AP source: Indicted billionaire headed to Texas

A law enforcement official said Monday that indicted billionaire R. Allen Stanford was en route to Texas to face charges that he ran a $7 billion swindle.

Stanford was being taken by U.S. Marshals from Virginia, where he was arrested Thursday, to Houston, where he was indicted by a federal grand jury. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because discussing the transfer was not authorized.

The official said the trip would consist of two separate flights and Stanford should be in Houston sometime Tuesday morning.

Stanford was indicted last week on charges that his international banking empire was really just a massive Ponzi scheme.

He made an initial court appearance in Richmond, Va., and a further detention hearing is scheduled to take place in Houston.

The indictment unsealed Friday in Houston charged that Stanford and other executives at Stanford Financial Group falsely claimed to have grown $1.2 billion in assets in 2001 to roughly $8.5 billion by the end of 2008.

Investigators say that even as Stanford claimed healthy returns for roughly 30,000 investors, he was secretly diverting more than $1.6 billion in personal loans to himself.

Court papers charge that Stanford and top executives orchestrated the massive fraud by advising clients to buy certificates of deposit from the Antigua-based Stanford International Bank. Stanford and the other executives were charged with wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Stanford also was charged with conspiring to obstruct a proceeding of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Dick DeGuerin, Stanford's lawyer, said in a written statement Friday that Stanford was "confident that a fair jury will find him not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing."

Stanford could face as much as 250 years in prison if convicted on all charges in the 21-count indictment, officials said.