YOU’LL DIE IN JAIL

15 years on Death Row and 28 years in prison for a crime cocaine hitmen say THEY did. So what did US judge tell this Briton at his last-ditch appeal?

A BRITISH millionaire businessman who has spent 28 years in prison – including 15 years on Death Row – for a double murder because of an ‘epic miscarriage of justice’ spoke of his despair yesterday after a Florida judge crushed his hope of freedom.

Kris Maharaj, 75, who is in poor health, believed he was on the verge of release because of sensational new evidence showing that the men he was convicted of killing at a Miami hotel in 1986 – father and son Derrick and Duane Moo Young – were actually executed by a Colombian drug cartel.

But despite statements from key members of the cartel, including cocaine king Pablo Escobar’s former hitman, Maharaj’s appeal was rejected last week. His earliest possible release date remains 2040.

The new evidence in Maharaj’s case was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday – and speaking through his lawyer, he told this paper yesterday that Friday’s ruling was a ‘terrible body blow’.

He added: ‘I just don’t know how long I can survive, though I must fight on. Please tell my wife that if I have to suffer in this place until I am 90 I will endure it so I can get back to her.’

But his tearful wife Marita, who speaks to her husband every day on the phone, said: ‘He’s very sick and I am worried that he won’t leave prison alive. I can’t believe this has happened. I am heartbroken.’

Before the start of the brief hearing at the Miami court, Maharaj’s lawyers, led by Clive Stafford Smith of human rights charity Reprieve, were hugely confident.

They had already revealed their compelling new evidence to the court in November.

It included testimony from Jhon Jairo Velasquez Vasquez, Escobar’s top assassin, who said his boss had ordered the hit because he’d discovered the Moo Youngs were taking a cut of cocaine money they were supposed to launder.

‘They had stolen his [Escobar’s] money and that of his partners and… therefore they had to die,’ said Velasquez, who named the killer as his cartel colleague Guillerno Zuluaga, now dead.

In addition, former Miami policeman Michael Flynn said corrupt officers later helped frame the British businessman.

Maharaj – once one of Britain’s richest men, whose horses raced

against the Queen’s – said: ‘I sat in court while compelling witnesses said the cartels did the crime. By the end [of the November hearing] I was sure that this time, after all these years, I was going home.’

But Judge William Thomas told the court on Friday that the new evidence was ‘too weak’ and there were ‘admissibility issues’.

While Mr Stafford Smith, who has been involved with the case since 1993, believes there are strong grounds for appeal, he is worried that Maharaj is running out of time. ‘The process grinds slowly and could take another year. Kris doesn’t have that time,’ he said.

Maharaj said he has ‘already come very close to death twice’ in prison – once when he suffered gangrene in his arm and again when he contracted the flesh-eating bug necrotising fasciitis. He said he had gone from ‘living like a prince to existing like an animal’.

Schooled in Trinidad, he moved to Peckham, South London, in 1960. With the help of a £1,500 loan he quickly built up a thriving food import business.

A fixture of the ‘swinging London’ social scene, he loved collecting Rolls-Royces, but his greatest passion was racehorses.

At one time he owned 110 – the second-biggest stable in Britain. In 1974 his horse King Levanstell won the prestigious Queen Alexandra Stakes at Royal Ascot, defeating a thoroughbred owned by the Queen.

He began to invest in property in the 1980s and formed a business with Derrick Moo Young, ostensibly a respectable Florida businessman.

But Maharaj says he soon discovered that Moo Young had embezzled £300,000 from the firm. The bodies of Derrick and his son Duane were found in room 1215 of the Miami Plaza Hotel on October 16, 1986. Derrick, 53, had been shot six times. His son, 23, died from a single bullet from a gun placed in his mouth as he knelt by the bed.

Maharaj has always insisted that he was having lunch 30 miles away at the time – an alibi supported by five witnesses, who, inexplicably, were never called to testify. But his fingerprints were in room 1215. Maharaj said he had been let into the room for a business meeting there earlier that day, but the man he was waiting for did not turn up.

Mr Stafford Smith presented evidence that a man with known links to the cartel was the only other registered occupant of the 12th floor of the Dupont on the night the Moo Youngs were killed.

Mr Stafford Smith called the case an ‘epic miscarriage of justice’ and said he had never been more convinced of a client’s innocence. ‘I’m shell-shocked,’ he said.

Maharaj spent 15 years on Death Row before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.