Man sues government over dismissed money laundering charges
A man who spent a year and a half behind bars before federal prosecutors in Las Vegas dropped money laundering charges against him has sued the government.
Ghassan Bouari Houbous of Miami was lured to Las Vegas by undercover FBI agents in a sting operation that targeted his half-brother, Emile Bouari, according to the civil complaint filed this week.
Houbous, who alleged malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress, said in the suit that agents Dennis Lao and Charles Ro convinced him they were interested in his weight loss business. Lao purchased an airline ticket for Bouari in early 2016, and when he landed in Las Vegas, he was arrested and transported to the Nevada Southern Detention Center in Pahrump to await a trial on conspiracy and money laundering charges that never came.
“The charges were false, malicious and fabricated,” stated the complaint filed by Las Vegas attorney Benjamin Durham and San Diego attorney Eugene Iredale. “Mr. Houbous never aided and abetted money laundering. Those false charges resulted directly from the actions of the lead case agent, FBI Special Agent Charles Ro, and under cover FBI Special Agent Dennis Lao.”
Officials with the FBI and the Department of Justice in Nevada declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The indictment against Houbous, Bouari and his girlfriend, Kimberly Ann Milko, had alleged that the defendants conducted a dozen money laundering transactions with the undercover FBI agents totaling nearly $590,000 between May 2014 and August 2015. Prosecutors said at the time that the evidence included more than 60 secret recordings.
Prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against Houbous in August 2017 after his attorneys convinced the government that he “never knowingly participated in any money laundering transaction,” according to court records and the lawsuit.
Later, prosecutors also dropped charges against Bouari and Milko.
As a target of the FBI sting known as “Operation Bo-Tox,” Houbous’s lawyers wrote, he was “deprived of his livelihood, and the association of his family and his freedom, based on false assertions.”
Agents Ro and Lao used the sting “to drink, carouse, paw women and spend wads of taxpayer money in ‘investigating’ hapless nobodies and charging them with lurid crimes to justify their waste, fraud and abuse,” the lawyers added. “The prosecution and media coverage caused Mr. Houbous to be falsely portrayed as an individual involved in criminal behavior including drug trafficking and sex trafficking.”
The lawsuit alleges that Houbous suffered from “loss of liberty, invasion of privacy, substantial emotional distress,” and financial loss because of the charges he faced, and he lives in fear of repercussions from the government.
Contact David Ferrara at dferrara@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039. Follow @randompoker on Twitter.