On a spring day last year, a Pakistani man came to Shamsha Laiwalla looking for help. He told her he had recently jumped off a cargo ship docked in the Port of Los Angeles and was now looking to buy a new identity.
On the surface, Laiwalla was not an obvious go-to person. She owns a seemingly innocuous vehicle registration company -- one of the thousands in California that take care of DMV-related tasks for people willing to pay for the convenience.
For years, however, the 44-year-old Pakistan native has offered customers a startling menu of illegal services as the architect of an extensive fraud ring involving several DMV employees she regularly paid to produce licenses and other documents, according to Los Angeles police and federal officials. The names of at least some of her alleged clients have surfaced in ongoing federal investigations into national security issues, said LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Downing.
The Pakistani man was, in fact, an undercover detective in the Los Angeles Police Department's counter-terrorism bureau, which is headed by Downing. For $3,500, Laiwalla told the detective, she could get a valid California driver's license with his photo, an expertly forged birth certificate and a Social Security card, police say. All the documents would bear his new name, Francisco Gonzalez Rios.
Laiwalla recently pleaded guilty to federal charges of identity theft stemming from the investigation and is awaiting sentencing. Last week, prosecutors in the Los Angeles County district attorney's office filed 11 state charges against her. They also charged 13 of her alleged accomplices.
She pleaded not guilty to the state charges Wednesday. Her attorney, Roger Rosen, declined to discuss the case, saying he had not had a chance to review the allegations.
LAPD counter-terrorism officers, who recounted the undercover operation in interviews with The Times, said she has not been connected directly to any known terrorist organizations.
But her tangential ties to a recent case, they said, underscore the risks posed by such security breaches. In 2007, one of Laiwalla's contacts altered DMV records for members of a criminal organization that dealt drugs and sold counterfeit goods in L.A.'s garment district, police say. The money from the enterprise is suspected of having helped fund Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant Shiite Muslim group that operates in Lebanon.
