airport customs.

The gold, whose total weight is estimated to be nearly 100 kilograms, was brought hidden inside brake shoes for scooters on a Cathay Pacific Airways flight from Hong Kong. The brake shoes were imported by Ready Trade Pvt Ltd.

The seized goods have been sent to the Mint Division of Nepal Rastra Bank to determine the actual weight of the gold. But the gold has yet to be weighed.

[kathmandutimes]

Rohan Adukia arrested in gold smuggling case

Businessman Rakesh Adukia’s son Rohan Adukia has been arrested in connection with the recent gold smuggling case.

According to a source, the Department of Immigration (DoI) arrested Adukia from the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) in Kathmandu upon his return from India on Friday.

The DoI had blacklisted Adukia on the request of the Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI).

The source said that the DoI is preparing to hand him over to the DRI.

Police had raided Rakesh Adukia’s house some days ago.

Also on Friday, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal Police arrested two Chinese nationals -- Li Jialin and Liu Fuyan -- from the TIA at 8 AM. The two were scheduled to fly to China by a Himalaya Air flight at 9 AM.

The CIB of Nepal Police had earlier written to the Department of Immigration to blacklist them.

The CIB arrested them from the airport after receiving information that they were about to fly to China. Their role in the gold smuggling case has not been disclosed yet.

With Adukia’s arrest, the number of people arrested in the case has now reached 21. Among them, customs agent Rukmina Subba has been released on guarantee as she suffers from cancer and needs to undergo treatment.

The DRI had arrested Suresh Tamang, known as Naresh, on July 26 and Belgian national Dawa Tsering on July 30.

Three staffers of Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) Customs Office – Santosh Chand, Kumar Dhakal, and Saroj Shrestha – have also been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the scam. The Department of Customs had already suspended them citing negligence before the DRI arrested them.

Customs agents Yadav Shankar Parajuli and Sudarshan Gautam, Global Pvt Ltd promoter Pushkar Raj Bhatta, Krishna Shrestha, Rajan Shrestha, taxi driver Ashok Lama, customs agent Rajendra Rai, Ready Trade Pvt Ltd promoter Dilip Bhujel and his maternal uncle Ram Kumar Bhujel, Harka Raj Rai, Indian national Thapten Tsering and Chinese national Lin Zeqiang have also been arrested in the case.

The DRI was investigating them under the Revenue Leakage (Investigation and Control) Act. It has handed over the case to the CIB.

A DRI team had confiscated a huge quantity of gold during a cargo inspection on July 18 after it had passed undetected through the airport customs.

The gold, whose total weight is estimated to be nearly 100 kilograms, was brought hidden inside brake shoes for scooters on a Cathay Pacific Airways flight from Hong Kong. The brake shoes were imported by Ready Trade Pvt Ltd.

The seized goods have been sent to the Mint Division of Nepal Rastra Bank to determine the actual weight of the gold. But the gold has yet to be weighed.

[livenews24x7hindi]

त्रिची एयरपोर्ट पर महिला के पास मिला करोड़ों का सोना, अधिकारी भी रह गए दंग

कल त्रिची एयरपोर्ट पर एक महिला को करोड़ों के सोने के साथ पकड़ा गया। इतना सोना देखकर एयरपोर्ट अधिकारी भी दंग रह गए। तमिलनाडु के त्रिची एयरपोर्ट पर आज एक महिला को गिरफ्तार किया गया है। महिला को एयरपोर्ट की एयर इंटेलिजेंस यूनिट (AIU) ने गिरफ्तार किया है। अधिकारियों ने महिला के पास से 2,291 ग्राम सोना जब्त किया है, जिसकी कीमत करोड़ों रुपये बताई जा रही है। आपको बता दें कि महिला यात्री के पास से बरामद…

[eveningkeralanews]

തൃശൂരിൽ സ്വർണ്ണക്കവർച്ചയുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെട്ട് നഗരമധ്യത്തിലെ ലോഡ്ജിൽ നടന്നത് സിനിമയെ വെല്ലുന്ന രംഗങ്ങൾ

തൃശൂരിൽ സ്വർണ്ണക്കവർച്ചയുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെട്ട് നഗരമധ്യത്തിലെ ലോഡ്ജിൽ നടന്നത് സിനിമയെ വെല്ലുന്ന രംഗങ്ങൾ

തൃശൂർ : സ്വർണ്ണക്കവർച്ചയുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെട്ട് നഗരമധ്യത്തിലെ ലോഡ്ജിൽ നടന്നത് സിനിമയെ വെല്ലുന്ന രംഗങ്ങൾ. കെഎസ്ആർടിസി പരിസരത്തെ ലോഡ്ജിൽ ഇന്നലെ വൈകിട്ടാണു സംഭവങ്ങളുണ്ടായത്. ആലുവ കേന്ദ്രീകരിച്ചു പ്രവർത്തിക്കുന്ന സ്വർണാഭരണ മൊത്തവ്യാപാര ശാലയിലെ ജീവനക്കാരാണു കൊള്ളയടിക്കപ്പെട്ടത്. സംഭവത്തെക്കുറിച്ചു പൊലീസിനു ലഭിച്ച വിവരങ്ങളിങ്ങനെ: മൊത്തവ്യാപാര ശാലയിലേക്കു ഫോണിൽ വിളിച്ച തൃശൂർ സ്വദേശിയായ ഇടനിലക്കാരൻ 637 ഗ്രാം…

[yugiohz]

that’s wild

[aeioumy]

i wasnt gonna post these-- anyway i wanted to see elliot in travel in time so im drawing my own elliot from the altered timeline

[rightnewshindi]

DRI की टीम ने सोना तस्करी मामले में कई शहरों में की छापेमारी, 25 किलो चांदी बरामद; जानें आरोपियों ने क्या खोले राज

नेपाल से सोना तस्करी में गिरफ्तार पांच आरोपियों ने कई राज उगले हैं। इसके बाद डीआरआई की अलग-अलग टीमों ने कई जगहों पर छापेमारी की है। इनमें दिल्ली, गोरखपुर, बस्ती, बहराइच शामिल हैं। साथ ही तस्करी कर लाई गई 25 किलो चांदी भी बरामद की गई है। डीआरआई यानी राजस्व खुफिया निदेशालय ने पिछले तीन दिनों में छापेमारी की है। सबसे पहले टीम को नेपाल सीमा पर तस्करी का इनपुट मिला। इसके बाद छापेमारी में दो किलो सोना…

[theancienttimesnews]

“Major Gold Smuggling Busts: Karnataka International Airport and Mumbai Airport Crack Down on Smugglers”

In a recent incident at Kempegowda International Airport in Karnataka, a passenger arriving from Bangkok was apprehended for attempting to smuggle gold. The individual, hailing from Tamil Nadu, was found to be carrying nine gold rods weighing a total of 545 grams and valued at Rs 33.3 lakh. The alert was raised by the Bengaluru Customs’ Air Intelligence Unit during a profiling operation on…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Gold Hidden In Washing Machine," Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. October 8, 1943. Page 12. --- VANCOUVER, Oct. 8. - How $10,000 worth of gold stolen from the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation was shipped from the Klondike to nearby Mission, B.C., concealed in the gears of a washing machine was disclosed Thursday by Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

STUFFED IN GEARS Donald William Duncan, who shipped the machine to his wife at Mission, was convicted at Dawson, Y.T., of stealing the gold and sentenced to four years in penitentiary, police said. His wife knew nothing of the case, they said, and the machine was still in the crate in which it had been shipped south,

Police said further arrests are expected at Dawson and at White- horse, Y.T. Inspector James Fripp of the R.C.M.P. said information leading to the discovery of the cache of gold at Mission was given by Duncan following his arrest at Dawson.

Police found 300 ounces of gold in four sacks stuffed in the gears of the washing machine. Several pounds more gold were found in Duncan's baggage when he was arrested, police said.

Duncan, a former resident of Mission, had been employed by Yukon Consolidated for three years.

[loriache]

"I've been waiting for ages for somebody to unmask them."

This moment tends to elicit negative reactions in a first read through, and I've got some opinions about why where Kabru is coming from here actually makes a lot of logical sense. So I thought I'd elaborate on that.

I think people hear this and go, "He thinks they must be hiding something because they gave money to someone? What a cynic." Or "he dislikes them because they did charity?? What's wrong with this guy!". And obviously, a lot, a lot is wrong with him. But I think this makes more sense than it seems at first glance! What people evaluating this judgement miss is why Kabru is paying attention to Laios and co to begin with.

Kabru knows of the Touden siblings because (he's a little bit of a stalker-) he is keeping an eye on all the relevant parties in events developing on the island, in order to be able to guide them to his preferred outcome. This includes adventurers because they are the ones actually exploring the dungeon! He's well aware that something as minor as internal tensions between party members could be key to the historical events that are developing. (He would love the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.)

His desired outcome is that whatever the rewards are of breaking the dungeon's curse, whether that's kingship or the ancient elven secrets of dungeons, are claimed by:

A) a short lived person

B) Someone who will be a good, effective leader and/or use those secrets and the power they carry wisely, with foresight, and to establish a political bloc for short lived people.

The person he can best trust to do this is, of course, himself. But due to his PTSD regarding dungeons and monsters, he's not able to develop the necessary skills to conquer the dungeon. Once he realises this, he starts looking for someone else who he can support to that end.

But most of the adventurers don't have any intentions of conquering the dungeon, don't have the skills, or are unsuitable in other ways. In fact, it seems like some potentially suitable people are the Toudens. There are a lot of good rumours about them going around - they actually seem to have a very positive reputation! That's what Kabru means when he says "unmask".

So when Kabru is observing something like them giving money to an old comrade from their gold-peeling days, he doesn't consider it a problem because "they're giving money to this person who doesn't actually need it" or because they must have some dark secret if they act superficially nice. I think he actually understands this situation and what it implies about Laios (in particular) perfectly well.

Laios and Falin gave money to an old comrade who got injured and couldn't work. That person then healed up but kept taking their money. Then he used the money to start smuggling illicit goods to the island.

The key is that for Kabru, the problem here is the same as with the corpse retrievers - people using the dungeon's resources to fuel dangerous, selfish, or violent pursuits cause problems for the island, attract more criminals and people with motives other than breaking the curse, and increase the chances of the whole situation ending in tragedy.

Kabru is willing to work with the Shadow Lord of the island if it gets him to his goal - he isn't scrupulous - but the criminal element of the island increasing is something he sees as a major issue.

Also, when you're evaluating someone as a candidate for power, riches, secrets, potentially kingship - then being curious about how the money you give to people is going to be used is kind of a relevant trait!

Interpersonally, Kabru's actually very easygoing - I mean, Mickbell isn't exactly an upstanding guy, is he! But Kabru likes him and they get along well. These traits wouldn't be a problem at all in a friend, or a comrade, or someone Kabru was confident he could use. But he can't get a handle on Laios, and Laios is someone who has the potential to be a major player!

On Laios' end, this is the same as with the marriage seeker who joined their party. She kept asking for things and he gave them to her, because he tries to be nice to others. He even gives her money! It's the exact same thing.

That's fine, but it became a problem because he basically wasn't interested in her motives, didn't notice she was trying to manipulate him, and it also didn't occur to him that the other party members would notice or be affected. We can assume the situation with the gold peeler is the same. When Kabru says that "It's not that they're bad people, they just aren't interested in humans," he isn't wrong.

The extent to which this is true of Laios is linked to his autism imo, (because it isn't just disinterest - he genuinely isn't able to notice nonverbal cues that people are lying to him or have ulterior motives) but to a greater or lesser extent I think it's a very common trait. Most people aren't actually that interested in other people who aren't close to them. Kabru is the weird one here. It isn't an issue except as a leader - which is why we see an immediate comparison to the Island's Lord, because that's how Kabru is evaluating them.

And disinterest in/lack of ability with people to the extent Laios exhibits it, it does, actually, make him a worse leader... it's just that as we see in the story, people can help him out. The rest of the party tell him the marriage seeker is taking advantage of him so he tells her he can't give her special treatment anymore. They're pissed and it's a crisis point - he couldn't have recovered their trust without Marcille and Falin - but that's exactly the point. With Marcille and Falin, he was able to recover their trust.

And he has other good traits that make up for it, such as his intelligence, strategic knowledge, open-mindedness and sense of fairplay.

Kabru doesn't disqualify Laios as a candidate based on what he sees about him from afar, though - he still tries very hard to get close to him, obviously hoping that if he manages he can steer Laios to defeat the dungeon and make up for his lack of people-skills in the aftermath. (Which... he does eventually achieve that goal!) He completely fails until the events of the story, so... definitely I think "They just aren't interested in humans" could also partially be a stung reaction to Laios' complete disinterest in him.

Anyway, that's my read on what exactly Kabru's "issue" with Laios is. Obviously, once he does find out what Laios' true nature is like - about his love for monsters - he develops an entirely new set of fears about Laios' priorities. But since Laios kept that a secret until the start of the story, he has no idea of that yet.

Given all that, I think it's interesting that he says that he doesn't think that the Toudens are suitable to defeat the dungeon, and that he's hoping they'll turn out to be the thieves. As some of his few potential candidates, people who he thinks may play a big role in the island's future, you'd think he'd hope they would be good people!

I suppose it's better, in his eyes, because it means that he's involved in something "interesting". They haven't just had their stuff stolen by regular criminals (boring, puts them further away from his goal) - they've been caught up in the beginning stages of "a historic event". The desperate and dwindling group forgetting morals in their quest to retrieve their lost comrade probably appeals to his sense of melodrama. Because he also just... loves drama.

Despite it being "uglier than anything he was expecting", he still pursues Laios as the person he wants to conquer the dungeon pretty much as soon as it becomes clear that he won't be able to do it himself and they are out of time. That's because... well, to be fair, there aren't any other options. And he fits standard A: he's short-lived!

and Kabru still hopes he can fit standard B, too, and be persuaded to use the power he wins for good. No matter how many nightmares he has about Laios, or whether he thinks about killing him. He doubts him, but ultimately he puts his faith in him and seems happy after the manga's ending that he made the right decision.

[xtruss]

How a Man in Prison Stole Millions From Billionaires

With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold.

— By Charles Bethea | August 28, 2023

Illustration By Max Guther

Early in 2020, the architect Scott West got a call at his office, in Atlanta, from a prospective client who said that his name was Archie Lee. West designs luxurious houses in a spare, angular style one might call millionaire modern. Lee wanted one. That June, West found an appealing property in Buckhead—an upscale part of North Atlanta that attracts both old money and new—and told Lee it might be a good spot for them to build. Lee arranged for his wife to meet West there.

She arrived in a white Range Rover, wearing Gucci and Prada, and carrying a small dog in her purse. She said her name was Indiana. As she walked around the property, she FaceTimed her husband, then told West that it wasn’t quite what they had in mind, and that he should keep looking. West said that he’d need a retainer. She reached into her purse and pulled out five thousand dollars. “That was a little unusual,” West recalled.

Later that summer, Lee called again, with a new proposal. His wife, he said, had been “driving around Buckhead, and she came across this amazing modern house and thought it had to be a Scott West house.” She was right. The house, on Randall Mill Road, wasn’t quite finished, and it had not been on the market—but Lee told West that he was already buying it, from the owner, for four and a half million dollars. Now he wanted West to redo the landscaping and the outdoor pool, plus some interior finishes. West took another retainer, but he had other clients to attend to, and Lee grew impatient. Eventually, Lee asked West for his money back and began planning the renovations without him.

The renovations were supervised, as far as the neighbors could tell, by Indiana’s father, Eldridge Bennett, a sturdy man who drove an old Jaguar and wore a pair of dog tags around his neck. Neighbors described him as friendly but hard to pin down. He told one that he worked in the concrete business—and that he’d been on the team that killed Osama bin Laden—but gave another a card that identified him as the marketing manager for an accounting company. This neighbor noticed that a wine tower in the house was being stocked with Moët & Chandon (“thousands of bottles, like, twenty feet tall”) and asked who was paying for it all. Bennett told him that the new owner was in California, “working on music stuff.” Like many residents of Randall Mill Road, this neighbor is white. The Bennetts are Black. “It seemed like they didn’t come from money,” the neighbor said, “but they had sure found a lot of it.”

A closing meeting was scheduled for early September at a bank in Alpharetta, north of the city. By then, Lee and the Bennetts had made three down payments on the house, totalling seven hundred thousand dollars, most of which Indiana and Eldridge had delivered in rubber-banded bundles of cash. Lee told the seller’s attorney that they would deliver the rest—about three and a half million dollars—in similar fashion, at the closing. He couldn’t be there himself, he said, because he was still busy in California. (Lee, the lawyer recalled, said that he “represented a variety of entertainers and got paid in a variety of ways,” and also that he’d made money in Bitcoin.)

Because so much cash was going to be exchanged, the bank arranged for the closing to be held in its kitchen and break room, which offered some privacy. The bank also asked a local cop to be present. At the appointed time, Eldridge and a younger man carried several black duffelbags into the room and began handing stacks of bills to a bank employee, who spent the next three and a half hours counting them all. Afterward, on the phone, Lee asked the seller to complete a few punch items on the property. When the seller got to the house, he noticed that the door to a large safe that he’d installed—and which he’d left open—was locked, and that the combination had already been changed.

A few weeks after the close, Lee sent Scott West another e-mail. “I’m buying land in a month or so to start planning on designing a house 100% to my liking,” he wrote. “I want to give you the ball and let you run the entire project. Let you go insane on your ideas. I’m thinking of a seven million dollar budget just for the house, not including the landscaping.” He suggested that the two of them “become a team.” West replied, as gently as he could, that he was too busy. A week before, he’d received a call from a federal agent, who asked him if he knew a man named Arthur Cofield. West said that he did not, and the agent began rattling off names. “He kept going through aliases until he said ‘Archie Lee,’ ” West told me. Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., the agent said, resided in a maximum-security prison in Georgia. He had been incarcerated for more than a decade.

Arthur Cofield probably stole more money from behind bars than any inmate in American history. His methods were fairly straightforward, if distinctly contemporary: using cell phones that he’d had smuggled into prison, and relying on a network of people on the outside, he accessed the bank accounts of the very wealthy, then used their money to make large purchases—often of gold, which he’d typically have shipped to Atlanta, where it was picked up by his accomplices. Some of that gold he seems to have converted to cash: he and his associates bought cars, houses, and clothes, and they flaunted all of it on social media. (At one point, Cofield wrote on Instagram, “Making millions from bed.”) By the time Cofield was charged—with identity theft and money laundering, among other crimes—he had likely stolen at least fifteen million dollars. “I don’t know of anything that’s ever happened in an institutional setting of this magnitude,” Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University who has researched crime in prison, told me. Cofield, she said, was “something of an innovator.”

He didn’t arrive in prison as a man with a lot of connections or a history of fraud. He didn’t have much history at all—he was just sixteen. He had grown up in East Point, a poor and predominantly Black suburb southeast of Atlanta. A number of gangs operate there, but, if Cofield belonged to one back then, no one seems to have noticed. When he was a kid, dirt bikes were his passion. He began riding at a motocross track northwest of the city when he was little; at eight, he finished fourth at the Amateur National Motocross Championship, in Tennessee. A friend from his riding days told me that Cofield stuck out among the motocross crowd for two reasons: “He was African American, and he was freaking badass.” Cofield told the friend that he was called racial slurs by fans and other racers. “Nasty stuff,” the friend said. “It almost fuelled the fire.”

Competing in motocross is expensive, and Cofield’s father, who mostly made his living hanging drywall, converted a box truck into a trailer, with living quarters, so that the family could get Arthur to the big races. At one of those races, when Cofield was about fourteen, a gate collector noticed that more than eight thousand dollars had gone missing from the till, and told the track’s operators that Cofield had been lingering nearby when it vanished. “We went into Arthur’s mobile home and he had the money hidden in there,” a member of the family who owned the track told me. The family was fond of Cofield and his father, and declined to press charges, but it was the last time that they saw the Cofields at a race. Soon, Cofield began to “slack off from racing,” his friend said, adding, “That’s when everything happened.”

In October, 2007, when Cofield was sixteen, he brought a gun into a bank in Douglasville, just west of Atlanta, and demanded that the tellers give him all the money they had. He walked out with twenty-six hundred dollars and headed for a stolen station wagon, where a friend of his older brother’s was behind the wheel. A smoke-and-dye pack hidden in a stack of bills exploded as he got into the car; the young men crashed soon after getting on the road. They ran but didn’t get far. The driver was sentenced to ten years and was paroled after three. Cofield got a fourteen-year prison sentence and ended up in a maximum-security facility in middle Georgia.

It took a few years and a couple of prison transfers before he became a more successful thief. Early in 2010, Cofield sustained cuts on his arm from a razor blade; according to a prison report, he initially told a guard that he’d cut himself shaving. But he later handwrote a carefully argued lawsuit alleging that he’d been attacked by a fellow-inmate and that prison staff had not only failed to intervene but knowingly allowed the assault to take place. Citing the damage to his motocross career, which he slightly embellished, he demanded more than a million dollars. A judge dismissed the suit on procedural grounds. Cofield was sent to another prison. Later that year, he was mailed a package containing bottles of shampoo and conditioner. Inside each bottle was a cell phone.

As smartphones have become more powerful and more ubiquitous, the barrier between life in prison and life on the outside has become more porous. Thousands of phones are confiscated from Georgia prisons every year, according to the state’s Department of Corrections. Prison guards are generally not well paid, and they are often bribed to assist in the smuggling or simply to look the other way. Most people in prison use phones in innocuous ways: to talk to loved ones, for instance—prison phone services are notoriously expensive—and to keep up with what’s going on in the world. In 2010, inmates at seven Georgia prisons used smuggled cell phones to organize a protest for better living conditions. But phones are also used to carry out drug dealing and other crimes. Authorities have recognized this problem for more than a decade now, but the phones keep coming.

In the years that followed Cofield’s first prison transfer, he was found with phones in his soapbox, taped around his waist, and inside his undershorts. Many more seem to have gone undiscovered. On one occasion, he told a guard seizing yet another phone, “I don’t give a fuck about that phone. I’ve had hundreds of phones.”

In 2014, he was transferred again, to Telfair State Prison, in south Georgia. There he met a man named Devinchio Rogers, who was serving a seven-year sentence for manslaughter. Rogers grew up not far from Cofield, but he was a few years older, and flashier. Cofield is stocky and gruff—he was lean and muscular in his motocross days but put on weight in prison. Rogers was tall and stylish. He shared Cofield’s knack for getting cell phones behind bars. He’d attained some brief local notoriety in 2011, when he began tweeting from inside Fulton County Jail. (His tweets were “littered with foul language and pictures of prison food, something that appears to be marijuana and himself,” a local TV station reported.)

Cofield and Rogers started a crew, which they called yap, for Young and Paid. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar crews in Atlanta, many with three-letter names, most of them small-time. They are typically founded in prisons or on particular city blocks. Some are involved in the drug trade; some flaunt a connection to nationally known gangs, such as the Bloods; some aspire to be movers and shakers in hip-hop. The most famous of these crews is Y.S.L., which was allegedly co-founded by the rapper Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams. Like Cofield, Williams, who is Cofield’s age, grew up in East Point. He and more than two dozen other alleged members of Y.S.L. are currently facing rico charges in Fulton County. They stand accused of crimes that range from drug dealing to murder. (Williams, who started a record label also called Y.S.L., has denied involvement in criminal activity.)

Cofield and Rogers adopted aliases, like hip-hop m.c.s, incorporating the name of their crew. Rogers went by yap Football, or just Ball. Cofield called himself yap Lavish. In March, 2017, they filed paperwork to establish yap Entertainment as a limited-liability partnership in the state of Georgia. yap Entertainment, according to its filing, planned to provide “agents and managers for artists, athletes, entertainers, and other public figures.” Within about a year of the partnership’s formal creation, three hundred thousand dollars went missing from a bank account in Alabama.

The Alabama Theft was probably not Cofield’s first big score, but it is the earliest, from his prison career, of which he has been formally accused. The target was a wealthy doctor. Cofield got hold of the doctor’s personal information, logged in to the doctor’s bank account, used money from the account to buy gold, and had the gold shipped to a UPS center near Atlanta, where someone else picked it up for him. According to a detective who has investigated Cofield and Rogers, the Secret Service, during the previous several months, had noticed a string of similar thefts, and began making inquiries. (The agency, which has jurisdiction over some federal financial crimes, declined to comment.) Eventually, the agency opened an investigation, and dubbed the case Gold Rush.

The year that followed, 2018, was a big one for Cofield and Rogers. They were, evidently, beginning to bring in a lot of money, and they also seem to have been actively recruiting associates. This recruitment could allegedly be quite direct. A young woman named Selena Holmes was approached by a friend, who, according to Holmes’s former lawyer, said, “Look, there’s these guys in prison. They’re really rich. And all you got to do is talk to them. They’ll look out for you.” A few days later, the lawyer said, Cofield called Holmes on the phone. She was nineteen and had grown up poor on the west side of Atlanta. (Cofield may have known her through a family connection.) She had dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant and was working at Panera. Shortly after Cofield called, according to the detective, a man named Keonte Melton found her outside work and handed her fifteen thousand dollars. (Melton could not be reached for comment.)

Soon, Holmes and Cofield were spending hours together on the phone. She got a yap tattoo and people began calling her yap Missus—the queen to Cofield’s king. He bought her a Mercedes-Benz and rented a penthouse apartment for her in Buckhead. He also flew her first class to Los Angeles, to shop on Rodeo Drive, where she bought a three-thousand-dollar purse. (The detective believes that Holmes was running yap-related errands.)

In May, 2018, a video was posted to YouTube of a pool party that yap threw at a “secret location” that looks a lot like a Buckhead mansion. The party was hosted by an aspiring rapper, Anteria Gordon, who had adopted the name yap Moncho. Gordon, in the front seat of a Bentley, gives a shout-out to Lavish. “Nobody doing it bigger than us,” he says later, amid drinking and twerking revellers. Around this time, Gordon released a single called “Lavish,” mostly about spending large amounts of money (“two hundred thousand, blow it on a stripper”), and gave an interview to the YouTube channel Hood Affairs, sitting in an ornate gold chair at the same mansion where the party was held. Wearing a diamond chain that spelled “yap,” Gordon shows his interviewer around the mansion, praising Missus and thanking Lavish, seeming to call him “the most richest motherfucker in the city.”

In June, Rogers was released from prison, and quickly began throwing money around, according to a person who knew him before he was incarcerated. “He bought four hundred and thirty-six pairs of Reeboks,” this person told me. “He had a line around Greenbriar Mall—people lined up to get those shoes that he paid for. He was giving them to kids.” This person also saw pictures of Rogers “standing on top of Mercedes-Benz trucks” and “living in penthouses.” (In one of them, there was a shark tank.) A lawyer for Rogers told me, “I’ve seen the photos, but he gets paid a lot because he’s attractive and he does social-media posts wearing different clothes and things of that nature. I don’t know if it’s called ‘influencing,’ but he’s a fashionista type.” As for yap, the lawyer said, “their business did sign people and do social media and marketing—club things—and that’s what our client Mr. Rogers is good at.”

The detective who has investigated Cofield and Rogers believes that the two men were both building a brand and enlisting accomplices—mostly young men who had spent time in prison, plus a handful of young women with whom one of them had been romantically involved. The detective pointed, for example, to an attempted theft for which neither man was charged. A woman who worked at Wells Fargo, in Atlanta—and who had, according to the detective, exchanged “affectionate text messages” with Rogers—gave Keonte Melton access to a large account at the bank in August, 2018. (Melton is the man who allegedly delivered Cofield’s cash to Selena Holmes.) The account belonged to one of the family businesses of John Portman, a famous Atlanta architect and developer who had died several months before. Melton tried to withdraw eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars; another Wells Fargo employee called two of the account’s signatories, who said that they had no idea who this withdrawer was. Melton was charged with an attempt to commit a felony; he pleaded guilty and is on probation.

The woman left Wells Fargo for another bank, then went into real estate. (She has also appeared in multiple episodes of the reality show “Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta.”) When I reached her on the phone, she denied knowing any of the men involved. She does follow Rogers on Instagram; on her own account, she often posts pictures of herself in Lamborghinis or wearing diamond-encrusted watches, not only in Atlanta but in places like Dubai and Aruba. She was questioned by police in connection with the Wells Fargo theft but was never charged. (As part of Melton’s plea deal, he was ordered not to have contact with her.) “It was like a big ring that all of them were part of,” the detective said.

In the summer of 2018, Cofield heard that Selena Holmes was growing close to a man she had met named Antoris Young. Cofield, perhaps flexing his growing power and resources, allegedly hired someone to kill him. The hit man, Teontre Crowley, tailed Young in a car; Rogers and Holmes followed in a separate vehicle so that Holmes could I.D. the target. Prosecutors say that the pair was on the phone with Cofield so he could be sure that the hit was carried out. Crowley shot Young around ten times outside a recording studio. Young survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Days later, according to the detective, Rogers threw a birthday party for Cofield at Club Crucial, on Atlanta’s west side. “They had ‘Lavish’ on the club’s marquee,” the detective told me. Within months, Holmes, Rogers, and Crowley had been arrested for the shooting. All pleaded guilty and are now in prison. (Cofield was also charged, and pleaded not guilty; the case against him is ongoing.) A lawyer for Holmes maintained that she had been forced at gunpoint to help Crowley identify Young; Holmes later filed to withdraw her guilty plea but was denied. Last summer, at a hearing related to her sentence, an investigator said, of Cofield, “He finds these women from the outside and kind of pretends like he owns them from the inside, using money and things like that, and they enjoy the life style, so they go along with it. And they’re O.K. with it, as long as the money is good.”

“I Was a Pretty Girl in a Strip Club,” Eliayah Bennett, who goes by Indiana professionally, told me recently. “I wouldn’t say that I’m, like, a million-followers type of girl. But people know me. I danced for big people and stuff like that.” I had asked her how she and Cofield met. The full story would “probably take about two hours,” she said. I asked for the CliffsNotes. “Somebody seen my picture,” she said. “I don’t know who it was. And people was trying to find me. I was out of town. I think I was dancing in Miami or something, because, in the summer, Georgia gets slow. So one of my homegirls, they would have, like, stripper parties and I was invited to one. And that was it.” I waited for more. “It’s a real long story,” she said.

The detective offered me a shorter version: Cofield “wanted Selena to recruit a stripper and for them to have a girl-on-girl encounter in front of him on FaceTime,” the detective said, explaining that this detail came from Holmes. “That’s how Eliayah got involved. Then she and Cofield developed a relationship behind Selena’s back.”

Bennett told me that she and Holmes are very different. She said she comes from a more middle-class background and went to a good school—a charter school just north of the city. But, like Holmes, she began to live more fabulously after coming into Cofield’s orbit. She moved into a Buckhead home with separate floors for her mother and her father; she bought two Range Rovers and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce S.U.V.; she got breast implants and a nose job, though she said she funded those procedures herself. (“I’ve always had my own before Arthur,” she told me.) “When I talk to him, really it’s just to see me naked,” she told an investigator, downplaying the role of money in their relationship. “And that’s about it. And we’ll watch movies together.” They liked true crime, she told me.

She and Cofield were married, online, in July, 2019. Afterward, she was approved to handle his finances. As his spouse, she received another privilege: she could no longer be compelled to testify against him. Meanwhile, Cofield’s reputation within the prison system continued to grow. A month after his marriage, Cofield was moved temporarily to Fulton County Jail to attend a court hearing related to the Antoris Young shooting. “The jail was buzzing,” a person familiar with the case told me. “You could hear it on calls from inmates using the jail phone system: ‘That guy Lavish is here!’ ”

Cofield was transferred to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison and later placed in solitary confinement in its Special Management Unit—a notorious facility that had been described by a social psychologist, a few years earlier, as “one of the harshest and most draconian such facilities I have seen in operation anywhere in the country.” There, he was kept alone for around twenty-three hours a day. But every prison has guards, and smuggling happens at all of them. Jose Morales was the warden of the prison when Cofield arrived. He described him as an unusual inmate. “The others were boisterous, loud, violent,” he told me. “Cofield was the opposite of that. Very cordial, very respectful.” Morales thought he was up to something.

In September, 2019, the Secret Service was contacted by Fidelity Bank. Someone had breached a large account belonging to Nicole Wertheim, the wife of the billionaire investor Herbert Wertheim. This person had used more than two million dollars from the account to purchase gold coins and had then had the coins shipped to a suburb near the Atlanta airport. Investigators traced the I.P. addresses of devices that had accessed the account: one led to an apartment building in Buckhead, and another led to a Verizon cell tower near the Special Management Unit of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison.

Investigators informed Georgia’s Department of Corrections, which began looking for the second device. In November, guards at the Special Management Unit found two phones on Cofield, including one hidden in the rolls of his stomach. They gave the phones to prison investigators, who matched one of them to the Wertheim breach. The phone had a virtual private network that could mask its user’s identity by routing its connection through a private server, and it had a free app called TextNow, which is marketed as a provider of affordable phone service but can be used to disguise the number that a call or text is coming from. It also had several saved Yahoo and Gmail accounts that incorporated, presumably for the purposes of impersonation, the names of some of the richest men in the country, including the real-estate tycoon Sam Zell, the media mogul Sumner Redstone, the hair-care entrepreneur John Paul DeJoria, the businessman Thomas Secunda, and multiple founders of the global investment firm the Carlyle Group.

Cofield had apparently narrowed his targets to aging billionaires: men who were rich enough to not notice if millions went missing—and old enough, perhaps, not to have set up personal online-banking accounts. Secunda, who is in his late sixties, was the youngest person on the list. Two men on the list have since died: Redstone, less than a year later, at ninety-seven, and Zell, at the age of eighty-one, this past May. Before Redstone died, his Fidelity account was breached twice. (Secunda and the founders of the Carlyle Group declined to comment for this story; DeJoria told me that he hadn’t heard anything about Cofield’s scheme.)

Having identified a likely suspect in Georgia, the Secret Service turned the case over to Scott McAfee, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the state’s Northern District. In August, 2020, one of McAfee’s investigators was contacted by the brokerage firm Charles Schwab. Two people, working in tandem, had successfully impersonated the ninety-five-year-old clothier and Hollywood producer Sidney Kimmel and his wife, Caroline Davis. Kimmel, who had recently executive-produced “Crazy Rich Asians,” reportedly had a net worth of around one and a half billion dollars, and had several accounts with Schwab. Cofield created an online brokerage account in Kimmel’s name, then called Schwab, claiming to be Kimmel, in order to connect the new account to a checking account. Over the phone, he provided Kimmel’s Social Security number, his mother’s maiden name, his date of birth, and home address. Three days after that, someone claiming to be Kimmel’s wife called Schwab and asked about making a wire transfer. Half an hour later, Cofield submitted a signed form authorizing such a transfer. The transfer was for eleven million dollars. It was used to purchase gold coins.

An investigator who has listened to these phone calls told me that the vocal impersonations were not sophisticated. “It was a bad old man’s voice,” he said, of Cofield’s Kimmel. “Just gravelly.” Even so, he said, the representative from Schwab was deferential. “I don’t know if they checked every single security-protocol box before transferring that money,” the investigator said. “It really seemed, like, ‘Yes, Mr. Kimmel. Yes, sir.’ ” Schwab, at the phony Kimmel’s behest, wired funds to a company called Money Metals Exchange L.L.C., in Idaho. This company was also deferential, the investigator told me: “They’re, like, ‘Folks, I’ve researched this Sidney Kimmel guy, this could be a really good client. Let’s give him the V.I.P. treatment! Let’s get him that gold!’ ” (When I asked the company’s director, on the phone, for comment, he hung up.)

Illustration By Max Guther

Cofield, still impersonating Kimmel, contacted security and logistics firms capable of transporting highly valuable assets from Idaho to Atlanta; that job was ultimately subcontracted to a man named Michael Blake. One night in June, just after 2 a.m., Blake landed on a private runway in Atlanta, during a heavy storm, with millions in gold coins in tow. He was met by two men in a Jeep Cherokee. The car was a rental, with Florida plates, which struck Blake as a little off. The driver showed him a license, and Blake loaded the gold into the car. He asked for a ride to a nearby hotel, due to the late hour and the weather, but the driver said no.

After the handoff, Cofield texted Blake with instructions to delete any photos that he had taken of the car or the driver’s license—and to send him a screenshot of his photo library and his deleted-files folder as proof. Blake, who had Googled Kimmel, thought this was an odd request to get, in the middle of the night, from a ninetysomething-year-old man. He complied, but he also kept a screenshot of the folder with the photos for himself.

Later, Cofield initiated another Schwab transfer, of eight and a half million dollars, again for the purchase of gold. But, before the transfer was complete, he cancelled the order and asked Schwab for a credit-line increase instead. At that point, a Schwab employee contacted a lawyer for Kimmel, who told Schwab that neither he nor his client had requested the transfer, or the previous one. (Kimmel’s lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. Last fall, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that neither he nor Kimmel had knowledge of anything related to the theft, adding, “Mr. Kimmel was unaffected by whatever occurred.” According to the investigator, the Kimmel breach alone doubled Schwab’s average annual loss from fraud. Schwab, which reimbursed Kimmel, declined to comment on this figure.)

In the meantime, guards at Cofield’s prison found two more phones in his cell in the S.M.U. and gave them to a prison forensics unit. The timing was fortunate: Cofield had been using the TextNow app, on which messages can permanently expire, to communicate with Money Metals Exchange and with someone listed in the phone as Yum. Prosecutors believe that Yum is a bank employee who provided Cofield with a driver’s license and a utility bill that belonged to Kimmel. Federal investigators also contacted Michael Blake, who sent them his screenshot of the I.D. that the driver in the Jeep Cherokee had shown him. Investigators enlarged the screenshot and determined that the photograph on the I.D. was of Eldridge Bennett.

Cofield Was Indicted in December, 2020, and charged with aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. His lawyer, a prominent Atlanta attorney named Steven Sadow, declined to comment. (Sadow currently represents Donald Trump in the ex-President’s election-interference case in Georgia; Cofield’s legal team also includes Drew Findling, who represented Trump until Trump replaced him with Sadow, in late August.) Eldridge and Eliayah Bennett were indicted on conspiracy and money-laundering charges.

Soon afterward, a resident of Randall Mill Road was working at his kitchen table when he looked out the window. “Up comes a white locksmith truck followed by maybe ten black unmarked S.U.V.s,” he said. Armed federal agents circled the house. “I’m, like, ‘This ain’t good.’ It was right out of the movies.” The agents couldn’t get the house’s large safe open; McAfee, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, became convinced that that’s where the gold was. He tried, unsuccessfully, to subpoena the man who designed the safe, in Arizona. (“He was, like, ‘You’re not the real government,’ ” McAfee told me.) A team of six safecrackers finally got it open. It was empty. The vast majority of the gold that Cofield is known to have purchased with stolen money has never been accounted for. Laundering tens of millions of dollars in gold coins is not easy—it often requires dealing with transnational organizations capable of smuggling the gold out of the country.

Agents also searched the Bennetts’ place, seizing electronic devices, a Range Rover, a firearm, three hundred thousand dollars, and six Buffalo Tribute Proof gold coins, which were found on Eliayah’s desk. Cofield entrusted his wife with much of what he stole, and text messages between the two, discovered by investigators, suggest that this strained their relationship: on several occasions, Cofield seems to have become convinced that Bennett was going to steal, in turn, from him. “I get why u mad,” Bennett wrote at one point. “Cause U think I’ll steal a house from u. Like I don’t steal money from u I had Millions in my house for months. I know u love that house probably more than me I’ll never do that to u.”

“Phones were the key to his success,” Scott McAfee said, of Cofield, “but also his downfall. For me, it’s all there.”

A Few Months after Cofield was indicted, McAfee was appointed inspector general of Georgia. He handed the case off to another U.S. Attorney, who left the post after two years and then handed the case off yet again. McAfee’s successors both declined to comment for this story. (McAfee has since become a judge in Fulton County’s Superior Court. In August, he was appointed to oversee Donald Trump’s election-interference trial.)

In March, I got a call from Eliayah Bennett, who told me that she had Cofield on the other line. She then patched him through. Calmly and firmly, with a cool Georgia drawl, he told me that he was going to take a plea on the fraud and conspiracy charges. With Bennett listening in, the only matter he seemed intent on discussing, apart from the plea, was his connection to Selena Holmes, which he insisted did not exist. “In the story, if you don’t mind, don’t put this lady’s name anywhere close to mine, because she don’t know me,” he said.

The detective who investigated Cofield and Rogers described listening to hundreds of calls that Holmes made from a county-jail phone—many of which, the detective said, were obviously with Cofield. “He’d disguise his voice like he was an old lady when they talked, the same way he disguised it as an old man when he called the banks to take over the accounts. It was crazy Madea-type stuff,” the detective added, referring to the grandmother played, in several movies, by Atlanta’s own Tyler Perry. “They’d usually try to talk in code, and she’d slip up every now and then. When she’d get really angry, she’d write e-mails saying she was gonna tell everything that happened.”

Several people I spoke to expressed a fear that Cofield could try to retaliate against anyone whom he perceives to be working against him. He has, after all, been charged with ordering the murder of one person, and he committed most of his crimes while detained in maximum-security prisons—it’s not clear what authorities can do to make things more difficult for him than they are. Earlier this year, Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, announced that he and twenty-one other attorneys general were pushing Congress to pass a law allowing states to jam phone reception in correctional facilities, which is forbidden as a result of the Communications Act of 1934. Todd Clear, a criminal-justice professor at Rutgers, told me that the better approach would be to allow people in prison to have cell phones, and to closely monitor their use. This, he noted, would also make prison life more humane.

A month after I spoke with Cofield, I attended his plea hearing, at a downtown courthouse. His high-priced lawyers made small talk about their ties while he hunched between them in his jumpsuit. He has a large tattoo on his neck, which was partly visible: “Laugh now, cry later,” it reads, alongside drawings of clowns.

After he pleaded guilty, lawyers for the government laid out the agreement that they had reached with him: a hundred and fifty-one months for fraud committed in Georgia and Alabama. The judge asked Cofield to explain what he’d done.

“What did I do,” he began. He took a deep breath. Without visible emotion, he described gaining access to bank accounts belonging to Sidney Kimmel and to the doctor in Alabama, using their funds to buy gold coins, and shipping the coins to Atlanta. “I got possession of it,” he started to say, when one of his attorneys cut him off. “I think that’s enough,” the lawyer said. The judge accepted this, then shook his head. “If you would have taken the ability and knowledge you have and put it towards something that was legal and right—” he said, in Cofield’s direction.

“I would be investing my money with him,” one of the lawyers said.

Eliayah Bennett, who has not yet entered a plea in her case, sat a few rows behind Cofield in the gallery. (Her father, who declined to comment for this story, has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.) Cofield smiled at her before a U.S. marshal escorted him out of the room. Later, the detective told me that another phone had recently been found in Cofield’s cell, and that he’d been Googling “U.S. marshal uniforms.” The detective suspected that he was trying to formulate an escape—that he wanted to get back to the free world, where he hasn’t set foot since he was sixteen. Devinchio Rogers is now in Ware State Prison, in south Georgia. His lawyer told me that, in July, he was stabbed multiple times. He is currently recovering, the lawyer said.

On one of my last visits to the house on Randall Mill Road, I saw that weeds had grown in the yard and around the unfinished pool. “Someone smashed a basement window,” a neighbor told me. “It’s attracted lots of activity and gawkers.” Neighbors said that they had also seen Eliayah Bennett around, late last year, in a Mercedes. “She was taking everything that wasn’t screwed down to the ground,” one said (including the Moëts). Bennett has opened a business in a North Atlanta strip mall offering facials and ombré brows. When I asked her on the phone whether she’d been by the house, she said, “I don’t want to talk about that.” Earlier this year, the government seized the property and put it on the market for around two and a half million dollars. It went under contract quickly. The new owner is an ophthalmologist. Proceeds will go to Cofield’s victims.

When I visited, it had not yet sold. As I stood outside, a black Lamborghini pulled up and parked nearby. Two well-dressed young men got out and ventured onto the property. When they returned to the street, one of them said to me, “The guy who built this house is in prison. Have you walked up on it? It’s nice.” This man turned out to be a real music producer, with the stage name of BricksDaMane. He mentioned his work with Drake, Future, and Lil Baby. (The Lamborghini was his.) I told him that I’d spoken with the architect who designed the house, and the producer asked me for his number. He wanted to chat with him, he said. He had some ideas for how it might be finished. ♦

[kathmandutimes]

Gold smuggling investigation risks political interference

KATHMANDU, Aug 15: After the government handed over the responsibility of investigating the recent gold smuggling case to the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal Police, the main opposition party in Parliament, the CPN-UML, has been demanding a high-level investigation committee to probe the scam.

The UML has been obstructing the Parliament meeting for the past few days demanding a parliamentary or a high-level investigation committee on the smuggled gold case. Experts say that there is no need to doubt the competence of the CIB, which is skillful in the investigation of organized and transnational crimes. They claim that the formation of a new committee will hamper the ongoing investigation and will not give the expected results.

Former DIG of Nepal Police Hemanta Malla Thakuri says that there is no need to form another investigation committee as CIB is capable of conducting result-oriented investigation. “The CIB is continuing the investigation in a comprehensive manner. There is a possibility to mislead the investigation when a political committee or other committee is formed. The political motives can hamper the investigation,” he says. According to DIG Malla, who resolved the mysterious Ranibari murder case when he headed the CIB, the investigations conducted from the political and administrative levels in the past were not able to provide any tangible results. 

“The investigations and studies conducted at the administrative levels have not been able to solve the rape and murder case of Nirmala Panta yet. There are many other incidents like this,” says former DIG Malla.

In the past, when KP Sharma Oli was the prime minister, a special investigation team was formed according to Section 11(1) of the Organized Crime Prevention Act, 2070. Even at that time, a report was submitted to the then Prime Minister Oli detailing the smuggling of up to 38 quintals of gold. The provisions of that report have not yet been implemented.

Relief to smugglers due to lack of coordination between the two agencies

The lack of coordination between the two government agencies – the Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI) and the CIB– in the investigation of the gold seized by the DRI on July 19 seems to have provided relief to the smugglers. 

Coordination between the two agencies is lacking because the CIB was assigned with investigation of organized crime and transborder crime 18 days after the gold was seized by the DRI.

It is also evident from the reluctance of the police to investigate those people blacklisted by the DRI and arrested by the Department of Immigration and sent to the CIB. 

On August 11, the Department of Immigration arrested two Chinese nationals from the TIA in connection with gold smuggling. Those arrested were Lijia Lin and Liu Fuyan. Along with them, the DRI blacklisted seven others, who were arrested and handed over to the DRI by the Department of Immigration. The DRI then forwarded the case for investigation to the CIB. But the CIB refused to charge them, stating that the DRI did not reveal the grounds for blacklisting them.

Similarly, controversial businessman Rakesh Adukia and his son Rohan Adukia were also blacklisted by the DRI. The Department of Immigration had arrested Rohan on August 12 and sent him to the CIB, but the CIB refused to investigate him and released him after signing an agreement to be present whenever required. 

“The gold was recovered by the DRI. But the department is not ready to share the source of information with us. Apart from written documents, nothing has been made available,” said a CIB officer involved in the investigation. “We have started the investigation from scratch. Clues have been received from some of the people who have been arrested but it will take some time to come up with a conclusion. The network of gold smugglers is linked with the Chinese nationals,” he added.

Police officers claim that if the DRI had taken the help of police at the beginning, it would have been easier to investigate the gold smuggling case. The government gave the responsibility of investigating the case under organized crime to the CIB only after widespread pressure. The police then formed a special team under the leadership of Superintendent of Police (SP) Sanjay Singh Thapa and started investigation. A week has passed since the team started its work. DSP, inspectors and junior officers working in CIB raided various companies operated by Chinese nationals but they could not reach the mastermind behind the gold smuggling. 

The officials of CIB claimed that despite having skilled manpower and resources for the investigation, it will take some time for concluding the investigation because the case was not handed in time to the police.

However, they have been stating that they will conduct an investigation to identify the root cause of the crime and solve it.

Past investigations conducted by the police also led to the peddlers at the initial stage. The mastermind of the 35 kg of smuggled gold recovered from Koteshwor by CIB in 2070 BS was not found at first. About 33.5 kg of  smuggled gold recovered in 2073 BS were recovered from outside the TIA. The investigation identified the mastermind but he could not be arrested immediately. The police were able to arrest only the peddlers in the initial stage in the case of smuggled gold seized by the police themselves. Similarly, the police were able to arrest only the transporters in the 88 kg of gold seized in 2074 BS and 33 kg of gold seized in 2074 BS. Even now, neither the DRI nor the police have reached beyond the investigation of the peddlers. 

“In the past, the investigations were concluded but the main leaders were not arrested. It cannot be said that similar problems will not occur even now,” said an officer at the police headquarters.

Nepal Police spokesperson Kuber Kadayat said that the CIB is investigating the case and it would be inappropriate to comment before the investigation concludes.

Due to the high demand for gold in India, Indian nationals are also involved in the smuggling of gold from Nepal, so the Nepal Police is also coordinating with the Indian Police. “We are also coordinating with the police of other countries as we have to investigate transnational crimes,” said a CIB source. Since a few days, CIB has been arresting suspicious people and releasing them on bail. According to CIB sources, three people were arrested four days ago but they were released as their involvement in gold smuggling was not confirmed.

[strangewolfbird]

Why is Zimbabwe Poor? Here is the Answer

With tons of gold, lithium, diamonds and platinum you still wonder why Zimbabwe is the poorest of the poorest. No electricity, no jobs, no manufacturing to talk about .We are a basket case and we will continue to be one until Zimbabweans everywhere join the rebellion Watch this Video, You will be shocked at the level of corruption in Zimbabwe and how our leaders are all involved in it