Thread: Area man facing federal forgery charges

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Area man facing federal forgery charges

6-13-05

By Taft Wireback Staff Writer
News & Record

New charges have been filed against a Montgomery County man in connection with the selling of counterfeit Social Security cards and other false identification.

Cecil P. Saffle, 60, was indicted April 25 on federal charges of manufacturing false documents.

Saffle initially was arrested Dec. 1 on similar state charges.

However, those charges were dropped this spring in deference to prosecution at the federal level.

In the interim, authorities have said they think Saffle fled the area while free on bond. He remains at large.

Police and sheriff's departments across the Triad said they don't see many sophisticated operations such as that which they have accused Saffle of running.

In the past five years, federal officials have prosecuted 20 document forgers in North Carolina's middle district.

Police said they're more apt to see the end results of such labs in financial crime, where someone steals another's identity or uses false identification to cash a bad check.

It is also common, several said, to arrest a suspect on unrelated charges and find him carrying multiple types of identification in different names.

"We see the results out in the community when they go about getting money from (the false identity document)," said Sgt. T.L. Callicutt of the Greensboro Police Department's fraud unit. "But it's hard to tie it back to the place where it's coming from."

The Guilford County Sheriff's Department has seen an increase in counterfeit identification in the past few months, particularly in cases involving Latinos, said Capt. Tom Sheppard. A recent kidnapping suspect carried documents in different names, he said.

"None of the names were his," Sheppard said. "Everything we got was in a different name. The apartment was in a different name. The cell phone."

Officers still aren't sure that they know his true identity, but they charged him under the most likely name, Sheppard said.

The operation that is the focus of the federal indictment ran from a shop in Candor's Main Street Shopping Center.

Saffle ran a legitimate business in which he offered his services as an intermediary and interpreter to the local Latino community. On occasion, he worked as an interpreter at the county courthouse in Troy.

He told investigators last year that he became fluent in Spanish while doing missionary work in Latin America.

State investigators said one of the two units Saffle rented at the shopping center in Candor was specially equipped as a counterfeiting lab.

The federal indictment says investigators found 16 pieces of equipment -- including computers, a paper cutter, a photo scanner, a heat sealer and two digital cameras -- that were used to make fake documents.

Officers also confiscated blank "alien" immigration cards, as well as three counterfeit green cards in the names of Alonso Ibarra DeLaCruz, Juan Carlos Munguia and Mario Perez Peralta, according to the indictment.

In addition, they seized a fake Social Security card in the name of another Latino man, the indictment says.

At the time of Saffle's initial arrest, authorities said the main customers of the fake documents produced in the Candor store were illegal immigrants who used false identification to get driver's licenses or to establish multiple identities.

Montgomery Sheriff Jeff Jordan said he and the N.C. Division of Alcohol Law Enforcement began investigating because officers were seizing a lot of false identification.

In Alamance County, officials have amassed a large collection of counterfeit identification confiscated in recent years, said Randy Jones, spokesman for the Alamance Sheriff's Department.

He said officers have seen a merging of document counterfeiting, once almost exclusively a white-collar crime, with a variety of other more violent misdeeds.

"We're seeing false documents and counterfeiting tying right into these other situations, especially drugs," he said.

"It's not uncommon to find them all mixed together: drugs, guns, counterfeit money and false documents," he said.

Rockingham County deputies have not had many problems with false identification or document counterfeiters, said spokesman Dean Venable.

But in Randolph County, officers regularly encounter people with fraudulent Social Security or green cards, said Capt. Barry Bunting of the Randolph Sheriff's Department.

"When you ask for ID, a lot of times you're not going to get a driver's license," Bunting said.

"All you're going to get is a Social Security card or a green card," he said.

Both Bunting and Callicutt, of the Greensboro department, said false identification adds another level of difficulty to police work.

Instead of investigating the crime, they said, officers must spend time trying to figure out a suspect's true identity.



Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or twireback@news-record.com

THE REAL ID WONT STOP FALSE ID'S