An informant for the US government yesterday said confessed drug kingpin Roger Khan ordered the execution of political activist Ronald Waddell.
And Health Minister Dr. Leslie Ramsammy was again mentioned as having had contact with Khan.
According to Capitol News, giving testimony in a Brooklyn, New York courtroom, where former Khan lawyer Robert Simels is being tried for witness tampering, Selwyn Vaughn, 34, a professed former member of Khan’s “Phantom gang,” stated that after ordering the hit on Waddell, the Guyanese businessman contacted Ramsammy. He also said Ramsammy had been expected to help Khan after he was held by US authorities.
Reached for comment, Ramsammy last night dismissed the allegations against him as “nonsense!”. He told Stabroek News that he had been mourning the passing of his father on the same day that Waddell was murdered. In rejecting the claims he said too that “this is nonsense, it continues”. Ramsammy said further that he has important work to do and would focus on his commitments rather than claims being made in the New York court against him.
Vaughn, who is in protective custody and under special immunity that shields him from later prosecution in the United States, spent the entire day on the witness stand, where he revealed that in addition to Waddell, Khan also ordered the execution of Agricola boxing coach Donald Allison. The allegation in relation to the murder of Allison and an informant Devendra Persaud, had come up during pre-trial proceedings in the drug conspiracy case against Khan.
Vaughn was the confidential source who helped the US government to implicate Simels and his associate Arienne Irving, who are jointly charged with plotting with Khan to threaten and bribe witnesses to prevent them from testifying in the case against Khan. In a transcript of recorded conversations with Simels, he had also previously named Ramsammy repeatedly. The Minister’s name was also on a list which included drug accused individuals, dead notorious criminals and present and past members of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) that was to be included in a questionnaire for prospective jurors for Khan’s trial.
In March, Khan agreed to a guilty plea on charges of cocaine trafficking and witness tampering.
Waddell, 57, was killed in January 2006. According to reports at the time, a dark-coloured car took the gunmen to the scene, where they were apparently watching Waddell’s movements from the seawall. According to reports, as soon as Waddell stepped into his car, two gunmen ran across the road and opened fire on the vehicle. They then ran back across the road, jumped into their car and sped away east along the highway. Police had arrested freed murder accused, Shawn Hinds and two relatives of dead ‘hitman’ Axel Williams, but the men were all released. It was believed that a city-based death squad with links to the underworld carried out the killing.
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According to Capitol News, Vaughn yesterday said he was in a Burgundy AT 192 motor car when four other named members of the squad turned up and shot Waddell. He told the court he had been the lookout man who was tracking Waddell and he called Khan on his cell phone that night and reported that the talk show host had left his residence and his car was idling on the roadway. Within minutes, four members of Khan’s squad, all former members of the GPF named by Vaughn, turned up and shot Waddell.
After the shooting Khan and his group, including Vaughn, reportedly gathered at a nightclub, from where Khan called Minister Ramsammy. The former talk show host, Vaughn explained to the court, was criticizing Khan and was connected to a gang of prison escapees based in Buxton, East Coast Demerara.
Several telephone calls were played in the courtroom detailing separate conversations between Vaughn and Simels in the US as well as others.
Vaughn, who said that he became a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant after Khan was arrested and taken to the US in 2006, was asked specifically whether he ever met with Ramsammy. He said that he met Ramsammy both at Roger Khan’s Carpet Cleaning office in Bel Air and that he went to the Minister’s office on behalf of Khan who introduced them.
He also revealed that after Khan’s extradition to the US, it was expected that Ramsammy would help. In 2006, just prior to him fleeing to Suriname, Khan had claimed in newspaper advertisements that he fought alongside law enforcement to defeat criminals in Guyana. Vaughn noted that later, President Bharrat Jagdeo said publicly that Khan must say on whose behalf he was fighting crime. Nevertheless, Vaughn indicated that Khan’s group received help from Ramsammy on behalf of the government and he added that President Jagdeo would not like Khan to talk. He, however, concluded that Khan is not that type of person since he could have talked about his involvement with the Guyana government when he was originally held by US authorities and would have walked right out.
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Speaking about the murder of Allison, Vaughn said he was the lookout in that hit as well. Khan, he said, called him to ask for the location of Allison and after receiving the information members of the “Phantom squad” came out and shot Allison dead. Later, in retaliation the daughter of one of the members of the squad was kidnapped. Allison was the uncle of former army officer David Clarke, who was identified to testify against Khan. Khan had vehemently denied having anything to do with Allison’s murder.
The star witness named several Guyanese individuals who are involved in the narcotics trade between Guyana and North America and Europe. Their photographs and phone numbers were displayed in court and in some cases telephone conversations were played.
The involvement of Khan in trying to quell and capture the five February 23 prison escapees was also mentioned in the testimony. The jury learnt that Khan organized various houses to have money placed there to lure the escapees to those targets so they could have been eliminated. The witness in sworn testimony said that he was asked because he was a schoolmate of Rondell “Fineman” Rawlins to infiltrate the Buxton group on behalf of Khan. There were two attempts to send explosives into Buxton to blow up the Gang. Guns were brought in from Brazil though an employee of a timber company that Khan later bought.
According to Vaughn’s testimony, a man targeted for extradition from Guyana was also part of the Khan organization, helping to facilitate the movement of hundreds of kilos of drugs out of Guyana. He told the court that at one stage Khan said just to run the “Phantom squad” and pay all the members he would have to land 500 kilos of cocaine per year into the US and Europe. The witness also said he saw cocaine at Khan’s Bel Air House and he saw Khan give a kilo of cocaine to a man whom he named.
According to a report in the New York Law Journal, the trial, which began on Monday, is being closely followed by New York’s legal community. The courtroom was packed with the overflow watching from the courthouse’s third-floor cafeteria via closed-circuit television.
Simels, 62, faces up to 10 years in prison.
The report noted that Khan was indicted in the Eastern District of New York in April 2006 and charged with heading the Phantom Squad, a Guyana-based paramilitary drug cartel that smuggled and distributed cocaine to Brooklyn. He hired Simels, a defence attorney known for representing high-profile drug dealers and members of organized crime families—including Henry Hill, the mobster played by Ray Liotta in “GoodFellas”—to represent him.
According to an affidavit filed by a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, soon thereafter Simels met with a member of the Phantom Squad-Vaughn, a government informant who recorded their conversations, and advised him that Khan would need to “eliminate” or “neutralize” potential witnesses. In one excerpt from the recordings, the informant allegedly told Simels that one potential witness wanted $10,000 in order to sign a contract agreeing to testify in favour of Khan.
