Debbie Schlussel: Just Desserts: Arab Gas Rip-off Leads to Gas Discount
Last year, we wrote about Nabil Dawood and Samir Dawood, Arab brothers who owned and operated a Detroit-area gas station. The brothers ripped off all their customers, giving them 5% less gas than that which they paid for.
Now, the the Dawood brothers have settled with prosecutors in Macomb County, home of Reagan Democrats and the Dawoods' fraud-fraught gas station. They will pay a $40,000.00 fine, which will be used to roll back gas prices at Macomb County gas stations to as low as $1 per gallon. It is, at least, some of poetic justice for consumers who already pay through the nose at the pump.
Prosecutors cannot identify the defrauded customers individually. Maybe that might have something to do with the fact the Dawoods did NOT take credit cards, claiming that service was "out of service". Check out the sign specifying that on the now shut-down pumps at their gas station, pictured below.
But, unfortunately, it appears, much more than $40,000 was ripped off from customers, since a gas station of that size may do thousands worth of business in a day and no-one knows for how long the Dawoods were ripping off customers (probably from day one).
Also unfortunate, charges against Samir Dawood were dropped and Nabil Dawood was sentenced to mere probation for his crime. As we noted in our previous post on the Dawoods, in the 1980s an FBI investigation uncovered Arab-owned gas stations throughout the Mid-West doing the same thing as the Dawoods (giving customers less gas than they were paying for). That money was then sent to Islamic terrorist Abu Nidal and his terrorist group of the same name. The money was used to finance Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis in the first Intifada ("Uprising").
Posted by Debbie on February 16, 2006 10:58 AM to Debbie Schlussel