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Morris
on the Lam Again
By:
Lorenzo Dee Belveal
There
is big excitement on Roatan these days.
The “Incredible Island’s” long-time resident fugitive from justice,
land thief and all-around international outlaw, has lost his ‘safe-haven’ in
Honduras. El Jefe Carlos Flores finally got around to signing an extradition order
for Morris. This set off a serious game of “hare and hounds” with a posse
comprised of local Honduras cops, INTERPOL officers and agents of the U. S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation. The chase continues as this is being written.
But perhaps this report should begin at the beginning, for the
benefit of those members of the audience who came in late.
Arnold Frederick Morris arrived in Honduras, on the run from a
26-count Indictment for Commercial Fraud and Money Laundering that awaited - and still
awaits him in Florida. You can read this document in my WebSite at URL: http://ldbelveal.net/indictment.htm, as
well as his Arrest Order at http://ldbelveal.net/arrest.htm.
Boiled
down to its essentials, Morris was supposed to have presented himself in the Sixth
District Court (Tampa) on the 18th of August, 1993, to answer to a variety of felonies
enumerated in the Indictment. Rather than keep that date, which would surely
resulted in a long stretch, wearing the striped wardrobe so much favored in the Florida
State Penitentiary, Morris opted for Honduras in general and the island of Roatan, in
particular.
In a serious effort to shake the stateside law-dogs off his tail,
Morris met and married Roatanian Rita Thompson Silvestre in something like
record time for purely an affair of the heart. Of course, in the case of Morris, his
problems with the law no doubt added a sense of urgency to the situation. The
nuptials out of the way, Morris then put Rita to work arranging the purchase of a Honduras
citizenship for him.
The Presidente at the time was Rafael Leonardo Callejas, who is a man who
knows how to count American money. He made a Honduran out of Arnold Morris with a
snap of his fingers and the firm encouragement of twenty-five thousand U. S. dollars and a
Cadillac sedan out of the pocket of Arnold Frederick Morris. As part of the
deal, Morris had to renounce his American citizenship.
No doubt all of these exertions were intended to dilute the interest of
U. S. lawmen in grabbing him and returning him to Pinellas County, Florida, for his
overdue court date. But it didn’t work that way. INTERPOL, the U. S.
Department of Justice, the F.B.I., etc, continued to keep close tabs on their
“rabbit on the run”, just waiting for him to make the wrong move that would
enable them to grab him.
In the
meantime, Arnold Morris, along with his bride and stepson, fired up a real-estate firm
(Southwind Properties) and a ‘paper’ trust (Alpha Trust), and got busy at the
business they know best (stealing land). For the most part, they got away with it.
Their victims tended to be either too naïve or too financially limited to
fight off the thieves.
Success in
lawless activities tends to build confidence.
In this
case, their confidence increased to a point that they set about stealing my land. On
returning to Roatan after an absence of many months, I discovered that “Alpha
Trust” (Rita Thompson Silvestre Morris, Principal) now held (fraudulent)
documents to one piece of my land, and Southwind Properties (Emilio Silverstre, President)
had grabbed another parcel and festooned it with lot markers and For Sale signs.
Since I had owned both of those plots for about twenty years, held public documents
on them, and had all of the annual tax-receipts, I was more than a little bit
curious about how this land robbery had been arranged.
Especially when both of the people who had sold the properties to me
were dead!
A modest
amount of investigation was all it took to solve the mystery.
The Judge of
Letters at that point in time was one Fernando Azcona Schrenzel, nephew of the former
Presidente of Honduras by the same (Schrenzel) name. The Judge of
Letters was also the Registrar of Propiedad Inmueble (read: land). The Judge of
Letters was also the very good friend of Arnold Morris, and – by simple extension
– a very good friend of Rita Thompson Silverstre Morris, Emilio Silvestre, and their
Southwind Properties, Alpha Trust, etc., etc.
As the
division of labor worked out, the Morris (Silvestre) gang cut my fences and stole the
land, and the corrupted Judge of Letters (Azcona Schrenzel) prepared forged replacement
documents and then registered his forgeries in the public record. What could
possibly be more airtight than that?
But rather
than roll over and play dead, like the other numerous victims of Morris-authored larceny,
I decided to fight.
I opened my
Domain <ldbelveal.net> on the Internet and began publicizing every crooked more
Morris and Company made. I wrote open letters to Presidentes Callejas, Reina and
Flores, and then published those letters on my WebSite. I wrote letters to the
Presidente of the Corte Suprema de Justicia, and the Fiscal General of the Republica, and
I also published those letters on the Net.
Needless to say, my letters were only answered in the most pro-forma manner
possible, if at all, You can read my letters and the “official” replies on
my Site. They are all listed in the Table of Contents, at: http://ldbelveal.net/toc.htm
But in spite
of the lack of concrete results, I kept the pot boiling under the thieves and their
political and administrative co-conspirators. I wrote articles and Letters to
Editors to publications in the United States, to congressmen and senators, officials
in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and to private foundations. In
short, I set about to publicize Honduras corruption on a scale that had never been
lavished on a sovereign nation before. Especially, not by a single individual!
My objective, of course, was to shut off the money supplies to Honduras, as a
means of pressuring the court system into looking into the judicial thievery that was
making a mockery of both law and judicial procedures.
A lot of people whose help I tried to enlist, told me I was wasting my time.
What’s the bromide? “You can’t fight City Hall?”
The hell you can’t! With a computer and an Internet connection you can fight
the highest levels of government – up to and including the Presidential Palace –
and you can win.
Witness:
As a direct result of my efforts, Judge Fernando Azcona Schrenzel was
fired out of his judgeship. Remember, his uncle was a recent Presidente of the
Republica. It’s not easy to unseat such a well-connected crook. It's not
easy to overcome their direct ties into the political machine.
Witness: After more than six (6) years in Honduras,
and outfitted with a Honduran wife and a Honduras passport in his pocket, Arnold Frederick
Morris is running again,
He's running under the impetus of a signed extradition order. If he gets
caught before he can find another country that will accept him and protect him (for a
price), he will be sent back to keep the trial date he has been running from for
years. This means a long stretch in the stony lonesome.
But the question remains, why now - after some six years of protecting him, have his
political benefactors decided to throw him to the wolves? Why?
The answer is obvious: Because he has proven to be a larger embarrassment
than Honduras is willing to put up with, for the relatively modest bribes and payoffs
involved. No other reason. Don’t think for a minute that Honduras
disenchantment with Morris results from any sudden adoption of a newfound morality.
In Honduras, everything comes down to dollars. Nothing else.
So now we can sit back and see how this charade plays itself out. In
the meantime, having given up his American citizenship, and now ‘persona
non-grata’ in Honduras, Arnold F. Morris is truly “a man without a
country”.
In my opinion, it couldn’t possibly happen to a more deserving
candidate.
If Honduran officialdom thinks that, with the crooked Judge of Letters
and Arnold Morris out of the way, I will just fade away, they are wrong. This
WebSite will continue to bear witness to Honduras corruption and collusion with criminals
until I get my day in an honest court – and an opportunity to regain my properties
that were stolen from me by a criminal conspiracy, and the active collusion of a corrupt
sitting Judge of Letters.
In a legally civilized country, such glaringly criminal behavior from the bench would
result in Judicial Review and automatic reversal without the necessity of the
aggrieved party even filing a Motion. Honduras legal procedures haven’t
reached this degree of circumspection. Honduras courts only do what they choose to
do, and what they are forced to do.
So this crusade continues. How long? God knows. I do not. My
guess, however, is that it will continue until the political leadership of Honduras
decides that the ongoing embarrassment of its judiciary and federal administration is a
too-high price to pay for a continuing refusal to admit to judicial wrongdoing, and
correct it.
Stay tuned. This saga is far from over.
======= E N D ========
Lorenzo
Dee Belveal
<ldbelveal.net>
<What you must know to survive in Honduras>
================================
Copyright © June 29, 2000 Lorenzo Dee
Belveal
All Rights Reserved
Guadalajara, Jalisco, MEXICO
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Last modified:
March 11, 2004 |
