• The inmate is in a federal immigration facility in Arizona (as opposed to a county jail with an immigration section).

• He was arrested for allegedly trying to sell marijuana to undercover officers in Arizona (earlier reports in the New York Times said he was trying to barter counterfeit designer goods from Chinatown for marijuana, which would mean he was trying to buy, not sell, marijuana. Also, earlier reports didn't say where he was arrested, only that it was in the Southwest and he was currently detained in Arizona.)

• She called the inmate the day after the attack using a second cell phone in her possession (Earlier reports were that when confronted with the information about payments from her bank account for five different phones, she denied the phones were her's or that she had made the payments, and said the inmate/boyfriend and his friends were responsible.)

  Even the phone the maid used to make the call was problematic for her credibility. The woman initially said she had only one phone. Early last week, she told investigators that she had a second cellphone she used to call the inmate in Arizona because it was a local number and was cheaper, according to law-enforcement officials.

As I wrote yesterday, there are five ICE detention facilities in Arizona. None of them allow inmates to receive incoming calls. Their policy manuals state:

Calling a Detainee

Detainees cannot receive incoming calls. If you need to get in touch with a detainee to leave an urgent message, you must call (520) ***** and leave the detainee’s full name, alien registration number and your name and telephone number where you can be reached. The detainee will be given your message.

The Times says the phone call first came to light after investigators received information about a call between the inmate and a second man, a week after the encounter:

Suspicions of the woman’s associations arose relatively quickly: within a week of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, the authorities learned of a recorded conversation between the subject of a drug investigation and another man, who said his companion was the woman involved in the Strauss-Kahn matter, according to another law enforcement official.

The Times reported it was the second phone call that led them to the earlier call between the accuser and the inmate. But according to John Solomon at the Daily Beast, whose sources are also law enforcement, prosecutors started checking the call records on the other phones in the accuser's name and came across the call to the detention facility.

[I]nvestigators in the prosecutor's office also began following a financial trail that linked the woman to suspected criminal elements in the drug world. They found several phones in the woman's name that she hadn't told them about as well as tens of thousands of dollars in suspicious deposits into her banking accounts, one source said.

The investigators began checking calls on those other phones, and eventually found that the woman, the day after the alleged attack, had made a call to a detention center in Arizona where one of her male acquaintances was being held on drug charges, according to the sources.

She could have called the detention facility and left a message for her inmate acquaintance to call her back. Collect calls from prisons are outrageously expensive, so it's possible she had a phone with an AZ area code so he could call her collect and that it's cheaper if it's not long distance. But, since she was in protective custody when she made the call on May 15, she must have had the phone on her.

It sounds to me like she also had the phone on her during the hotel encounter, and that the reason she re-entered the nearby suite afterward, when she had already cleaned it, was for privacy to make the call to AZ and leave a message for the inmate to call her. It probably wasn't until the next day, May 15, that he got her message and called her back and they had the discussion about DSK being rich and that she knew what she was doing. She had already spoken with her friend Blake Diallo of the 2115 Cafe by this time, and he had already hooked her up with lawyer Jeffrey Shapiro, having found him on the Internet. It sure sounds like she had dollar signs in her eyes the whole time.

As I wrote yesterday, a French newspaper reports the inmate is from Gambia, and they were married in a religious (but not civil) ceremony last year. Who is he? When was he arrested? It's unlikely he could have arranged bank deposits and new phone purchases from a detention facility, so he must have been arrested fairly recently before May 14, the date of the DSK encounter. Who were his friends that the accuser claimed to prosecutors were in the bank and phone scam?

I wonder if the inmate really is facing criminal charges. There's no reports of a similar arrest during 2011 that I could find. I'm not sure how it works in AZ, but here, federal defendants aren't moved to ICE custody until after their case is over and they've finished serving their sentence. ICE puts immigration holds on federal prisoners, and those who are subject to removal are held in the same pre-trial detention facilities as all other federal pre-trial detainees. The only way you'd get to an ICE facility before trial is if you managed to have bond set and posted it, and ICE steps in and files a detainer or physically shows up at the federal facility to grab you before they let you walk out the door.

If he is from Gambia, there's another wrinkle. Gambia's president announced last year the country would not cooperate with ICE and issue emergency passports to its citizens the U.S. wanted to deport. Which means, I think, that Gambians in immigration custody can't be deported back to Gambia, so the U.S. needs to find a third country willing to accept them. Nor can they be held here in indefinite detention, so if no criminal charges are pending, it seems to me eventually the inmate will be released, either on some kind of immigration bond or with orders to stay in touch. (Immigration law is so confusing I'm not entirely sure about this.)

French news reports say the accuser worked at a Gambian restaurant in the Bronx when she met this guy. She then got the job at the Sofitel and quit, according to an interview with the restaurant's owner. Did the inmate get her the job at Sofitel? And why has nothing leaked about his identity? Is he cooperating with the feds on the Chinatown counterfeit goods scam and trying to protect his identity? (Added: It's doubtful he helped her with her asylum application since that was back in 2004.)

The phone call was apparently the last straw for prosecutors, according to some reports. Lead prosecutor Joan Iluzzi-Orbon tells the Wall St. Journal:

"There are things that are concerning regarding the phone call," said Ms. Illuzi-Orbon, who declined to discuss its contents. "I had concerns."

I don't think there's any more investigating the DA's office can do as to the truth of the sexual assault allegations. It's her word against his, she has lied, and he has remained silent, other than to deny a forcible encounter. I suspect the reason the DA hasn't yet dismissed the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is because they are still investigating the accuser, and it's opened a big can of worms. And a lot of problems for her and her associates, whoever they are.

I'm convinced the DA's office will dismiss the charges against DSK, probably before July 18, the date of his next appearance. They probably want to do it in a nice, tidy way, with an explanation of why the accuser is or is not being charged for lying on her asylum application or to the grand jury. And that's the part they haven't figured out yet.

Update: The French and African papers reported on May 25 and May 26 that the accuser had remarried a man from Gambia. The African paper, Walf Fadjri, sent reporters to interview her mother, now living in Ziguinchor in Senegal (coincidentally, where Blake Diallo is reportedly from.) Her mother said she remarried the man from Gambia last year at a ceremony in the very house she was being interviewed in, which belongs to her sister. I'm not linking since it publishes the accuser's name.

The French paper, Le Figaro, (english version without accuser's name here) sent reporters to New York to interview people in the Guinean community.

Julien Baba Sylla, a telecommunications engineer who introduces himself to us as the leader of New York's Guinean community, which counts some 5000 people in total, gives us a lift in his Ford Expedition. He says the grocery owner had become like a big sister to the alleged victim. The two woman talked to each other in a mixture of Bambara and French.

...But she has already told some important information to Julien Sylla, which contradicts one point about the alleged victim: she is married, not a widow as has been widely reported. Her husband is still living in the U.S., but not with her, and may have had trouble with the law.

The French paper, leJDD.fr, reported yesterday the Arizona inmate is the accuser's Gambian husband, along with the other details I wrote about him yesterday, with the exception that it reported the couple hadn't gone to Africa to celebrate the marriage.