Saquib Khan, Staten Island Wholesaler, Pleads Guilty to Bank Fraud A Staten Island man who wrote $82 million in worthless checks over a two-week period as part of an ambitious fraud scheme pleaded guilty on Tuesday to several counts of bank fraud. Saquib Khan, who owns a wholesale cigarette and grocery business on Staten Island that supplies delis and gas stations around the city, admitted to carrying out the shell game in which he wrote millions of dollars of bad checks to himself, deposited them and transferred the money to other accounts he controlled before the banks realized the fraud. He said he used the money to support his business. In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday, Mr. Khan held his head low during the hearing and slouched in his chair at the defendant's table. In a faint whisper, Mr. Khan said eight times that he was guilty, after the magistrate judge, Ramon E. Reyes Jr., asked him his plea on each count of bank fraud. By the end, his voice cracked. "I know, judge, it was wrong to present checks like that," Mr. Khan said. Now I understand what I did was a crime and I'm sorry about that. Mr. Khan faces up to six and a half years in prison under the federal sentencing guidelines. As part of a plea agreement with the government, he agreed to pay $4.8 million in restitution; he has already repaid the rest of the money to the banks. Mr. Khan, who is not an American citizen, will also be deported to Pakistan. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. His crimes were of a scale that only a person of means could have pulled off. On one day, for example, Mr. Khan deposited $3.5 million of worthless checks into one his banks, according to a complaint against him. On that same day, he made four wire transfers, totaling $3.6 million, to another of his accounts. The relative ease with which he moved fake money between accounts - a fraud called check kiting - pointed to gaping holes in the way banks authorize checks. His business, Richmond Wholesale Company, which he built with his family, recorded $125 million in sales last year, according to Dun & Bradstreet, a financial information provider. Mr. Khan had lived a life of extravagance, with a luxury car and a large house in the tony Todt Hill neighborhood. In an unrelated criminal case, Mr. Khan had testified that a soldier in the Genovese crime family pressured a deli owner to sell his business to him, suggesting that some of his business success was ill gotten. Still, Mr. Khan, who came to the United States in the 1980s, held stature among Pakistanis on Staten Island, serving as chairman of the board of a prominent Staten Island mosque. And he gave tens of thousands of dollars to political campaigns.