A former Burlingame resident who admitted disposing of the body of a murdered Millbrae man in 2016 has been sentenced in federal court in San Francisco to six months in jail for passport fraud.
Mustapha Traore, who was raised in Ivory Coast, was sentenced Saturday by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria after he pleaded guilty during the same court session to making a false statement by using the name of a French citizen on a U.S. passport application in 2011.
In a separate state court case, Traore pleaded guilty in San Mateo County Superior Court to being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Keith Green, the father of the two children of wealthy Hillsborough heiress Tiffany Li.
Li and her boyfriend, Kaveh Bayat, were accused of murdering Green, but a San Mateo County Superior Court jury last year acquitted Li and deadlocked on a verdict for Bayat. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Bayat. Li posted $35 million in bail after being charged.
Green was fatally shot on the night of April 28 to 29, 2016. Traore, a mixed martial arts fighter who worked for Li as a part-time bodyguard and limousine driver, admitted to driving the body in the trunk of his car to Sonoma County and dumping it onto an embankment off U.S. Highway 101 north of Healdsburg.
Traore was scheduled to be the key witness against Li and Bayat in last year's murder trial. But District Attorney's Office prosecutors withdrew him as a witness after he violated the trial judge's orders by contacting a potential defense witness.
Traore was sentenced in San Mateo County Superior Court on Jan. 10 to three years already served, was released that day and then was immediately rearrested by U.S. Diplomatic Security Service agents on the charge of making false statements on his passport application.
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The false statements were the use of the name of Olivier Adella, a French citizen living in Martinique, and a statement that Traore was born in France.
Traore, now in his mid-40s, moved from Ivory Coast to France and then used a phony French passport in Adella's name to enter the United States in 2002. He successfully applied for a U.S. passport under the same assumed name after becoming a naturalized citizen in 2011.
Traore has already served almost four months of the federal sentence and could be released in about two months. Chhabria also ordered him to serve six months in home confinement after his release.
