Roger Levans, the Guyanese man who was charged with cocaine trafficking after drugs were found in his suitcase and later freed, has sued Delta Airlines citing severe emotional distress, financial loss and damage to his reputation.
According to the New York Post, Levans a 56-year-old Yankees Stadium security guard filed the lawsuit on Wednesday and has described the shock of being charged with a crime he didn’t commit.
The South Ozone Park, Queens resident in an interview with the Post said the horrors began on December 29 last after he got off his Delta Airlines flight from Guyana where he had been visiting family for Christmas. The ordeal did not end until March, when the US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn finally dropped its drug charges.
Recalling his experience, he said that as he went through Customs at JFK airport he was asked what he was carrying. “I told them I had cooked rabbit and fish” in one suitcase, he said.
But when that piece of luggage went through the security scanner, “I heard the officer say, ‘I’m seeing something here, what is this?”, he said adding that “I was looking at it – it was kind of shocking,”.
“I wanted to know what he saw. He put the suitcase on the counter and when he opened the suitcase, there was no lock on it”, he said. It was then he saw a big black bag with cocaine right alongside the fish and rabbit.
“I was like, ‘How did this get into my suitcase?”, he recalled adding that “[The cocaine] was literally taped up with brown tape. I was scared when I saw this thing. Then the inspector looked at me and said I was in a lot of trouble.”
Levans said when he checked in at Cheddi Jagan International Airport in Guyana, all three of his suitcases were secured with small locks.
But at the JFK Customs check, “There was a tiny ribbon on the handle of [one] suitcase. It was never there before,” he said.
He said that what followed changed his life forever.
After the discovery, he said “I was handcuffed and then taken to another room. I was stripped. They told me to take off my clothes . . . bend down. After they found nothing, they told me to put back on my clothes. They handcuffed my hands and my feet. They shackled me to a bench.”
Levans said that he was then put in a cell and denied even a call to his wife.
“A lot of things were flashing through my mind” he said. “I don’t like to think about it because it gives me a nightmare.”
The horror continued for three months, he said – during which time he was investigated in both the US and Guyana, the Post article said.
But what investigators found was that Levans’ luggage had been tampered with while it was in the custody of Delta, said his lawyer, Michael Borrelli.
“I could have spent up to 40 years in prison” on the charges, he said.
Borrelli said Levans was suspended from his Yankee Stadium job. He was reinstated when cleared of charges, but to a different post.
