Ms. Dali faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison if found guilty of sneaking aboard an aircraft in an incident that raises troubling questions about airport security.
Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

How a Stowaway at J.F.K. Airport Made It All the Way to Paris

Prosecutors accused Svetlana Dali, 57, of hiding among other travelers during a busy travel day before Thanksgiving.

by · NY Times

A woman who stowed away on a flight from New York to France last week managed to do so without a passport, much less a boarding pass, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.

Svetlana Dali, 57, exploited weaknesses in the security system at Kennedy International Airport during the busiest period of the year for air travel by blending in with crowds of boarding travelers, prosecutors said.

First, she infiltrated a flight crew and passed through a checkpoint with them. Then, she slipped past Delta Air Lines employees, who failed to ask for a boarding pass, and onto a fully booked plane, they said. While on the plane Ms. Dali attempted to avoid detection during the seven-hour flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris by ducking into the aircraft’s bathrooms.

Ms. Dali, who is believed to have migrated to the United States from Russia, was arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn on Thursday on a charge of “secreting aboard a vessel.” She was arrested at Kennedy Airport by F.B.I. agents upon her return Wednesday evening after spending about a week in the custody of French authorities.

Ms. Dali faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison if found guilty of sneaking aboard an aircraft in an incident that raises troubling questions about airport security. Magistrate Judge Robert Levy ordered Ms. Dali to be held until 2 p.m. Friday while her bail was decided and her residence was verified.

Prosecutors wanted to ensure she had a stable residence, said Brooke Theodora, an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “We’re concerned for a risk of flight here rather than the nature of the offense.”

In separate complaints she filed in two federal courts last month, Ms. Dali provided two different home addresses, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington, D.C. One of those complaints, scrawled in ink, claims that she had been sold for $20,000 in 2014 by a Russian government official.

Ms. Dali was escorted into the second-floor courtroom on Thursday, wearing a black puffer jacket zipped all the way up and her platinum-blonde hair in an asymmetrical bob. She sat between her lawyer, Michael Schneider, and a Russian interpreter, occasionally scowling at reporters sitting in the gallery.

Mr. Schneider said the charge she faced was relatively minor, “akin to theft of services or jumping a turnstile.”

He added, “She did pass through security, she went through the magnetometer. So there doesn’t appear to be any risk that she smuggled anything onto the plane.”

Mr. Schneider added that Ms. Dali had requested asylum in France. Her attorney added that Ms. Dali “believes she was poisoned” sometime over the past few days, and spent the night vomiting and lost consciousness while held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. “She believes if she stays overnight at the M.D.C. again, her life will be in danger,” Mr. Schneider said.

Prosecutors said Ms. Dali arrived at Kennedy International’s Terminal 4 on the night of Nov. 26, two days before Thanksgiving, and within about 10 minutes attempted to get into a security screening line. She was turned away after failing to produce a boarding pass, they said.

Ms. Dali tried again, this time in a special line for flight crews where she mixed in with a large contingent from Air Europa, a Spanish airline, prosecutors said. She was screened for weapons and other prohibited items alongside ticketed passengers, they said.

About 90 minutes later, she boarded the Delta flight, walking past agents who were busy helping other passengers and who did not stop her or ask her for her boarding pass, prosecutors said. Her presence went unnoticed until the plane was nearing Paris.

“This was a lot of failures in one day,” said Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation. “The system is lucky that she wasn’t apparently intending to do harm to the plane or the passengers.”

As for the Transportation Security Administration’s claim that it had ensured that Ms. Dali was not carrying any prohibited items, Ms. Schiavo responded that “she was the big prohibited item.”

Before landing, a member of the flight crew realized that Ms. Dali did not have a seat and asked for her boarding pass. When she could not produce one, Delta notified French law enforcement officials that there was a stowaway on the plane, prosecutors said.

Ms. Dali was detained by French police before entering customs and eventually ordered returned to the United States.

Her return took a few attempts. She was taken onto a Delta plane on Saturday, Nov. 30, but was removed before it took off for being disruptive, an aviation official said.

A second attempt on Dec. 3 was aborted when Delta refused to let her stay aboard one of its planes. A Delta spokesman, Morgan Durrant, declined to explain Delta’s objection.

In a prepared statement, Delta thanked French and U.S. authorities for their assistance and said that Ms. Dali’s breach of the airline’s security resulted from a “deviation from standard procedures” and that a review determined that its security infrastructure was “sound.”

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