Gary Bender, a veteran biometrics expert who has been called an architect of the FBI's highly-touted fingerprint system, says he was tricked out of at least $940,800 by a business partner in Newport Beach.
In a lawsuit filed this week in Orange County Superior Court, Bender alleges that Behnam Bavarian, his business partner at AFIS and Biometric Consulting, Inc., owes him the money because he breached their 50-50 revenue split agreement.
On the company's website, Behnam and Bender claim that their clients have included the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, San Francisco Police Department, National Institute of Justice and Fingerprint Interoperability Project and the Calgary Police.
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According to Bender's lawsuit, Behnam approached him in 2007 and
proposed a 50-50 deal from their expected consulting gigs. Bender says
that while he wrote “most” of the consulting proposals and performed
“nearly all of the technical work” on seven approved projects, he still
complied with the equal split agreement. But he says he
discovered that Behnam considered him his employee, hired his own son
and “misappropriated” corporate funds by incurring costs without
consulting with him, the lawsuit alleges.
Behnam's lawyers have not yet filed a response in court.
The case has been assigned to Superior Court Judge Gregory Lewis.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
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