Good-Bye, Dubai

By Len Forster

Good-bye, Dubai is based on the handwritten diary of the author, written during his 105-plus days as an inmate in jail in Dubai. In them, he outlines all the manifest problems of the Dubai judicial system, of the corruption of its police, of the kindness that he discovered within the police, and the frustrations that he experienced in trying to extricate himself from an utterly impossible situation. Good-bye, Dubai is a study in how to survive in the most impossible of circumstances without losing one's mind and to still come out of it retaining most of one's sanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Len Forster
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393013433

Book preview

Prologue

This is the true and factual account of the 8 months during which I was detained and held for ransom in 2003 and 2004, my 105 days as a prisoner in the Interpol Jail and the Public Prosecutor’s jail in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and of what happened to me over the course of those 105 days in jail, and afterwards, as well as the truth of the conditions in the jails, the people I met, and the legal system prevailing in Dubai.

I was fortunate enough, while I was in jail, to be allowed to make notes, fortunate enough to have ten fresh legal pads in my luggage on which to take those notes, AND fortunate enough that my jailers allowed me both access to my luggage and permission to take notes.

It’s worth noting and an important part of the story for you to understand that my wife and I were wanted in the United States. Dee and I were living under assumed names with real British passports in names not our own, not fake but not ours, and we had created solid identities for ourselves during our ten plus years of living plainly in the open in Spain as Leonard Adams and Dee Durber-Adams. 

Accents notwithstanding, we were accepted as having been born in Britain, and everyone just assumed that we also had American passports, too.  We did, but they were in different names and had been destroyed by us some years earlier.  We were active politically and socially in Spain, not living in the dark.  We even voted there, which is legal for legal residents, which we were.

There were grounds for the charges against me in the United States, but the only thing Dee was guilty of was being married to me.

In the U. S., my then current occupation conducted from Spain would be considered money laundering and investment management.  Money laundering is illegal in the United States, though not necessarily so in the countries in which I was doing it.  Dubai was one of the banking and financial centers that I used for parking my clients’ money before putting it into investments through other banks in Europe.

At the time of my arrest, we had been living in Spain for more than ten years and doing business in Dubai for much of that time.  I was a financial consultant to people from all over Europe, the Middle East and Asia.  Those who wished to hide their money, legally (or, sometimes, not so legally), for the purposes of avoiding taxes, or alimony or other financial liabilities were my clients.

In the case of some of my Muslim clients, they came to me for help in avoiding the laws of descent and distribution under Islamic Law, Sha’ria, in order to protect their western wives and children, who would otherwise have been disinherited and left penniless.

Not only did I help them make their money disappear from the radar screens, I also managed the investment portfolios created from those disappeared funds.

Although I was wanted in the U.S. for conspiracy, money laundering, mail fraud, wire fraud, passport fraud and a number of other related charges all stemming from activities dating to the end of 1993, for those ten years, we’d been living a perfectly normal life in Spain, and I was doing something that I was not only good at doing but something that very few people on the planet knew how to do.  In the U.S., of course, I was considered to be a notorious felon.

I did not deal with drug dealers, thieves, or terrorist organizations.  It is interesting that, when word got around in the right circles about what I did for a living, I was approached in Spain by a mafia boss from Toronto (who wanted me to launder some $40,000 per month in drug trafficking proceeds), a representative of Hamas (who wanted me to manage a portfolio of some $40 million), and other nefarious characters.  I always said no.  Can you imagine a good Jewish boy from Ft. Lauderdale managing $40 million for Hamas?  Not in your lifetime!

After so many years of normal living in Spain, I had apparently gotten too confident and raised my head just a little too much, and someone had gotten wind of where I was and of my new identity.  The hunt for me had begun again in earnest, and that’s what actually led to my arrest in Dubai.

When I was arrested, I had already been in Dubai for two months.  My purpose there was both to deal with some client banking issues and to put together a concert venue for an ostensible UNICEF concert by Carlos Santana. 

What I did not know, at that time, was that this concert by Santana was all part of an elaborate con game (not a sting operation) with me as the victim.  It was a good con.  As part of the set up, I had already had two meetings with the Rolling Stones, or The Stones, in Madrid and in Paris to work out the details of a concert featuring them.  Ah, but all that’s a story for another book. 

In any case, I had succeeded in negotiating an arrangement at the Meydan Race course, which is owned by the present ruler of Dubai, Sheik Rasheed.  On the day I was arrested, I was supposed to go the race track to pick up and sign the agreement for the concert venue, and I had already made arrangement for a television producer to come to Dubai and figure out where to set up the stage, the cameras and all the stuff that television producers do.

My wife, Dee had been in Dubai visiting me in the J.W. Marriott for two weeks and had just left to return to Spain two nights before my arrest, so she was fortunate enough not herself to have been arrested.  She had intended to stay longer, but, because I was not feeling well and because we had four Yorkshire terriers staying with our housekeeper in Spain, she had decided to go home. 

When she had left the hotel by taxi to go to the airport, she later told me that the taxi seemed preselected for her, and, when she arrived at the airport, she was met by two guys in red jumpsuits (not something you see at the airport) who took care of her luggage and accompanied her through ticketing, passport control and all the way to the gate. 

She thought nothing of it at the time, but, after my detention, she realized that it had been a bit strange.  Had they intended to arrest her, too, had she remained any longer in Dubai?  We’ll never know. 

Just before Dee’s visit, I had suffered a very serious fall in front of the Intercontinental Hotel in Deira, skiing down an unmarked luggage ramp in leather soled shoes, and, unknown to me at the time, fractured a vertebra in my low back, ruptured 11 vertebral discs, as well as having fractured my left shoulder.  The hotel offered me a massage and a bottle of wine (and in an Arab country, too).

All I knew was that the pain just kept getting worse and worse, day after day.  Walking anywhere or shopping was just too painful for me.  All I wanted to do was to get back to Spain to be treated by my personal doctors, not shop with Dee in Dubai, and I had only delayed my return because of business.

So, being arrested and spending 105 days and nights sitting and lying down on concrete floors with these kinds of injuries was something that no one in his right mind would have wanted to suffer.  I was in my right mind.

The conditions in the Dubai jails may not be the best.  In fact, they’re terrible.  The people, for the most part, are not terrible, and this story of mine includes many anecdotes about people I met while I was under detention, including a members of the Taliban wanted for murder in Afghanistan, an Islamic scholar who was a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden, as well as descriptions of other people who were part of my Arab universe during my incarceration.

When I was in Dubai during this period of imprisonment and detention, His Highness the late Sheik Mohammed Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum was the ruler of Dubai.

*

Chapter I

Dubai.  9:05 a.m.  Tuesday, September 16, 2003 

I was staying in the J.W. Marriott hotel in Dubai.  I’d been there for two months already.  Naked, I had just climbed out of bed and was checking my email when the hotel phone rang.  I answered it.  Silence.  No one there. 

It rang again.  Again, silence.  Still no one there.  Swearing fluently in Spanish for the pointless interruptions, I went back to checking my email. 

A few minutes later, there was a knock on my door.  Still naked, I quickly slipped into a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt to answer the door.  It was Osama, the hotel manager. 

Hi, Osama, come on in.

Before I could get out of the way to let Osama in, a huge brute of a man in a dirty and wrinkled black T-shirt and jeans and with a three-day growth of beard, smelling like I-don't-don’t know-what, forced his way through the door holding up some kind of card at eye level, and announced in a loud voice, Dubai police! 

And, thus began a most remarkable episode in my life, part nightmare, part journey of enlightenment.

*

Entering my room with Osama, this Dubai policeman (whose name I never learned) demanded that I change into comfortable clothing, collect whatever medicines I normally take and to collect my passport.

I comply agreeably enough, because, at this point, I have no clue as to what’s going on.

Outside my room, there were three other policemen in traditional Arab dress.  When we came out of my room, one of them cuffed my hands behind my back and, with two policemen in front and two behind, we marched like some Navy Shore Patrol on our way to the lift.

So far, I wasn’t too bothered by my predicament, but, as we passed through the lobby and reception area of the hotel, my not having showered or shaved, my hair more unkempt than Dr. Zorba’s, and wearing handcuffs, all in the company of four policemen, I was embarrassed. 

Out of the lobby we went, still in lockstep, traversing the hotel’s porte cochére, crossing the street in front of the hotel.  We marched directly to a dirty black Jeep Cherokee 4 x 4 parallel parked across the street from the Marriott. 

I was directed to sit in the middle of the back seat between two very large and muscular Arab policemen, neither of whom gave me any assistance whatsoever climbing into the vehicle.  All I can say is that climbing into the back seat of a step-up Jeep 4 x 4 with what amounts to a broken back, a broken shoulder and one’s hands cuffed behind one’s back is not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.  Once everyone’s seatbelts were on, the Jeep started up, and away we went to who-knew-where.

Where turned out to be the office of Interpol/CID Financial Crimes Division, where I was promptly shown to an ante-room to a small office and told to sit.  After about a two- hour wait, an Arab in spotless white kandoora came out of the small office and identified himself as a police captain.  He wanted to ask me some questions. 

Initially, he was very polite and pleasant, though not very forthcoming, so I still didn’t know why I was there.  I sat down on the opposite side of his desk, as he began to ask me a series of seemingly innocuous questions.  He took copious notes in Arabic, asking why I was in Dubai, the details of my business transactions, where I lived, on and on.

He spent a great deal of time asking me about the Santana concert and my negotiations for a concert venue at the Meydan Racetrack.  I told him that I had an appointment with the General Manager of Meydan at 3:00 that same afternoon to review and sign the final agreement.

I had also been invited to speak at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) the next day at the Marriott, which I mentioned to him.  This didn’t seem to phase him in the least.  I mean, it would have phased me.

Then, the captain had to take a short break.  At the same time, I realized that I needed to use the toilet.  I asked the captain if there was a toilet I could use, while he was doing what he had to do.  He pointed me in the right direction.  I walked into the toilet, started to drop my trousers, realized there was no toilet paper.  There was a hose next to the toilet.  I thought to myself, Surely that’s not for what I think it is.

Back to the captain’s office I went to complain that there was no toilet paper.  He looked up at me with a smile that said, You poor fool, and handed me a box of Kleenex from behind his desk.  I wasn’t pleased to be using Kleenex, instead of the real thing, but I was overjoyed not to have to use a water hose to clean myself.

My ablutions and such completed and the captain’s other responsibilities met, we resumed our discussions.

In the middle of the interview, the captain received a phone call and had to curtail our meeting for a few minutes.  He had me escorted to an external waiting area next to a main exit.  I guessed he wanted to see if I would make a break for it.  It was clear from much of his questioning that he had been watching way too many American crime shows.

Anyway, while I was waiting, a vehicle with diplomatic plates arrived. A really cocky young guy who was, by his dress and demeanor, clearly an American went in to visit with the captain.  He was carrying a really thick file, which I assumed was the complete file on me from the U.S. Marshal’s service.

The way this ostensible FBI/U.S. Marshal/embassy employee gave me the once over, while trying to pretend he wasn't giving me the once over, had been enough to convince me he was not there to look after my best interests.  He was, in context, the personification of the modern American law enforcement/criminal justice system in dress, attitude and with the same abundance of arrogance.  He looked at me as though I were some sort of undesirable species he was seeing for the very first time.

After he left, and I was back in the captain’s office, the captain said, The U.S. Embassy might be very interested to know that you are here. 

I responded, They already know I’m here.  An FBI guy was here earlier and brought you a file.

The captain retorted, Who told you that? We haven’t called them, but we will. 

Right!  I know an FBI guy/U.S. Marshal when I see one, and I saw one.  I used to watch cop shows, too.

After two hours or so of this continued, detailed cross-examination, the captain tells me that he’s satisfied with my answers.  I felt a big sigh of relief that I couldn’t show, and asked, Then, I’m free to go back to my hotel?

The Captain replied, "Yes, of course, but, first, we have to search your room.  After that, he says, I’ll be allowed my return to the hotel.

All of sudden, just as I’m about to walk out of the office in the company of the same four policemen as before, the captain informed me that he had thought, before I came in, that you might be using a false passport.    Since he had already indicated he was satisfied with my answers, I breathed a silent breath of relief, thinking that, now, he didn’t think that. 

*

As we leave the Interpol offices at around 3:00 p.m., I have an opportunity to observe my surroundings.  The police station, where I’ve been interrogated, is in a police-only compound that is itself at least one square mile in size.  It’s huge.  There are medical facilities, barracks, jails, intelligence offices, anti-terrorism departments, vehicle repair shops and all kinds of other buildings, offices and departments.  It was amazing to see.

En route to the Marriott, I’m allowed for the first time all day to answer my cell phone when it rings.  Dee (my wife) calls, then René Walters (the fraudster whose victim I am).  I try to talk to them cryptically, in order to explain my circumstance, but it was difficult riding in the black Jeep Cherokee with the four Arab policemen sitting there, listening.

I had bought two children’s Radio Shack walkie-talkies in Dubai and two RadioShack handheld, 64-channel CB radios in the adjoining emirate, Sharjah, for a friend of mine in Spain to use in communicating with his son, who he was teaching to sail.  It was like those cops had radar and they went straight to the bags where the radios were located.  It is true; every one of the hotel staff is a snitch for the police.   Otherwise, how would they have known?

We’re going to have to confiscate these.  They’re not legal in Dubai.  Then, why the hell do you sell them in Dubai?  That makes no sense.

Back to the police station we go, and the third degree really begins in earnest, especially focused for the first six hours, on the stupid radios.  I explained that I met the guy who found the radios for me, that he bought them with money I gave him and delivered them to me at the hotel in my favorite coffee shop, where every evening I would go to drink Kapusa (a Tunisian coffee) and play backgammon.

Because I mentioned that I met the person who found the person who actually got me the radios while I was out playing backgammon with my friend Marwan, they demanded Marwan’s number, so they could call him in and try to intimidate him into saying that he was the one who got me the radios.  I don’t understand why, but they are really pissed off about those radios!

My friend Marwan is a Syrian lawyer practicing in Dubai with his wife, Helene (a Quebecois and also a lawyer).  He showed up in about an hour, while they had me cooling my heels in their small waiting area outside the captain’s office again.  You could see in his face, he was terrified to be there, terrified of the Dubai Police.  That made me really afraid.

After Marwan had waited for about an hour in the little waiting room, sitting next to me – neither of us talking, they called him in and browbeat him for a little over an hour.  Then, they made him sit in the waiting room again, while they called me in and started in all over again. 

Gee!  This is so much fun.  Not!

The interrogation continues until 9 PM or so, but, now, the focus shifts.  Who is Web Foster? the captain asks, holding a photocopy of an American passport with an old photo of me wearing glasses (at this point in time, I’d been wearing contact lenses for about ten years).

No clue, I say.  I knew who, but Web Foster wasn’t my name, so I wasn’t going to give him any help.

More questions.   Then, he was showing me photos on two old U.S. passport documents with two different names but each with my photo.  This is you, he badgered.

My name is Leonard Adams, and I’m a British citizen, I challenged him.

Then, he jumped back to the radios, then to the passports again.  I’d call it browbeating, except the captain was, generally, so pleasant in his continual probing.  At this point, he had to be getting as tired as I was, at the very least.  We’d been going at it for a long time.

I stay with my story.  I am who I am, and I don’t know who sold me the radios, both statements being true.

Finally, he asked me where I got the British passport.  After continually responding that I applied for it like anyone else, I got really annoyed and barked out, I sold rotten eggs and bought it.  Well, that smart ass remark was taken by him as confirmation that it was a false passport, even though it was a legitimate passport acquired through official channels.  I guess he didn’t actually understand that American idiomatic expression, because his transcript of the interrogation said that I had admitted to illegally purchasing the passport.

That’s not what I said, even though it may have been true.  The passport wasn’t legal, because I wasn’t really Leonard Adams, but it was legitimate.

Anyway, around 1 AM, he tired of the game and took me to the office of the major who supervised CID.  This guy was not nearly so friendly.  He told me they were going to keep me overnight (in the Interpol jail) for "suspicion of terrorism".  Terrorism!  Come on, man!  You can’t be serious!

He looked down his long nose at me, almost like the guy from the American embassy and, with a kind of sneer, he asked if I would like hamburgers, asking in such a way as to imply that hamburgers are all North Americans eat.  I did want a hamburger, because I hadn’t eaten all day, but I wasn’t going to tell that to this guy.

Then, he asked me if I wanted to go see George Bush.  Huh?  Do you want to go see George Bush? he asked again.  At this point, I didn’t know that financial crimes are not extraditable offenses in the United Arab Emirates.  I looked him straight in the eye and asked, Do YOU want to go see George Bush?

Had I known they couldn’t extradite me, I might have had more to say.  And, because I didn’t know that, I kept saying to myself, I’m toast... I am toast!

In any event, after being hassled about the hamburgers, this major said, You know, for a wire transfer of €500,000, you can be on a plane home to Spain in the morning.  That was a comment I wasn’t expecting.  He was soliciting me for a bribe?  Well, that certainly fit with the stereotype that many people have of Arabs, though it didn’t fit with my knowledge of them.

I just looked at him like he was out of his mind, and we just stared at each other.  After a few moments of silence, he gestured to a corporal and I was taken down the hall to the Interpol jail.

There, I gave them all the personal belongings I had on me, plus my medicines. They put everything, except the medicines, in an envelope with my name on it, sealed the envelope prepared a detailed receipt, which they had me sign with a thumbprint (left thumb only).  They gave me a copy of the receipt (blue paper) and stapled the other copy (pink paper) to my envelope of personal belongings (wallet, watch, other jewelry, etc.) and stuck the envelope in a file cabinet.

An officer who spoke only the most minimal English led me into a storage room immediately adjacent to the entrance to the jail, where he conducted a thorough body search, which for some reason included a detailed inspection of my penis.  

Then, they had me take off my shoes and leave them under the storage shelving next to 50 other pairs of shoes, gave me a pair of nasty looking shower shoes, had me select three dirty blankets from a stack of scratchy wool blankets on a shelf, escorted me to the gate to the cell block, invited me to enter and clanged the big iron gate behind me.

Yep. It was real. I was in jail.

*

Chapter II

The first thing I noticed was that it was cold enough to hang meat.  The second thing I noticed, as I checked out the cells, is that there were no beds.  The floor was terrazzo, and everybody was sleeping on the floor.  The inmates all had one blanket doubled beneath them, one folded for a pillow, and they covered themselves with the third one.

Not immediately ready to go to bed, I use the toilet.  Shock!  The toilets are just holes in the floor about 6 inches in diameter.  You have to squat over the hole.  There’s no toilet paper?  On the wall next to the hole in the concrete, there’s a short, 2-foot section of water hose connected to a spigot.  For cleaning my bum? 

Are you shitting me!

For all intents and purposes, the toilet arrangement meant that, every time one wanted to have a bowel movement, it was necessary to undress from the waist down (and, of course, there were no hooks on the walls of the stall to hang your clothes on) and be prepared to be soaking wet.  How crude, I thought.

When they had taken my personal belongings, they had also taken all my cigarettes, only because I didn’t ask if I could keep them.  I really wanted a smoke, but the cop had disappeared.  There was no one to ask.

I saw a young Middle Eastern fellow sitting on the sink at the very end of the cell block having a smoke.  I go over to him with the idea of asking how one goes about getting a cigarette, when he surprises me by speaking to me first, not only with very good English, but with an American accent. 

He offered me a smoke, and then explained that it’s necessary to ask the jailers for both the cigarettes and a light, and, if they feel like it, they may give me one or both.

I light my cigarette from his, and we chat for a few minutes.  He asks me why I’m in the jail, and I answer without much detail.  He asks where I’m from, and I say Canada.

He tells me that he’s from Detroit, Michigan and that he was born in Bangladesh.  He’s been in this jail for 8 months.  Seems he was implicated (by one witness out of seven) in a murder that took place in Detroit (Much later I was able to confirm that the charges against him were dropped, and the one witness against him was charged with perjury).

His name is Murshed.  His parents panicked in the face of his being charged as an accessory to murder, and they decided that the best thing to do was to get him out of the U.S. and back to the family in Bangladesh.  His route of travel required him to change planes in Dubai, and, just as his final flight was due to pull away from the gate, Dubai police entered the plane and took him into custody.   He was in jail for Flight to Avoid Prosecution.

Murshed is quite forthcoming about everything and a veritable font of knowledge about life in the Interpol jail in Dubai, about the Dubai and UAE legal system with respect to issues dealing with the criminal justice and extradition, though he didn’t mention that financial crimes are not extraditable.  

Murshed, who was ultimately destined to be my roommate, speaks Bangladeshi, Hindi, Urdu, some Arabic, some Farsi, as well as his excellent English.  He's a favorite with the guards and with the prisoners.  Since he's only 18, he's like the baby of this very small jail and protected