British man locked up for murder may walk after stunning new evidence he was set up by bent cops and drug cartels

Across the table at the South Florida Reception Centre, a jail for elderly inmates on the outskirts of Miami, British businessman Krishna Maharaj grasps the armrests of his wheelchair.

‘My trial was a conspiracy to have me murdered,’ he says. ‘But now the truth is coming out, and those responsible are running for cover.’

Once a multi-millionaire food and property magnate whose horses raced the Queen’s at Royal Ascot, Mr Maharaj has been a prisoner for the past 27 years – the first 16 of them on Death Row, facing the electric chair.

Now 74, he’s serving life for the 1986 gangster-style slaying of a father and son, Derrick and Duane Moo Young, and his earliest possible parole date is 2040.

Last week, Mr Maharaj told of his ordeal in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, the first that he has been able to give for many years.

The story he describes sounds like a far-fetched episode of the 1980s TV crime show Miami Vice. But thanks to an investigation by his lawyers which has lasted years, it is now the subject of a fresh appeal, supported by multiple witnesses and copious documentation.

According to papers reviewed by a Florida court last week, seen by this newspaper, Mr Maharaj was ‘victimised by the pervasive environment of corruption and drug traffic endemic at the time .  .  . the 1980s, when cocaine money entered the bloodstream of the city of Miami.’

The result, say these documents, was that a respectable businessman with an impeccable legal record found himself trapped by corrupt police officers and witnesses who lied in order to protect the real killers, hitmen from Colombia’s notorious Medellin drugs cartel.

‘God allowed me to be born British,’ says Mr Maharaj. ‘I have always been proud of my country, and I pray that what happened to me never happens to another British citizen. I worked hard all my life. I made a fortune, but I was never dishonest, let alone a murderer.

‘I pleaded not guilty from day one, and before my death sentence was commuted in 2002, I decided I would not seek clemency: clemency is for people who are guilty. Now at last the evidence is conclusive. I always told the truth, and I was framed.’

The Mail on Sunday has also spoken to Mr Maharaj’s wife Marita, who has stood by him. She too has not given an interview for years.

As the documents filed in Mr Maharaj’s appeal point out, in the 1980s, not only was corruption endemic throughout the Miami criminal justice system, the city was also America’s murder capital. Following an FBI probe, five criminal judges were indicted for taking huge bribes to ‘fix’ drugs cases.

Another inquiry that started a year before Mr Maharaj’s arrest resulted in 20 police officers jailed for racketeering and drug dealing. Several were convicted of murder.

The documents cite a body of fresh testimony stating that similar corruption was at work in the Maharaj case. Some of it comes from Pete Romero, a retired Miami policeman who was one of the main detectives on the Moo Young case.

Before he committed suicide last year, the documents say, he said explicitly that police had both committed further murders and framed Mr Maharaj. That claim, The Mail on Sunday has learned, is now supported by other Miami Police Department whistleblowers.

Before interviewing Mr Maharaj, I met a seasoned legal source who is close to one of these whistleblowers and who is co-operating with Mr Maharaj’s defence. There was a ‘pattern’ of criminal wrongdoing by officers, the legal source said, especially in its Narcotics Vice squad – the inspiration for the TV series.

‘This was about making certain people disappear. Teams of officers were directly involved in murders, in both carrying out hits and in an accessory role, framing others and allowing hits to occur.’

But should any of the whistleblowers’ identity become known, the source went on, ‘they’re dead. Maybe not now, maybe not in a year. But they will get them.

‘And the way the drugs business works, their families will also be seen as fair game.’ That, he admitted, did not make it easy for Mr Maharaj: ‘His lawyers are trying to vindicate him, but at the same time that’s putting others in mortal danger.’

Two years ago, Mr Maharaj – who was born in Trinidad when it was a British colony – fell prey to the flesh-eating bug, necrotising fasciitis. He shows me the resultant scar: a dark hollow where his calf muscle should be – the reason for his wheelchair.

For three months, he hovered close to death, but confounding the prison doctors’ expectations, he recovered.

As we talk, it’s obvious that this is a man of tremendous inner strength but he attributes his survival to Marita, also 74, who relinquished her own jet-set lifestyle when he was arrested in order to be near him, and has been living ever since in a humble rented house in Fort Lauderdale.

The couple speak by telephone twice a day, and she visits him every weekend, just as she has for the past 27 years. ‘As a young man, my great weakness was for lovely young ladies,’ says Mr Maharaj. ‘But Marita was sent to me by God. She’s the reason for my sanity, the heroine of this tragedy.’

‘I think we’ve helped each other’, Marita tells me later at her home, ‘because I need him as much as he needs me. I told him when he was arrested, “Don’t worry, I came here with you, and one day I will leave with you – I will take you home to Britain.” Even now, the most painful part for me is leaving the prison without him after each visit.’

Mr Maharaj’s talent for making money became apparent when he was just 18 and took his first job as a salesman for an Austin car dealership in Trinidad. He was on a two-month trial, being paid only commission. But by the end of this period, he had negotiated lucrative contracts to supply three of the island’s biggest firms with all their company cars, and was earning several times as much as his boss.

‘Austin tried to put me on a fixed salary,’ he says. ‘So I switched to Ford. I knew I could make more on commission. But I wanted more. ‘I saved enough money to come to England, and to pay my way through law school.’ He arrived in 1960, and settled in Peckham, South London.

Mr Maharaj studied hard, but a part-time job as a lorry driver allowed him to spot the opportunities which led to his first steps in the food business. He started by importing small consignments of yams from Nigeria, and exporting British beef. By the mid-1960s, he had paid off an initial £1,500 bank loan and become a millionaire, dealing in a wide range of what were then considered exotic fruits – such as bananas – and vegetables.

Around the same time, he acquired the first of the approximately 100 Rolls-Royce cars he has owned, usually four at a time.

He also built up a stable of 110 racehorses – Britain’s second biggest. One of his proudest moments came in 1974 when his horse King Levenstall came in at 11-2 to beat the Queen’s in the Queen Alexandra Stakes at Ascot. ‘She came over to congratulate me. I bowed. Her Majesty was very gracious,’ he recalls.

Kris, as he is known, met Marita, a glamorous, multi-lingual banker from a wealthy Portuguese family, at a party in Oxford in summer 1976. Five months later they were married and they had ten ‘wonderful years’ together.

It wasn’t only his evident Midas touch that convinced Mr Maharaj that he was born lucky. Early in his career, he had cheated death when a traffic jam on the road to Heathrow meant he missed a flight to Nigeria for a business trip. ‘The plane crashed. They had overbooked, and the guy who sat in what should have been my seat was killed.’

By the mid-1980s, he had new interests in publishing and real estate in Florida. He had started a venture with local businessman Derrick Moo Young, only to discover that Moo Young had been embezzling from the company.

At the time of the murders, Mr Maharaj had a pending civil lawsuit to recover the stolen money – around £300,000. ‘That alone ought to undermine my supposed motive,’ he says. ‘If I had wanted to kill him, surely I’d have waited until I’d got my money.’

The bullet-riddled bodies of Derrick and Duane were discovered in room 1215 at the five-star Dupont Plaza hotel in downtown Miami on the afternoon of October 16, 1986.

Mr Maharaj’s fingerprints were in the same room, and the following year he was convicted and sentenced to death. He says: ‘When I heard the verdict, I fainted.’

What followed was a 24 hours-a-day lockdown, except for three weekly visits to the showers, on Death Row at the state prison in Starke, in the far north of Florida.

‘I never went outside because I was scared,’ says Mr Maharaj. ‘I was not a criminal, and I’d never associated with criminals. Here were all these murderers and drug dealers, and I was frightened of what they might do.

‘Death Row was terrible in so many ways. I broke my arm when I slipped in the shower, and because it wasn’t treated for a long time, it got so badly infected I was lucky it wasn’t amputated.

‘While I was recovering and couldn’t use the arm, my one friend, who lived in the cell next door, used to write my letters for me. He got a stay of execution 45 minutes before he was scheduled to die. His head and leg had been shaved: prepped to take the electrodes.’

Nowadays, Mr Maharaj can at least wheel himself around the single-storey geriatric jail and its ring-fenced yards. But he sleeps in a dormitory with 91 others. ‘You could not say this is a good quality of life,’ he says.

The Mail on Sunday revealed in December some of the astonishing discoveries made about the case by his solicitor Clive Stafford Smith, of the human rights charity Reprieve, and his colleagues.

For example, the Moo Youngs – portrayed at Mr Maharaj’s trial as almost penniless – controlled funds worth billions of pounds, while their front company, Cargil SA, was registered in the Bahamas at the office of a notorious drug cartel lawyer.

The documents filed for Mr Maharaj’s appeal state that a new forensic analysis of the Moo Youngs’ secret accounts not only show they were involved in money laundering on an almost unimaginable scale, they were also skimming extra commissions worth many millions from their drug baron clients – so creating the strongest possible motive for their murder.

Only one room on the 12th floor of the Dupont Plaza besides 1215 was occupied on the day they were killed. Across the hall was Jaime Vallejo Mejia, a Colombian who was later convicted in Oklahoma of transporting and depositing vast sums in cash into Swiss bank accounts as a cartel courier.

Stafford Smith and his team have also established that six alibi witnesses who have always said they were having lunch with Mr Maharaj 30 miles away when the Moo Youngs were shot have stuck by their stories, although – inexplicably – his trial defence lawyer, Eric Hendon, failed to call them as witnesses.

So why were Mr Maharaj’s fingerprints at the murder scene? Because hours before the Moo Youngs got there, the real killers – planning to frame him – lured him to a business meeting with a man who never turned up.

Further inquiries have also disclosed that Mejia and other cartel members were at the Dupont and knew all about the extra ‘commissions’ stolen by the Moo Youngs, and that they were working for the infamous Medellin boss, the late Pablo Escobar.

Stafford Smith knows that however persuasive the evidence unearthed for Mr Maharaj’s appeal, the prosecution will continue to fight: when documents containing details of Romero’s testimony were filed earlier this year, it asked the court to rule them inadmissible because they were not typed in the correct format.

But Mr Maharaj is optimistic. ‘I’ve always had faith in God, and I am certain I will be exonerated. Even in the darkest times, I have never given in to despair.’

‘For so long now our lives have been a nightmare,’ Marita tells me later. ‘But this time, I truly believe we’re going to wake up.’

Original report here




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