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Brooklyn jury convicts millionaire Indian in contract killings

An Indian who made millions running a chain of gas stations has been convicted of ordering two contract killings to protect his mob-style operation. He could face the death penalty.

A jury on Tuesday convicted Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa, from Punjab, in a federal court in the New York borough of Brooklyn after deliberating two-and-a-half days. It now must decide whether Dhinsa should be executed, or sentenced to life without parole.

Dressed in a dark suit, Dhinsa, 36, remained stoic as he listened to the foreman read the verdict finding him guilty on multiple charges, including rigging gas pumps to rip off motorists, evading taxes and terrorising fellow immigrants who crossed him. His wife left the courtroom in tears.

Afterward, Defence Attorney Gerald Shargel said he already was concentrating on how to save his client's life during the death penalty phase of the trial, which begins on Monday.

"I can't afford to wallow in despair,'' Shargel said. "I have an important job to do... There's a very good argument of why the death penalty should not be imposed.''

During the seven-week trial, Shargel said Dhinsa was prosecuted on false testimony from hit men and rumours spread by a rival faction of Sikhs within the city's Indian community.

But prosecutor Benton Campbell described the defendant as a man "who uses murder as a way of doing business.''

Dhinsa arrived in the United States in 1982 and took a job pumping gas in the Bronx borough. He soon scraped up enough money to lease that gas station, then began opening others in the city's toughest neighbourhoods.

At its peak, Dhinsa's City Gas chain had 51 stations in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, and employed 300 people. Annual revenues topped $ 60 million, according to authorities.

But prosecutors said the city's consumer affairs office repeatedly cited Dhinsa for overcharging customers. And in 1990, he was arrested in the kidnap-torture of one of his attendants. He served 90 days in jail on lesser charges.

In 1995, another city gas employee vanished. When the employee's brother later confronted Dhinsa, the businessman allegedly paid Marvin Dodson, a career criminal he had hired for security, to execute him.

Prosecutors said Dhinsa struck again in 1997 after he learned another man, livery cab driver Satinderjit Singh, was co-operating in an FBI investigation of City Gas.

During the trial, Dodson and two other men testified that Dhinsa personally orchestrated their broad-daylight killing of Singh on a street in the local borough of Queens. They described using a van to block Singh's car before Dodson fired seven shots at the victim point-blank, then calmly walked away.

At a meeting later that day, Dhinsa gave the killers $ 5,000 each, said "good job,'' and told all of us we needed a vacation,'' Dodson said.

UNI

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