Police Procedural - Material Witness is foreign national

I am *so* not a lawyer.

But no, unless that witness has diplomatic immunity, the consulate representative cannot simply walk in and take the witness out. As long as there's a proper material witness warrant.

BUT: Everything I found was based on the foreign national being arrested or detained as a suspect. Like this procedure document from the Chicago, IL Police Department.

I did find this article that says the Material Witness authority has been used on foreign nationals:

The case law and statistical information suggest that the federal statute is used with surprising regularity and most often in the prosecution of immigration offenses involving material witnesses who are foreign nationals. Critics, however, contend that since September 11, 2001, seventy individuals, mostly Muslims, have been arrested and detained in abuse of the statute’s authority.

Click to expand...

Not sure about the company tracking. TV shows generally have forensic accountants (which I'm sure the FBI has) locate these chains of shell companies in a day or two. I doubt that it's truly that quick if the shells exist in other countries, especially tax havens.

In theory, any foreign national taken into custody triggers a notification requirement; the appropriate consulate/embassy is supposed to be so advised. In practice, this doesn't always happen in a timely fashion.

Very few foreign personnel assigned to embassies/consulates actually enjoy diplomatic immunity - most staff do not.

ICE can and does communicate with INTERPOL on these human trafficking cases - so you don't really have a problem there.

The FBI does have very good investigative accountants; and of course, your task force can always tap the resources of FinCEN. Their forensic accounting investigators and intel analysts are awesome.

http://www.fincen.gov/

As far as holding onto a foreign national as a material witness, it comes down to who has the biggest set of balls and wants to push harder. Ultimately, the law favors the US holding onto her, but its more a question of whether it's worth it to the US and how much do the Russians want to fight it.

Okay, on container ports, if you're talking New York, you can use either Howland Hook, Port Jersey, Port Newark-Elizabeth, or Red Hook. Without knowing the port of origin for your shipment, I don't know which would be used. Container ships operate on a schedule, for example Rotterdam to NYC to Rotterdam to NYC. Several companies operate container ships, with the biggest players being Maersk and ACL (off the top of my head).

Let's start with a legitimate container. A company in Frankfurt, Germany contacts a shipping company and arranges for a container from its factory in Frankfort to be delivered to a warehouse in Nashville, TN, US. The shipping company takes a container in its yard, places it on a trailer, and delivers it to the factory. The company loads and seals the trailer.

The shipping company then picks up the container, and brings it to a port, where it is removed from the trailer and stacked waiting for a ship. When a ship becomes available, it is loaded onto the ship, still locked and sealed. In the US, it is off-loaded from the ship, stacked, and waits to leave the port. To make life interesting for you, it is then loaded on a train, routed to Nashville, where it is unloaded from the train, and put on another trailer. It is then delivered to the warehouse.

The container is identified throughout this process by the number of the container. This number consists of the container company's name, and a unique number. The bill of lading, which describes the cargo, is marked with the container's number. During this entire process, the container will probably never be opened, and will arrive with the original seals. Customs deals with what is contained in the paperwork.

Maersk, probably the largest owner of containers, has over a hundred thousand of the suckers. In theory, the computer for Maersk can print out the location of each and every container the company owns. Reality is that when Penn Central went bankrupt, the bankruptcy trustee couldn't find over 3,000 boxcars.

Okay, simple way to use a container illegally is to take a legitimate container shipment and hijack it. You offer the truck driver a big chunk of change to take the container from the factory in Frankfurt and stop on the way at your criminal operation. There you off-load the container, put in your illegal cargo, and put up a fake wall of the original freight on the end of the container. Weak point here is the driver, but other then that, untraceable.

When the container arrives in NYC, a driver shows up with the right paperwork and asks for the container. No one will think anything of it, because there's lots of whoops in this business. Truck driver takes the container, bad guys unload it, and truck driver dumps the container at some container terminal. Eventually, someone at the container terminal will find the container, and send it on its way to Nashville. When opened, the company finds a few boxes from the original shipment. Again, the weak point is the driver.

If someone was on the ball at either end, the truck numbers were recorded. Usually doesn't happen.

Virtually untraceable. In theory, US drivers are now security cleared to get into ports, but once the container clears the seaport, no one really checks.

Shell companies are a complication that no one needs. And you wouldn't want to know the number of stolen shipments and shipments of stolen goods that move through our transportation system.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

I've been in the industry, both behind the wheel and in management. Did you work the ports at a driver? And the TSA has increased the requirements for getting into ports as a truck driver.

Don't make the container owned by a shell company. Use a shell company for the shipment. Have a shell company doing the shipment, and let the shipment go according to the normal paperwork. Fake destination and origin are nice touches that will slow the investigation.

Shell companies can be traced, but it's hard, and sooner or later, you run into dead ends. Basically you can go into a state's corporate offices (under the secretary of state in each state) and register a company. There's no check to make sure that the company is actually at the address listed or the people exist. You can layer as many shell companies as you want to go through the effort of doing, although there is a cost involved in each company.

By the way, fingerprints inside a container are going to be very, very many. Everybody that's been inside the container is going to leave prints, that are only going to disappear slowly. And the worker's gloves are going to mess them up a lot. But there will be lots of prints.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe