By Ivan Pereira
A Rosedale rug dealer who violated the trade embargo with Iran was ordered to be held in prison and pay the federal government hundreds of thousands of dollars for his illegal sales, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan said.
Reza Safarha, 55, an Iranian immigrant, was sentenced Friday to more than eight years in prison after he was convicted of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, conspiracy to launder money and stealing government money, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
A federal judge convicted Safarha, who owned the KP House of Carpets, at 134-35 Brookville Blvd., in February for sending nearly $300,000 in cash to Iran in violation of the trade embargo with the nation that has been in effect since 1995.
The immigrant used an informal money-transferring system known as a “hawala,” where funds never physically cross boundaries through a banking system, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The funds are transferred from one country by a hawala operator and distributed to recipients in another nation by the operator’s associates.
Safarha worked with a man who was working for the government as an informant in 2007, and over the course of a year the pair plotted the scheme, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The informant would allegedly come to the rug store with the cash, which he told Safarha came from the purchase of stolen computers, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The money would be either deposited into the owner’s U.S. Chase bank account or write a check to an accomplice, the U.S. attorney’s office said. The alleged accomplice would then write checks with “For Hawala from Iran” written in the memo and move the money into an Iranian bank, according to federal prosecutors.
A federal judge ordered Safarha to pay the court $300,000 for his crimes, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Reach reporter Ivan Pereira by e-mail at ipereira@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4546.
