Informants have always been an integral part of the FBI, providing the eyes and ears on everything from the Prohibitionera Mafia, when informants furnished information about organized crime figures such as Al Capone, to the civil rights movement, when the FBI used, among other informants, African American freelance photographer Ernest Withers to infiltrate the organization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.1 Under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, however, informants never played an active role in FBI investigations; instead, they just watched and listened, and then reported what they saw and heard to their handlers at the Bureau.
This fly-on-the-wall approach metamorphosed during the war on drugs in the 1980s, when the FBI adopted a street-level approach to fighting crime. As part of this new approach, informants became active players in investigations, often posing as either drug dealers or buyers and saying and doing things that pushed plots forward or drew in additional targets. The terrorism informants of today are evolved versions of those drug war–era agents provocateurs.
The very first of this new breed of informant sprung up in Miami just before 9/11, putting together the kind of sting that would be replicated dozens of times over the next decade: A target was identified—a disgruntled young Muslim man who said he wanted to launch an attack—and the informant then provided the means and opportunity for the attack, all the while secretly recording the target with hidden audio and video equipment. You might expect the informant who adapted the drug war–era “no-dope bust” for a new time and a new threat to be a grizzled, well-trained spy with a history of infiltrating dangerous, insular criminal organizations and bringing down high-profile crooks. But that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, the man who deserves the credit for the change in FBI informant tactics was an inept, underachieving security guard who dreamed of a bullet-dodging, enemy-killing career as a spook with the Central Intelligence Agency.
The chief problem for Howard Gilbert—an overweight, middle-aged, Canadian-born Jewish man who had attended high school in Hollywood, Florida, and worked odd security jobs as an adult—was that he wasn’t much like the bluebloods of the CIA. A Florida newspaper in 2002 described him as “a 340-pound man with a fondness for firearms and strippers.”2 When he wasn’t working as a bodyguard or assassinating evil Latin American despots vicariously through Soldier of Fortune magazine, Gilbert could be found hanging around International Protective Services, a police and personal security store near downtown Hollywood, a few blocks from the train tracks Henry Flagler built from St. Augustine to Key West. International Protective Services garnered national attention after 9/11 for offering personal defense courses to American Airlines flight attendants—the wonderful irony being that terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta had partied at Shuckum’s Raw Bar & Grill, just a stone’s throw from the doors of International Protective Services, before the deadly terrorist attack.
Gilbert had wanted in on the counterterrorism game before 9/11, as he saw it as a way of proving he was CIA material. In 2000, after attending the wedding of a Muslim friend, Gilbert hatched a plan to infiltrate the Darul Uloom mosque in the Miami suburb of Pembroke Pines. His idea was to pose as a Muslim convert named Saif Allah, meaning “sword of God” in Arabic. As one female congregant who asked not to be identified told me, everyone at the mosque was at first excited about Saif’s arrival. “We were thrilled,” she remembered. “The reaction was: ‘Yeah! We got a white guy!’” Gilbert told everyone he was a disgruntled ex-Marine who was now working as a security expert, but some of the congregants at the mosque began to grow wary of the newest worshipper when Gilbert gave an inflammatory speech in late 2000 chiding Israel for what he described as its mistreatment of Palestinians and its refusal to adhere to previously drawn borders in allowing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “That was truly the night that launched me into the terrorist umbrella of South Florida,” Gilbert would later brag.
While the speech made many of the congregants suspicious, even frightened, of Gilbert, Imran Mandhai, a nineteen-year-old Broward Community College student, became enamored with him. Stirred by the oration, Mandhai approached Gilbert and asked if Gilbert could provide him with weapons and training. Since Gilbert had previously provided information to the FBI, primarily related to cases involving cargo theft, he already had contacts at the Bureau. He called his handlers at the North Miami Beach office and told them he wanted the assignment—and the paycheck—to work Mandhai as part of a counterterrorism case. The FBI agreed to put Gilbert on the books as an informant to see what might happen.
Mandhai told the newly minted FBI terrorism informant that he was angry with the U.S. government for having indicted his friend, a Turk named Hakki Cemal Aksoy, for immigration violations. While searching Aksoy’s apartment, federal authorities had discovered bomb-making manuals; it’s never been clear from available evidence whether Aksoy was on his way to becoming a terrorist or was just another immature young man fascinated with bombs and explosives. Gilbert told Mandhai he could help him take revenge against the government for indicting Aksoy, and he sold the young man a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook for twenty dollars. Mandhai and a friend, Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan, then told Gilbert they wanted to bomb electrical transformers and a National Guard armory in South Florida as part of their quest for revenge. However, to build a terrorism conspiracy case, prosecutors needed more than just angry words about aspirational attacks: they needed the targets to do something—buy guns or bomb-making materials, take pictures of possible locations, transfer money. But because Gilbert was overeager, and a little awkward in the role of a terrorist, Mandhai began to suspect that Gilbert was an FBI mole, and he quickly closed up, putting the entire operation at risk.
In an attempt to keep the sting alive, the Bureau brought in another informant, Elie Assaad, an experienced snitch originally from Lebanon. How exactly Assaad came to work for the FBI is unclear. The story he tells seems incredulous, but it goes something like this: While he was living in Lebanon, a group of alleged terrorists asked him to bring a vial of some undetermined but reportedly dangerous substance into the United States. Assaad informed U.S. government officials of this while he was still in Lebanon, and they instructed him to board an airplane as planned and travel to Chicago with the substance, where he’d meet with FBI agents and hand over the vial. If the vial did in fact contain something dangerous, the obvious question that follows is why would U.S. government officials instruct Assaad to board a plane with it? Nevertheless, Assaad claimed that he traveled to Chicago, provided the vial to government agents, and that the FBI then put him on their payroll, sending him back to Lebanon as an informant. While he was in Lebanon, a car Assaad was riding in exploded—a bombing purportedly committed by the terrorist group who had provided the mysterious vial—and Assaad was badly burned in the blast. For his safety, FBI agents supposedly spirited him away to the United States, where he worked criminal and drug cases in Chicago for several years.
While working in the Windy City, however, Assaad failed an FBI lie detector test—which, under Bureau policy, should have disqualified him from future operations.3 Informants who fail lie detector tests are disqualified for the obvious reason that they can no longer be trusted not to lie to their FBI handlers. The main difficulty in dealing with informants is that honest people don’t make good ones. On the contrary, the best informants are professional liars who are able to develop personal relationships and then exploit those relationships, without remorse, for personal gain. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephen S. Trott, a Reagan appointee who was on the short list to be nominated as FBI director in 1987, is one of the nation’s leading experts on criminal informants.4 His 1996 law review article, “Words of Warning for Prosecutors Using Criminals as Witnesses,” has become standard reading for criminal law students. Trott believes that the best informants are “sociopaths” whose negative social skills are necessary for effective criminal investigations. “They’re sociopaths and one of the best things they can do is to lie. They’re good at that,” Trott told me.5 “The Sisters of the Poor, the Delta Sorority, they’re not going to help you catch bad guys. You just can’t walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, what’s happening here?’ You need your own bad guys to help you get subpoenas. You need your own bad guys to get information and help you build cases against other bad guys.”
But that creates a challenge for the FBI: How can agents task an informant with lying to others and then be certain the informant isn’t lying to them? Polygraph examinations, used when FBI agents debrief informants, provide the best solution for this dilemma—which is why as a policy the FBI disqualifies informants who are believed to have lied during a polygraph. However, Elie Assaad, having been caught lying to the FBI, kept on working for federal law enforcement. To this day, the Bureau has refused to release any information about the failed polygraph, other than the vague acknowledgment that agents caught Assaad lying. FBI officials have also declined on several opportunities to give me an explanation for why Assaad was not cut from the informant ranks. The only possible explanation for this is that Assaad got results as an informant, and that those results were impressive enough for the FBI to make an exception and keep him as an informant.
In early March 2001, trying to salvage Gilbert’s ambitious but badly listing sting operation, Assaad introduced himself to Mandhai as “Mohammed.” Gilbert made the introduction, and remained on the periphery as Assaad took charge of the operation. He was a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden, Assaad told the nineteen-year-old Mandhai, and his job was to establish a local training center for jihadists in Florida. Thinking he’d found his connection to Al Qaeda, Mandhai explained to Mohammed how he wanted to attack the power stations and National Guard armory and then contact the U.S. government to demand it stop supporting Israel. Assaad agreed to provide financial assistance. Mandhai also confided in Assaad that he suspected Howard Gilbert might be an FBI informant.
On March 13, Mandhai happened to mention an actual terrorist to Assaad—only Assaad and the U.S. government hadn’t heard of him at the time. “Brother,” Mandhai said, “why don’t you come with us to Adnan … Probably he will join with us.”6 Adnan was Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah, who attended the same Florida community college as Mandhai and scratched out a living as a freelance computer technician. Shukrijumah lived in the suburban town of Miramar, where his father was an imam. Just before 9/11, he left the country and has never returned. The FBI now believes he is among Al Qaeda’s top officials, and the U.S. government is offering $5 million for information leading to his capture. But back in 2001, when the federal government first became aware of him, Shukrijumah had no interest in joining Mandhai’s amateurish plot to attack power stations and the armory. (He also reportedly turned down offers to become an FBI informant himself.)7 In addition, Shukrijumah’s brother thought it comical that the FBI considered Mandhai a potential terrorist. In an interview with the Washington Post, Nabil Shukrijumah said of Mandhai, “He’s a naive … childish, very childish,” adding that, “It’s very funny to me that he was supposed to be recruiting people.”8
Three days after mentioning Shukrijumah, and after having confessed to “Mohammed” that he believed Howard Gilbert was an FBI informant, Mandhai changed his story. He now told the FBI informants that he wasn’t the leader of the bomb plot, and was in charge only of recruiting and operations for an idea and plan that had originated with Gilbert. The next day, Mandhai told Assaad and Gilbert that he was unwilling to move forward in the bomb plot. The FBI quickly severed Gilbert from the investigation, paying him $6,000 for his undercover work, since it appeared that Mandhai couldn’t get past his suspicion that Gilbert was a snitch for the feds.
But Mandhai’s mistrust of “Mohammed” didn’t last. Once the FBI cut Gilbert from the sting, Mandhai contacted Assaad and asked for help in freeing Aksoy—the friend indicted for immigration violations. Aksoy could help with the bomb plot, Mandhai told Assaad, and he’d recruit twenty-five to thirty people to be trained at the Al Qaeda training camp. Assaad in turn presented Mandhai with an assortment of weapons and explosives as examples of what he could provide. Assaad, Mandhai, and his friend Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan then moved forward in the plot, first attending a gun show where they tried—but failed—to buy a gun. (Jokhan’s credit card was declined.)
However, the whole operation came to a halt on April 6, 2001 when Miami-Dade police arrested Assaad at his apartment after his pregnant girlfriend called 911. When officers arrived, Maria Granados told them Assaad had beaten and choked her, and she had called authorities when she became fearful for the safety of her unborn child.9 During questioning, Assaad told the police that he was unemployed. Granados ultimately spared Assaad by having prosecutors drop the felony aggravated battery charges against him.
One month after Assaad’s arrest, FBI agents interviewed Imran Mandhai, and he admitted that he was planning to blow up electrical transformers and demand changes to U.S. foreign policy. One year later, after 9/11, federal prosecutors finally indicted Mandhai on two charges—conspiring to damage and destroy electrical power stations and a National Guard armory by means of fire and explosives, and inducing Jokhan to damage the property of an energy facility. Mandhai pleaded guilty to the first charge and received a sentence of 140 months. He is scheduled to be released in December 2014. Mandhai was the nation’s first successful terrorism-related prosecution after September 11, 2001.10
While Howard Gilbert deserves credit for pioneering the aggressive terrorism sting operations in the Mandhai case that the FBI would replicate over the next decade, you won’t hear his name in Congressional testimony or in laudations from FBI executives, because he never got public credit for his ideas. As a matter of fact, his life went into a tailspin shortly after Mandhai’s arrest. He was officially outed as an informant in June 2002 when an FBI agent said his name during a pretrial hearing for Mandhai and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported the news on its front page. At the time, Gilbert was working as a limousine driver in Miami. Upon seeing his name in the newspaper, he did what you wouldn’t expect from an aspiring CIA agent—he freaked out. Gilbert bought a second handgun and began hiding in hotel rooms, fearful that terrorists would try to assassinate him. Keith Ringel, a friend from Rhode Island, flew to Florida, and together he and Gilbert drove to Providence, traveling straight through and stopping only for gas. When Gilbert arrived at his friend’s apartment, he placed the two handguns in a safe. But two days after their arrival, Ringel told Gilbert he had to get the guns out of the safe—he was having a party that evening and some of the attendees knew the safe’s combination. Gilbert collected the guns and, using a holster, placed one of the guns on his hip. As Gilbert walked to his SUV, the gun visibly at his side, one of Ringel’s neighbors called the cops to report an armed man in the apartment complex. Providence police arrived, and after admitting to officers that he did not have permits for the guns, Gilbert was arrested. State prosecutors charged him with two counts of carrying a pistol without a license—punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Broke and living out of his SUV in the parking lot of a Marriott Hotel, Gilbert was assigned public defenders Michael A. DiLauro and Anthony Capraro to help him fight the charges. Their defense was that Gilbert was under duress because he believed his life was in danger after being exposed as an FBI terrorism informant. DiLauro and Capraro subpoenaed records from the FBI—which failed to respond to the subpoenas. The Bureau’s stonewalling proved as much of a problem for the prosecution as it did for the defense. Without FBI cooperation, the prosecution couldn’t prove Gilbert wasn’t in danger—that he was overreacting. James Dube, the prosecutor in the case, wanted desperately to bring in FBI agents from Florida to undermine Gilbert’s claims of duress, and asked Superior Court Judge William A. Dimitri Jr. for more time, saying state officials needed to process the requests to allow Special Agents Keith Winter and Kevin O’Rourke to travel to Rhode Island.
“Don’t give me that story,” Dimitri told Dube. “Am I supposed to hold this trial until they’re ready?”
“I can’t be held accountable for what I don’t have and a federal agency might have in its possession,” Dube said.
“I do not dance to the tune of the FBI or the U.S. attorney in Florida,” Dimitri said. “The FBI has been uncooperative since day one in this case.” 11
The prosecutor sent a transcript of that conversation to the FBI in Miami, and on the day before the trial was to end, Winter and O’Rourke, as well as their boss, Supervisory Special Agent Mark Hastbacka, arrived in Providence to serve as rebuttal witnesses—to explain that Gilbert had never been in danger because the Mandhai prosecution didn’t involve any actual terrorists. But given their late arrival, Judge Dimitri would not allow them to testify and dismissed the charges against Gilbert. The informant hugged his lawyers and promised to name his children after them, declaring them, with a nod to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, “better than any million-dollar dream team.”12
But Gilbert would never have any children. In the winter of 2003, he returned to South Florida, working as bodyguard and a limousine driver and hanging around International Protective Services, just as he had before he became a terrorism informant. He was in a rut, and certainly not on a road leading to a future with the CIA, as he had once dreamed. In 2004, Gilbert was found dead. He had killed himself in the middle of the night, a silencer-equipped handgun to the head. Gilbert would never see how the FBI ultimately adopted the terrorism sting techniques he had developed in the Mandhai investigation, and how Elie Assaad, his fellow informant in that case, became a star snitch by refining those tactics in the case of the Liberty City Seven.
I was living in Miami on June 22, 2006, when the NBC affiliate interrupted regular television programming for a breaking news story. “We have some video that is just arriving from the scene,” reporter Patricia Andreu told viewers. The video showed federal law enforcement officers wearing green uniforms and black boots as they walked in front of a ramshackle warehouse. “We’re told that a terrorism-related investigation is under way,” Andreu continued. “We’re told that armed federal and local officials—there you see them right there—have set up a perimeter in the area. … As you can see in this video that we just got into the NBC6 newsroom, several federal and local officials are on scene there, including the FBI. They’re armed, as you can tell.” The CBS affiliate quickly followed suit, posting a video on its website whose headline read, “Terror Suspects Detained by Agents in Projects.”
That afternoon, federal agents had arrested seven alleged Al Qaeda operatives—Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin, and Rotschild Augustine—who had supposedly plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the North Miami Beach office of the FBI. Though the media in Florida and around the country quickly portrayed the seven men as dangerous terrorists, immediate questions arose among people familiar with terrorism cases as to whether the charges were trumped up. “I firmly believe there are public relations aspects to this case and other cases like it,” Khurrum Wahid, a Miami lawyer who has represented accused terrorists, told me the day after the arrests were announced. “It’s clear to me that the federal government used this case to try and send a message about the threat of terrorism in Miami and the rest of the country.”
The timing of the raid was suspicious as well, as the New York Times had just revealed on its website a secret Bush administration program that permitted, under the guise of counterterrorism, the CIA and the Treasury Department to review, without warrants or subpoenas, the financial transactions of U.S. citizens and others living in the United States—yet another program that raised questions about whether the Bush administration was overstepping its legal authority in the hunt for terrorists after 9/11.13 The Times story had been in the works for months, and the Bush administration knew it was coming, so the announcement of a terrorist cell bust in Florida pushed that important story below the fold in most major newspapers the following day.
Max Rameau, a Haitian-born activist who led a project to monitor local police and another to seize vacant lots in Miami and build a shantytown for the homeless, and who knew personally the men the federal government charged as terrorists in the Liberty City case, believed that the arrests were specifically timed to coincide with the story in the New York Times. “I think the government’s immediate intention in announcing the Liberty City Seven case was to draw attention away from the New York Times story coming out the next day,” Rameau told me at his office on Northwest Fifteenth Avenue, in the heart of Liberty City, when I met with him in 2009. “The arrests happened on a Thursday. That Friday was the long-awaited New York Times story about how the Bush administration was spying on people’s ATM transactions. But the day that story came out, it was downplayed because what became big news was the fact that these seven terrorists, black terrorists, reportedly Muslim terrorists, were arrested. I think the initial intention of it was to divert attention away from this story related to terrorism that was very damaging to the Bush administration and they wanted to trump that by showing there was some terrorism actually happening. Of course, they couldn’t find any terrorism happening, so they had to manufacture this instead.”14
Finally, the area of Miami where the alleged terrorists were arrested—Liberty City—seemed like a peculiar place for them to hide. The poorest section of Miami, Liberty City—which gets its name from the Liberty Square public housing project built in the mid-1930s under the New Deal—is a largely African American and Haitian American neighborhood that Miami’s leaders would just as soon pretend didn’t exist. The police presence in Liberty City is obvious at all hours of the day and night, and a number of nonprofit community organizations have feet on the ground there. In short, it’s not a neighborhood where anyone—terrorists in particular—would likely go unnoticed.
None of this skepticism, however, was evident in the news media’s initial coverage of the arrests. In one report, Rad Berky, a journalist for the Miami ABC affiliate, stood outside the group’s warehouse in Liberty City as the phrases “Terror Raid” and “Terror Arrests” flashed across the screen. Berky reported the government’s allegations in full, telling viewers that the seven men were preparing to launch attacks in Miami and Chicago. “There is also said to be audio- or videotape of the group members pledging support for violent holy war,” he said. Berky’s unquestioning, overhyped reporting of the government’s claims is emblematic of the lapdog approach the media has taken in covering federal terrorism cases since September 11, 2001.
The main reason for this is cultural. After 9/11, there was a nearly unanimous belief at the FBI that terrorists were hiding in the United States, preparing to launch a second wave of attacks. Every current and former FBI agent I interviewed in researching this book told me they were certain that terrorist cells were embedded in the United States after September 11, 2001, and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were just the beginning. “We were bracing for the next attack,” Dale Watson, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on 9/11, told me. This was a popular belief nationwide in the first few years after 9/11; the Showtime television series Sleeper Cell, about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles, exemplified this national assumption that deadly terrorists were out there and we needed to find them before time ran out and innocent people were killed. The government’s story of seven guys plotting to blow up a skyscraper and an FBI office fit perfectly with this widespread public assumption. If the media and the public believe terrorists are out there, they aren’t likely to question the government about whether the men trotted out for the cameras are actual terrorists.
This attitude, which is still prevalent today, provides the government with a public suspension of disbelief whenever officials announce terrorism-related arrests. During the first few days of any crime story, even those unrelated to terrorism, law enforcement has a unique ability to control the narrative. Whenever local, state, or federal police announce a highprofile indictment, they do so with the luxury of operating in an information vacuum, as most, if not all, of the initial information comes from the police or prosecutors—details of the crimes and the defendants’ backgrounds and motivations. It can take weeks, even months, before journalists are able to interview people related to the defendants or uncover information that provides a more nuanced view than the one law enforcement hand-fed to the media. By then, the story is off the front pages of newspapers and no longer the lead on the broadcast news. In the Liberty City Seven case, for example, four months passed from the day of the indictment before the Miami media were able to interview the primary defendant’s wife, who described a very different man from the one presented by the FBI and the Justice Department.15
This lack of any immediate doubt on behalf of the media was clear when the Justice Department held a news conference in the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Miami the day after the arrests of the Liberty City Seven. More than two dozen cameras were trained on a lectern crowded with microphones as media liaisons for the Justice Department passed out to reporters copies of a disc with photos of the accused terrorists. At 11:30 a.m.—about thirty minutes after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had finished a news conference in Washington, D.C., in which he said the accused terrorists wanted to wage “a full ground war against the United States”—U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta stood behind the lectern. “We believe that these defendants sought the support of Al Qaeda to, in their own words, wage jihad and war against the United States. To ‘kill all the devils that we can,’” Acosta told the gathered reporters. “They hoped that their attacks would be, in their own words, ‘just as good or greater than 9/11.’”
Despite the statements of Acosta and Gonzales, reporters didn’t have to look hard for information that suggested the Justice Department might be overselling their case. According to the eleven-page indictment, the seven men who supposedly wanted to wage war against the United States didn’t have any weapons or explosives, and their only alleged Al Qaeda connection was an FBI informant posing as a terrorist. Even the management company of the Sears Tower, one of the alleged targets, knew the building was never in danger. “This group never got beyond talking about a workable plot,” Barbara A. Carley, managing director of the Sears Tower, told the New York Times on the day of the press conference. “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they’ve never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that’s ever gone beyond just talk.”16 Yet the reporters at the Miami news conference accepted unchallenged the government’s claims that this was an active terrorist group that had sought support from Al Qaeda, which prompted several follow-up questions that the U.S. attorney struggled to answer.
“Was Al Qaeda on its way to responding?” one reporter asked during the press conference. “What kind of feedback did they get?”
“I’m sorry—I don’t understand,” Acosta replied.
“They asked for money. They asked for weapons. What kind of feedback did they get from Al Qaeda?”
Acosta had to admit reluctantly that the group had never made contact with Al Qaeda. They were in contact with an FBI informant posing as Al Qaeda—that was their crime.
“How did they get the $50,000?” another reporter asked.
“I’m sorry?” Acosta replied.
“You mentioned $50,000,” the reporter said, clarifying.
Acosta conceded that while the group did ask for $50,000, they had asked the FBI informant for it, not Al Qaeda, and in the end, they never received any money. The only terrorist involved in the case was an imaginary one on the FBI payroll, a man who called himself Mohammed, and whose real name was Elie Assaad.
The story of how Elie Assaad, Howard Gilbert’s fellow informant in the Imran Mandhai case, came to pose once more as an Al Qaeda operative named Mohammed begins with another untrustworthy informant—a five-foot-seven, 190-pound, twenty-one-year-old Yemeni man named Abbas al-Saidi. In 2006, al-Saidi ran a convenience store in North Miami, and one of his frequent customers was Narseal Batiste, a thirty-two-year-old former preacher at a nondenominational Christian church, a father of four, and a one-time Guardian Angel. Growing up, Batiste had split his time between Chicago and Marksville, a small town in Louisiana. He attended a Catholic high school and his father, Narcisse, a preacher himself, had raised his son to be a Christian. Batiste met his wife, Minerva Vasquez, who was born in Estancia de Animas, a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico, in high school, and Narcisse married them shortly after Vasquez gave birth to her and Batiste’s second child, a little girl named Narcassia. Batiste had moved to South Florida following a failed attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps as a preacher in Chicago. He also saw Miami as a place to start a new life after his mother, Audrey Batiste, died in 2000 from surgery complications. The youngest of five boys and one girl, Batiste took his mother’s sudden death hard. “All my kids took it so hard,” remembered Narcisse.17
As an adult, Batiste wasn’t content in limiting his religious studies to Christian texts, and Islam and the Koran intrigued him particularly—something his father tried to dissuade. “I didn’t agree with it, but he was a man by then and I didn’t think I could argue with him about it,” Narcisse Batiste said.18 Despite this, Batiste never identified himself as a Muslim. By the time he and his family moved to Miami in 2001, Batiste considered himself a member of the Moorish Science Temple, a religious sect that blends Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He’d preach to anyone who’d listen and offered martial arts training to disadvantaged, mostly black, kids in Liberty City. He wanted to help clean up Liberty City, and six men—Haitians and African Americans—joined him to form something of a group. Batiste also ran a drywall business, Azteca Stucco and Masonry, out of a run-down warehouse, and his followers were also his employees.
Above all, however, Batiste was a natural-born bullshitter and hustler. That’s how he came to strike up a friendship with the young al-Saidi at the convenience store in North Miami. Batiste, who was trying to keep his drywall business solvent while he and his family were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, told al-Saidi he was looking for ways to make money. Al-Saidi said he knew people who could help. “You’re always looking for money, and I have some people in Yemen I can introduce you to who would fund your organization, but you gotta spin it the right way, and I’ll help you do that,” al-Saidi said, according to the story Batiste told his lawyers.
What happened next isn’t entirely clear. What is known is that al-Saidi left the United States to visit his wife and family in Yemen and returned on a ticket paid for by the FBI. His task: to infiltrate a terrorist cell in Miami.
Rory J. McMahon sat behind a conference table inside his office in North Fort Lauderdale. It was a fall afternoon in 2009, several years after he had been hired by defense lawyers to investigate Abbas al-Saidi. But the case still bothered him. A private investigator who had previously worked as a federal probation officer, McMahon was asked to piece together how exactly al-Saidi came to be an informant who identified a supposed terrorist cell in the poorest section of Miami. That investigation led McMahon to a public housing project in Brooklyn, New York, and a young woman named Stephanie Jennings, who was al-Saidi’s girlfriend. Jennings told McMahon that al-Saidi had been working as an informant for the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division, which since 9/11 has aggressively monitored Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey.19 For some reason—Jennings was never told why—NYPD handlers became concerned for al-Saidi’s safety and moved him and Jennings to a city-funded public housing project. But they didn’t stay there long.
One afternoon, one of al-Saidi’s friends from the Middle East knocked on the door. Jennings, home alone, let him in, and with al-Saidi not around, the friend raped her in the apartment. Jennings went to the police and pressed charges; when al-Saidi returned home, she told him what happened. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go kill the motherfucker,’ his response was, ‘We can use this to get money,’ because she pressed charges,” McMahon recalled. “So he goes to the guy. ‘Give me $7,000 and I’ll get Stephanie to drop the rape charge against you.’ So that’s what they do, and he uses the $7,000 for seed money to move to Miami.”
In South Florida, al-Saidi and Jennings lived in a neatly kept apartment building in Miami Beach, just steps from Biscayne Bay and near the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway. But their relationship wasn’t as neatly kept as their building. On November 10, 2004, Jennings stepped out of the apartment to smoke a cigarette, which annoyed al-Saidi. When she walked back in, the Yemeni man punched her in the left eye and in the stomach, then bit her on the neck.20 When Jennings, crying, began to complain of pain, al-Saidi called 911. After the police arrived, al-Saidi told them, “I bit her because she choked me!” But the police documented that al-Saidi did not have any bruising to indicate he’d been choked, so they arrested him and charged him with simple battery, a misdemeanor. At the time, al-Saidi told police he was an unemployed laborer.
Stuck in jail, according to a story he would later tell Jennings, al-Saidi called his former contact at the NYPD Intelligence Division.
“Is there anything you can do to help me out?” al-Saidi asked.
“I’m a New York City cop. There’s nothing I can do,” the detective said. “But I work with some FBI agents, and I’ll let them know.”
FBI agents working under Miami’s Mark Hastbacka then met with al-Saidi. Hastbacka was the agent who supervised the Mandhai investigation as well as a late 1990s case involving Irish Republican Army gun smugglers. What was said or promised to al-Saidi while he was at the Miami-Dade County jail isn’t known. But shortly after al-Saidi’s meeting with the FBI, he was released from jail and prosecutors dropped the battery charge against him. In less than a year, al-Saidi would call the FBI about an alleged terrorist cell in Miami led by a street preacher named Narseal Batiste. And Hastbacka would have himself another high-profile terrorism case in South Florida.
Though he lived in a one-bedroom apartment and ran a failing drywall business, Narseal Batiste thought of himself as a leader—and as a godlike man. He described himself as the god of his organization and once said he believed that “man has the authority to, on a certain level, be God.” He called himself Prince and required his small group of followers to do the same. Batiste’s hero was Jeff Fort, a Chicago gang leader who co-founded the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation—a black Islam-influenced organization that was financed through criminal activity and maintained order in Chicago’s South Side.21
Fort and Batiste had a lot in common. Both were born in the South and raised in Chicago. Both called themselves Prince. While Fort worked to help disadvantaged Chicago communities, Batiste wanted to aid poor Miami neighborhoods. Both identified their religions as offshoots of the Moorish Science Temple, though neither was an official member. Fort’s gang would march in Chicago wearing uniforms and kufis, while Batiste and his six followers and drywall employees would exercise on the streets of Liberty City wearing uniforms. And there was one more startling similarity that prosecutors would ultimately use against Batiste to great effect: he and Fort were also both alleged terrorists. In 1987, Fort was convicted of conspiring with Libya to perform acts of terrorism in the United States; he’d offered Muammar Gaddafi his gang’s services in exchange for $2.5 million.22
Of course, that isn’t altogether different from what the U.S. government alleges Batiste did. He believed al-Saidi had a rich uncle in Yemen who would be willing to send money if Batiste and his group would launch an attack in the United States. Talking big, Batiste claimed to have an army of men at the ready in Chicago. “I can get 5,000 soldiers in Chicago,” he told al-Saidi. “I used to be a leader of the Blackstone Rangers,” he added, referring to Fort’s gang. “They would have done any fuckin’ thing I told them to do.”
“OK, brother. Do you want to go to Chicago?” al-Saidi asked.
“Got to go to Chicago.”
“When you want to go?”
“As soon as we get the money. Soon as we get the money.”23
To get the money, however, Batiste would have to meet an associate of al-Saidi’s family. On November 21, 2005, Batiste expressed his concern to the informant about meeting someone new. “We don’t know if this guy might be a double agent,” he said. “He might work for the FBI.”
“No, he just came from back home,” al-Saidi said. “I don’t believe that, and if I’m getting a trust from my family, from one side, they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t deal with somebody that was like that. I know them; forget it. From the next side, I’m not gonna do anything until I get to know the person.”
“Um-hmm,” Batiste said, as if to acknowledge the statement.
“That’s why he’s coming, so he can get—cause they’re saying the same thing,” al-Saidi said. “How can he trust these brothers … I know them for a long time, I trust them, so they’re like, ‘OK.’”
“A person that’s coming to—coming to evaluate,” Batiste said.
A few minutes later, Batiste asked al-Saidi about the one who would be coming to evaluate them. “So does he know bin Laden?”
“I don’t know, brother,” al-Saidi said. “Believe me, I don’t know.”24
Just as it had in the Mandhai investigation, the FBI brought in Elie Assaad to serve as a closer halfway through the Liberty City sting after al-Saidi couldn’t build a strong enough case to bring to prosecutors. Assaad would again play a terrorist operative named Mohammed. On December 16, 2005, Batiste and Assaad met for the first time. At the meeting, Batiste compared himself to Jeff Fort. Assaad asked Batiste what he needed. In block letters, Batiste scribbled down the following on a Radisson Hotel notepad:
Boots > knee high > ankle boots
Uniforms > black security guard type
Machine guns > automatic hand pistols type
Radio communication. Nextel, Motorola cell phones.
Squad cars > SUV Truck > Black color25
The following week, in a conversation on December 21, 2005, Batiste’s bragging continued. He told al-Saidi that with some financial help he and his men could launch attacks on buildings throughout the country, including in Chicago. “We need to have the gangs go crazy in the streets,” Batiste said. “You see what I’m saying? That will cause a massive confusion.”
“But you know, brother—” al-Saidi started.
“Let me tell you something,” Batiste continued. “There’s two major buildings that blow up. The Empire State Building and the Sears Tower. Sears Tower—it’s the tallest building in the world. It used to be the Empire State Building. Then you gotta get—you gotta get the buildings right here in Miami. California, some in Texas. That sounds impossible, but it can be done. It can be done because they can be put on fire. Burn them to the ground. But whatever they take to burn them, whatever they take to destroy them, they gonna have to be destroyed.” Not only were Batiste’s ideas to take down skyscrapers with his ragtag group of six guys far beyond his capability, but they also suggested his grip on reality wasn’t particularly firm. For example, he also told the FBI informant that he believed they could topple the Sears Tower in such a way that it would fall into Lake Michigan and create a tsunami that would destroy parts of Chicago.26
Over the next three months, Assaad built up a level of trust with Batiste. But oddly, during this time, Batiste never seemed to know which terrorist organization the informant represented. In a March 16, 2006, conversation, Assaad mentioned that he worked for Osama bin Laden—a fact that surprised Batiste.
“I did not know that, ah, Osama bin Laden was your leader. The great sheikh,” Batiste said.
“I—” Assaad started, before being interrupted by Batiste.
“I did not know that.”
“You didn’t know,” Assaad followed.
“I didn’t know that, really,” Batiste said.
“So because I know you send, you send after Al Qaeda. You send—”
“Well,” Batiste interjected.
“You send the message?” Assaad said.
“I just told, ah, I just told Abbas that you know, what I was trying to do and I told them I needed some help. He told me that he knew some people that was fighting in jihad and, and, ah, but there’s so many different types of groups that’s fighting in jihad, like Hamas and all of them. I thought maybe it was probably one of those.”
Assaad also told Batiste that day that he and his men needed to take a bayat—a pledge of allegiance to Al Qaeda. As the group’s leader, Batiste would need to take the pledge first. But the pledge, recorded and entered into evidence at trial, bore a certain “Who’s on First?” flavor:
“God’s pledge is upon me, and so is his compact,” Assaad said as he and Batiste sat in his car. “Repeat after me.”
“Okay. Allah’s pledge is upon you.”
“No, you have to repeat exactly. God’s pledge is upon me, and so is his compact. You have to repeat.”
“Well, I can’t say Allah?” Batiste asked.
“Yeah, but this is an English version because Allah, you can say whatever you want, but—”
“Okay. Of course.”
“Okay.”
“Allah’s pledge is upon me. And so is his compact,” Batiste said, adding: “That means his angels, right?”
“Uh, huh. To commit myself,” Assaad continued.
“Brother.”
“Brother,” Batiste repeated.
“Uh. That’s, uh, what’s your, uh, what’s your name, brother?”
“Ah, Brother Naz.”
“Okay. To commit myself,” the informant repeated.
“To commit myself.”
“Brother.”
“Brother.”
“You’re not—you have to say your name!” Assaad cried.
“Naz. Naz.”
“Uh. To commit myself. I am Brother Naz. You can say, ‘To commit myself.’”
“To commit myself, Brother Naz.”
Things then went smoothly for a while until Assaad came to a reference to being “protective of the secrecy of the oath and to the directive of Al Qaeda.” Here Batiste stopped. “And to … what is the directive of?”
“Directive of Al Qaeda,” the informant answered.
“So now let me ask you this part here. That means that Al Qaeda will be over us?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Assaad said. “It’s an alliance.”
“Oh. Well…” Batiste said, sounding resigned.
“It’s an alliance, but it’s like a commitment, by, uh, like, we respect your rules. You respect our rules,” Assaad explained.
“Uh, huh,” Batiste mumbled.
“And to the directive of Al Qaeda,” Assaad said, waiting for Batiste to repeat.
“Okay, can I say an alliance?” Batiste asked. “And to the alliance of Al Qaeda?”
“Of the alliance, of the directive—” Assaad said, catching himself. “You know what you can say? And to the directive and the alliance of Al Qaeda.”
“Okay, directive and alliance of Al Qaeda,” Batiste said.
“Okay,” the informant said. “Now officially you have commitment and we have alliance between each other. And welcome, Brother Naz, to Al Qaeda.”27 Assaad then administered the oath to five of Batiste’s six followers—Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Rotschild Augustine, Burson Augustin, and Naudimar Herrera. (By then, the sixth follower, Lyglenson Lemorin, had left the group.)
After administering the oath, Assaad spoke in front of the group about a secret message from Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda, Assaad told the men, was planning to blow up five FBI buildings around the country, including the one in Miami, and needed assistance in obtaining videos and photographs of these buildings. Batiste, in turn, requested a van for the surveillance and a memory chip for his personal camera. On March 24, 2006, Batiste and Patrick Abraham drove Assaad to a Circuit City, where he bought a memory chip. They then drove by and identified the FBI building in North Miami Beach, the National Guard armory and a Jewish synagogue.
Throughout all of this, how dedicated Batiste really was to committing an act of terrorism remains questionable. The FBI’s undercover recordings suggested that Batiste, who was having trouble paying the rent on his warehouse, was mostly trying to shake down his “terrorist” friend. After first asking the informant for $50,000, Batiste is recorded in conversation after conversation asking how soon he’ll have the cash.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said in one exchange. “Once I give you an account number, how long do you think it’s gonna take to get me something in?”
“So you is scratching my back, [I’m] scratching your back—we’re like this,” Assaad dodged.
“Right,” Batiste said.28
To prove that he had connections in Chicago, Batiste suggested that they fly Charles James Stewart to Miami. Stewart, also known as Sultan Khan Bay, was a convicted rapist and a leader of the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago. He also was affiliated with Jeff Fort’s gang, the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation. Assaad gave Batiste $3,500 to fly Stewart and his wife from Chicago. Batiste was able to convince Stewart to come down by saying that they needed him to help them start a Moorish Science Temple in Miami.
In meetings recorded by the FBI, Batiste and Stewart smoked marijuana as they discussed absurd plans, such as opening a shop to sell drugs and building a Moorish nation in the United States. But Stewart’s visit to Miami ultimately backfired on Batiste—and the FBI—as the two men began to disagree about the direction of the Miami organization. After Batiste told Stewart about his plans with al-Saidi and Assaad, Stewart told him that he was being duped by FBI informants. Stewart then kicked Batiste out of his own organization and took command of the small group.
The so-called terrorist cell al-Saidi had initially identified was falling apart. A few members sided with Batiste; the others cut off all ties. Master G.J.G. Atheea, one of Batiste’s former spiritual advisers, confronted Stewart in Miami to complain about how he had treated Batiste. Whether Atheea did this of his own volition isn’t known, as he was also working as an FBI informant at this point. And that’s when the Liberty City case gets even stranger. Stewart, angered by being confronted, pulled out a gun and began firing at Atheea, who escaped unharmed. Police then arrested Stewart for possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. Federal prosecutors filed charges, and ultimately Stewart cut a deal to become a government witness against Batiste.
After Stewart’s arrest, the FBI raided Batiste’s warehouse in Liberty City and federal prosecutors charged him and his followers with conspiracy to support terrorism, destroy buildings, and levy war against the U.S. government.
James J. Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent who spent more than three decades at the Bureau, was hired to review the Liberty City Seven case as a consultant for the defense. I met with him at his home outside Sacramento, California, in late 2010 and asked him about the case. His first reaction was a smirk. “These guys couldn’t find their way down the end of the street,” Wedick said of Batiste and his followers. “They were homeless types. And, yes, we did show a picture where somebody was taking the oath to Al Qaeda. So what? They didn’t care. They only cared about the money. When we put forth a case like that to suggest to the American public that we’re protecting them, we’re not protecting them. The agents back in the bullpen, they know it’s not true.”
Indeed, the Justice Department had a difficult time winning convictions in the Liberty City Seven case. It was clear from trial testimony that Batiste, the alleged ringleader, was merely bullshitting with the FBI informants, free-flowing with absurd ideas he’d picked up from popular culture in the hopes that he might see some cash at the end of the hustle. For example, when his lawyer asked him on the stand how he came up with the idea to bomb the Sears Tower, Batiste answered: “Just from watching the movies.”29 In three separate trials, juries deadlocked on most of the charges, eventually acquitting two of the defendants—Lyglenson Lemorin and Naudimar Herrera—and convicting the other five of crimes that landed them in prison for between seven and thirteen years.* (To date, Lemorin’s and Herrera’s acquittals are the exceptions to what is otherwise a perfect conviction record for FBI terrorism sting cases that go to trial.) Despite the eventual convictions, the U.S. government was never able to show in any of the three trials that the Liberty City Seven had the ability to commit an act of terrorism were it not for the FBI informants providing them with the means.
For the Justice Department, the case was an early test of what has become known as preemptive prosecution—when the government uses terrorism conspiracy charges to make the case for what defendants would have done if not busted by federal law enforcement. Liberty City Seven prosecutor Jacqueline Arango emphasized this in her closing arguments. “The government need not wait until buildings come down or people get shot to prove people are terrorists,” she said. But if the government doesn’t need to show that defendants committed the crime, Batiste’s lawyer asked the jury in her closing argument, how can we be sure that they would have committed the crime without the prodding of government informants? “This is not a terrorism case,” Ana Jhones told the jury. “This is a manufactured crime.”30
The Liberty City Seven case, however, proved to be quite lucrative for the informants involved in it. Elie Assaad earned $85,000 for his work on the case, while Abbas al-Saidi received $21,000.31
Several years later, Elie Assaad resurfaced in El Paso, Texas, where he was running a low-rent modeling agency on the Mexico border. In March 2011, El Paso police attempted to pull over Assaad’s black SUV on the interstate. Instead of stopping, Assaad led the police on a high-speed chase through the city and onto the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, where he drove into a dead end, reversed, and backed into a police officer whose gun was drawn. The officer fired several times. Assaad later rolled his SUV on a nearby street as he tried to get away. 32
I called Assaad shortly after his arrest and asked if I could meet with him in El Paso. He told me his incredulous story about how he came to serve as an FBI informant and bragged on the phone about how his work as an informant saved the United States from another terrorist attack—but he wouldn’t agree to meet with me. He’s saving his story, he said, for his own book. He’s still looking for a publisher.
Since the 9/11 hijackers spent the days before their attack in hot and balmy Florida, it’s fitting that terrorism sting operations were born in the Sunshine State. Starting as an idea from a security guard named Howard Gilbert with big dreams, these stings would have their greatest test in court with the Liberty City Seven case, which proved to the government that it could win terrorism prosecutions even when no evidence linked the defendants to actual terrorists.
J. Stephen Tidwell, the FBI’s executive assistant director who supports the use of terrorism sting operations, and James J. Wedick, the former FBI supervisory agent who is opposed to them, both told me that the FBI and the Justice Department viewed the Liberty City Seven case as a test of what the law and juries would allow in terrorism cases in a post-9/11 United States. Winning the case, even if it did take three trials, strengthened the government’s position in using terrorism sting operations. It also sent a message to defense lawyers that the Justice Department can win these cases at trial, and this likely has played a role in the high rate of guilty pleas we see today following terrorism stings.
But that doesn’t mean that the government treated the members of the Liberty City Seven like dangerous terrorists after their trial and conviction. One of the convicted men, Burson Augustin, has already been released from prison, and he’s back in Florida. While the government portrayed him as a dangerous killer who wanted to bomb buildings in June 2006, when authorities released him in September 2012, they never even bothered to warn the community that a convicted terrorist was living among them, suggesting either that the U.S. government believes terrorists can be fully rehabilitated after short prison sentences, or that those convicted as terrorists weren’t really dangerous in the first place.
Augustin is the first man convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting operation to be released from prison. During the six years he was incarcerated, the FBI has dramatically stepped up its use of terrorism sting operations. To do that, the Bureau has had to recruit thousands of informants to perform the job of agent provocateur that Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad helped pioneer. But not every informant has hooked up with the FBI in the hopes of becoming a secret agent man, as Howard Gilbert did, or of becoming a federal snitch for the money, as Elie Assaad did. Many spy for the government because FBI agents have coerced them into doing so. Just as agents have targeted Muslim communities to find terrorists, they have also targeted those same communities to recruit informants, using any means necessary.
*Lemorin, who had left the group before it engaged in an alleged terrorist plot with an FBI informant, was acquitted in the first trial due to lack of evidence and later deported to Haiti. Herrera was unexplainably acquitted in the third trial when the evidence against him was similar to the evidence against the five men in the plot who were convicted. Herrera’s not guilty verdict was an anomaly—something none of the jurors has come forward to explain—since his actions weren’t significantly different from those of the other defendants.