Jury Won't Hear Murder Charges in Fraud Case
By Robert E. Kessler
STAFF WRITER
NEWSDAY, WENESDAY, MAY 16, 2001

A jury in U.S. District Court in Central Islip has not been told one startling fact in the ongoing trial of Ali Bessaha of Long Island City, who is charged with cheating his late wife out of her share of the couple's $1.2 million in assets.

The withheld fact: Bessaha, 64, of 43-20 40th St., is facing a separate trial on charges that he brutally murdered Ourida Bessaha, 54, his wife of 30 years, at her home in Hicksville in January 1999.

Prosecutors say that he killed her to ensure that she did not get any money in their contested divorce action.

U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Wexler ruled the jury would not hear about the murder charges because it would be too prejudicial in the federal trial in which Bessaha is charged only with fraud and money laundering.

Bessaha's attorney, Todd Greenberg of Forest Hills, denies his client is guilty of either the federal charges or the state homicide charges.

The unusual circumstance in which Bessaha is facing separate federal and state charges came about because federal postal inspectors initially came up with evidence that Bessaha had defrauded his wife after she was found murdered in 1999, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Brown.

Ourida Bessaha, who was separated from her husband, was found murdered by what appears to have been 20 hammer-like blows to her head.

But while Bessaha was charged with the fraud and money laundering two months after his wife's death in 1999, the Nassau district attorney's office and police had not gathered enough evidence to charge him with her murder until March of this year.

So when Bessaha's federal trial on fraud and money laundering charges began late Monday, both Brown and Greenberg only made a brief mention that Ourida Bessaha had died.

Brown said Bessaha had diverted the couple's joint assets illegally to banks in France, where he planned to move and open a restaurant in a complicated scheme in which "he would get everything and she would get nothing … He wasn't going to play by the rules. He was going to swindle his wife."

Greenberg acknowledged that his client and his wife were engaged in "a bitterly fought divorce proceeding," but his client had not cheated his late wife.

The federal trial is expected to continue today. No date has been set for the state homicide trial.