Flaming death no accident, FBI says: Gasoline found on clothes of license examiner

The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court.

Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, FBI agent J. Suzanne Nash told U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Daniel Breen.

Nash also testified that investigators found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith's car.

Breen found there was probable cause to charge Mohammed Fares, Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin and Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad. He also denied them bond.

Fares, Hammad and Abou-Shahin, wearing tan prison scrubs and blue windbreakers, listened to the proceedings through cell phones with an Arabic interpreter on the other end of the line in another city. The courtroom's sound system was piped through the phone line for the interpreter to hear.

After hearing the translation of Breen denying him bond, Fares, 19, set his cell phone on the table and put his head in his hands.

Smith and her co-defendants, including alleged ring leader Khaled Odtllah and Hammad's cousin, Sakhera Hammad, were charged Feb. 6 with conspiracy to fraud ulent ly obtain Tennessee driver's licenses.

While her five co-defendants have been imprisoned without bond since their Feb. 5 arrest, Smith was released on her own recognizance. She died one day before she was due to appear at a detention hearing before a federal magistrate judge.

"Was this death a result of an accident?" federal prosecutor Tim DiScenza asked Nash, who was the only witness to testify during Wednesday's two-hour hearing.

According to Nash, this is what FBI agents and Tennessee Highway Patrol investigators have concluded about the car crash:

Six unnamed witnesses - all related to each other - saw Smith's 1992 Acura Legend veer off U.S. 72 around 12:45 a.m. Sunday. They said the interior of the car was on fire as the car drove across a ditch and hit a utility pole.

"Every single thing inside the car is burnt," she said before noting that the trunk and gas tank were untouched by a blaze so intense that Smith's arms and legs were "burned off."

There was only "slight damage" to the front end of the car from hitting the utility pole, she added.

Nash said gasoline was found on Smith's clothing. She said investigators are still waiting on test results of traces of an unknown accelerant found in the car. A dog trained to sniff out such chemicals detected the accelerant.

Attorneys for the three defendants were quick to point out that their clients were all in prison at the time of Smith's death.

"Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more," said Karen Cicala, who represents Fares. "She may have had other things going on in her life that may have led to her death."

She also questioned whether Fares is being treated differently because of ties to the Middle-East.

Attorney Jake Erwin, representing Hammad, urged Breen to consider only the fraud conspiracy charge.

"You're not saying that Mr. Hammad had anything to do with Katherine Smith's death, are you?" Erwin asked Nash.

"You're not saying he had anything to do with the World Trade Center attack, are you," he asked again.

DiScenza has said there are "connections" linking two of the accused to the World Trade Center in the days before it was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Those connections include a visitor's pass to the WTC dated Sept. 5 that belonged to Sakhera Hammad.

DiScenza focused on Smith's death as a factor that Breen should consider in denying bond.

"This court has to consider that Katherine Smith died under very suspicious circumstances, in a manner that was clearly not an accident," DiScenza told Breen. "Coincidence only goes so far."

Now, that this looks like an "ARKANCIDE," wonder if Charlie Trie owns any Chinese Restaurants nearby?

Not Yah Lin *Charlie* Trie's restaurant, but maybe a name or two here will ring a bell....

The Jimmy Hoffa investigation

'This disappearance has me hurting, too'

O'Brien also says he wants answers just as much as Hoffa family

By Shannon Colavecchio / Palm Beach Post

Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien, shown in 1991,
remains a key figure in Jimmy Hoffa's 1975
disappearance. He denied again Saturday
playing any role in Hoffa's presumed death.

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Twenty-six years after the man who raised him vanished, Charles "Chuckie" O'Brien insists he wants the answers to union boss Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance just as much as Hoffa's mourning children.

Speaking publicly for the first time since the FBI interviewed him last month, the 66-year-old O'Brien said he understands the Hoffa family's grief, but not their suspicions that he bears responsibility for Hoffa's July 30, 1975, disappearance.

"This disappearance has me hurting, too," said O'Brien, an Irish Italian who came to know Hoffa as a father, having been raised by the powerful Teamster leader since his early childhood.

"I loved this man more than anything. My thought has always been that this could be solved, and I agree with Jimmy (Hoffa's son and Teamsters president) that they deserve closure."

Federal officials say they might decide whether to prosecute someone in connection with the Hoffa case by December 2003.

FBI agents have long suspected the car was used in the disappearance, but until now had no proof.

Investigators believe Hoffa, then 62, was picked up outside the restaurant and killed. His body never has been found, despite authorities' years of investigating.

The result has been a sort of national fascination about Hoffa's disappearance and presumed death, one that has spawned movies and books speculating about what happened, and why.

Hoffa's family has long maintained that O'Brien is one of the few people who could have convinced Hoffa to get into the car.

O'Brien said Saturday that he was in the process of moving to Florida with his new wife, Brenda, at the time of Hoffa's vanishing.

"I'd just married a girl from the South and she didn't want to live in Detroit, so I took the new job," O'Brien said.

He said he had been transferred to a construction job within the Teamsters' Southern Conference and he was in Detroit that day only to clean out his office.

"Then I was asked to go deliver this huge salmon, you should have seen it, it was 60 pounds!" he recalled. "But I didn't even have a car there anymore, so I had to borrow one."

His most recent recollection of events don't exactly match reports of what he told the FBI soon after Hoffa vanished. He said then that he borrowed a car belonging to Joe Giacalone, son of mob boss Anthony Giacalone, because his own Lincoln Continental had been repossessed; that he was staying with friends near the restaurant where Hoffa was last seen; and that the salmon weighed 40 pounds, not 60.

Saturday, he insisted his car was not repossessed: "It was in Memphis."

For years, media accounts and FBI sources have portrayed O'Brien as a gambling man who struggled to overcome debt and an increasingly troubled relationship with Hoffa in the months leading up to the disappearance. FBI reports dating back to 1975 also indicate that O'Brien gives conflicting accounts of the days surrounding Hoffa's disappearance.

Saturday, he denied newspaper reports that he dropped out of sight for the five days after Hoffa vanished: "I was moving! I wasn't running away from anything."

He was moving, or getting out of Dodge for a good reason.

And suddenly, 26 years later, the FBI drags it all back into the news again. And what else is going on:

Dallas Business Journal

July 31, 2001

Pancho's Mexican Buffet shareholders OK merger

Pancho's Mexican Buffet Inc. (Nasdaq: PAMX) said Tuesday its stockholders approved the merger of Pancho's Restaurants Inc., an affiliate of Stephen Oyster of Austin, into Pancho's.

The Fort Worth-based company said it expects that the merger will be effective Aug. 1.

Under the agreement, Pancho Mexican Buffet's common stock will be converted into the right to receive $4.60 cash per share. The company currently has about 1.5 million shares outstanding and outstanding options to purchase about 175,000 shares.

When the merger becomes effective, the company's common stock will no longer be listed on the Nasdaq Small Cap Market.

Pancho's Mexican Buffet operates 47 restaurants in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:vygkzKFg1j0C:www.gomemphis.com/mca/local_news/article/0,1426,MCA_437_1235231,00.html+odtllah&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Fraudulent-license seekers sentenced to time served
By Bill Dries
gomemphis.com
June 28, 2002

Four members of a fraudulent driver's license ring were sentenced Thursday to the nearly five months they've spent in prison awaiting trial on the federal conspiracy charge.

Khaled Odtllah, head of the scheme to get the New York City men Tennessee driver's licenses with a phony Cordova address, was released hours after being sentenced by U.S. Dist. Judge Bernice Donald.

But his three co-defendants - Mohammed Fares, Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad and Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin - remained in custody to face deportation, a process that could take a year.

They were in the country illegally at the time of their arrest in February.

Odtllah, who lived in Cordova before his arrest, has permanent resident status.

"Under the circumstances I think this was the best possible outcome," Odtllah's attorney Anthony Helm said of the time-served sentence.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, the maximum sentence for each of the four would have been six months in prison because none had felony convictions.

The four defendants and fifth suspect, Sakher Hammad of Jordan, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to fraudulently obtain driver's licenses. Sakher Hammad, who is free on bond, will be sentenced in August.

The case drew national attention when Katherine Smith, the Memphis driver's license examiner accused of being Odtllah's inside source for the licenses, died in a fiery car crash the day before her first court appearance.

Adding another twist, Sakher Hammad had a visitor's pass to the World Trade Center dated just days before the terrorist attack.

The guilty pleas and conspiracy charge made no mention of Smith's death or terrorist acts that prosecutors highlighted in the early stages of the case.

Asst. U.S. Atty. Tim DiScenza declined comment after the hearings on Smith's death and the continuing investigation into her death. Federal investigators have said the fire that burned Smith alive in her car was deliberately set and that traces of gasoline were found.

After the guilty pleas, a defense attorney released a letter purportedly written by Smith the day of her arrest and five days before her death in which she wrote she had "lost everything" and "can't live without any honor."

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