The woman who snuck aboard a Delta jet from New York City to Paris last year allegedly tried the same trick two days earlier at Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport, according to court documents.
Svetlana Dali, 57, is jailed in New York on a federal stowaway charge pending a May 19 trial. She has pleaded not guilty, and her defense lawyers are reportedly working on a plea deal.
Dali was first arrested in Paris in November after blending in with other passengers and flight crew members to slip past gate agents and board the Delta flight sans boarding pass or any other travel documents.
However, that was not Dali’s first rodeo, according to a memorandum filed this week in Brooklyn federal court. She had allegedly attempted to slip through security at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut’s Hartford County just 48 hours before successfully doing so at JFK, and had attempted the same at Miami International Airport back in February 2024.
At Bradley, Dali was seen on surveillance video twice trying to enter TSA security checkpoints without a boarding pass, prosecutors said. The first time she was thwarted, but the second time she made it through, wearing the same boots and toting the same backpack as she had at JFK.
“Although there is no evidence that the defendant boarded or traveled on a flight illegally from BDL, the BDL security footage shows that the defendant bypassed BDL security checkpoints in a manner that is strikingly similar to her conduct at JFK and MIA,” prosecutors said.
To do so, she allegedly hid among passengers while staff was vetting other people, camouflaged her way through security and hid in the bathroom. She also got in line for a domestic JetBlue flight but didn’t make it onto the plane, prosecutors said.
In Miami, Dali was found in the airport’s secure international arrivals zone preceding U.S. Customs. While she claimed that she had just arrived via Air France and was waiting for her husband, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent who questioned her said he “could not find any records of the defendant on an Air France flight that day, and that there were no records of the defendant leaving the United States for approximately the last five years,” the court records state.
Prosecutors argue that Dali’s prior conduct should be admissible as evidence because it “shows that the defendant’s actions at JFK were methodically planned based on her past experience” and were “deliberately and intentionally designed to obtain air transportation without consent.”
Dali was detained in November after touching down in Paris and sent back to the U.S. to face federal charges of being a stowaway on a vessel or aircraft without consent.
Initially released on the condition she steer clear of airports and submit to GPS monitoring, the Russian national and U.S. permanent resident was arrested again a few weeks later after lopping off her ankle bracelet and attempting to cross into Canada by Greyhound bus. She has been jailed without bail ever since.
A conviction could carry a five-year prison sentence.
With News Wire Services
