Homeland Security Conman’s Arrest Is ‘Karma,’ Says Former Friend

A man arrested this week for allegedly posing as a phony Homeland Security agent in a years-long ruse that fooled at least four members of the Secret Service—one of them on first lady Jill Biden’s security detail—has been busted for passing bad checks, allegedly created a fake company to win a city contract, and stiffed a close friend and business partner before skipping town, according to state court records and interviews with two former associates.

Arian Taherzadeh, 40, was arrested by the feds at his Washington, D.C., apartment complex on Wednesday. He is charged with false personation of an officer or employee of the United States. Along with alleged co-conspirator Haider Ali, the two “for years… portrayed themselves as federal law enforcement agents involved in covert operations on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),” states a detention memo filed Friday in Washington, D.C. federal court. “They are not law enforcement agents, and they are not involved in sanctioned covert activities. Neither Defendant is even employed by the United States government. But their impersonation scheme was sufficiently realistic to convince other government employees, including law enforcement agents, of their false identities.”

In an interview with investigators following his arrest, prosecutors say Taherzadeh admitted to posing as a DHS agent and said he also falsely told others that he was an ex-Army Ranger. However, he put much of the onus on Ali, telling the feds that “Ali was the individual that funded most of their day-to-day operation but Taherzadeh did not know the source of the funds.”

“You could call it karma,” a former friend and business partner in Kansas City who started a now-defunct IT consultancy with Taherzadeh told The Daily Beast. “I got burned a couple of different times and I finally walked away.”

Court records do not explain what Taherzadeh and Ali were thought to be hoping to achieve, and prosecutors did not elaborate in a detention hearing on Friday.

The friend said he’s extremely curious to know what Taherzadeh’s end-game was.

“Part of me just wants to tell you, it’s because he could,” he said.

Taherzadeh left Missouri for the D.C. area in the mid-to-late 2000s, said the friend, a local business owner who asked not to be identified so as not to spook his clients. Several years earlier, the two had begun working together running online operations for various companies.

The finances were overseen by Taherzadeh, said the friend. He said he was getting paid regularly, and the two lived in, and worked out of, a local townhouse.

“The servers were on the bottom, they lived on the middle floor, and the third floor was the party floor,” Joe Lehman, who knew both men in Kansas City, told The Daily Beast.

Everything seemed fine—for a while, Taherzadeh’s ex-business partner said. Until one day, when Taherzadeh called to offer him six months of work on a project he was doing for a national manufacturing company.

“I laid my price out for the six months, and I never got paid,” he said. “He would string me along, and string me along, and string me along.”

During this period, when the friend still hoped to get paid, he said Taherzadeh hired him to install some server equipment for a customer he was working with. This time, Taherzadeh gave him a check at the end of the job, representing payment in full.

“He’s good at making friends, and making people feel welcome,” said the friend. “And even when he burns you, he’ll still try to make it seem like it’s not that big a deal, you know?”

At the time, the friend was broke, living in a trailer with no bank account, he said. So, he was all-too happy to have a few bucks in his pocket. But about a month after he cashed the check, he learned that Taherzadeh had been arrested for check fraud after trying to cash a check he had written to himself.

Taherzadeh was picked up on April 9, 2007, on a misdemeanor charge of passing a bad check under $500, according to Clay County, Missouri Circuit Court records.

The police subsequently accused the friend of being in on the scam, and threatened him with felony charges, he said.

“They came after me,” he said. “I had a detective sweating me for weeks, telling me I was going to jail for forgery. But in the end, I wasn't the one who wrote the bad check. I had the check given to me.”

On Nov. 15, 2007, Taherzadeh took a deal and pleaded guilty in exchange for a suspended 180-day sentence and two years probation, which were also suspended, court records show. The friend was eventually able to resolve his issue without facing trial, and while he was initially charged, prosecutors dropped the case and his record is now clean, he said. But not before his life was turned upside-down in the process.

“Clay County was trying to pin it on somebody,” the friend said. “That’s probably the last time we really had it out, and then he bailed to D.C. The last time I talked to him, it was not pretty.”

While living in Missouri, Taherzadeh was also arrested and convicted on DWI charges, and spent two weeks in jail. He was also sued for non-payment of rent and credit card bills, being found in default in both cases. A few years later, Taherzadeh would be convicted in Virginia for assaulting his wife. While awaiting sentencing in that case, Taherzadeh was arrested and charged with assault and battery for attacking his girlfriend, according to the detention memo filed Friday by prosecutors, who did not specify if Taherzadeh had been convicted.

For this reason, prosecutors said in their detention memo that Taherzadeh is prohibited from “possessing a firearm or even a single round of ammunition.”

Reached by The Daily Beast on Friday, Taherzadeh’s court-appointed lawyer, Michelle Peterson, said, “We will be making no comment outside of the courtroom.”

Earlier in 2007, Joe Lehman established an LLC with Taherzadeh so he could bid on a municipal contract to supply dog licenses to Kansas City.

Lehman, who now works in the logistics industry, told The Daily Beast that Taherzadeh convinced him to put his name on the incorporation papers after his partner in the venture “bailed on him.”

The contract involved manufacturing the metal tags attached to dog collars, which was something Taherzadeh had no experience with, Lehman said.

“He was somehow able to bullshit them enough to win the bid,” Lehman said. “He told me he needed to meet with all these city officials, and he wanted to bring me on as the frontman. I made up an LLC, I put on a suit and tie, [and] we went and showed these people an empty office building.”

The two would be “the middlemen,” Lehman continued, saying that Taherzadeh told him they would “place the order, stamp ‘em and shine ‘em, then ship them to the City and we’d get paid.”

“He said he already had his vendor to make the tags, and then the whole thing never went anywhere, it never happened,” said Lehman. “He moved away, and last I heard, he was like a Border Patrol agent or some shit.”

Of course, Taherzadeh wasn’t a Border Patrol agent, nor was he any of the various things he claimed to be, such as an ex-Army Ranger, according to federal prosecutors.

“This investigation is less than two weeks old,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Rothstein said at Friday’s detention hearing. “And every day the facts get worse and worse… The defendants were not merely playing dress-up with firearms and ammunition, body armor, tactical gear, surveillance equipment, they were engaged in conduct that represented a serious threat to the community and compromised the operations of federal law enforcement and created a potential national security threat.”

In the government’s detention memo, prosecutors laid out a slew of disturbing allegations about Taherzadeh and Ali. The duo “pretended to recruit other individuals to law enforcement and their fake operation—including shooting a person with an air gun—and leveraged their phony law enforcement status to ingratiate themselves to other law enforcement agents in sensitive positions,” the detention memo states. “They compromised United States Secret Service (USSS) personnel involved in protective details and with access to the White House complex by lavishing gifts upon them, including rent-free living. And they procured, stored, and used all the tools of law enforcement and covert tradecraft: weaponry, including firearms, scopes, and brass knuckles; surveillance equipment, including a drone, antennae, hard drives, and hard drive copying equipment; tools to manufacture identities, including a machine to create Personal Identification Verification (PIV) cards and passport photographs; and tactical gear, including vests, gas masks, breach equipment, police lights, and various law enforcement insignia.”

Taherzadeh’s former friend and partner in the IT consultancy enjoyed spending time with him, and said the two had “all these common interests.” They played video games together, and “did some partying,” but both knew they’d eventually “have to grow up.”

“He’s always kind of been into guns but it was never his main focus or priority,” the friend, who now works in the HVAC business, told The Daily Beast. “He never expressed interest in going into law enforcement when I knew him. He had talked at one point about maybe becoming an attorney.”

“Live and learn,” he said. “Don’t have a business partner… or don’t do business with friends. I knew I'd never get the money and once he left town, what could I do? I’m broke, it’s not like I can chase him to D.C. Other than that, dude was fun to go to bars with, fun to be around, fun to sit around and shoot the shit with, but it got to a certain point where I just had to bail.”

A year or two ago, he said, Taherzadeh sent him a “friend” request on Facebook, but he ignored it.

“I hadn’t talked to the dude in probably a decade,” he said. “So I started looking through his profile and seeing what was posted. It was all pretty much lifestyle stuff, but there were pictures of him in police-style clothing and tactical gear… I was like,’ Well, shit.’ But I still don't want to be friends with you.”

On Friday, Magistrate Judge G. Michael Hervey ordered Taherzadeh and Ali detained without bail.

“It’s a hell of a thing to be charged with,” Taherzadeh’s former friend said with a laugh. “But am I really surprised? I’m not shocked.”