"Dinesh said he could get me back on top by trading commodities, so I gave him $9,300," Martin says. "I am not a financial guy, but I know you can make money on commodities if you know how to do it, and he came across as very smooth. He was also very aggressive and forceful." Martin says he would see Shah trading commodities on the phone, but now speculates that it was always with other people's money and that the rewards, if any, went only to Shah.
"Nobody around this guy ever profited, and a lot of people's lives got way worse, mine included."
Courtesy of Houston Police Department
According to police, Dinesh Shah, pictured here at the scene of his 2009 arrest on Jack Street in Montrose, attempted to pass himself off as the attorney of an octogenarian retired FBI agent. Shah allegedly even went so far as to attempt to arrange the man's funeral.
This 1976 Ford Elite once belonged to "Dave Martin," a man Dinesh Shah befriended in 2007. After Shah praised Martin's car in a supermarket parking lot, the two men started hanging out. Shah promised Martin he could make him money trading commodities. Instead, Martin says, Shah eventually made off with more than $9,000, a vintage hat and watch, and, finally, his beloved Elite.
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Martin and Shah became friends, often dining together at places like Pappas Seafood, the Barbecue Inn on Crosstimbers at Yale, Mark's and Rudi Lechner's. Over dinner and drinks, Shah would regale Martin with more of his bullshit — how he'd been in Ronald Reagan's security detail, how he'd gone undercover as a mullah in his top-secret CIA missions in Iran. He also shared his retro tastes in music and film.
"He was always listening to old boring Sinatra songs in his car," Martin wrote in an e-mail. "He also was obsessed with Rock Hudson, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant...What a boring person. Amazing how being sober changes perspective."
Martin was also starting to see that his new friend and financial adviser had a dark side. He seemed to have a Nazi fetish. Shah would often tell Martin that he loved to study up on Gestapo and SS tactics in history books, and claimed to have worked alongside veterans of the Axis forces on secret missions in the 1980s. (Martin noted to himself that former Gestapo and SS troopers would have been pretty old by then — it was just one of Shah's lamer whoppers.) He drove hyper-aggressively and told Martin that he liked to run motorcycle riders off the road for fun.
"I was pretty unguarded and not using very good judgment and he gained my confidence, and it got to the point where I would get home and within two minutes he would call," Martin remembers. "That's why I think he either had bugged my place or had a camera in there. It was making me really paranoid."
Martin thinks it was all part of Shah's meticulous procedure. While investigating the Jackson case, police found boxes and boxes of notes, including to-do lists on Shah's presumed targets. (A to-do list was also found regarding Joan Johnson's eldest son Wirt Johnson.) "One of them was bug the place, find out their friends, find out where they hang out," Martin says. "Then he proceeds to isolate them from their friends and the places they hang out."
"He was really methodical in putting his victims together and working on them over time," says Anderson of HPD's Major Offenders Squad. Anderson would eventually lead a search of Shah's home and work on the Jackson case. "He waited very patiently." Anderson says that Shah is also leery of computers. "So he keeps documents instead, and it's the same difference, but just less sophisticated. I was like, 'Wow, this is a treasure trove of information.'"
(In a side note, among Shah's files, Anderson found information about an eccentric Montrose codger by the name of Ray Rush Brown, who dressed like a street person but was in fact the recipient of a chunk of the royalties for a popular song he'd ghostwritten years before. In Anderson's recollection, the income was $10,000 to $15,000 monthly, but the cop says Brown received very little of it once Shah entered his life. "Shah separated him from all that money," the sergeant says. "I found it all in documents and personal checks." Anderson believes Shah forged power of attorney over Brown, and says he also found a will purportedly from Brown in Shah's possession — a will lacking only Brown's signature and notarization. The will left everything to Shah, including Brown's share of the song royalties.)
Meanwhile, things started disappearing from Martin's apartment. First it was a few books. Then a vintage Stetson hat walked out the door unannounced. Shah liked a Guildford watch Martin had and told him he knew where to get it fixed. Martin let him take it and never saw it again. (Anderson says that Shah loved to keep mementos of his victims.)
"So I should have known then, but it just got worse and he got more and more aggressive," Martin says. "He kind of takes people hostage. He said he could put slow-acting poison in people's air-conditioning. He told me if I didn't do what he said, then bad things would happen to me."
One night, Martin, Shah, Henry Dyches and a homeless man named Jason whom Martin says Shah attempted to enslave dined together at One's A Meal. By this time, Dyches was deep in the clutches of Alzheimer's and had just over a year to live. Shah was growing tired of the old man's doddering.
According to Martin, after Dyches returned to the table from an unfortunate trip to the restroom, Shah screamed at the old man for wiping shit on his own shirt. "First he said he was gonna shoot him down in a ditch like the Nazis did to the Jews, and then he said that all he would have to do is push him down the stairs at his house and the police wouldn't say anything because he was just an old man."
