Retraction The corporation referenced in this story is Pasha International. An earlier version of this posting erroneously displayed a photo from Pasha Automotive, which was not the subject of the federal case.

In October 2012, San Diego businessman Idin Rafiee was getting ready to board a flight headed from Lindbergh Field to London, when a federal agent came up beside him and told him all his electronic devices were going to be detained.

Laptop, iPad, cell phone, external hard drive — all would be taken from him, the Customs and Border Patrol agent said. The reason: the agent suspected there was child pornography on the devices.

Rafiee wasn’t told what that suspicion was based on, but all his electronics were seized that night, though he was allowed to continue on to London.

One week after the encounter at the airport, and after agents had thoroughly copied the electronic data, Rafiee’s devices were returned to him. He never heard about child pornography again.

More than three years later, it turns out the suspicion weren’t based on anything. It was a ruse, designed not to reveal what agents were really after: evidence that Rafiee and the company he founded with his father Hassan — Pasha International — was selling goods to Iran, in violation of sanctions barring trade with that country.

In February 2014, the Rafiees, their company and a third man, Majid Nouri, were all indicted by a San Diego federal grand jury on charges that they evaded the sanctions by selling nearly $8 million worth of air conditioning cooling products to Iran. Emails and other information captured from the computers played a critical role in developing the case, court records say.



At the time, the arrest was seen as another example of the U.S cracking down on the illegal trade with Iran that was undercutting the sanctions, designed to pressure Iran into giving up its nuclear program .

On Friday, the case against the Rafiees and their company quietly came to a close. The corporation pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to export materials to an embargoed country.

The same charge that the Rafiee’s and Nouri faced were dismissed, ending the case. The corporation was also ordered to forfeit $874,940 to the government.

Prosecutors didn’t say why the charges against the men were dropped, though defense lawyers had vigorously challenged in pretrial hearings whether the evidence from the electronic devices was collected legally.

Those challenges dealt not with the deception about child pornography suspicions, but whether there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe that the Rafiee’s and their company were engaged in illegal trade in the first place.

The child pornography approach is, according to testimony from Homeland Security investigation agent Kevin Hamako, not unusual.

“The agents who seized the electronic media, you advised them to advise Mr. Rafiee that they were doing a porn investigation or looking for pornography, not for violations of the Iranian trade embargo?” asked James Hairgrove, Idin Rafiee’s lawyer, at a hearing in January 2015.

“Typically, one ruse we use, in order to not alert a subject of an investigation, as to the specific nature of a possible existing investigation into them, is the ruse the CBP is conducting an investigation to determine if there is child pornography,” Hamako answered. “Not ‘any’ pornography.”

The case had begun with a phone call into a Homeland Security tip line from a salesman, based in Florida, who said he worked for the company. He said he suspected that Pasha was a “front company” for selling goods to Iran.

Court records show the tipster, identified as Ray Pack, believed the Rafiees were Pakistani, and based his suspicions on the fact he was not allowed to pitch customers or provide quotes. Based on that, agents researched Pasha and the Rafiees, finding that Hassan Rafiee had traveled to Iran several times since 2003.

The father and son also had bank accounts that had received wire transfers of $600,000 from Dubai, Kuwait, and Turkey in 2010 and 2011. Dubai is known as a transfer point for products from the U.S. to Iran, court records say.

While the law protects citizens from warrantless searches, that constitutional protection is lessened for searches done at borders, for people either entering or exiting the country. Defense lawyers argued even under that relaxed standard, agents did not have enough reasonable suspicion to launch an investigation and seize the computers under a “disingenous” story of looking for child pornography.

Prosecutors said that other evidence, including the wire tranfers, justified the move. The issue was never fully resolved — no formal ruling was made by U.S. District Court judge Janis Sammartino — before the case ended.