Costa Rica Private Investigation – Man Fakes His Own Death to Live In Costa Rica May 28, 2012
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HMV worker faked his own death in bid to live dream lifestyle in Costa Rica by claiming £850,000
Hugo Jose Sanchez, also known as Alfredo Sanchez, was jailed for five years after he faked his own death
A frustrated HMV web developer who faked his own death to start a new dream life as a Disney-style 3D animator in Costa Rica, has been jailed.
Hugo Jose Sanchez staged the audacious con to claim more than £850,000 with wife Sophie, who told his bosses he had died of a heart attack on a trip to his native Ecuador and been cremated.
However, the plan was derailed when a friend used Sanchez’ staff discount card to buy an Elvis album, triggering an investigation by the company.
The conman and his 43-year-old partner were caught out again when HIS fingerprints were found on a death certificate she had presented as proof of his demise.
The couple had already moved abroad and she was jailed alone after returning to the UK to visit her sister’s wedding, leaving Sanchez to continue living the good life, this time in Australia, with their four children.
The 57-year-old, also known as Alfredo, was eventually extradited after his wife had served her time and he was today jailed for five years and will serve half.
The defendant was warned he would face automatic deportation on completion of his sentence.
Sentencing him, Judge Gordon Risius said: ‘I sentenced (Sophie Sanchez) to two years in prison having given her credit for pleading guilty, for her previous good character and because the fraud had clearly been masterminded by you.
‘More importantly she had been swept into it by misguided loyalty to you as a husband and the father of her four children.’
The court heard how the conman had built contacts in Los Angeles through exhibiting his fine art was invited to help set up a 3D animation studio in Costa Rica.
Sophie Sanchez, wife of Hugo, was jailed in 2010 for two years for her part in the life insurance fraud
At the time, in 2004, he was so poor he had resorted to stealing number plates so he could fill his petrol tank and flee without paying on the way to work, until he was caught by police.
He was unable to put food on the table for his four children or to keep up with mortgage payments, his lawyer Michael Stradling said.
However, as the family started building links in the central American country his ‘partners’ began intimidating him into raising funds.
Mr Stradling told Oxford Crown Court: ‘There was, experienced by the family in Costa Rica, some considerable difficulty – it was not the safe place that he had thought and it became far more unsafe after he expressed to his potential business partners that he was in financial difficulties.
‘A mixture of these factors led him to go to Ecuador and fake his own death.’
Before his ‘death’ Sanchez set up a string of life insurance policies, maxed out credit cards, took out a loan on the family home worth £65,000 and even completed his will.
He also took out further loans and insurance on the money he owed as well as renting out the family home for a year.
Mrs Sanchez told his employers on January 10, 2005, that he had died tragically while on holiday in his native Ecuador and been cremated.
She even produced death and cremation certificates in order to receive his company pension fund before cashing in on the insurance policies and applying to have his debts wiped out.
HMV even paid for her to attend his funeral in the South American country, still believing he had genuinely passed away.
Hugo Sanchez dreams of a life in Costa Rica all fell apart when a friend bought a CD with his HMV discount card
However, the con began to unravel when pal Malcolm Jackson tried to buy an Elvis CD using Mr Sanchez’s staff discount card and was arrested and charged.
The bemused shopper called his friend from the police station but the trickster hung up.
Simon Heptonstall said: ‘This scheme began to unravel with a simple CD purchase. Mr Sanchez had given his staff discount card to a good friend, having said that it had been approved by HMV.
‘Mates rates were to a serious fate – when that friend went to buy an Elvis disk using that card he was stopped banned from HMV and arrested.’
The couple slipped up again when a pal receiving their mail accidentally opened a letter and discovered one of the claims.
Hugo Sanchez was a web developer for retail chain HMV, and worked in Marlow, Bucks
She tipped off the life insurance company and GE Insurance Solutions launched an investigation later telling police of their suspicions.
Officers then uncovered Sanchez’s fingerprints on his own death certificate and his wife was arrested after she arrived in Britain for her sister’s wedding in September 2010.
Following his arrest in Sydney he was on remand in an Australian prison where other inmates attacked him, in a bid to get their hands on his reported wealth, the court heard.
She was handed a two-year jail term for fraud and later ordered to pay back £160,000 pounds of the money she falsely claimed.
Sanchez, of no fixed abode, will also face a confiscation hearing at Oxford Crown Court on September 27.
Had the plan been successful the couple would have profited to the tune of a minimum of £850,000, plus ongoing payments made from his HMV pension scheme.
The couple had lived together at a house in Farnham, Surrey while he commuted to Marlow, Buckinghamshire, for work.
They met while she was on travelling in Australia and moved to Britain in September 1990 but he hid his real name even from her, calling himself after his younger brother Alfredo.
Extradition from Germany to Costa Rica? Captain Paul Watson Arrested May 26, 2012
Posted by csi8 in Costa Rica Detective, Costa Rica Investigator, investigations, Uncategorized.Tags: costa rica investigation, costa rica law, private investigator
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Captain Paul Watson Arrested in Germany, Faces Possible Extradition to Costa Rica on Attempted Murder Charges
Notorious Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson was arrested Saturday in Germany and is likely facing extradition to Costa Rica where he could be charged with attempted murder. The charges, Sea Shepherd admits, stem from an alleged incident took place in Guatemalan waters in 2002 while filming Sharkwater, a documentary film meant to expose the ugly shark-hunting/finning industry and stars Watson as he confronts shark poachers in Guatemala and Costa Rica.
According to a release by the marine wildlife conservation society, Sea Shepherd encountered an illegal shark finning operation run by a Costa Rican ship called the Varadero and order them, under authorization by the “order of the Guatemalan authorities”, to cease activities and head back to port to be prosecuted. While escorting the vessel back to port, the crew of the Varadero contacted the Guatemalan authorities and said that that the crew of Sea Shepherd actually tried to kill them. Staying true to their roots, the Guatemalan authorities quickly switched sides and dispatched a gunboat to intercept the Sea Shepherd crew. The Sea Shepherd retreated, fleeing into Costa Rican waters where they continued their assault on illegal shark finning groups.
But that’s not the end of the story. Years later in October of 2011 a warrant for his arrest was first issued in Costa Rica, which Sea Shepherd says curiously coincides with a civil suit filed against the Sea Shepherd Society in the U.S. by the Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR).
Although Sea Shepherd first said that the charges would likely be dropped, German officials on Tuesday decided to proceed with the extradition of Captain Watson to Costa Rica.
Now the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society issued an urgent plea to its followers:
Our last hope of saving Captain Watson from extradition is to convince German officials at the Ministry of Justice to step in and overturn their decision. Show your support for Captain Watson by contacting Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the Federal Minister of Justice in Berlin, Germany. Let her know that the warrant for Captain Watson’s arrest is politically motivated and thus should be ignored by the German government. With international support we can set Captain Watson free, and keep him from the possibility of facing an unfair trial in Costa Rica.
What’s your opinion on this case? Send along your comments for discussion to the Costa Rica Private Investigator
Etan Patz Disappearance Solved? Confession 33 Years Later! May 26, 2012
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Confession 33 Years Later Does Not Automatically Prove The Case
A man is in police custody after confessing to strangling Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose disappearance three decades earlier started the movement to put faces of missing children on milk cartons. Police, however, remain skeptical, because they need more than a confession.
Etan disappeared on May 25, 1979 while walking alone to his school bus stop for the first time. The stop was just blocks from his home.
Pedro Hernandez told New York police that after he killed Etan, he wrapped the boy’s body in a bag and put it in a box somewhere in Manhattan. But when he returned a few days later, the box was no longer there, according to what a source told the New York Times.
But just because someone confesses doesn’t mean it’s a slam-dunk piece of evidence in solving a case. Anybody can walk into a police station and confess to a murder. Investigators need solid proof to back up the words of the confessor.
That appears to be the case here.
Hernandez was taken into custody in Camden, New Jersey, on Wednesday, May 23. As of today, he has not been charged. Investigators have been interviewing Hernandez as well as his family members to see if he had given them any indication over the years that he had killed the missing boy.
One positive link that may help prove the case is that Hernandez once owned a bodega – a small grocery – in the Patz family’s Soho neighborhood. Etan told his mother when he left for the school bus stop that he intended to buy a soda from a nearby bodega with a dollar he had in his pocket.
It was the first time Etan had walked alone to the bus stop; he had insisted, so his mother, watching from a window above as her son walked to the stop, allowed him. Information about Etan’s plan to buy a soda was first reported by journalist and author Lisa Cohen, author of the book After Etan.
More details in the case are expected later today during a New York Police Department news conference.
Cathy Scott, Contributor
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Murdoch private eye targeted U.S. hedge fund boss May 25, 2012
Posted by csi8 in Asset Locate, Asset Recovery, Costa Rica Detective, Costa Rica Investigator, Fraud Investigator, investigations, Uncategorized.Tags: costa rica private investigator, private detective, private eye, private investigator
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(Reuters) – A private detective working for Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers used a legally questionable tactic to obtain a hotel bill that a New York financier ran up at one of London’s swankest hotels, records reviewed by Reuters show.
A database of business records compiled by British government investigators shows that some time before his arrest in March 2003, private investigator Steve Whittamore, or someone working for him, misrepresented themselves to obtain from Claridge’s Hotel a copy of a bill belonging to Robert Agostinelli, an American who runs the Rhone Group private equity firm.
Whittamore was convicted of trading in illegally obtained information but did not serve jail time. He could not be reached for comment.
Agostinelli did not respond to messages left for him at Rhone Group offices in New York and London.
He is a former senior partner at Goldman Sachs and Lazard and ranks among the richest financiers in the world.
The Whittamore database entry on Agostinelli is one of the few pieces of evidence to surface from extensive U.K. investigations that Americans were targeted by operatives working for Murdoch’s British newspapers, who used questionable investigative techniques.
Murdoch’s News Corp newspapers in Britain are among the principal targets of a judicial inquiry, created by British Prime Minister David Cameron and chaired by Sir Brian Leveson, a senior English judge, into the practices and ethics of the British press.
A spokesperson for News International, Murdoch’s London-based newspaper publishing arm, said: “The information you refer to was the subject of a report by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2006 and has been examined extensively by the Leveson Inquiry in recent months. News International has given detailed evidence on these matters.”
Allegations have surfaced that Murdoch journalists or investigators may have used similar tactics on celebrities visiting the United States, but so far those allegations relate to journalists and targets based in Britain.
An FBI investigation so far has turned up no evidence to substantiate allegations, originally made by a British newspaper which competes with Murdoch properties, that victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. may have been targeted for intrusion by Murdoch journalists or investigators.
The Whittamore database was put together by the office of Britain’s Information Commissioner, a government privacy watchdog, from records seized in a police raid on the private detective’s office.
The database indicates that Whittamore’s inquiry regarding Agostinelli was commissioned by Murdoch’s now-defunct Sunday tabloid, the News of the World. The database shows an address for Agostinelli on Fifth Avenue, New York City. It describes Whittamore’s assignment as a “Claridges blag”.
“Blag” is a British slang word meaning that a private detective adopts a false identity in order to con information out of a targeted organization or individual.
In the United States, blagging is known as “pretexting”. According to the website of the Federal Trade Commission, pretexting is illegal under federal law if the purpose is to obtain “customer” or financial information.
In Britain, media industry sources said, blagging is usually illegal. But newspapers can defend themselves against legal complaints by asserting that the use of the practice in a specific case was in the “public interest.”
The Whittamore database records show that as a result of the “Claridges blag”, information was obtained about a four-day Agostinelli hotel stay, in a room which cost 411.25 British pounds per night. The total bill was 3,433.98 British pounds. The records show that the hotel stay in question was in the month of July, but do not specify a year.
Searches through media databases do not indicate that stories about Agostinelli appeared in the News of the World in the period before or soon after the police raid during which Whittamore’s records were seized.
Some years later, British press articles did mention Agostinelli as a member of a group which was interested in buying the Liverpool soccer team, but ultimately lost out to another American bidder.
Agostinelli appeared as No. 19 in the 2011 edition of an annual “rich list” published by Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London. The paper said Agostinelli was now “London-based”, with estimated wealth of 625 million British pounds, and counted former French President Nicholas Sarkozy as a friend.
The journalist named in the Whittamore database as having commissioned the private detective to investigate Agostinelli, who now works for a different newspaper, said he had never heard of Agostinelli and maintained that the database entry referring to him was inaccurate.
A spokesman said Claridges had no comment.
The News International spokesperson added: “There is a public interest defense available for any potential breach of the Data Protection Act and you do not have the information necessary to make any judgment on specific cases. We are not in a position to comment on a specific case.”
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
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