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  • U.S. says drug cash was good at car lot

    The Record, NJ
    Nov. 2, 2004

    U.S. says drug cash was good at car lot

    By TOM TRONCONE
    STAFF WRITER



    Zakar Motors looks like most of the used car lots that line Route 46
    from South Hackensack to Little Ferry: Small paved lot. Tiny business
    office. Dozens of cars.

    But there was a difference, federal authorities say: The father-and-son
    shop catered to drug dealers with a penchant for luxury cars.

    Early Monday, drug agents arrested the owner of the Little Ferry
    dealership, Zakar A. Civan, 58, of Fort Lee; his son, Raffi Civan, 37,
    of Englewood Cliffs; and their secretary, Eudelys Manzueta, 30, of
    Moonachie, on money laundering charges.

    U.S. marshals seized close to $1 million in luxury vehicles, including
    a $130,000 Ferrari 360 Modena and a stable of Porsches, Mercedes-Benzes
    and BMWs.

    "They knowingly and willfully violated federal money laundering
    statutes," said Michael Pasterchick Jr., special agent in charge of the
    New Jersey office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
    "These guys were well-known in the drug community."

    Zakar Motors allowed drug dealers to pay for the luxury cars with cash
    by illegally creating financing and other paperwork in the names of
    bogus buyers, Pasterchick said. From January 2002 through July 2004,
    the dealership sold $3 million in luxury vehicles, with more than $2
    million of the money paid in cash, he said.

    A DEA database flagged 20 percent of those buyers as having previous
    drug arrests.

    Civan family members disputed the DEA's claims.

    "All I know is that my brother has always done everything by the book,"
    Tony Civan said of Zakar Civan as he waited to talk to federal drug
    agents outside the lot's fenced perimeter.

    Agents from the DEA's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force
    opened their investigation into the dealership in March 2003, based on
    information from a confidential informant, as well as a series of what
    they deemed suspicious IRS documents, Pasterchick said.

    An undercover investigator negotiated the cash purchase of four
    vehicles from the Civans, three of which the agent claimed he would
    sell back to them a month later as a way of laundering his money, he
    said. The agent then surreptitiously recorded a conversation in
    Armenian between the father and son, during which the son told the
    father, "[The buyer] wants to launder money," Pasterchick said.

    In August, a drug dealer-turned-informant who was arrested in a
    Monmouth County sweep told investigators he purchased a $70,000
    Mercedes-Benz from Zakar in May because "the dealership had a
    reputation within the drug community as a place that was willing to
    sell cars with no questions asked as to the source of the funds,"
    according to the criminal complaint filed against the trio.

    The Neptune drug dealer told investigators he gave Manzueta, the
    secretary, a plastic bag with $9,000 as a down payment for the car and
    that it had to be registered in the name of a fake purchaser, the
    complaint says. It says he then made $5,000 and $10,000 installment
    payments in the next few weeks and provided Zakar Motors with the names
    of prospective "buyers" before settling on the appropriate stand-in
    purchaser.

    Later that month, two undercover agents bought a 2001 BMW 330ci from
    Zakar Motors for $30,000, telling the dealership that the buyer's name
    could not appear on any paperwork and that they "had a lot of product
    on the street," the federal complaint alleges.

    "We made sure that these people were going to put cars in other names
    and we told them that the money was drug proceeds and that we need
    concealed [compartments] in the car," Pasterchick said. "It's very
    unusual in today's business world to work with bags of cash."

    Besides the cars, DEA agents seized $70,000 from a bank account and
    could seek the forfeiture of Civan's homes in Fort Lee and Forked River
    in Ocean County, Pasterchick said. The agents had to let several other
    high-priced vehicles remain -among them, a $250,000 Bentley Azure and a
    $180,000 Ferrari -because they were on consignment from another car
    dealer, he said.

    On Monday morning, investigators from the DEA, IRS, state police and
    Bergen County Prosecutor's Office sifted through paperwork in two small
    offices on the lot, occasionally removing brown cardboard boxes marked
    "DEA evidence."

    Bill Offord, the assistant special agent in charge of the criminal
    division of the IRS in New Jersey, said the agency's goal now would be
    the possible prosecution of some of the cash buyers.
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