FedEx Operations Manager in New York Manny Mancuso testified both in direct testimony and under cross-examination yesterday that his company had shipped from Guyana to Robert Simels’s NY office, items listed as documents, Panasonic laptops, Auto Data Recording Device computer base power supply and a flash drive.
According to Capitol News, the jury heard that some of the shipments emanated from addresses at Bel Air New Haven and Dadanawa Street Section ‘K’, Campbellville, Georgetown.
Police Commissioner Henry Greene maintained yesterday that the force is still in possession of the sophisticated surveillance equipment it seized from confessed drug accused Roger Khan back in 2002. He said they were watching to see how the trial unfolds in New York before making any decision to produce it saying he was not ready to reveal what the force has as yet.
Yesterday Green told reporters that he stood by his earlier assertion that the equipment was handed to the police but whether there is any contradiction between whether the equipment was the same or part of a set which was the subject of testimony in the US court, Greene said, “they will have to sort that out.”
Meanwhile, Capitol News reported that the prosecution’s last witness, Agent John Mazella, who led the investigation, yesterday tendered into evidence a letter Khan had written to an associate in Guyana in 2007. In the handwritten letter dated July 27, 2007, Khan stated that he had three laptops and that persons will come to Guyana to verify the equipment. Khan wrote asking that one of his associates do a demo of the equipment.
He also asked the associate to help Simels help find calls relating to “the Muslim guy”. “It’s under the targets name ‘fulla’,” Khan wrote from jail. He said he could not remember the man’s name.
He also instructed his associate to “check out for the other Muslim guy in Bel Air not far from Swiss”.
He told the associate to “Please keep all of this confidential do not tell anyone about this” and signed the letter Shaheed K.
Mazella also tendered a memo written to Simels by someone called ‘Al’ in 2007, which said Khan wanted to make a deal to trade in the old equipment for new equipment. According to the memo, the Spy Shop wanted US$500,000 for the deal, but Khan was willing to offer US$250,000.
From the memo, written while Khan was in prison but prior to his guilty plea, ‘Al’ had been told by Khan that he was living in London, England and he wanted someone at another spy shop to be contacted and for that person to contact Carl Chapman, the trainer.
Cross-examining Mazella, Simels’s attorney took a line of questioning that attempted to paint Simels as being entrapped by Mazella, the informant Selwyn Vaughn and the prosecutors.
The jury also heard yesterday that Simels’s fee for defending Khan in his drug trial was US$1.5 million and he had billed Khan’s brother in Florida for US$1.1 million, which was past due. He billed by the hour.
The court heard testimony from the technical officer at the prison where Khan is housed that Khan and Simels were recorded in monitored telephone calls. In one call they discussed Stabroek News’s coverage of the case, why it was being reported by “a PNC guy” that everything was peaceful since Khan left Guyana and money Khan owed to a man.
The court heard too that Khan felt depressed in prison. He wrote in another note, “I am so sad. Whatever I did or said that caused him to leave me like this. I wish I can say sorry please forgive me. I wish that he can understand that this case is really about him so when I win he wins for life.”
