-co-accused gets 10 years

The wife of drug convict David Narine was yesterday sentenced to time serve and five years supervised release while a co-accused was sentenced to ten years in prison by Judge Edward Korman in a New York court.

Susan Narine, who was held together with her husband and others in 2003, was one of the many who had testified at the trial of their co-accused, Trinidadian Hung-Fung Mar. She was given a similar sentence to that of her husband. Mar had refused to plead guilty.

The husband and wife duo, along with David’s brother William and his wife Savitree, were all charged in 2003 with conspiracy to traffic in narcotics. William was sentenced to time served last year and his wife was given a similar sentence in 2005. David and William Narine had also testified against Mar. William had said Mar sent persons to his apartment in New York to drop off packages. Susan had testified at Mar’s trial that she and her husband had begun trafficking in narcotics to the US from Trinidad in August 2001.

Susan Narine had told the court that months after they started trafficking, they re-located to Guyana after Mar, who had joined their ring, was arrested in Trinidad. Mar was eventually freed in Trinidad but was subsequently nabbed by the US authorities.

However, unlike her co-accused she refused to plead guilty and was found guilty in 2007. She was attempting to have her conviction overturned based on insanity claims.

Mar’s lawyer, Howard Leader, whom she fired after she was convicted, told the court in an affidavit that while his client may have been stubborn and ignored all of his advice, she was definitely not insane and was more than competent to stand trial.

Leader said while she was offered an opportunity to plead guilty and give information on other “high-profile drug traffickers,” Mar refused and insisted that she was innocent and that she was a victim of “lying Trinidad police.” She felt the case in the US was a “re-hash” of the case she faced in Trinidad that was eventually dismissed. Mar had also claimed that she knew none of the persons, including the Narines, who testified against her. Leader said while Mar was the proprietor of a grocery store in Trinidad, it was obvious to him that she was not “well-educated or sophisticated” and did not have a good understanding of the US court system. However, he said she was not incompetent, even though she felt the judge would have just sent her home whether she was found guilty or not.

During Mar’s trial Susan Narine had revealed that the woman recruited couriers for them in Trinidad by placing classified advertisements in newspapers.

The advertisements sought individuals with valid US visas who were interested in travelling to the United States for housekeeping or nursing jobs. When an individual responded to the advertisement, Mar would interview them over the phone and then arrange for them to travel to Guyana to meet the Narines. “Susan Narine also testified that, during the course of the conspiracy, the couriers generally transported between one half of a kilogramme and five kilogrammes of cocaine on each trip to the United States,” court documents revealed.

David Narine, who had played a key role in the arrest of Morgan had claimed that he only became involved in drugs as a means to repay a debt. He had been in the US prison since 2003, shortly after he was extradited from Guadeloupe, where he was serving a seven-year sentence. He was expected to be one of the main prosecution witnesses had Peter Morgan’s case gone to trial.

His lawyer had said that Narine’s prosecution was well publicised here and it was suggested that he was cooperating with the US government. “There came a time when his children were confronted [in Guyana where they were pretty much self-sufficient on their own] by an individual thought to be associated with the drug lords for whom David worked,” the lawyer had said.

The confrontation was of such a serious magnitude, it was stated, it prompted the US government to spirit the children out of the country that very weekend and they have been in the US since.

It has since been revealed that Narine had built a “mansion” and a guest house and was in the process of developing a resort near Shell Beach in Region One, shortly before he was held and convicted in St Martin on drug trafficking charges.