Plan B Forum

Soon after Seemona Sumasar started dating Jerry Ramrattan, she had an inkling that something might be wrong.

He said he was a police detective, but never seemed to go to work. He seemed obsessed with CSI, Law & Order and other television police dramas.

About a year after he moved into her house in Queens, New York, their relationship soured. One day, he cornered her, taped her mouth and raped her, she said. Ramrattan was arrested.

But he soon took his revenge, US authorities said. Drawing on his knowledge of police procedure, gleaned from his time as an informer for law enforcement, he accomplished what prosecutors in New York called one of the most elaborate framing plots that they had ever seen.

One night, Sumasar was pulled over by the police. Before she could speak, detectives slapped handcuffs on her. "You know you did it," she said one later shouted at her. "Just admit it."

Sumasar, a former Morgan Stanley analyst who was running a restaurant, said she had no idea what that meant. Yet suddenly, she was being treated like a brazen criminal. She was charged with carrying out a series of armed robberies, based on what the police said was a wealth of evidence, including credible witness statements and proof that her car was the getaway vehicle.

In her first extensive interview about her ordeal, she recalled sitting in jail, consumed by one thought: "Jerry is behind this."

But when she insisted to the authorities that he had set her up, they belittled her claims.

Now, though, they concede that Samasar was right - an astonishing turn of events that has transformed her case into one of the most bizarre in the city's recent history.

They released her from jail last December after seven months, acknowledging that the entire case against her had been concocted by Ramrattan, officials said.

"We prosecute tens of thousands of cases each year, but in the collective memory, no one has ever seen anything like this before," said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney.

"Few people have the capacity to pull off a master plot of this magnitude to exact revenge," Brown said.

Ramrattan framed Samasar because she would not drop the rape charge, prosecutors said.

And so even as Ramrattan remained free on bail in the rape case, Sumasar, who had no prior criminal record, was facing up to 25 years in prison.

Despondent, Sumasar passed her days behind bars scouring the indictments against her for clues that could help prove her innocence, even as news of lurid crimes that she had not committed were splashed in newspapers.

"From the beginning, I said he made it up," Sumasar said. "I never thought my life would become a cop film."

Sumasar, 36, is bubbly and petite. She never finished college but used her analytical skills to land six-figure jobs on Wall Street. Yet she acknowledged she can be too trusting.

After her arrest, she lost her restaurant franchise and her house in Far Rockaway went into foreclosure. She was separated from her daughter, Chiara, 12.

Sumasar is now planning lawsuits against the Police Departments in New York City and in Nassau County, the location of one of her purported robberies, over her arrest. Neither agency would comment.

Ramrattan never worked as a law enforcement officer, prosecutors say, but he often presented himself as a private investigator.

Ramrattan, who is being held at Rikers Island, appeared this month in a Queens court, where a judge refused a request for bail and set his trial date on the rape and conspiracy charges for October 3. He has pleaded not guilty to both.

He and his supporters are now voicing their own theory of the case: Sumasar framed him.

"My son is innocent, he was set up," said Shirley Ramrattan, Jerry Ramrattan's mother.

Ramrattan's lawyer, Frank Kelly, said, "Everything about her and her associates will come out."

Some legal experts say Sumasar's story shows how the American justice system can be easily manipulated, with the principle of innocent until proven guilty turned on its head.

Prosecutors said that the web of false evidence presented by Ramrattan was so detailed they had little reason to doubt it.

But Anthony Grandinette, Sumasar's former lawyer, said law enforcement was negligent.

"Why would a tiny woman with no criminal record, who worked 10 years on Wall Street, randomly hold up people at gunpoint at night dressed as a policewoman?" Grandinette asked.

Sumasar, the daughter of an Indian taxi company owner from the South American nation of Guyana, was the embodiment of immigrant success.

When Ramrattan, dressed in a suit and tie, first entered her restaurant in 2006 and introduced himself as a police detective, Sumasar, a single mother, recalled being impressed.

The two began dating, and Ramrattan eventually moved into Sumasar's house. At first, he seemed attentive, but she grew suspicious of him. He lied constantly, she said.

"I said to Jerry, 'You tell so many lies, I think you actually believe what you are saying,"' Sumasar said.

Throughout 2008, she said she begged him to leave but he refused.

After Sumasar said she was attacked, on March 8, 2009, she pressed rape charges against Ramrattan, who was arrested and released on bail. Soon after, Ramrattan sent friends to intimidate her, prosecutors said.

They said that when she would not back down, he vowed to put her away.

The key to Ramrattan's scheme, prosecutors said, was to spread fake clues over time, fooling police into believing that all the evidence pointed to Sumasar.

They said he coached the supposed victims, driving them past Sumasar's house so that they could describe her Jeep Grand Cherokee and showing them her photo so they could pick her out of a police lineup.

The setup began in September 2009, prosecutors said. An illegal immigrant from Trinidad told the police that he had been handcuffed and robbed of $US700 ($633) by an Indian woman who was disguised as a police officer and had a gun, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Ramrattan had persuaded the immigrant to lie, telling him that he could receive a special visa for victims of violent crimes.

Six months later, another man said he had been robbed in Nassau County by two police impersonators and described the main aggressor as an Indian woman about Sumasar's height. The man said he had managed to take down the first three letters of the Jeep Grand Cherokee's New York license plate - AJD.

All the while, Sumasar had a strong alibi, including cellphone records showing that calls were made from her phone at a casino in Connecticut on the day of the robbery.

But Sheryl Anania, executive assistant district attorney in Nassau County, said Sumasar's business was foundering, so she appeared to have a motive.

The final fake crime was conjured in May 2010, officials said, when an acquaintance of Ramrattan said she had been held up by a couple posing as police officers. She said they were driving a Grand Cherokee, but she gave a full Florida license plate number.

She said she heard the pair call each other by name - "Seem" and "Elvis." Elvis was the nickname of another former boyfriend of Sumasar, who owned the Jeep.

When the police looked into the Florida plate number, they found that the day after the purported March robbery, the title and the plate for the Cherokee had been transferred from Elvis to Sumasar's sister in Florida.

Sumasar, who holds a Florida driver's licence, had driven the car to Florida to register it. To the police, she seemed to be covering her tracks.

With all the evidence pointing to Sumasar, the police arrested her. Bail was set at $US1 million.

Prosecutors said the scheme unraveled in December 2010 - just weeks before Sumasar was to go on trial - when an informer told the police that Ramrattan had staged the plot. The informer gave detectives a number for a cellphone owned by Ramrattan.

When they checked phone records, they discovered multiple calls to the false witnesses, who confessed to the police. They were charged with perjury.

Today, Sumasar is trying to rebuild her life.

She checks the Rikers website frequently to make sure Ramrattan has not been released or escaped. She once paid for purchases with cash but now uses only credit cards, so there is a paper trail attesting to her whereabouts.

"From the beginning I was presumed guilty - not innocent," she said. "I felt like I never had a chance."

"I can never have faith in justice in this country again."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/a-revenge-p ... z1TLs5BaKI

Could this be happening? A man's nightmare made real

Louis Gonzalez III stood accused of unspeakable acts: kidnapping, torture, sexual assault. If convicted, he faced life behind bars.



Det. David Del Marto was on the other side of town, working leads on a robbery, when he heard the radio chatter about the attack. He has level blue eyes, a graying mustache and the faultless posture of the Army MP he once was.

He found West, 33, in the emergency room of Simi Valley Hospital and followed her across the street to Safe Harbor, a forensic facility where sexual assault victims are examined and interviewed. Her appearance suggested an attack of concentrated malice. Her face was swollen, her lip gashed, her hair torn out in chunks. A cord, found tied around her neck with a slipknot, had left an angry red line, and there were burns on her stomach and ring finger.

Later, Del Marto would remember how she looked away and pulled herself into a fetal position as she talked. It was the body language he'd seen in dozens of sexual assault cases.

West was unequivocal about who had attacked her. It was Gonzalez, she said. He was her ex-boyfriend, the father of her son.

Del Marto made his voice gentle. "I need to find out what happened and what to charge him with, OK? You know he's in custody, right? You don't have to worry anymore about him for now."

In a small, fragile voice that kept trailing off and lapsing into silence, West explained that she and Gonzalez, 30, had been fighting over custody since their son's birth. She and Geiges were raising the boy, along with their younger daughter.

She said Gonzalez ambushed her in the garage, dragged her to an upstairs bedroom, hogtied her with her clothes, singed her with matches and assaulted her vaginally and anally with a wooden coat hanger. Then, she said, he forced a plastic bag over her head and held it tight, and she feigned unconsciousness until he left.

"He told me he was gonna kill me," she said. "He told me that. Seven or eight different times."

"Did he have anything with him in his hands?"

"He had a bag. Like a little mini-duffel bag."

During the attack, she said, she awoke from a blackout to find Gonzalez had placed mittens on her hands — she recalled drawstrings at the wrists — while he wore plastic gloves.

Del Marto thought this pointed to an uncommon level of sophistication — to a man who took extraordinary pains to avoid leaving fingerprints or traces of his DNA under his victim's raking fingernails. In his report, the detective noted another detail she gave: Her attacker had worn beige-colored overalls, as if to shield his clothes from evidence.

After the interview, West left with her husband. Del Marto followed them to their home on Penngrove Street for another examination of the scene. It was a placid residential block in one of California's safest cities. He watched for some time as she refused to leave the car and go inside.

Del Marto thought West was lucky to be alive. A 23-year veteran, he knew custody cases bred a special sort of derangement, and he was confident he understood the outlines of what happened here: extreme rage mingled with extreme calculation.