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A criminal complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn alleges that a murder-for-hire plot hatched by the defendant, Ronald Mallay, and a Queens insurance broker resulted in the overdose deaths of two victims _ Basdeo Somaipersaud and Hardeo Sewnanan, Mallay's nephew.
An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and NYPD detectives found the defendants "engaged in a scheme to insure the lives of several Guyanese individuals, murder these individuals and collect the resulting insurance proceeds," the complaint said.
"The investigation indicates that as a result of this scheme several individuals have been killed," the papers added.
Secretly recorded conversations caught the insurance broker, Richard James, recommending using a lethal mix of alcohol and sedatives to kill one of his targets, court papers said.
"The higher the dose, the better," he allegedly said. "No marks or nothing like that."
Investigators believe the defendants intentionally targeted unsuspecting alcoholics, including some who knew nothing about the policies.
Mallay, 57, who was arrested early Tuesday, was ordered held without bail until a hearing on Friday. A call to his attorney was not immediately returned.
More arrests were possible, investigators said.
An informant told investigators that in 1998 he turned down an offer from Mallay to kill Somaipersaud for $5,000. Somaipersaud was later found dead in a Queens park from an apparent drug overdose.
A year later, Mallay allegedly offered another informant living in Guyana $11,000 to murder Sewnanan. The informant declined, but claimed that Mallay later told him that his cousins killed the victim using alcohol and ammonia.
James allegedly was the agent on life insurance policies for the dead men, which named himself and Mallay as beneficiaries. Mallay collected a $300,000 settlement from Sewnanan's death, investigators said.
Agents arrested James in June while he was trying to flee to Guyana with a large amount of cash, authorities said. He was ordered held without bail after pleading innocent to murder conspiracy.
An analysis of policies brokered by James found that death claims were 318 percent higher than expected, and that "a large number of the deaths were violent or under unusual circumstances," court papers said.