33 park hill Africans arrested for identity theft ring

Staten Island Advance/Michael OatesA suspect in an identity theft ring, right, is led to Supreme Court, St. George, yesterday.

NEW YORK -- Thirty-three suspects -- many of whom are Nigerians living on Staten Island -- have been arrested in connection with a multimillion dollar identity theft ring that victimized 60 people, included more than a dozens soldiers who were preyed upon while on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the victims were more than a dozen Staten Island residents, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and District Attorney Daniel Donovan announced during a press conference at NYPD headquarters in Manhattan today.
Twenty-seven banks in total, including several on the Island, were also defrauded as part of the scheme.
The suspects would gain information on their victims through mail theft and other methods, officials said. They allegedly used that information to open up or gain access to accounts.
All in all, the suspects may have stolen as much as $5 million in the scheme, officials estimated. Aside from the dozen borough residents, other victims lived in Manhattan, Westchester, Philadelphia, Atlanta, North Carolina, and the soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas.
The organization was known as "Bro" -- an acronym based on the first letter in the last name of its three key players, officials said today.
Those main suspects were: Kazeem Badru, of the 200 block of Osgood Avenue in Stapleton; Ganiu Rilwan of the 200 block of Park Hill Avenue, Clifton; and Okoronkwo Okechukwu from Parkview Loop in Graniteville.
Most of the suspects were natives of Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia.
There were 18 alleged key players in the scheme -- of them, 17 face a top count of enterprise corruption, a Class D felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison. An additional 15 suspects face lesser charges.
"It takes a certain type of detached cruelty to victimize people this way," Kelly said at the press conference, referring to the suspects as "despicable con artists."