Brooklyn DMV scammer gets 20 years for kidnapping accomplice who stole his money

An unrepentant criminal who kidnapped one of his cronies in a driver’s license cheating scam will spend 20 years in federal prison.

Akmal Narzikulov, 38, was so incensed that his former flunky stole a few thousand dollars and hopped a bus to California, that he subjected the man to a sadistic, hourslong kidnapping ordeal when he returned to New York in February 2019.

Narzikulov and his fellow scammers tased the victim into unconsciousness as he clung to a door handle, forced him to strip in a parking garage, and ordered him to open up a bank account to cash a check he was carrying, prosecutors established at trial.

And after his arrest, Narzikulov bribed the victim, convincing him to move to Uzbekistan so he wouldn’t testify at trial.

He also tried to pay a second potential witness and co-conspirator —$10,000 every six weeks to lie low in Uzbekistan, but the FBI intercepted that witness at JFK Airport before he could leave the country.

The kidnapping victim ultimately returned to the U.S. but didn’t testify. Even so, a Brooklyn Federal Court jury saw enough to convict Narzikulov of kidnapping, extortion, conspiracy and other charges in July 2021.

“The nature and circumstances of the offense could only be worse if somebody died,” said Judge Brian Cogan, who handed down the sentence Monday.

The scheme was complex — DMV test takers would wear smartphones around their necks, hanging from hidden wires, and hidden wireless earpieces, with tiny holes cut into their T-shirts for the phone camera to peek through. Someone on the other end of the phone call could see the test through the hidden camera, and would feed the correct answers back to the test takers.

Narzikulov was convicted in 2015 of running a similar driver’s license scam and sentenced to 30 months in prison, but instead of quitting his life of crime, he doubled down, prosecutors said.

“If anything, he ramped up the size and scope of his operation,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Turner Buford wrote in a Dec. 5 memo the judge. “The defendant also manifested a willingness to turn to violence.”

Narzikulov’s driver’s test scheme netted him big bucks — he had $293,000 stashed throughout his Brooklyn apartment when FBI agents busted him in April 2019.

But the kidnapping victim didn’t go along with Narzikulov’s plans. He stole money, and threatened to tell police about the scheme.

And for that, Narzikulov thought he had to be punished, prosecutors said.

“Just imagine if word got out there that there’s no penalty for anyone who steals from Akmal Narzikulov,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Virginia Nguyen said in her closing argument to the jury. “The defendant needed to take action.”

That action happened in broad daylight, and was caught on video. Narzikulov and two others cornered the victim on March 28, 2019, near his apartment in Brighton Beach, zapped him with a Taser and dragged him into a car, Nguyen told the jury.

From there, they drove him to a parking garage and made him strip, forced him to sign a notarized “debt acknowledgment letter” saying he owed Narzikulov’s mother $5,000, and drove him to a bank, where they forced him to open a small business account to cash a $2,100 check, prosecutors said.

Narikulov’s lawyer, Peter Guadagnino asked for leniency, saying that he witnessed “a tremendous amount of verbal and emotional abuse at home” as a child in Uzbekistan, and likely suffers from mental illness. He also took the wrong lessons from the corruption in his home country, Guadagnino said.

But the judge rejected the idea that he couldn’t help being corrupt because of where he was raised.

“I do have a hard time that a criminal coming from a corrupt country is entitled to some leniency,” Cogan said.