CREDIT WHERE NONE IS DUE

By John Greenwald

TO HIS ADMIRERS BACK IN NIGERIA, Olushina Adekanbi, 36, was revered as the "King of New York." U.S. law-enforcement officials were less adulatory. They knew the dapper Nigerian as a man of more than two dozen aliases who allegedly ran the largest ring of credit-card thieves in the U.S. Authorities busted Adekanbi last September on credit-fraud charges. Then last week, after a five-month investigation, they brought some 200 counts against the still-jailed Adekanbi and seven other Nigerians, including Adekanbi's wife Mary. The quondam king could go to prison for up to 25 years. "We've broken the back of this ring," said Queens assistant district attorney Michael Mansfield.

But there will undoubtedly be others. The worldwide traffic in stolen and counterfeit cards costs issuers of plastic $1.6 billion a year in phony charges, according to the Nilson Report, a credit-card industry newsletter. Nigeria has produced so many credit-card bandits that the U.S. Secret Service joined with other federal agencies in the 1980s to form a special West African Task Force that helped nab Adekanbi. According to authorities, his gang used counterfeit cards to obtain at least $650,000 in goods and cash advances and had access to lines of credit worth $8 million. Officials suspect that this loot is only a fraction of the thieves' real total.

Adekanbi had previously been deported from the U.S. for credit-card fraud, only to filter back by using a fake passport. When police arrested him, his two-bedroom Queens apartment was littered with boxes of stolen credit-card slips that, authorities believed, gang members used to set up phony accounts. The closets were stuffed with fashionable men's suits, chic handbags and Italian leather shoes, with price tags attached. Adekanbi, says assistant district attorney Diane Peress, "liked to play Santa Claus" by responding to shopping lists from friends in Nigeria. They will surely miss him.

--By John Greenwald. Reported by Jenifer Mattos/New York

With reporting by JENIFER MATTOS/NEW YORK