Top ‘Deadbeat Parent’ Is Arrested but May Avoid Prison

But when federal authorities arrested the man, Robert D. Sand, this month as he exited a plane that landed in Los Angeles by way of the Philippines, Ms. Sand confronted for the first time the odd tension that complicates child support enforcement everywhere: The courts could finally send Mr. Sand to prison, but then how would he ever pay her back?

“If it was five years ago, I’d want to see him rot away in jail,” Ms. Sand said. “Now I don’t care for that. I want to see him work, and pay his debt to me and my children.”

Mr. Sand, prosecutors say, is of an exceptional breed: the million-dollar “deadbeat dad.” He is the second person currently facing prosecution in federal court in New York for child support arrears in seven figures, as part of a federal effort to assist the states in cracking down on the worst offenders.

Though Mr. Sand, whom the Justice Department labeled the Most Wanted Deadbeat Parent, has become the face of that effort, he has plenty of company. In New York State alone, 23 parents — of more than 760,000 with child support orders — owe $1 million or more, according to the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which enforces child support. Most of those parents live in New York City.

Many of them have the means to pay but openly scoff at the law, exploiting an enforcement system that is mostly filled with poor people who could not pay child support if they wanted to, and for whom the prospect of jail remains an empty threat.

For Mr. Sand, 50, the huge debt dates to 1995, when a Nassau County judge ordered him to pay Ms. Sand $750 per week, an amount the court later raised to $995 per week to account for cost-of-living increases.

The couple had been married for nearly 10 years, living well on Mr. Sand’s $500,000 to $600,000 yearly earnings from the car auction business, according to court documents. Mr. Sand paid $87,000 — a little more than two years’ worth — before he stopped making payments without explanation.

Their daughters are now 25 and 22; Ms. Sand supported them with a job in retail sales.

Mr. Sand married another woman and moved to Florida in 1997, but that couple, after having one child, also divorced, leaving Mr. Sand with an additional obligation of $625 per week in child support. As his debts accumulated, in 2000 the Nassau County Family Court issued a warrant for his arrest, and he fled the country soon afterward. A federal arrest warrant was issued in 2002.

Soon there were sightings of Mr. Sand in Thailand. The federal agent who worked the case, Joseph A. Napolitano, with the Department of Health and Human Services, saw the evidence on the Internet — a picture of Mr. Sand working at a motorcycle business, and mentions on blogs and Web sites. Mr. Sand offered to turn himself in but never did.

Despite his occasional legal trouble abroad — in 2005, the authorities in Thailand arrested Mr. Sand for carrying a fake British passport — he was not deported until this year after he was arrested in the Philippines for traveling with false documents.

Mr. Sand’s arrest on Dec. 18 came two months after federal authorities arrested Dr. Raihan Chowdhury at Dulles International Airport after he returned to the United States from Bangladesh owing more than $1 million in child support.

Dr. Chowdhury, 51, an anesthesiologist who was living in Brooklyn, was on a vacation with his family in Bangladesh when he told his wife he planned to stay there. His wife and their three children returned to Brooklyn to find that Dr. Chowdhury had sold their home, resigned from his position at Maimonides Medical Center and transferred his money to Bangladesh.

A Brooklyn judge presiding over the divorce proceeding later ordered Dr. Chowdhury to pay $10,000 a month in child support. Dr. Chowdhury is in a federal jail pending the resolution of his case.

Dr. Chowdhury and Mr. Sand were both featured on the “Most Wanted Deadbeat” list, compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces child support at the federal level.

The men face up to four years in prison, but even now, it is possible that they will not serve time. Most of the other people on the list who were convicted received only probation and the requirement that they resume payments.

Lawyers for the two fathers did not contest that the men owe child support. Glenn A. Obedin, who represents Mr. Sand, and David M. Blum, Dr. Chowdhury’s lawyer, both hope to negotiate plea deals for their clients.

“The best-case scenario would be no jail time but probation,” Mr. Napolitano, the federal agent, said. “But a condition of the probation would be making payments.”

Ms. Sand said she did not expect the full $1 million to suddenly arrive. “I’ll never get all of that,” she said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article misidentified the ex-wife of Robert D. Sand. She is Lisa Sand, not Rita. Rita Sand is Mr. Sand’s mother.

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With a Parent at War, a Holiday of Pain and Pride

It is nothing unusual for Alexandra Alfield, a 17-year-old senior whose father, a Special Forces soldier, has been gone since August and for six of the last nine years. “I do miss him,” she said, “but I’m just so accustomed to it.”

As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 66,000 American troops from Afghanistan, the parents of Fort Campbell students are still going off to war.

Nearly 10,000 men and women from the 101st Airborne, a third of the active-duty troops based here, are either in Afghanistan or getting ready to go. Still more parents here have been deployed with units like the Fifth Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, whose members piloted the helicopters in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

That has made the high school, which is run by the Defense Department and is one of only four secondary schools on military bases in the United States, something of a window into the pain, pride and resentment felt by the families of the all-volunteer military force, which has borne the burdens of 11 years of war.

The high school, which has about 700 students and is open to any 9th to 12th grader who lives on the 100,000-acre post along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, is by definition physically and psychologically cut off from the world outside the gates. But at no time is that sense of isolation more acute than now, when many of the students’ parents are deployed while the rest of the country’s interest in Afghanistan has moved on.

“No one really cares,” Tyisha Smith, a 19-year-old senior, said of the outside world. “Your father goes, gets deployed. War — it’s normal. It’s not like a big deal that we’re still at war.”

But Ms. Smith said she was struggling to manage the pressures of her final year in high school while her father was away and she was living with her stepmother. The reality of his deployment with the 101st Airborne is never far away. “It’s starting to hit me that there’s a possibility that he could die,” she said. “I just hope he comes home.”

School administrators point to a bright spot: not as many parents are gone this year as there were at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when nearly everyone in the school had a parent deployed and the post was a virtual ghost town. But that hardly makes the modest one-story school typical.

A strict dress code bans jeans and T-shirts, so students wear tucked-in collared shirts with khakis or dark pants. Presidents turn up a lot: Mr. Obama spoke at the post in May 2011, and George W. Bush visited three times while he was president. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met earlier in 2011 with the Fort Campbell High School football team. And the death of a parent is something to be mourned but overcome.

Only months after his father was killed in Afghanistan in June 2008, Josh Carter, a starting linebacker, helped lead the Falcons to their second of three straight state championships.

“My dad would want me to keep going,” Mr. Carter, now a student at Western Kentucky University, said in an interview over the summer. Administrators say that perhaps five other students have lost parents in the wars in recent years. Many other parents have been wounded or have received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The students readily call their school a “bubble,” both comforting and claustrophobic, because of the dangers their parents face. “If you went to off-post schools, you couldn’t exactly talk to a teenager because they wouldn’t understand what you’re going through,” said Larissa Massie, a 17-year-old senior whose father is home but has had two deployments to Iraq.

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