Feds bust country’s worst deadbeat dad, who owes $1.6M

A heartless doctor from Brooklyn who ditched his wife and kids and fled to Bangladesh, leaving them homeless, has been jailed after six years on the lam as the nation’s worst deadbeat dad, federal authorities said.

Dr. Raihan Chowdhury, 51, was arrested on a federal warrant when his plane landed at Dulles airport in Virginia on Oct. 12.

Investigators had been tracking his every move, and were ready with handcuffs when his flight from Qatar touched down.

“We knew he was coming,” said Thomas O’Donnell, an agent with the inspector general of the US Department of Health and Human Services. “He was quiet, almost like he knew. He was probably just saying, ‘I’ll slip through the cracks and get in.’ ”

Chowdhury, who has a sister in Virginia, bolted in 2006, racking up $1.6 million in support payments, according to his ex-wife’s lawyer. That’s a half-million more than the nation’s second-worst scofflaw, Robert Sand, an auto dealer from Nassau County who fled to Thailand and owes $1.1 million.

Chowdhury had been living in luxury in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, after secretly selling his family’s $975,000 home in south Midwood and liquidating all his assets in late 2005.

In January 2006 he dumped his wife, Sharmin, and three kids — then ages 8, 6 and 2 — in Bangladesh following a family vacation to Disneyland in Hong Kong.

They returned to an empty home — his pal had removed the furniture along with Sharmin’s medical diploma and her jewelry. When the new owners showed up, the family was forced to move to a homeless shelter.

Sharmin filed for divorce. As the case moved ahead, Chowdhury provided another shock.

“He claimed he’d obtained a divorce in Bangladesh and remarried,” said Laurence Greenberg, her lawyer. “So he’s been living with his new wife in Dhaka in a luxury apartment in the most expensive part of town.”

Sharmin found work as a physician’s assistant — she’d been a gynecologist before marrying and giving up her career. She eventually got an apartment. The kids are now public-school honor students.

Chowdhury has been ignoring $9,680 a month in support, despite having earned $280,000 a year as an anesthesiologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and owning pain-management clinics and a phone-card company.

When a judge granted Sharmin a divorce last year, the husband was also ordered to split the marital property 50-50, meaning he owes his ex-wife an additional $1 million.

Greenberg forwarded court papers to the city’s Office of Child Support Enforcement of the Human Resources Administration, which assigned an investigator and contacted the feds, who indicted him as a fugitive.

It’s a federal crime to flee the country to duck child support.

Chowdhury was arraigned Oct. 15, when a judge OK’d $500,000 bail. But the anesthesiologist couldn’t come up with the cash, so he remains in federal prison in Alexandria, Va. It’s unclear if he’ll be returned to New York.

“We never expected him to come back,” said Greenberg.

“He’s a despicable human being,” said O’Donnell, whose agency maintains a Most Wanted Web site for deadbeats: oig.hhs.gov/fraud/child-support-enforcement.

“In the end, we’re trying to get money back to the kids.”



NY POST