Wall St.'s Soldier of Fortune - Kevin Ingram

Talk, Nov, 2001 by Leah Nathans Spiro

He was a high-flying trader with a taste for flashy cars, pretty women, and fast cash. But when Kevin Ingram turned his WorldTrade Center office into a money laundromat for alleged arms dealers, not even his powerful friends could save him--especially after the name Osama bin Laden came out in the wash.

HAVE YOU EVER SUFFERED FROM A MENTAL ILLESS?" asked Judge Donald Middlebrooks in his Orlandobred drawl.

Kevin Ingram, 42, late of Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, Porsche-driving playboy, disgraced master of the universe, stood in front of Middlebrooks, his hands clasped before him, his broad shoulders slumped inside his double-breasted pinstripes.

"I suffered from depression," Ingram replied. For a few seconds silence suffused the small West Palm Beach courtroom. "Mostly after this incident ensued," Ingram explained to the court. Ingram admitted that he had been seeing a counselor and that he was now taking medication.

August 28, 2001, was a particularly sweltering day in West Palm, but inside the courtroom Ingram seemed remarkably cool as he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to launder S350,000 and publicly declared himself a felon. Behind Ingram sat his wife Deann, a statuesque beauty who took in the proceedings from behind a pair of two-tone sunglasses. Her prim black suit and gilded stilettos rendered her a glamorous anomaly in these dispiriting surroundings.

Ingram's ordeal had begun three months earlier, when federal agents stormed a Fort Lauderdale hotel room after a 31-month sting operation and arrested Ingram and Walter Kapij--an airplane broker who had allegedly chartered a Learjet to help Ingram fly $2.2 million to Holland (Kapij has pleaded not guilty). After Ingram was released on bail, magistrate judge Ann Vitunac was tipped off to $1.6 million Ingram had secreted in a Swiss bank account. Fearing he would jump bail, Vitunac remanded him to jail. On August 6 Ingram appeared before Vitunac in handcuffs and leg irons. Satisfied that he wasn't biding any other assets, Vitunac released him.

The arrest of Ingram, a protege of former U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin and one of the financial world's rising stars, has global implications that go far beyond Wall Street. Prosecutors claimed that Ingram knowingly conspired to launder $2.5 million in funds from two alleged arms dealers: an Egyptian-born commodities broker named Diaa Mohsen and Mohammed Malik, a Pakistani native who owns a small grocery store in Jersey City New Jersey. At one point, in 1999, the government was so concerned that Mohsen was trying to buy arms for the Taliban--"the group presently secreting Osama bin Laden...the most wanted individual in the world at this time," an agent pointed out in court--that it begged a judge to keep a confidential informant for whom Ingram would launder money out of jail precisely because the government wanted to snare as many people as it could in this sting operation. The charges now seem even more unsettling, given the September 11 terrorist attacks on the WorldTrade Center and the Pentagon. While Ingram's misdeeds pale in comparison with those horrific events, his crime exemplifies how the world terrorist network is supported in part by a web of people and governments that win a blind eye to the devastation caused by their profiteering.

In November Mohsen and Malik will go on trial for money laundering; next year they will be back in court for the more serious charge of arms dealing. Though both men have pleaded not guilty to all charges, prosecutors have more than 500 audio and video tapes that they claim document Mohsen and Malik's efforts to buy a wide array of weapons, from Beretta 9mm pistols to Stinger missiles to an M2020, a nuclear-weapon component. Valentin Rodriguez, Mohsen's court-appointed attorney, says the government believes this hardware may have been destined for the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. A government agent said in court he was concerned the arms may have been destined for Afghanistan-- and Osama bin Laden, the Muslim fundamentalist considered the brains behind a slew of terrorist cells around the world.

As part of his plea bargain Ingram has agreed to be the government's star witness against the pair--even though the fact of the September terrorist attacks may reduce Ingram's chances for a lenient sentence. "It will be very difficult to erase what happened in New York in September," says Rodriguez. That's why the Mohsen-Malik trial, scheduled to begin on November 7, promises to be one of the most closely watched court cases of the year.

HOW DID INGRAM--A GENIAL, STANFORD-EDUCATED MBA with more than 13 years' experience at top-tier investment banks and a raft of high-powered friends--come to be implicated in a second-rate scheme to divert arms to third world countries? Though Ingram repeatedly declined to comment for this story, interviews with more than 60 of his friends and colleagues sketch a picture of a man in love with his ostentatious lifestyle, a man who believed that as a black trader in the lily-white provinces of Wall Street, he had been denied the rewards that were his due. Ingram grew up one of five children in inner-city Philadelphia and made it through college and grad school only to see his high-flying career as a trader flame out in an ugly lawsuit with Deutsche Bank, his last employer. As his financial situation deteriorated, friends say, he scrambled to hang on to a life that included a 44-foot yacht, a Prada-loving wife, and the most expensive Porsche made: a Turbo 911 the color of platinum.