PRISON FOR 3 IN FAILED MURDER PLOT

Plan was pay assassin to take man to Mexico, kill him; hit man an informant

On a November morning in 2018, Ninus Malan awoke to the sound of FBI agents knocking loudly on his door. They informed him that his longtime business partner, with whom he was entangled in a roughly $40 million legal dispute, was plotting with two other associates to have him kidnapped, taken to Mexico and killed.

The agents suggested staging Malan’s death, and he agreed. Later that day, he posed for pictures with makeup and fake blood that made it look as if he’d been beaten, tortured and shot in the head. Malan said in court Thursday that the memory of those photos still haunts him more than four years later.

Calling the case one of the most unusual she’s ever seen, U.S. District Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo on Thursday sentenced each of the three plotters to prison after they pleaded guilty last year to a kidnapping conspiracy.

Bencivengo sentenced Salam Razuki, Malan’s former business partner, and another of his business associates, Sylvia Gonzales, to seven years in prison. She sentenced Elizabeth Juarez, who worked for Razuki and played a more minor role in the conspiracy, to a term of three years and 10 months.

The defendants argued in sentencing documents that the plan was never to kill Malan, but prosecutors and the judge disagreed.

“This was cold, calculated and premeditated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek Ko said, adding that the only reason the plot failed was because the hit man they hired was an FBI informant, not an assassin.

“The evidence the court has seen shows it was anticipated the victim was not going to return (from Mexico), that he was going to be done away with,” Bencivengo said while sentencing Razuki.

Investigators allege the plot to have Malan killed was set in motion in October 2018, when Razuki and

Gonzales first met with the longtime FBI informant. At some point over the next month, an agreement was reached to pay the informant $2,000 for the job. Prosecutors included in their sentencing memorandum a photo showing the first $1,000 that Gonzales paid the informant.

A second photograph shows Gonzales and Juarez posing together at a La Mesa sushi restaurant following a dinner with the informant in which they allegedly discussed the plot. Prosecutors alleged the women wanted to commemorate the occasion.

A few days later, Gonzales asked the informant to meet her and Razuki at San Diego Superior Court, where they had a scheduled hearing in the civil lawsuit involving Malan, according to prosecutors. Though Gonzales had previously sent photographs of Malan to the informant, she wanted

him to see Malan in person.

The informant declined to go inside the court, but Gonzales met him outside and provided two business addresses where Malan could be found, according to prosecutors, who added a photo of the note to their sentencing memorandum.

Outside court Thursday, Malan said that he had worked with Razuki for more than 10 years, mostly on commercial real estate dealings and later cannabis ventures, and they had built a portfolio of more than $40 million.

“He tried to cut me out of all of it,” Malan said. “We were in a court battle, a legal dispute, and he looked for other measures outside ... of court.”

Each of the defendants argued, in different ways, that they should not go to prison. Razuki’s attorney requested he be sentenced to home confinement because of his ailing health. Gonzales, who unlike her co-defendants has been in jail since her November 2018 arrest, asked for a sentence equivalent to the time she’s already served. Juarez asked for supervised release rather than a prison term.

Juarez’s attorney argued that the extent of her involvement in the plot was eight minutes at the sushi restaurant when she boasted about having capabilities she didn’t actually have. “She said this ‘wasn’t her first rodeo’ — it was,” defense attorney Allen Bloom said.

Bencivengo said Juarez’s sentence was the most difficult to decide because of conflicting evidence. On one hand, the judge said, her role was limited to discussing the plot on just one occasion. But that one time involved “rather glibly suggesting sending someone to Mexico and having them killed.”

Juarez’s mother screamed at the judge at the end of the hearing, demanding to know how the judge could send her daughter to prison “after working for the DEA” and as an “informant for the government.”