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Court records don\u2019t say why the Justice Department dropped its charges after two years. Prosecutors said the dismissal was being sought \u201cso that justice may be done, and not for any improper purpose” in a two-paragraph motion.<\/p>\n
Neither Muharib\u2019s lawyer nor the Justice Department immediately responded for requests for comment.<\/p>\n
A straight dismissal of a federal criminal indictment is rare. Only around 5.1% of federal defendants had their cases dismissed in the 2025 fiscal year, the most recent year that data was available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.<\/p>\n
Nearly all of the other people in the case have pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges.<\/p>\n
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History of the AABLE Bail Bonds case<\/p>\n
In July 2024, 53 people were charged in connection to a scheme to defraud the county\u2019s bail bond system. Dozens of the indicted people were rounded up in a single operation and brought to a makeshift jail at NRG Park to be processed.<\/p>\n
According to the Justice Department, the group participated in a scheme to create falsified pay stubs and other documents in order to be considered financially qualified for a bail bond. Prosecutors alleged that\u00a0AABLE employees facilitated the lies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prosecutors pointed to 11 men, including some murder suspects, who used AABLE to get bonds on the basis of their lies. The scheme ran from 2020 until 2022, according to an indictment.<\/p>\n
Of those people, 52 were charged with wire fraud-related crimes. Muharib was the only person who was not. Instead, Muharib was accused of permitting one of the other defendants, Oscar Wattell, to participate in the business of insurance. Wattell is a felon with previous convictions for credit card abuse and forgery; crimes of dishonesty that can result in a person being barred from working in the insurance industry.<\/p>\n
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The Justice Department\u2019s case named the victim of the scheme as Financial Casualty & Surety Inc.<\/p>\n
While officials publicly positioned the case as a strike against a bondsman risking public safety by conspiring to release potentially dangerous people from jail, the actual indictment argued Financial Casualty was defrauded by being tricked into insuring risky bonds.<\/p>\n
When it arranged a bond for an arrested person, AABLE insured their financial obligation to court through Financial Casualty. While none of the men who received bonds absconded, prosecutors argued that the company could have lost money if a bond secured by AABLE was forfeited.<\/p>\n
Some AABLE employees await sentencing<\/p>\n
Two AABLE employees, Wattell and Mary Brown, were accused of acting as recruiters and facilitators of the scheme. The pair were accused of arranging bail bonds with arrested people, directing people outside the jail on how to file falsified paperwork to get a bond approved and recruiting strangers to put their names on some papers.<\/p>\n
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Both Wattell and Brown have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.<\/p>\n
In a motion to dismiss in 2025, Muharib\u2019s attorney argued that the case should be dismissed because the indictment didn\u2019t show how her actions were \u201cwillful.\u201d Attorney Leira Moreno Gracia argued\u00a0prosecutors hadn\u2019t shown that Muharib knew employing Wattell was unlawful, and said that Wattell wasn\u2019t \u201cengaged in the business of insurance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that Ms. Muharib was an agent of FCS does not automatically signify that Mr. Wattell would have engaged in the insurance business,\u201d Moreno Gracia wrote.<\/p>\n
District Judge Lee Rosenthal rejected that motion, and called Moreno Gracia\u2019s arguments \u201cunpersuasive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, Rosenthal agreed to allow Muharib to be tried separately from other defendants. Moreno Gracia successfully argued that because the crime Muharib was accused of was different from the dozens of other defendants, she could not get a fair trial if she was tried alongside them.<\/p>\n
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By that time, many of the people indicted in the case had already agreed to plead guilty. As of Monday, 35 of the defendants in the case had pleaded and received time-served sentences that resulted in them spending no time in jail.<\/p>\n
Six of the men who received bonds have pleaded guilty and received sentences of between 4 and 15 months. In some cases, the sentences were appended to prison time they were serving in other cases.<\/p>\n
Six other defendants are still contesting their indictments and are scheduled to go to trial in November. Among them is Curtis Holliday, a man who was convicted of killing his wife in 2024. Holliday\u2019s wife, Chi Thi Lien Le, was found stuffed inside a commercial freezer.<\/p>\n
AABLE has been out of business since 2023. Its closure was foreshadowed by Financial Casualty refusing to insure bonds and public complaints made about the company to the Harris County Bail Bond board.<\/p>\n
Gaps exposed by the AABLE case<\/p>\n
In recent years, amid intense public scrutiny of bonds, regulations on felony bonds have changed in ways that close the gaps exposed by the AABLE case. In 2022, Harris County adopted a rule requiring a 10% premium on certain bonds. Last year, Texas voters amended the Constitution to allow people accused of certain serious crimes to be more easily held without bonds.<\/p>\n
Financial casualty in 2023 sued AABLE for breach of contract and fraud and sought more than $1.5 million in damages. The lawsuit was put on hold earlier this year after Muharib declared bankruptcy. However, in April the bankruptcy case was dismissed without any clear repayment plan or dismissal of debts.<\/p>\n
On July 16, the judge overseeing the civil lawsuit announced she intended to dismiss the case for want of prosecution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Multi-agency law enforcement operation with fellow members of the Texas Anti-Gang Task Force takes place at Aable Bail…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389395,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-389394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389394\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}