A local wholesale jeweler accused of purchasing nearly $135,000 worth of jewelry and jewels with bad checks before skipping town will face a jury in June after a V.I. Superior Court judge refused a motion to dismiss his charges Thursday.
Defense attorney Treston Moore asked Judge Michael Dunston to consider the possibility that his client, St. Thomas resident Najah Ayshey, simply ran out of money before he could finish repaying stateside vendors for two shipments of jewelry worth $89,000 and $45,000 in 2007. He repaid $24,000 to one vendor and attempted to send the jewelry back to the other, Moore said.
He received the jewelry “on consignment,” had agreed to pay “over time,” but ran into “financial difficulties,” Moore said.
“It’s nothing more than a standard business agreement,” Moore said at the hearing Thursday, which ended with Dunston finding probable cause and ordering a jury trial over Moore’s request.
After writing at least eight checks for tens of thousands of dollars to a Miami vendor on a bank account closed the previous year, Ayshey shuttered his jewelry business on St. Thomas, Najah’s Palace, in 2007 and moved to New Mexico from where he was extradited to St. Thomas last year, according to Agent William Curtis, head of the V.I. Attorney General’s Special Investigations Division.
Curtis acknowledged that Ayshey made an attempt to repay some of what he owed.
“But $20,000 versus $90,000 – we can do the math here,” Curtis said under cross-questioning by Moore.
Ayshey is charged with five crimes, including multiple counts of grand larceny and obtaining money under false pretenses. Attorneys will select a jury on June 7.
