Inquiry Aims at Convicted Arms Dealer

As federal agents pore over documents seized from Signal Aerospace, the Ventura company suspected of selling counterfeit jet-engine parts, a clearer picture is emerging of one of the central figures in the investigation: Arif Durrani.

In documents and interviews, officials describe him as an elusive entrepreneur, a foreign-born 49-year-old fond of fast cars and plush homes, who bought and sold aircraft parts before getting caught supplying missile components to Iran.

The arms deal landed him in prison for five years. But federal agents say Durrani quickly slipped back into the lucrative aircraft-parts business--despite court restrictions--by running small companies from behind the scenes.

“Arif Durrani was intelligent, he was shrewd, and he was also very in touch with making a profit,” said Steven Arruda, the U.S. Customs Service agent who investigated the 1986 arms deal that resulted in Durrani’s conviction.

“Profits were important to Mr. Durrani,” Arruda said. “He liked to live the high life.”

Customs officials suspect Durrani, who left the country in February, runs Signal. The 4-year-old company, situated in a nondescript industrial park, is being investigated for the alleged sale of counterfeit aircraft parts.

Among the suspected counterfeit parts from Signal are copies of combustion liners made by General Electric for engines of small corporate jets, said GE spokesman Rick Kennedy. The parts are not used in commercial airliners, nor are they linked to any accidents, officials said.

Although the company’s president is identified in state business records as 36-year-old Susanne L. Stehr, Durrani’s wife, federal officials suspect he was a key player in running the business.

According to interviews and business records, it is a field the Pakistani national has specialized in for more than a decade.

“This is the business he knew,” Arruda said.

Durrani came to the United States in 1973, the son of a Pakistani military general who was in charge of buying equipment for the army.

He settled in California, living in a 5-acre hilltop home in Westlake Village with his former wife. He drove a silver Porsche. He traveled extensively as president of his own company, Merex Corp., which bought and sold parts used in military and commercial aircraft.

“He was a middleman,” Arruda said. “[He] sold everything from a $2.50 bolt to a canopy for an F5 fighter.”

In his own words, however, Durrani later revealed that his business was not limited to selling helicopter and airplane components.

In an interview with the Hartford Courant after his conviction, Durrani boasted that he had become one of the more prosperous arms dealers in the world.

“There are many people in the business, but few are successful,” he said. “I lived very comfortably.”

Durrani started Merex in February 1984, but the business was suspended three years later--two months before his conviction in U.S. District Court in Bridgeford, Conn.

During his investigation, Arruda learned one of Durrani’s partners at Merex was an Iranian national, establishing a possible connection for the later arms deal.

At his trial, Durrani admitted to shipping the missile parts but maintained he was acting on behalf of the U.S. government in its efforts to obtain the release of American hostages in Lebanon.

He described himself merely as “a delivery boy” for the Reagan administration, and said he met once with former National Security Council aide Oliver North.

But prosecutors said Durrani arranged for 11 shipments of antiaircraft missile parts to Iran between June and September 1986. He was arrested in October during a sting operation by federal agents.

A federal judge sentenced Durrani to 10 years in prison and ordered him to pay a $2-million fine. But the businessman served only half his term, and was released from custody in 1992.

Within three years he was again the subject of a probe by federal agents, this time with a new business and a new wife.

Since 1995, U.S. Customs Service officials have been investigating Durrani and Signal for allegedly exporting aircraft parts to banned countries, according to court documents. As a result of his conviction, Durrani is prohibited from exporting certain aircraft parts to some countries.

Earlier this year, the customs investigation dovetailed with the current probe by officials with the FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Department of Transportation.

Customs Agent Wayne Kempton told a task force investigator that he learned Durrani had left the United States in February. Kempton said Durrani probably anticipated he would be deported.

In the meantime, Kempton said, Stehr “is ostensibly running Signal in Durrani’s absence.”

FBI agents searched the couple’s five-bedroom home in Camarillo as well as Signal’s Ventura offices Thursday. Agents were looking for documents such as records of sales and mailing lists.

Property records show Stehr bought the Camarillo home in the Spanish Hills neighborhood for $823,000 last year. Records also show an “intra-family transaction” from Durrani to Stehr at the time of sale.

Speaking through her lawyer this week, Stehr has denied any wrongdoing in Signal’s business practices and told a television reporter outside her office Thursday that she welcomed the probe because it would eventually clear her name.

Stehr’s Beverly Hills attorney, Lawrence Ecoff, said his client is cooperating with authorities. He said the federal investigation has spun out of a prior civil suit.

Meanwhile, Durrani’s whereabouts are unknown. Sources suspect he has returned to his native Pakistan.