GOING UNDERGROUND
THE MAN CONVICTED OF SMUGGLING PEOPLE FOR PROFIT.
THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE PAPERWORK OF SOME OF THE ASYLUMSEEKERS ... THAT WOULD TEND TO INDICATE THAT PLANNING HAS BEEN GOING ON NOW NOT JUST THE LAST FEW MONTHS BUT PERHAPS AS MUCH AS THE LAST YEAR. —PUBLIC SAFETY MINISTER RALPH GOODALE
Calling f rom the Adams County prison in Natchez, Miss., Srikajamukan Chelliah wasn’t happy about being locked up in the U. S. of A. “I have a different name: Under Satan Authority,” he said. “There is no justice here.”
The 51- year- old Canadian was serving a sentence following his latest arrest by the FBI, which wrote in an affidavit that Chelliah had acknowledged smuggling 1,750 people into the United States, at least some of them destined for Canada.
“Canada is a better country,” Chelliah explained.
To U. S. authorities, t he 5- foot- 5 Toronto resident is a people-smuggling profiteer who charged up to US$55,000 a head for his illicit travel service, which ferried migrants by air and sea through Haiti, the Bahamas and South Florida.
“Nobody paid me that money, I don’t know where U. S. people got that information,” Chelliah countered in one of his calls from prison to a reporter. He denied making any profit from smuggling. “I don’t gain nothing. Not even one dollar,” he said.
In a world on the move, demand for illicit passage to the West has soared, creating a ready market for human smugglers. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said last week there was “anecdotal evidence” that human smuggling might be playing a role in the influx of asylumseekers walking across the border from the United States.
“We raised the concerns that there is the risk of that,” he told CBC’s Power & Politics after meeting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in Ottawa on Friday. “At the moment, there is no hard evidence that would actually prove that point, but there is anecdotal evidence.
“There is something in the paperwork of some of the asylum- seekers, for example, that would tend to indicate that planning has been going on now for not just the last few months but perhaps as much as the last year.”
The Canadian Press has reported that some of those crossing into Quebec on foot had obtained American visas in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, apparently with the intention of transiting through the U. S. to their ultimate destination: Canada.
If human smugglers are involved, they could be charging a hefty sum. A newly-declassified Canada Border Services Agency report says it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to be smuggled into Canada.
“For irregular migrants, Canada’s geographical l ocation makes it much more difficult, hence more expensive, to reach via air, land or sea,” said the Intelligence Brief by the CBSA’s Intelligence Operations and Analysis Branch.
Fraudulent documents that can be used to fly to Canada cost $4,000 to $35,000, it said. Arriving by sea is even more costly, from $ 30,000 to $ 50,000. Getting here by land means first making it to the U. S., either by plane or through Mexico.
For African and Asian migrants, crossing into the U. S. through Mexico from South and Central America costs $7,000 to $ 16,000. “The vast majority of refugees and migrants do not have the means to make the expensive journey to Canada,” the brief said.
Chelliah, however, seemed to have no shortage of clients.
“We used to live in Lawrence and Jane,” Chelliah said in a phone call, describing his for- mer Toronto neighbourhood. “I was living in Canada, but time to time I was out and in, in and out. But I am a Canadian citizen. My family, my wife, children, my mother — all my family is in Canada.”
Originally from Sri Lanka, Chelliah said he had studied in Montreal before arriving in Toronto three decades ago. He said he became a Canadian citizen in 1989. It’s unclear what kind of career he had but whatever it was, he allegedly didn’t pay his taxes.
In 2007 the Canada Revenue Agency filed a case against him in Federal Court, claiming he owed $ 75,625 plus interest. A CRA spokesman declined to comment on the matter, citing confidentiality provisions of the Income Tax Act.
Also known as “Mohan” and “Ritchie,” Chelliah’s troubles with U.S. law enforcement began in 2001 when he was identified as a human smuggler in an anonymous letter sent to the American consulate in Mumbai. The letter claimed he was working with an Indian travel agent named Babu Dhamelia.
Also the Honorary Cuban Consul in Ahmedabad, Dhamelia had been selling Cuban visas that were being used by “persons seeking to enter the United States,” the FBI alleged in an affidavit. Dhamelia was wanted in Panama as well for attempting to smuggle 29 people to the U. S. from Ecuador by ship, it further alleged.
When FBI agents interviewed Dhamelia’s wife in Mahwah, N. J., she told them her husband “smuggles aliens into the United States for a fee of approximately $ 20,000,” the FBI complaint said. Shown a photo of Chelliah, she identified him as her husband’s partner in the smuggling ring, along with a Pakistani named Iqbal Munawar.
She said she had overheard her husband saying he had “already made $ 100,000 using Cuban visas to smuggle aliens into the United States,” the FBI alleged. During a family vacation with Munawar in Florida, and during a subsequent phone call, she had also “learned that Munawar brings aliens into the United States through Jamaica, using Air Jamaica airlines, and that Dhamelia and Munawar have also used a boat to smuggle aliens into the United States.”
Two days after the FBI interview, Chelliah was transiting through Nassau International Airport when a U.S. immigration officer found blank Canadian immigration sponsorship forms in his luggage. Chelliah claimed he was a “former Canadian Immigration inspector.”
But once he got to Miami, he was arrested and Munawar was taken into custody that night. Dhamelia later turned himself in. All three pleaded guilty. Reached in Florida, Munawar’s wife said her husband was out of the country and would not comment.
“I know I have not done anything wrong,” Dhamelia told the National Post when contacted in Gujarat, India. “I am not any criminal.” He said he had only pleaded guilty to bringing his own family members into the U.S. from India.
He said he first met Chelliah in Jamaica. He had retained the Canadian smuggler to bring his wife and daughter to the U. S., he said. Chelliah smuggled his second daughter for free, said Dhamelia, who insisted the Canadian only wanted to help people.
“As far as I know him, he’s a real good guy,” he said. “He helped me a lot. Not for money.
I DON’T GAIN NOTHING. NOT EVEN ONE DOLLAR.
No, no, sir.” He said Chelliah had a solid reputation. “He did a real, real good job. I don’t have any idea for Sri Lankan people, but for Indian people, he got real good respect because those people who tried to go enter U. S. A. are always poor, always poor, they don’t have money.
“But this guy really, really helped them and tried to get money expense, you know whatever the expense is, maybe make a little bit of money, but not like other people who ( are) doing this business only for money … no he is not doing that, no. “Trust me.” Chelliah was sentenced to 18 months. Upon completing his prison sentence he was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and held for eight days in the Trumbull County, Ohio jail, then deported to Canada on Jan. 24, 2004.
Canadian officials subsequently seized his passport and citizenship certificate, according to a case Chelliah filed in Federal Court. His court claim argued he had been “arbitrarily deprived” of his passport, which had “constrained” him from running his business in Jamaica.
He also accused Ottawa of ignoring “the pleas of a father to reunite with his minor daughter,” whom he said was alone in Jamaica, her live- in caregiver having quit over “unpaid wages and personal reasons.”
But he never pursued the case, prompting his lawyer to write a letter to the court explaining that Chelliah “suddenly stopped showing any further interest” in the matter after his citizenship certificate was returned to him.
The lawyer, Danish Munir, said Chelliah had not been returning his phone calls. He said that when he finally spoke to Chelliah “he advised me that he was away to India.” The retainer cheque Chelliah had given him had bounced, the lawyer said.
Even after Sri Lanka’s long civil war came to an end in May 2009, life was hard. Hoping their son could have a better life, one young man’s family pooled their savings and he flew from Colombo to Haiti, which is where he met Chelliah.
“There were people he was working with also,” said the Sri Lankan refugee claimant, now living in the U. S., who asked not to be identified because he feared for the safety of his family. “But we only knew his name.”
Chelliah flew him to the Bahamas, where he boarded a boat that crossed the Straits of Florida to Miami, which is where it all fell apart. FBI agents had been working with a confidential source who knew Chelliah. In fact, the source had been smuggled into the U. S. by Chelliah. The source had remained in contact with him, and was passing information to the investigators.
In July 2010, the source told his FBI handlers that Chelliah would soon be sending a load of migrants by boat. Six Sri Lankans were subsequently caught in West Palm Beach. One of them identified Chelliah as his smuggler, the FBI wrote in an affidavit.
Five months later, the informant said another group would be coming on Dec. 4. Police waited until they had arrived and raided their Miami safe house, arresting seven Sri Lankans, including the one who told his story to the Post. Five of them identified Chelliah as their smuggler.
One told investigators Chelliah had cautioned him not to mention his involvement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the defeated Sri Lankan rebel group, the FBI wrote. Another said he was injured in an altercation with Chelliah, who denied it.
In phone calls recorded by the FBI over the next eight months, Chelliah “discussed his alien smuggling organization and admitted to illegally smuggling approximately 1,750 aliens into the United States,” the FBI affidavit said.
Tipped off about an August 2011 smuggling run, undercover agents travelled to the Bahamas, picked up the human cargo from a member of Chelliah’s organization and brought the migrants to the U. S., where three of them i dentified Chelliah as their smuggler.
A witness told the FBI how he met Chelliah in Haiti. Chelliah “took him to the Western Union store in Haiti to pick up the smuggling fee.” Chelliah then drove him to the airport and put him on a plane to the Bahamas, where they boarded a boat to Miami. Several other witnesses had similar accounts.
Sealed charges were filed against Chelliah on Sept. 15, 2011 and he was arrested in Miami on Oct. 12. He pleaded guilty to four charges. “As part of the conspiracy,” read a document that Chelliah signed outlining the facts that would have been proven at trial, “Chelliah would assist these aliens in travelling from Sri Lanka to Canada, knowing that the aliens would travel through the United States.”
“Chelliah would meet the aliens when they arrived in Haiti and collect money from them that was wired through Western Union,” it said, adding that each of the migrants he had been caught smuggling had “paid Chelliah for his services.”
The document said he had been running the smuggling scheme since March 2009. He was sentenced to five years. In 2014, he wrote to the judge about conditions at the prison, partly to complain that the food was “geared toward the Mexican inmates.”
In his letters, Chelliah told the judge he had “completely transformed.” He also disclosed that, in the hope of reducing his prison sentence, he had decided to become a jailhouse informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.