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March 31, 2011
Swami "hunkered down" on Mexican border, feds say
U.S. Marshals say they are reasonably confident that Prakashanand Saraswati is “hunkered down” in Nuevo Laredo, said Hector Gomez, supervising deputy marshal of the agency’s Austin office.
“I really think we’ve got him landlocked now,” he said.
And Gomez said he expected new charges to be filed eventually against devotees who helped the guru escape: “When it’s all said and done, we’re going to catch a lot of people in a lot of lies.”
Prakashanand, the founder and leader of the Barsana Dham ashram in Driftwood, disappeared two days after he was convicted on 20 counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact. The charges were based on the accounts of two women who said the guru, known to his devotees as Swamiji, molested them when they were young teens living on the ashram in the mid-1990s.
Gomez declined to identify how the marshals knew Prakashanand was hiding out in the border city, but he said the latest hard evidence of the guru’s location was reliable as of about a week ago.
He also said the agency has evidence that Prakashanand left the country “with loads of cash,” presumably to use to bribe a pilot to fly him out of Mexico, probably to India. The guru’s passport was confiscated by Hays County authorities late last year, prior to his trial.
Gomez said that, while Mexico has an extradition treaty with the United States, Prakashanand, should he be arrested, would most likely be returned to this country under the deportation process. In that case, Mexican authorities would label him an undesirable alien, which would leave him with no legal status to remain in that country.
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March 23, 2011
U.S. Marshals seek guru through wanted poster
Yesterday afternoon we reported that U.S. Marshals believed Prakashanand Saraswati, who was convicted by a Hays County jury of 20 counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact on March 4 and who fled two days later, was hiding out in Mexico.
A spokesman for the federal agency said the Hindu guru, who founded the Barsana Dham ashram in Driftwood, was probably receiving logistical and financial support from his devotees, and was likely seeking to hire a plane to take him to India.
We’ll report developments as they occur. In the meantime, here is the U.S. Marshal’s wanted poster:
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July 14, 2010
New U.S. marshal says cooperation is key to catching bad guys
Robert Almonte said that in his short tenure as the U.S. marshal for the western district of Texas, which includes Austin, he has been impressed with the relationships forged between the marshal service’s fugitive hunting specialists and local law enforcement officials.
That cooperation has been especially strong in Austin, where a marshal-led task force that includes Austin police and Travis County sheriff’s deputies has captured some of the most notorious local criminals in recent years, including now-convicted killers Colton Pitonyak and Paul Devoe.
Almonte, a former El Paso deputy police chief, wants to expand the reach of the task force and convince every law enforcement agency in his district that the marshals are very good at hunting bad guys and that they have the manpower to find them quickly.
That’s one of the goals Almonte is pitching while he visits Austin this week to meet some of the people working for him as well as officials from other police agencies.
“We are ready. We’ve got the manpower and they are really good at finding people,” Almonte said during an interview at the downtown Austin federal courthouse. “I want that to continue.”
Almonte, 53, is an appointee of President Barack Obama. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in March and sworn into office in June.
Almonte worked for the El Paso Police Department for 25 years, more than half of it as a narcotics detective or supervisor, before retiring in 2003. Since then he has trained narcotics officers and in recent years served as executive director of the Texas Narcotics Officers Association.
Almonte said last year his phone rang on the way to a training in Seattle and he was informed that Obama wanted to nominate him for the federal post, previously held by Lafayette Collins, a former U.S. Secret Service agent. He had not applied but later found out that people he had worked with in El Paso recommended him.
“I never imagined this would happen,” he said. “If I did anything right I think I had a knack of surrounding myself with great people. They made me look good, and me getting this job is a tribute to them.”
With his wife, Almonte recently moved from his lifelong home in El Paso to San Antonio, where the district headquarters are located.
The couple have two grown children — a son who is a prosecutor in El Paso and a daughter who is a doctor in McAllen.
In addition to hunting fugitives, the marshal service protects federal judges and courthouses, transports federal prisoners and seizes property illegally acquired by criminals.
The western district, where he commands 195 deputies, covers a 91,531 square miles and 68 Texas counties in central, south and west Texas, and in addition to Austin and San Antonio, includes the cities of Odessa, El Paso, Waco and Del Rio.
Almonte said he is looking forward to consolidating the Lone Star Fugitive Task Force in Austin at the new federal courthouse downtown when it opens in the fall of 2012. Now segments of the task force are housed at Austin police or Travis County facilities.
“The best way to address criminal activity,” Almonte said, “is to work together.”
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