HOW PANAMA CAUGHT ITS MOST WANTED DUTCH FUGITIVE FRAUDSTER

Those of you who wondered how Panamanian Immigration was able to identify, and detain, the fugitive (and thrice convicted) Dutch fraudster, Okke Ornstein, when he arrived in Panama, inasmuch as he was carrying a valid passport issued to another Dutch citizen, here's why: Panama, thanks to the able assistance of the US Department of Homeland Security, now conducts biometric scans of all foreign nationals coming into its international airport from abroad.

This means digital fingerprint scans, and a digital photograph, are taken from all foreign nationals. Okke Ornstein was immediately taken into custody, and send directly to prison, to begin serving the 40-month sentence, on two separate cases, that he evaded two years ago, by engaging in unlawful flight out of Panama. Whether he will be charged with passport and immigration offenses is not known. All the years that Ornstein lived in Panama, he never held legal residency. he simply came in and out every six months, posing as a tourist, when in truth and in fact, he was a career criminal, committing financial crimes, as well as the more serious variety, leaving many victims in his wake.

All those newspaper articles, from the Netherlands, claiming that he is merely a journalist, imprisoned for blogging in Panama, for libel and slander, are totally uninformed and misguided. This individual has a long and sordid criminal history in Panama, as a purveyor of child pornography, to extortion and blackmail, to managing and supervising the operation a Ponzi scheme, to securities fraud, and many more crimes that are too long to list here.

Any efforts to free Ornstein, for some misguided, benevolent purpose, are from individuals, and organizations that have fallen for his ficticious journalist persona. He poses a danger to the public at large, and frankly, he deserves to serve his entire sentence, so that he does not scam any other victims, for the rest of this decade, and then to be deported to the Netherlands, to serve a sentence there, for another criminal conviction.