Auto-finance specialist Nizameddine Hassan Chokr lives the life men crave. He works undercover missions for the FBI, belongs to a Middle Eastern family worth at least $6 billion and can fly fighter jets. By his own “cautious” estimation, the Costa Mesa man is well-educated, healthy and adored.
What's more remarkable about Chokr is, for lack of a better word, his mojo. His presence can turn female strangers relentlessly horny. Bus stops, cheap hotel parking lots and fast-food restaurants are among the places women have demanded sex from him. He's not even safe from lust in a donut shop.
Chokr acknowledges it's not always his striking looks and intelligence that mesmerize women. He has a secret weapon, and when he's wearing his tight 1992 Fashion Avenue suede pants, the opposite sex can't resist him.
That is Chokr's version of reality. Police, on the other hand, say the Beirut, Lebanon, native is one of Orange County's serial public masturbators.
Last year, a jury found law enforcement's assessment to be more credible. Superior Court Judge Richard M. King sentenced Chokr to five years and eight months in prison. Home is now an upper bunk bed in the California State Prison at Vacaville.
But Chokr, a former Boeing engineer, refuses to acknowledge his culpability. Two weeks ago, a state appellate panel denied his efforts to overturn his conviction. He'd claimed King botched a jury instruction on the definition of reasonable doubt and issued an improperly harsh punishment. If only the judge had given him probation and ordered a diagnostic evaluation, the court would have appreciated the “erroneous misconceptions and misperceptions” of his guilt, he argued.
“I am not a sexual offender,” said Chokr, who has a theory about his woes.
Gifted people, the short, slight 51-year-old man says, often incur the wrath of jealous individuals, who then hatch plots to sabotage them. And Chokr sees himself as extraordinarily blessed.
“I own the world,” he told King at his trial. “I am the best ever.”
The men, women and children who witnessed three separate masturbation events are all “liars” engaged in a conspiracy, he explained.
Chokr recalls, for example, his 4 a.m., August 2005 experience at Jax Donuts in Orange: He had been enjoying a snack of a croissant and milk while he waited to catch a bus. The middle-aged female cashier couldn't control her passion, engaged him in sex talk, and then ignored his protests. She reached for his pants, unzipped him, grabbed his erection and began stroking wildly.
“I was terrified,” he recalled.
Was he to blame that he ejaculated on her skirt?
The cashier called 911 because “she felt snubbed” that he wouldn't go home with her, Chokr later told jurors.
The conspiracy continued when Chokr left the Orange County Jail on bail. Later that night, he'd gone to Angelo's Hamburgers in Anaheim. After he ordered food at the counter, he felt an involuntary urethral discharge and took his penis out of his pants to wipe himself off. Why did those customers scream? Why did that out-of-town truck driver slam him down and hold him for police?
Weeks later, at the parking lot of Anaheim's Evergreen Motel, Chokr says he was the victim of a con game. He'd spent the evening at JC Fandango's restaurant and bar, where a woman he didn't know asked him for a $200 loan. He consented. As repayment, she suggested a “threesome” with another woman. They'd taken his penis out in the parking lot, tricked him and notified police to set him up.
Deputy District Attorney Keith Bogardus calls Chokr a man “with deviant sexual motivations” and his stories “ludicrous.” The prosecutor noted, for example, that the victims in the hotel parking lot weren't two women, but a man, his wife and their young son. According to Bogardus, Chokr had propositioned the man for a threesome and began masturbating when the guy said no and rushed his son away.
At trial, Chokr represented himself. He cross-examined the donut-shop cashier by asking, “Did anything out of the ordinary happen in your shop on the 30th of August 2005?”
Angry cashier: “Yeah, you walked in.”
By the end of the case, Chokr was on the defensive. “I have control of my mental faculties,” he declared to no pending question, adding that Bogardus had used “smoke and mirrors.” He would “lie, cheat, steal—would do anything to get a conviction!”
It's impossible to know what a juror will believe. The claims might have had a remote chance if Chokr hadn't already served a three-year prison stint for whacking off in public in 2001. Here's his version of what happened at a Fullerton bus stop: He had been waiting for the bus to go to Norwalk. Two women in a sport utility vehicle saw him, stopped and asked if they could give him a ride.
“I recognized trouble right away,” Chokr recalled. “I said, 'Honey, no.'”
One of the ladies replied that if he refused their offer for sex, they would tell the police he'd exposed his genitals.
“You wouldn't do that,” replied Chokr.
Minutes later, two sheriff's deputies arrested him for public masturbation. To Chokr, the experience revealed how a naive, innocent man can be abused by evil, horny women. Still, he says, he loves them.
“I am a human, a decent human being who cares the world about people—especially women.”
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.