India's top federal detective police, the CBI, which is investigating the Unit Trust scandal, accused the three of being involved in a blatantly fraudulent investment in a software company called Cyberspace Infosys.
The details of the crime resonated with a federal investigator, John O'Malley, who had once been a homicide detective in the Bronx.
But to federal authorities, Detective Gardell, 52, was a traitor to his shield, a law enforcement officer who not only broke the law, but who broke it on behalf of one of the government's most persistent enemies -- the mob.
Federal marshals and detectives from the New York Police Department's fugitive task force, as well as detectives from Miami, were on hand when Mr. Williams was arrested on Tuesday.
When Najibullah Zazi drove a rental car from Colorado to New York City, he set off a frenzied government investigation involving hundreds of F.B.I. agents, federal prosecutors and detectives.
Presumably, Arenas gave the same version of events to the authorities when he met for two hours Monday with federal prosecutors and detectives from the Metropolitan Police Department.
Instead, much of it was collected on the fly in the last two weeks, with hundreds of F.B.I. agents, federal prosecutors and detectives rushing to fashion a mosaic of details into a case that could be brought to court.
Yet between 1997 and 2002, while receiving $36,796.57 in Social Security assistance and $35,025.38 in state welfare, she earned more than $450,000 as a freelance computer consultant, money that she never reported to state or federal agencies, said Detective Mario Rosa of the Connecticut State Police.
In the search of Mr. Rodriguez's apartment late Wednesday, detectives and federal agents found several expired federal firearms licenses, one in the name of a Manhattan gun dealer for whom he worked in 1998 and another in the name of a man from Pocono Pines, Pa., a law enforcement source said.
The two men, wearing police raid jackets, took $169,000 from a drug money courier on Nov. 26, but were interrupted by other detectives and federal investigators who had the courier under surveillance, according a federal criminal complaint unsealed yesterday.
