Former President of Queens Mortgage Brokerage Firm Pleads Guilty to $23 Million Fraud Case - Channel 6 News »

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The former President of GuyAmerican Funding Corp., a mortgage brokerage firm in Queens, New York, pleaded guilty on Friday to participating in a $23 million fraud scheme, prosecutors said.

David Ramnauth, 54, of Levittown, New York, was charged in a superseding indictment along eight other defendants. He was accused of conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud. As the President of GuyAmerican, he facilitated a massive mortgage fraud scheme conducted through the branch office in Jameica, New York.

Three co-defendants, Peggy Persaud, Orette Killikelly and George Esso were loan officers at GuyAmerican. They received thousands of dollars in commissions based on fraudulent loan applications submitted to lenders.

Elton Lord, Rafick Baksh and Mahamood Hussain recruited homeowners in financial distress who were willing to sell their homes. They worked along the loan officers and used straw buyers who posed as the buyers for a fee.

The three recruiters obtained mortgage loans using fraudulent representations, including the straw buyers supposed net worth, employment, and income. They re-sold the properties with inflated market values, sometimes even for the double of the original price.

After the fraudulent loans were submitted, Ramnauth directed through a GuyAmerican loan officer to have the closing attorneys set aside six months' worth of mortgage payments from the closing proceeds in order to conceal the fraud from lenders.

Ramnauth faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and he was ordered to forfeit the fraudulent proceeds. All other defendants have also pleaded guilty with the exception of Baksh and Hussain, who remain at large.

Richmond Hill Journal - Richmond Hill in Queens Aims to Do Better With Census by Kirk Semple - NYTimes.com

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Harpreet Toor, left, and Ravisharon Kaur talked with members of the South Asian community in Queens about the census. Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times

Kulwinder Singh, a 52-year-old Punjabi Sikh who works as a tow-truck operator, approached a young community organizer who was taping a promotional poster for the 2010 census to a wall inside his temple in Richmond Hill, Queens. Mr. Singh looked perplexed.

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The 2010 Census Form

The New York Times

Percentage of 2000 Census questionnaires returned by mail, in selected tracts

“Population count,” the organizer, Herminder Singh, 19, explained in Punjabi, before launching into a detailed explanation of the survey.

The older man listened intently, finally declaring, with a resolve that would warm the heart of any census official: “My family has 10 to 15 members. When the form comes, I’ll fill it out.”

Those forms will start arriving in the mail next week, and government officials say the success of this year’s census will depend heavily on the grassroots efforts of thousands of nonprofit, corporate and community organizations that have volunteered to mobilize their constituents to complete the forms and mail them in.

They have their work cut out for them in Richmond Hill, a middle-class neighborhood with a large South Asian and Indo-Caribbean population. In the 2000 census, swaths of the area had some of the most dismal response rates in the city, with only about 4 in 10 households mailing back the forms.

This time around, members of Seva, a community-based organization that works with Richmond Hill’s immigrants, have vowed to raise those numbers by acting as advance troops for the Census Bureau.

“We understood how there was a vacuum in the community,” said Gurpal Singh, 34, the group’s executive director, who was born in the Punjab region of India and has lived in Richmond Hill since 1985. “We looked at what happened in 2000, which was nothing.”

Census officials say these advocates will be crucial in helping to dispel fears that the information they provide on the form will be used against them. Though the law protects the confidentiality of the information, many illegal immigrants fear that providing their personal information could lead to deportation. The group members can also help overcome language obstacles — a particular concern in Queens, where nearly half the residents were born overseas.

“The challenge is the thing that we’re also very proud of, and it’s our diversity,” said Susie Tannenbaum, the community and cultural coordinator for the borough president’s office. “So many language groups, so many immigrant populations.”

Richmond Hill, once heavily Italian and Irish, has changed drastically in recent decades. South Asians, particularly Indians, began settling there in large numbers during the mid-20th century. They were followed, beginning in the 1970s, by Guyanese and Trinidadians — descendants of Indians taken to the Caribbean in the 19th century to work as contract laborers on sugar plantations. The neighborhood is also home to one of the world’s largest Punjabi Sikh populations outside India.

Gurpal Singh and his partners at Seva decided to get involved in the census outreach more than a year ago because it dovetailed with their work as organizers. They saw it as a way “to get people into the room, to get them talking and to then discuss other things,” Mr. Singh said.

They have conducted scores of seminars for Richmond Hill businesses, community groups and its plethora of mosques, Sikh and Hindu temples and Christian churches. They have sent out e-mail blasts and used Facebook.

“We’ve been taking the grassroots approach, just making sure the local real estate guy understands what the census is about and the message he should send out to his clients,” Mr. Singh said.

The group’s attention to the neighborhood’s cultural subtleties is reflected in the thousands of posters and leaflets it has printed. Leaflets for the Punjabi population, for instance, are in Punjabi, illustrated with photos of Sikhs in turbans. But those for the Guyanese population are in English, with images of West Indian people.

“Because we live in the neighborhood, we have to use our instincts to know whether someone is going to walk by a poster and think it’s sexy,” said Ravisharon Kaur, 35, director of programs and development for Seva.

But some of the most critical work has begun only in the past few weeks, as organizers and their workers — many of them high school and college students, like Herminder Singh — blanket the neighborhood with literature and address constituents’ concerns one-on-one.

On a recent Sunday, Nadia Kahnauth, a Guyanese-American lawyer and Seva representative, stood in front of her congregation at the Bhuvaneshwar Mandir temple and gave a short speech about the census. (The temple is in Ozone Park, but draws some of its mainly Guyanese congregation from neighboring Richmond Hill.)

After the service, Ms. Kahnauth, clutching a stack of Census literature and flanked by her husband and three school-age volunteers, stood next to a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha and buttonholed congregants as they filed by in stockinged feet.

“Do you have any questions about the census?” Ms. Kahnauth cheerily asked a Guyanese man. He stopped, a confused look on his face.

“It’s very simple,” she said, explaining the process.

“O.K.,” the man said, nodding, though his apprehensive smile and wary glances suggested otherwise. As he headed toward the door, Ms. Kahnauth smiled and shrugged, as if to say she had done the best she could.

The Seva activists acknowledge that they have not done enough to take aim at the neighborhood’s growing yet atomized Latino population, which accounts for about 28 percent of the total. In coming days, the group plans to dispatch a team of interns to canvass Latino businesses and storefront evangelical churches.

And once the census campaign is over, organizers will turn to a cause that hangs on the results of the count: the redrawing of state and federal legislative districts. They intend to leave the neighborhood census committees in place.

With a slight tweak to the committee names and a major shift in focus, they will be ready for their next battle.

About New York - 13 Birds From Guyana, and a Chance at Stardom in New Yorkby Jim Dwyer - NYTimes.com

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There is surprisingly good money to be made — and lost — on male finches when they sing to woo the females. On fine afternoons, the birds are taken in cages to Smokey Oval, a park in Richmond Hill, Queens, for singing contests. The finches are treated by Guyanese immigrants as if they were college basketball players: the wagering is ferocious.

The bird that sings the best wins, and successful owners can bring home $5,000. The judges in these matches are male humans, not girl finches, which presumably have their own notions of what makes for a good song of courtship.

“They’re judged on how mellifluous they are,” explained Deirdre von Dornum, a lawyer who recently acquired an expertise in the field of bird song contests. “Their range and length and sophistication of song.”

The money may be good, but it is not easy. Among Guyanese in Queens, the finches with the best reputation as singers are those that live in the grass back in Guyana. Whether they really are superior singers, or this is simply a matter of deflected longing for home, is impossible to say. It is enough that people believe the Guyanese finches are worth the trouble of evading quarantine requirements by smuggling them. And part of that trouble, naturally, involves law enforcement.

On Tuesday, a case involving 13 smuggled finches took Ms. von Dornum to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn along with nine other lawyers and law students, a forensic ornithologist flown in from Oregon, a federal magistrate, his law clerk, a court stenographer to document the proceedings, and 14 jurors.

The story begins on a summer day nearly three years ago, when customs officers at Kennedy Airport pulled Terrence McLean, a maintenance worker at a nursing home in Brooklyn, out of line when he arrived from Guyana. In his checked luggage, the officers found a bundle of grass seed.

One of the officers asked if Mr. McLean had any birds with him.

“No sir,” he replied.

His carry-on consisted of a plastic shopping bag with two bottles of duty free liquor. Also in the plastic bag was a small paper shopping bag. It held 13 plastic hair curlers. Inside the hair curlers were 13 live finches.

A team of federal agents fell on Mr. McLean, who was searched and found to have not a penny of cash. He spoke freely about the finches, which he called Towa Towas, according to papers filed in federal court.

Born in Guyana but now a United States citizen, he had gone home to settle his grandmother’s estate, with requests to bring back quality birds. He was to be paid $100 for each finch delivered in good condition. These were just his transport fees.

The birds were supplied by a man named Eric Thomas, apparently a leading source of Guyanese finches, who was paid directly by the buyers from New York. Nine were going to one man.

For himself, Mr. McLean said, he bought two birds for $200 each in an open market. “McLean said Thomas gets a better price from the sellers in the market, but they will raise the price for someone living in America, like McLean,” according to a report by a federal Fish and Wildlife Service agent.

In the United States, the price is higher still, Mr. McLean told the agent: from $300 to $1,500. “Asked why they use hair curlers, he said that the plastic does not trigger the metal detectors, and if you have only a couple of finches, the curlers can be put hidden beneath the clothes,” the report said.

That was not the end of the subterfuge. At the airport in Guyana, Mr. McLean went through security without the birds. Meanwhile, Mr. Thomas turned them over to an airport employee, who had been told what Mr. McLean would be wearing. “Are you Terry?” the airport employee asked, and told Mr. McLean to follow him to the cantina. There he handed over the bag of hair curlers and finches without a word.

IN court on Tuesday, the magistrate decided, after hearing from the forensic ornithologist, Pepper Trail, that Mr. McLean could not have violated a 1919 Guyanese law that bans the export of various wild birds because the classification of the finches had been revised since the law was enacted.

Mr. McLean, 36, pleaded guilty to filing a false customs declarations form.

“This is something that practically every one who flies has done at some point or another,” said Ms. von Dornum, who represented Mr. McLean.

Perhaps — but not with hair curlers filled with finches.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com