Wayne County IT Director Sentenced For Bribery And Extortion
DETROIT (WWJ) - A former top Wayne County official has been sentenced to 41 months in prison for obstructing an FBI bribery and extortion probe.
Zayd Allebban was accused of pressuring a vendor to lie to agents and manufacturing evidence to impede the investigation, reports Newsradio 950's Stephanie Davis. He was found guilty in February.
Allebban was once the director of the Wayne County Information Technology Department. Now, he will spend over three years in prison for his convictions on two counts of obstruction of justice.
His boss, Tahir Kazmi, pled guilty in his case. The two are among four in the Ficano administration who have faced corruption charges.
Following is Allebban's statement, which he read to the court during his sentencing. The statement was sent to WWJ Newsradio 950/CBS Detroit by his sister, Emann Allebban.
Defendant's Statement
Sentencing Hearing
Zayd Allebban
Your honor, I understand that the typical posture of a defendant at a
sentencing hearing is one of contrition, remorse, or regret – sentiments
that, whether genuine or contrived, are expressed with the goal of
leniency in mind. However, those sentiments do not reflect my feelings,
your honor, for two reasons. Firstly, if I were to express those
sentiments, I will for the first time be lying in your courtroom and lying
to you. Unlike others who have traversed your courtroom in this case, I
take my oath to the truth very seriously; it is not bound by where I sit or
which hand I raise. And secondly, your honor, I am not looking to
manufacture artificial words that will earn leniency because I firmly
believe that the truth alone will best equip you to determine a just
punishment.
Your honor, entering this process, I expected certain disappointments.
Firstly, disappointment in the man who unnecessarily pulled me into a
mess of his own making, disguised it in honesty, effectively told lies
about my involvement, and then used me as the currency for his own
freedom. Mr. Shisha was an enormous disappointment. Then, when I
expected Mr. Kazmi to tell the same story to the government that he told
me and instead admitted to criminal behavior, that was a disappointment
– made worse by the fact that he had an opportunity, amidst his lies and
crimes, to do something noble. He had an opportunity to make clear to
you, the jury and the government that no conspiracy existed and that I did
not even know – to the day I was arrested – that anything illegal or
improper had ever happened. But cowardice dictated his actions, just
like it did Shisha's, and he passed on that opportunity to do the right
thing, encouraged without a doubt by the government who dangled his
own sentencing above his head to drive his decision to remain silent.
But your honor, my largest disappointment blindsided me – and this may
be more of my naivety showing. I was most disappointed in my
government – the stewards of justice sitting behind me. And although
there is, I'm sure, much to be disappointed about in the quality of their
investigative work leading up to my arrest, I'll start further down the
timeline.
Mr. Shisha first approached them presumably with a story of
victimization and extortion. Then suddenly, Kazmi doesn't plead guilty
to extortion, but bribery. On the surface, it may seem that the true story
doesn't matter much as long as the bad guy gets caught. But the real
story, the nitty gritty details, what was said to who, who did or knew
what…. those details do matter, your honor – I am proof that they matter.
Your honor, the prosecution's case revolved around these conversations
between Mr. Shisha and I. I'm sure they fully expected that I would try to
minimize those meetings and shift focus elsewhere. Your honor, I would
never run from those transcripts. Those transcripts are the evidence of my
innocence. Those conversations are saturated with my reassurances to
Shisha that he had done nothing illegal, to always tell the truth, to hold
his head high because he was an honest businessman, and that I wouldn't
even be helping them if they had done anything improper. But somehow,
all those statements escaped their consideration.
Nonetheless, Shisha tried again to sell his victim story in court, under
oath, and at the direction of the prosecution. Your honor, it didn't take a
federal investigator trained in the art of uncovering public corruption to
reveal him as a liar and a criminal – it took an astute attorney a couple of
hours in cross examination. That's all it took, sir, for Shisha's house of
lies and deception to come crumbling down around him. In fact, he was
so discredited and exposed as a crook that the prosecution had to retreat
from their star witness against me – how telling is that? How pathetic it
is, your honor, that fundamental questions about Shisha's companies,
activities, contracts, and profits weren't posed by the very investigators
who explicitly stated on the witness stand that those are exactly the types
of things that they were investigating. The prosecutor himself seemed
surprised to learn that Shisha's shell company, VM Logic, had
coincidentally profited exactly double the money he gave Kazmi – who
held 50% of that criminal enterprise. Now after Shisha's crimes were
made clear – and this may be more of my naivety showing again – I
drove home with Mr. Faraj that afternoon with a smile I couldn't wipe
off, but he maintained the same focused, stoic look that he always has.
"This was a good day, Haytham. Doesn't this change everything?" He
knew nothing would change, but let me instead see it with my own eyes
the following day in court. You see, your honor, I fully expected the
prosecution to take a step back and reconsider their position against me –
a position that had been crafted by the lies of a single person who had
everything to gain by selling these lies to them. But our Department of
Justice, our stewards of justice, pressed forward unwaivered. To speak
frankly, it blew my mind that the truth presented itself so clearly in court,
yet it did not move them. And Mr. Shisha, sir, to this day, is a free man,
charged with no crimes, when there is another county contractor in this
very same investigation who had committed the very same crime with
another county official, who was charged and pled guilty to offering
bribes.
Your honor, I'll mention one more painfully obvious truth that the
investigators missed. A cursory look into my background, my family, my
friends, or even my coworkers would have defined my lack of propensity
to be involved in anything illegal or unethical. Mr. Shisha and Mr. Kazmi
hid their crimes from me purposefully – they knew how I'd react and
that's why they didn't tell me the truth. They knew that had they shared
the true nature of their activities with me, their best case scenario would
have been that I simply walk away. The more likely scenario would have
been that I walk away and walk straight to the investigators and say,
"you're looking for corruption? Here's two crooks for you." You see,
your honor, my belief in the honesty of these two men did not stem from
my friendship with them. My friendship with them stemmed from my
belief in their honesty and decency. The moment I were to find out that
honesty was a ruse, that friendship and loyalty disappears.
And that, your honor, highlights again the greatest travesty in all this: the
real bad guy has been promised protection from prosecution. The man
who profited from multi-million dollar contracts that he admitted were
illegally obtained is sitting free of charges. And instead, the only county
employee who took nothing, who knew nothing, who covered his own $2
cup of coffee when he sat with a contractor, was not only charged, but
somehow convicted.
Your honor, I absolutely take responsibility for my actions. With that
said, your honor, this courtroom and the hallway behind it are full of
people for whom I would do the exact same thing, albeit with a little
more vetting this time, I'm sure, but I would do it nonetheless. Let me be
clear, sir – if two good people, your honor, approached me today, so
worried about something that they were considering taking their own
lives, and I had no reason to doubt their honesty, I would help them
without hesitation. That decision, as was my decision a year and half ago,
would be driven not by friendship or loyalty, but compassion, humanity.
Not even the prosecutor himself would stand here and minimize the
importance of that quality. After all, it was the prosecutor himself who,
during a pause in trial, walked over and requested that my attorney not
ask a potential witness about money he had received from Shisha – yes,
your honor, there were three county employees that took bribes from
Shisha – and the prosecutor cited "humanitarian reasons" to leave that
unmentioned. But of course, it didn't matter, because I had already asked
my lawyer to exclude that information if we called this person as a
witness – simply because it came from the mouth of Shisha and I was not
going to be part of destroying another life on the credibility of a crook
like him. But set that aside, again, I think the prosecutor understands
humanity.
Your honor, I will never let this experience, the lies of Mr. Shisha, the
wrecklessness of the investigators, and the indifference of the prosecutor
change that about me. If I let a year of endless damning press releases
from the government, foregone conclusions by the media, and the harsh
judgment of thousands of residents of this region chip away at what it
took my poor parents a lifetime to instill in me, I have lost. Forget my
legal standing, I've lost something greater. And I thank God every day
that I live in a country where there is still a path to exoneration, to
clearing my name. Because when you grow up in a simple life, live
paycheck-to-paycheck, and have nothing to show for years of education
and employment but a foreclosed house that is $60k underwater and a
wispy-thin savings account, all I have is my name, my credibility, the
humanity that drives the decisions I make.
Your honor, to conclude, I wanted to also apologize if we created any
confusion this morning with the time we requested to speak. You see,
my attorney is comprehensive in his work and had arranged to have a
couple of friends of mine speak today about me, my community service,
character, and so on. But I pulled the rug out from under him earlier this
morning before we began. So I apologize to those of you who had
prepared something to say and I am truly humbled by your support. And
I did that for a simple reason, your honor. When this case began a year
and half ago and I had a single conspiracy charge against me, the USA's
office approached me to make a plea deal. I refused them. They
approached again with a sweeter deal, I refused them. They approached
again – I refused them. And they approached one final time with a team
of FBI agents in an attempt to convince me that their evidence against me
was insurmountable – I respectfully declined to even sit down with them.
Because, your honor, an innocent man has only the hope of exoneration
at trial to cling to when the DoJ is raining the full weight of the
government down on him. Right is right, your honor, and wrong is
wrong. The space between these four walls is the only place in the
country where those words will always ring true. Of course, after I
refused all their attempts, the USA's office just piled on more charges. I
don't know if you hunt, your honor, but birdshot spreads wide in the
hopes that one of those little pellets will take the target down. I suppose
they operate much the same way.
Your honor, I wouldn't plead guilty because I would never admit a false
guilt in exchange for some sentencing leniency. I would never
compromise my principles to shave a few months or even years off my
sentence. Much the same way, your honor, I also won't parade my
character and put my altruism on a pedestal for leniency today. I am not
unique in my service to those in need. Others who have the same
commitment would say as well that service for the community is for the
community, not for me to barter away in court.
My attorney asked me to think of my girls when I make this decision,
your honor. I paused briefly and realized that I am thinking of my two
little girls, your honor. Because when those two beautiful little girls, in
eight or ten years, decide to Google their father's name, and learn about
the investigation that ensnared him, understand his commitment and
confidence in the truth, and internalize the lessons they extract from that,
that will give them so much more than a few months of my absence will
ever take away from them. To put it simply, your honor, if you decide a
sentence of custody is just, my slumber on that prison pillow will be
restful, because I know where I stand with myself, your honor, and in
front of God.
I simply ask, your honor, that you render a sentence that I deserve – no
more than that and no less.
