Mohammed Hossain, an immigrant from Bangladesh, had made a nice life for himself in the United States. A short, slender man with a long gray beard, Hossain had immigrated to Albany, New York, in 1985 with most of his family—his mother and father, his wife and her mother, and Kyum, his mentally disabled younger brother. Hossain supported all of them by owning and operating the Little Italy Pizzeria on Central Avenue in Albany. Finding good help in Albany was difficult, so Hossain often did every job in the restaurant himself, including delivery. He and his family lived in a modest apartment above the pizzeria.
When he wasn’t rushing around town dropping off pizzas, Hossain was buying run-down properties at municipal auctions, fixing them up, and then renting them out. He always paid cash, and owing to his frugal nature, Hossain would buy doors and fixtures and anything else the houses needed at secondhand stores. By 2003, at the age of fifty, and after less than two decades in the United States, Hossain had accumulated real estate valued at nearly $1 million.
But Hossain’s dream life in the United States quickly turned into a nightmare when a visitor arrived at his pizzeria one afternoon in November 2003. Hossain was walking back to Little Italy after having delivered a pizza when he passed his children on the sidewalk, playing with small toy helicopters.
“Who gave you these toys?” Hossain asked his kids.1
“Uncle,” they replied, explaining that the man who gave them the helicopters said he was Hossain’s brother from Bangladesh. Hossain knew that this was impossible, however, as his brother didn’t have a visa, so there was no way he could be in the United States. Hossain thought it odd that a stranger would not only give his children toy helicopters, but then claim to be a faraway uncle the children had never met.
The following day, as he entered the pizzeria, Hossain saw an unfamiliar man standing in the corner. He was tall and slender, with a fair complexion, dark brown eyes, and neatly trimmed black hair. He was the person, Hossain would soon discover, who had given his children the toy helicopters.
“Brother, you don’t know me, but I know you,” the man said, giving his name as Malik. He said he was from Pakistan, and that he owned a gas station and convenience store in town. He told Hossain that he’d heard that the Little Italy Pizzeria was for sale.
“I had wanted to sell it,” Hossain answered, “but that was a long time ago.” At one point, a community member had offered to buy Little Italy, but the sale had fallen through. He wasn’t actively looking for a buyer, Hossain told his new acquaintance, but if someone offered him the right price for the business, he’d sell it.
Just then, Hossain’s brother Kyum came in from the kitchen. Kyum was in his thirties, but he had the intellect of a five-year-old and spoke only limited Bengali. Malik called Kyum over and told Hossain he could arrange to get Kyum a driver’s license, explaining that he was a translator who helped immigrants obtain driver’s licenses.
“My brother doesn’t even know how to hold a driving wheel,” Hossain said. “He could cause a lot of problems on the road. However, if you want to help him, then give him an ID card, because he has gotten lost on several occasions.” Indeed, Kyum’s wandering had been a problem for the family. Once, after seeing a plane fly over Little Italy, Kyum decided he wanted to see airplanes up close and, without telling Hossain, walked to Albany International Airport. When he arrived, he was tired, thirsty, and hungry and didn’t have any money, so he started grabbing food out of people’s hands. The police arrested Kyum, but without any identification on him—he had forgotten his green card—they were forced to lock him up as a John Doe. Several days later, the authorities figured out who he was and called Hossain. It took immigration officials several weeks to return Kyum, a legal resident but not a citizen, to his family. That was why Hossain thought it would be a good idea for Kyum to have an official state identification card. Hossain thought he could trust Malik, even though he’d just met him, because he had official paperwork showing that he worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Malik said he’d charge seventy-five dollars to walk Kyum through the process of obtaining an identification card. Hossain agreed to pay the fee and provided Malik with documents proving Kyum’s identity as well as a bank statement with Kyum’s name on it. They agreed that Malik would take Kyum to obtain the identification card and then bring him back to the pizzeria, where Hossain’s wife would pay the seventy-five dollars. However, when Malik dropped off Kyum that evening, he handed the new identification card to Hossain’s wife but refused to take the money from her for payment. Instead, he asked her to tell Hossain to come to his office in Latham, a suburb fifteen miles north of town, and pay him there.
Upon learning this, Hossain was annoyed. He didn’t have the time to drive to Latham to deliver seventy-five dollars. But what Hossain didn’t know then was that Malik had a reason for wanting him to come to Latham: he was an FBI informant, and Hossain was his prey.
Malik’s real name was Shahed Hussain, and he was many things, in addition to being an FBI informant: an immigrant, a husband, a father, an importer, a convenience store owner, a scam artist, and an accused murderer.
His story begins in Pakistan, and telling it requires a blanket disclaimer: Hussain has exaggerated and lied so often, including under oath in court, that it is difficult to separate truth from invention concerning his biography. As Hussain tells it, he was born into an affluent Karachi family that owned a chain of eateries called Village Restaurants.2 As a child, he lived next door to the family of Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan, and grew up enjoying a privileged life, eventually earning a master’s in business administration.3 In the early 1990s, Hussain earned $100,000 per year from his family’s chain of six restaurants—a fortune in Pakistan. But after 1992, when the military in Pakistan began to target political opposition parties, Hussain claimed he was victimized, and his family’s restaurants were bulldozed.4 He was also charged with murder, arrested and tortured, and to this day bears a scar on his wrist he claims came from a violent police interrogation.5 He was released, he said, only after his father bribed the police officers detaining him.6 How Hussain could simultaneously be friends with Bhutto, then the prime minister, and face such life-threatening political persecution in Pakistan is among the many inconsistencies in a life story the informant has told under oath as a witness for the government.
Reportedly fleeing persecution, Hussain and his family immigrated to the United States in November 1994 with the help of a Russian human smuggler and a few fake British passports. They flew from Karachi to Moscow and then to Mexico City.7 From there, they drove to the U.S. border and crossed at El Paso, Texas.8 The human smuggler, however, stayed in the United States only long enough to take back what was his. “The guy that came with us, he took the passport,” Hussain explained in court testimony.9 Hussain and his family, without any kind of documentation, traveled by bus to Albany, where a friend found them an apartment on Central Avenue, not far from the Little Italy Pizzeria.10 Hussain then applied for, and was granted, political asylum in the United States.11
As an immigrant, Hussain was ambitious and entrepreneurial. His first job in Albany was as a gas station attendant earning four dollars per hour.12 Within seven years, Hussain owned two convenience stores and a middle-class home in a comfortable suburb outside the New York State capital.13 One of his convenience stores was located next to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and Hussain came to know the employees who stopped in on breaks to buy refreshments and cigarettes. One of those state workers told Hussain about a woman whose business provided translation services to the DMV. Able to speak five languages, Hussain was perfect for that kind of work, which paid well and offered a flexible schedule.
Hussain tppk the job and figured out a way to cheat the system and earn even more money on the side. It started small. DMV test takers would pay him between $300 and $500 to help them cheat on written tests.14 Since DMV employees didn’t speak the languages he was translating the tests into, Hussain could easily provide the answers or take the tests himself without raising suspicion.15 If a test taker needed additional assistance, such as passing the road test, Hussain charged a premium and then offered kickbacks to DMV employees who could help with his scam.16
In short order, Hussain pulled off his con nearly a hundred times. Then, in December 2001, the FBI sent in an informant who paid Hussain $500 to help him gin up a fake ID.17 The informant told Hussain he needed a driver’s license to become a taxi driver in New York City. “He actually changed the address with the DMV employee and put a false photograph on a license,” FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll said of Hussain’s handiwork.18 The FBI arrested Hussain. In addition to as many as one hundred charges in federal court, Hussain faced deportation if convicted. Cutting a deal was the only way he could remain free and in the country, so Hussain agreed to become an FBI informant. At first, he wore a wire and worked against thirteen of his associates in the DMV scam.19 Some of his targets were friends.20 He then moved on to narcotics cases in and around Albany. But just as Hussain had been an asset to the DMV for his ability to speak multiple languages, he was a great catch for FBI agents working on national security cases, and the fraudster would soon have his first counterterrorism assignment.
Yassin Aref, a refugee from the Kurdish region of Iraq, arrived in Albany in 1999. The son of an imam, Aref had fled Iraq with his family after the first Gulf War and stayed in Syria before coming to the United States.21 He initially worked as a janitor at the Albany Medical Center, but after a local university professor donated a building to found a new mosque in town, the Masjid As-Salam, Aref became its imam, earning $18,000 per year.22
How the government became interested in Aref isn’t clear. What’s known is that in late 2002, FBI agents in Albany reported to their counterparts in Atlanta that they had an open investigation of him. In Aref’s heavily redacted FBI file, the basis of the government’s investigation is not disclosed.23 However, around the same time that FBI agents in Albany were investigating Aref, U.S. forces in Iraq found a notebook with his name, address, and phone number in it. In front of his name was the Kurdish word kak. U.S. authorities initially mistranslated the word to mean commander—likely giving them reason to believe Aref was a militant—only to realize much later that kak is the word for brother, a term of respect. Whatever information the FBI had on Aref, the actions of agents made it clear that the Bureau felt that it needed to draw him out. To do that, the FBI needed to find someone close to the imam.
The candidate for that someone was Mohammed Hossain, who was on the board of directors of Masjid As-Salam. Hussain’s showing up at Hossain’s pizzeria, giving toy helicopters to his children, and offering to help his brother obtain a state identification card represented the FBI’s initial attempts to sidle up to someone close to Aref. That was the reason Hussain didn’t collect the money from Hossain’s wife when he dropped off Kyum and his new identification card. Hussain and the FBI wanted Hossain to come to a warehouse in Latham—a safe house where hidden cameras could record their conversation.
It was November 20, 2003, a Thursday evening, and Hossain was irritated that he had to drive out to Latham. Thursdays were among the busiest nights of the week at the pizzeria, but since Hussain had helped Kyum obtain an identification card, Hossain felt obligated to go. Just before seven o’clock that evening, after having gotten lost for a short time while searching for the place, Hossain knocked on the warehouse door.
“Where have you been?” Hussain asked in Urdu as he opened the door. Hossain could speak Urdu but was not as confident in the language as he was in his native Bengali.
“That delivery,” Hossain answered in Urdu, frustrated. “Today’s Thursday. On Thursday there’s the delivery.”
“So what’s the news?” Hussain asked.
Baffled by the question since it was Hussain who had asked him to come to Latham, the pizzeria owner replied with some annoyance: “Nothing. You tell me.”
Wearing a white button-down shirt and dress pants, Hussain took a seat behind a small desk. Hossain, wearing a taqiyah and a puffy jacket for the cold evening outside, sat in a chair on the other side of the desk.
“Where have you reached in your life?” Hussain asked, attempting small talk.
“There’s no praying or meditation or anything,” Hossain said.
“Why?”
“So much running around here and there! I’m forced to be so busy with the world’s business—there’s no worship.”
“But we have to do something in this world,” Hussain said.
“Well, I just say my prayers,” Hossain said.
Hussain then brought up a conversation the two of them had had the last time they’d seen each other, about how serving God and making money weren’t mutually exclusive in Islam. “Do you remember the last time when we talked?” Hussain asked. “So I told you that there are two kinds of work to be done in the name of Allah—one is jihad and the other is that one can make money. So what if both are done? So you said that both actions are right. Do you remember?”
“Yes, right, right,” Hossain replied.
Hussain went on to explain that he was in the business of importing goods from China, pointing to different areas of the warehouse—a concrete room with bare, white walls and boxes piled in every corner. “All this that you are seeing comes from China, see,” he said, adding that among the items he imported were weapons and ammunition. Hussain then stood and pulled back a tarp covering something on the floor. “Do you know what this is?” Hussain asked, his hands on his knees, looking over at his guest. Hossain peered down at the floor, at what had been covered by the tarp. “Do you know what this is?” Hussain asked him again.
“No,” he said.
“This is for destroying airplanes,” Hussain said, hoisting a device off the floor and placing it on his right shoulder. It was a metal tube, about four feet long, with a shoulder strap hanging from the center. Hussain placed his hand on the front of the tube. “Sensor heat, you know?” he said, holding a shoulder-fired missile he said he had imported from China. “This comes for our mujahid brothers,” Hussain said. “I have been doing this work for about five years.”
“I see.”
“This is Muslim work. Understand?”
“Yes, yes.”
“For all these Muslim countries. Today it’s going to New York. Today it came. This comes in our packaging, in our containers, see.”
“I see, I see.”
“From China, this will go straight to New York. It will be shipped.”
“I see, I see,” Hossain said, repeating himself again and showing little interest.
“So, yes, I was thinking I’ll show this to my brother as well, that I also do this business for my brothers, my Muslim brothers … This is easily about $4,000, $5,000 worth of merchandise easily.”
“Then from New York, it’ll be transferred to another place?” Hossain asked.
“I don’t have anything to do with that. My job is to get it to New York. You’ve heard the term ‘stinger,’ right? This is a SAM, right? This hits planes.”
“Yes, yes.”
“It’s used for hitting the planes. All the mujahideen brothers, right?”
“I’ve seen it on television,” Hossain said.
“They use these. This comes from China—it’s a Chinese product.”
“I had never seen it.”
“What?”
“I had never seen it,” Hossain said. “I have—but on television.”
“On television,” Hussain responded. “Did you like this business? So this is one of my other businesses.”
“Hmm,” Hossain said. “Good money can be made in this?”
“A lot,” Hussain interjected.
“But it’s not legal,” Hossain said.
“What is legal in the world?” Hussain answered, laughing loudly. “There is nothing that is legal in this world—everything has to be illegal. There is a lot of money in this. In this, see, who’s going to support our Muslim brothers? People like you, people like me, who have the resources to support, who have the power to support them. Until and unless we support, then we are not Muslims! If you are eating and you don’t support your brother, then you are not Muslim.”
Hussain kept on talking in this manner. This was one of the informant’s regular tactics in the case, talking about things that could be construed as related to terrorism but dominating the conversation to such an extent that Hossain said very little.
Over the next few weeks, Hussain regularly dropped by the Little Italy Pizzeria. He said he admired Hossain’s faith, and the two of them often talked about Islam. During those conversations, Hossain mentioned several times that he was short on money. One day, Hussain made him an offer: he’d give him $50,000 in cash, and Hossain could keep $5,000 and pay back the remaining $45,000 in installments over the following year. Hossain agreed, no questions asked. The government would later call this money laundering; Hossain would call it a loan, because his pizza shop was struggling and he needed money to fix up two run-down houses he’d purchased at a city auction. Either way, the transaction would allow the government to inch closer to their target—Yassin Aref, the local imam from Iraq. Hussain and the FBI knew that Hossain would want a religious leader to oversee the financial transaction—a customary request for any devout Muslim—and they also knew how to narrow the candidates down to ensure that the religious leader he chose was Aref.
“I don’t want any Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Indian as witness. I don’t want these people to know my business,” Hussain said when Hossain asked for someone to oversee the transaction.
In Albany, that left only one Muslim as a possible candidate. “How about Brother Yassin as witness?” Hossain asked.
Hussain agreed excitedly. “Holy is Allah,” he said.
Hussain arranged to give the first installment of money to Hossain on January 2, 2004. Hussain’s FBI handlers told him to make it clear that the money was ill-gotten. “I told him to explain that the money came from—make sure you explain the money came from illegal proceeds,” FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll said. “Malik told me the general term used is ‘blacken the money,’ so I said tell them in your words that the money came from illegal proceeds, that the money is black money, that the money came from under the table, under the tax—to be hidden from taxes.”24 Coll also instructed Hussain to give the money to Hossain and Aref while holding up in plain view the trigger mechanism for a surface-to-air missile.25 The trigger mechanism is about the size of a large handgun and attaches to the body of the missile launcher. It looks like an oversized label maker when separated from the missile.
Just after two thirty in the afternoon on January 2, Hossain and Aref arrived at the informant’s warehouse. They took seats in plastic chairs in front of Hussain’s desk. Just as with the previous meeting between Hossain and Hussain, a camera in the corner recorded the conversation. This time, they all spoke in English, since Aref did not speak Urdu.
“Okay, let’s do some business, okay? Let’s make some money, okay?” Hussain said as he pulled a wad of cash from the desk drawer. “This is $5,000, okay? I want you to count it, okay?”
Hussain handed the money to Aref, who began to count the bills. As he counted, Hussain reached behind and grabbed the trigger mechanism. “When I have to send this in, they will give me $45,000, $50,000, okay?” he said, holding the mechanism aloft. “This is part of the missile that I showed you.” Hussain pronounced the word missile as mee-zile, as if he were attempting a Russian accent. None of this seemed to register with Aref, who never looked up from counting the money. (Aref, whose English is poor, would later maintain he never heard the word mee-zile and that he didn’t realize the trigger mechanism was part of a weapon.26) “So as soon as [the money] comes, I’ll give you—this is $5,000, so next couple of weeks, or less, I’ll get you more money,” Hussain continued.
“Insha’Allah,” Hossain said. “It’s no problem, see, actually, I didn’t need all that. I just need to keep going, just so I can pay the bills.”27 Hossain, as the line suggested, believed the money was for a personal loan, not for weapons.
The FBI and Hussain stayed close to Hossain and Aref for the next several months, presumably in the hopes of documenting some type of criminal behavior. There were dozens of conversations during this time, and in some between Hussain and Hossain, the informant used a code word for the missile, chaudry. According to the government, this was evidence that Hossain knew about the missile, but from the transcripts, it isn’t clear whether Hossain knew the informant’s meaning of chaudry. Hossain also began to pay back Hussain with regular checks, as he had agreed, suggesting that the pizzeria owner truly believed their arrangement constituted a loan, not money laundering. In fact, on the memo line of one check, he wrote that it was for a loan repayment.
Finally, after seven months without criminal activity by either Hossain or Aref, the FBI arrested the pair in August 2004, charging them with conspiring to aid a terrorist group, providing support for a weapon of mass destruction, money laundering, and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. They went to trial together in September and October 2006. Because Hossain and Aref had not encountered a real terrorist during the entire FBI operation—only an informant posing as an arms importer for terrorists—the prosecution needed to find a way to link Hossain’s and Aref’s recorded statements to terrorism. For that, the U.S. government turned to Evan Kohlmann, a then-twenty-seven-year-old self-described terrorism expert whom an FBI agent once dubbed “the Doogie Howser of terrorism.”
A Florida native whose Manhattan apartment walls are covered with pictures of terrorists, Kohlmann is the government’s most prolific terrorism expert, having served as an expert witness in seventeen terrorism trials in the United States and in nine others abroad since 2002. With most of his knowledge gleaned from the Internet—the type of information the CIA describes as “open source intelligence”—Kohlmann has testified to juries about the history of Islamic terrorism, how terrorist organizations finance themselves, and how they spread propaganda and recruit others for terrorist acts. Since 9/11, Kohlmann has made a living testifying for the prosecution in terrorism trials as well as appearing on cable news as a terrorism expert. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, described Kohlmann to New York magazine as having been “grown hydroponically in the basement of the Bush Justice Department.”28 Several defense lawyers, including those in the cases of “dirty bomber” Jośe Padilla and the so-called Virginia jihad group, have tried to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, arguing that his only qualifications as a terrorism expert are self-fashioned.29 However, because few experts with university credentials and social science backgrounds are willing to testify about terrorism, the Justice Department has had little trouble persuading judges to allow Kohlmann to take the stand, where, as one of his critics put it, he spews “junk science” by suggesting that anyone who watches jihadi videos has self-radicalized.30
Kohlmann is one of a cadre of self-appointed terrorism experts who today earn handsome paychecks pushing forward the idea that Islamic terrorism is a real and immediate threat in the United States. Among Kohlmann’s peers is Rita Katz, an Iraqi-born Jewish woman who has helped the U.S. government investigate Islamic charities and mosques linked to radicals. One of Katz’s critics alleged that, like Kohlmann, she could find a way to trace just about anything to Islamic terrorism, telling the Boston Globe that she “fits everything into a mold—that there is a Muslim terrorist under everybody’s bed.”31 Many of these so-called terrorism experts, including Kohlmann and Katz, have worked under Steven Emerson, a former journalist who has earned millions of dollars while making such hyperbolic claims as that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are controlled by Islamic extremists. In 2009 and 2010, Emerson’s nonprofit organization, Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, raised $5.4 million in grants and individual contributions.32 The nonprofit then paid Emerson’s corporation, SAE Productions, $3.4 million in management fees, allowing the tax-exempt Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation to act as a pass-through for a for-profit company—a questionable but not illegal practice. Simply put, there’s a lot of money to be made in stoking terrorism fears. For testifying in the trial of Hossain and Aref, for example, the U.S. government paid Evan Kohlmann $5,000.
To establish a terrorist connection, the prosecution played a conversation the FBI had recorded between Hossain and Hussain. “We are members of Jamaat-e-Islami,” Hossain told Hussain in the recording. The government had originally claimed that Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party in Bangladesh, was linked to terrorism through a proxy organization, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. But when Kohlmann was named an expert witness in the case, replacing another government expert who was unable to testify at the trial, he submitted a report that seemed to confuse Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan with Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh—two different organizations. In a deposition, Kevin A. Luibrand, a lawyer for Hossain, challenged not only Kohlmann’s assertion, but also his general political knowledge of Bangladesh. Under questioning, Kohlmann admitted that he had never written about Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh and could not say how many political parties existed in Bangladesh or even who the current prime minister of the country was.
“Can you name any of the major political parties in Bangladesh from the year 2000 to 2004?” Luibrand asked.
“Other than Jamaat-e-Islami?”
“Yes.”
“That’s—I’m not familiar off the top of my head,” Kohlmann said.
“Have you ever heard of an organization known as the Bangladesh National Party?”
“Vaguely.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“I’m assuming it’s a political party, but again—the name vaguely sounds familiar but—”
“Do you know what, if anything, it stands for politically within Bangladesh?”
“Sorry, can’t tell ya.”
“You can’t tell me because you don’t know?”
“I don’t know off the top of my head.”
Following this exchange, Luibrand petitioned the court to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, writing in his motion: “Evan Kohlmann revealed that he has no basis to form any opinions with respect to JEI Bangladesh, or to explain JEI Bangladesh to the jury.”33 The presiding judge denied the request, and Kohlmann was allowed to testify not only about Jamaat-e-Islami but also about Ansar al Islam, a terrorist group formed by a man Yassin Aref had met a few times while living as a refugee in Syria. Of the damage Kohlmann’s testimony did at trial, Hossain’s lawyer said it “just kill[ed] us.”34
A jury ultimately found Hossain and Aref guilty of money laundering—but not of the more significant terrorism charges. At sentencing, both men were mystified about how they’d arrived in the position they were in—as accused terrorists about to be sentenced to federal prison.
“I never had any intention to harm anyone in this country,” Aref told the judge. “And I don’t know why I’m guilty.”
“I am just a pizza man,” Hossain said. “I make good pizza.”
The public in Albany was largely supportive of Hossain and Aref, believing an injustice had occurred. Community members pressed into the courtroom, some holding copies of Aref’s self-published autobiography, Son of Mountains. Fred LeBrun, the metro columnist for the Albany Times Union, compared the prosecution to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But U.S. District Judge Thomas McAvoy, indifferent to the community support, sentenced the pair to fifteen years in prison.
Yassin Aref is incarcerated in a special Indiana prison that restricts outside communication. The ACLU is representing him in challenging his confinement there. If Aref’s counter-part, Mohammed Hossain, were ever a terrorist threat, you wouldn’t know it today based on his assignment at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: he is serving his sentence at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institute, a medium-security facility located in a poor, rural part of Pennsylvania, between Allentown and Harrisburg.
The day I visited Hossain in March 2012, he was wearing a prison-issued, button-down blue shirt with gray pants. His name and prisoner number were embroidered on the left side of the shirt. Less than halfway through his sentence, he didn’t have a lot of hope of being released early. His initial appeal had been denied, and he was now drafting a second appeal himself, enlisting other inmates to help him with the spelling and grammar.
We sat across from each other on plastic chairs in an empty concrete room. Toys filled a small adjacent room, for when inmates receive their families. A bank of vending machines lined one of the walls. Three guards stood in the corner talking about baseball. From having researched Hossain’s case, I knew that Hussain, the informant, was a bad actor—a scam artist and an aggressive prevaricator who was, as FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll put it so well, “good at being deceptive.”35 But I found it hard to reason away Hossain’s inaction during the sting operation. For example, on November 20, 2003, when Hossain came to Hussain’s warehouse to drop off the seventy-five dollars for his brother Kyum’s state identification card, the FBI informant showed him the shoulder-fired missile and said in Urdu, “This is for destroying airplanes.” Hossain didn’t leave and report the missile to authorities. He just sat there, and then replied with a statement most Americans would think incriminating: “Holy is Allah.” I also could not understand why, even if Hossain thought the money the informant gave him was for a loan, he’d accept cash from a man he’d seen shouldering a missile as he bragged about knowing mujahideen.
Stroking his beard, which is long and gray and hangs down to his waist, Hossain tried to explain himself. “You have to understand,” Hossain told me. “He hounded me. Everywhere I went, he was there.” From the day Hussain gave the toy helicopters to Hossain’s children in front of the Little Italy Pizzeria, he said, the informant became a fixture in his life. Hussain said he wanted to become a better Muslim and admired Hossain for his faith. Despite being busy, Hossain said he felt a religious obligation to talk to Hussain about Islam. He’d walk into the pizza shop’s kitchen, and Hussain would follow him, asking questions. “I told him once I have to go deliver pizzas, and he said, ‘No problem, I’ll come with you.’”
During their conversations, Hussain would often talk about himself, describing how he ran an import business bringing in goods from China—the kind of cheap and small items you find in dollar stores—and bragging about having a relationship with the FBI. Once, when Hossain described some problems he was having with a tenant, Hussain offered to call his FBI friend and ask if he could assist. Hossain demurred. He had no reason to suspect Hussain was anything but a legitimate businessman with influential friends in law enforcement. That’s what he said he was thinking when Hussain pulled back the tarp at the warehouse and lifted a missile launcher to his shoulder.
“It looked like a telescope or some plumbing equipment,” Hossain told me. “Then he said it was a missile. You have to understand what I was thinking. Do you remember when Iraq was at war with Iran? Who did America back? Iraq. They sent weapons to Iraq. In Afghanistan, America gave weapons to the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. He said he had licenses to import from China and that he knew an FBI agent. I believed it was a legitimate business, that what he was doing was legal. I couldn’t prove it wasn’t legal. I ran a pizza shop, and every day, I would make sure the floors were clean and dry, and if they were slippery, I’d put up a sign. I knew that if I didn’t and someone fell, they’d sue me. They’d hurt me and my family. So what if I went to the police and told them about Malik and the missile? I thought he could sue me for a false report, and he would take all my money and all my properties.” Hossain added that Hussain came to the pizza shop the day after showing him the missile and assured him that everything was legal and on the up and up.
At one point, the FBI informant asked Hossain if he’d be interested in donating money to a school in Pakistan. “I told him that even if I had money, I wouldn’t be interested,” Hossain said. “But I also told him that I didn’t have money then. I told him that I purchased two homes from the city auction, and I needed $3,000 to $4,000 to buy new boilers.” Hussain said he could help and offered to loan him $50,000. “I didn’t need his money. I could have gotten the money from other people,” Hossain told me. “But I wanted him to go away. I thought if I agreed to do something with him, he’d leave me alone. People are like that—they bother you until you do what they want and then they leave. I thought that would happen.” As a result, Hossain agreed to accept the loan, and to this day maintains that he did not know that what he was doing could be considered money laundering or that the money was supposed to have come from a terrorist organization. “Why would I be a terrorist? I had a family, a business, nearly $1 million in properties,” Hossain said. “If someone did a terrorist attack in Albany, it would have hurt me just like everyone else. My family would have been in danger. My business would have been hurt. I have never had anything to do with terrorism.”
Hossain suffers from diabetes and hypertension, and incarceration has been hard for him. But it’s been even harder for his family, he said. He was the sole breadwinner, and in the wake of his trial and incarceration, he and his family lost the pizza shop. But he lost much more in the following years. “Children need a father. My children, they are lost to the world now,” he said.
I asked him what he meant by that.
“They fall into the wrong crowd,” he said. “I do not know them anymore.”
He then pointed to the appeal he is drafting—a thick stack of paper with amateur copyediting notes on the pages correcting typos and grammatical errors. The appeal described the FBI informant’s aggressive behavior and particular instances in which Hossain alleged his Urdu statements were mistranslated to sound more incriminating than they actually were. He has already lost one appeal that his lawyers filed, so this jailhouse petition doesn’t offer him much promise. But it’s all he has now—a final effort to reverse a decision by a jury he believes was overwhelmed by the government’s claims and biased by his appearance.
“Look at me,” Hossain said. “My beard, my face, my taqiyah—I look like Osama bin Laden.”
Hossain paused.
“I hate Osama bin Laden.”
Since 9/11, Shahed Hussain and informants like him have become one of the Bureau’s most valuable commodities in the war on terrorism—aggressive men indentured to the FBI who are willing to do anything to take down their targets and who also have the ability to “play the part” of terrorists in front of hidden cameras and microphones. This ability to betray others for personal gain, however, reveals a dark aspect to the FBI’s use of informants; namely, that the best informants are also those who tend toward criminal behavior themselves. Hussain is a classic example of this. While working for the FBI, he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in 2003, claiming $145,075 in personal assets, including his $125,000 home, and reporting $177,766.72 in debts. According to the filing, Hussain owed, among other debts, $18,377.72 to the Albany County Treasurer and $30,000 to HSBC Bank. Through the bankruptcy court, Hussain delayed payment to his creditors and negotiated lower settlement amounts for some of the debts.
But the FBI informant never told the bankruptcy court about some substantial assets he had, including an expensive Mercedes he said his family had been given by an old friend, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and $500,000 in a trust fund in Pakistan.36 While in bankruptcy reorganization, Hussain transferred the money from Pakistan to the United States and, in an apparent effort to hide his connection to the money, deposited the cash in a bank account in his son’s name.37 Hussain then used some of that money to purchase and fix up a run-down hotel near Saratoga Springs, New York. He listed the hotel—originally called the Hideaway Motel but renamed the Crest Inn Suites and Cottages—in his wife’s name.38 Hussain’s actions as a hotelier were reportedly as dishonest as his dealings as an FBI snitch, as three would-be guests sued him for fraudulent misrepresentation after they prepaid for hotel rooms that were not available upon arrival.39 In addition, the reviews the hotel has received on TripAdvisor are poor, with two guests claiming to have been cheated while staying there.
But none of this crooked activity seemed to matter to the FBI, which made Hussain a paid informant after the Aref case. In all, Hussain spent four and a half years serving FBI agents in and around Albany, receiving $60,000 in expenses and working off his criminal charges related to the DMV scam. Staying on with the Bureau was Hussain’s preference, as well. “I liked to work with the FBI,” he said.40
In 2007, FBI agents in Albany called their counterparts in White Plains, New York, and offered them the use of Hussain as an informant. FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who was involved in the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian Syrian citizen detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport and then deported to Syria and tortured, accepted the offer.41 He sent Hussain to Pakistan to investigate a possible terrorist camp and then to London to check out a mosque that was allegedly raising money for Palestinians in Gaza. Each time Hussain returned to the United States, Fuller met him at Kennedy Airport to make sure immigration officials allowed him back into the country. As we saw in the case of Foad Farahi, the FBI often uses shaky immigration status as a means of keeping informants, even paid ones, on a leash.
Despite his international travels, Hussain’s most ambitious assignment under Fuller would come closer to home. In September 2007, the informant began praying regularly in Newburgh, a struggling former Air Force town with few decent jobs about an hour north of New York City. It was a fishing expedition. “I was not looking for targets,” Hussain said in court testimony. “I was finding people who would be harmful, who can do harm, and radicals, and identify them for the FBI.”42 As in the Albany case, Hussain’s cover story was that he imported goods from China, and Fuller instructed him to tell people that he was an agent for the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed. Most of Newburgh’s Muslim residents were poor, and Hussain, who posed as a wealthy businessman and wore expensive clothing and drove high-end cars, easily made plenty of friends. But after more than a year of trawling the local Muslim community, he had not identified a single target.43
Then he met James Cromitie, a forty-five-year-old stocker at the local Walmart. A former drug addict with a history of mental instability—he once admitted to a psychiatrist that he heard and saw things that weren’t there—Cromitie had adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam while serving two years in prison for selling crack cocaine in 1987.44 However, by 2008, he had seemingly turned his life around. He had a job, a girlfriend, and a room he rented, and he prayed regularly at Masjid Al-Ikhlas, a large, tan-colored mosque. Below the surface, though, Cromitie was an angry, bigoted man, believing others discriminated against him because of his religion, and openly hating Jews.
In June 2008, Cromitie met a man from Pakistan at Masjid Al-Ikhlas who said his name was Maqsood. Everyone at the mosque had seen or knew of Maqsood. It was impossible not to know about him, because in poor Newburgh, Maqsood made an impression. He was always driving one of four expensive cars—a Hummer, a Mercedes or one of two different BMWs—and had been coming to the mosque so frequently that he had been invited to become a board member.44 Of course, the man’s name wasn’t really Maqsood—it was Shahed Hussain.
It was in the parking lot of Masjid Al-Ikhlas that Cromitie first approached Hussain. The two men began talking, and Hussain told Cromitie that he was destined for much more in this life. “Allah didn’t bring you here to work for Walmart,” he said.46 What exactly happened between the pair in the weeks following that initial encounter in the parking lot isn’t known, because from June to October 2008, Special Agent Fuller chose not to have Hussain record these conversations. But whatever happened and whatever was said, it allowed Hussain and Cromitie to become close.
By the time the FBI began recording their conversations on October 12, 2008, Hussain was already an experienced hand at fueling Cromitie’s bigotry and bolstering his personal narrative of persecution as a misunderstood Muslim.
“A lot of Jews up here. They look at me like they would like to kill me when they see me inside my jalabiya, everything they say. I don’t salaam them either,” Cromitie told Hussain.
“Does that make you angry, brother?” Hussain asked, clearly knowing the answer he was soliciting.
“It doesn’t make me angry. It just make [sic] me want to jump up and kill one of them,” Cromitie said.
“Wow,” Hussain replied.
Cromitie then talked about the Jews he met while working at Walmart. They looked at him strangely, he said, and the Jewish women refused to allow him to carry their bags to the car.
During the course of their conversations, Hussain would seize on any opportunity to amplify Cromitie’s paranoia and hatred of Jews. “I was reading in one of the newspapers, in the New York Times, that every second advisor in the White House, they yahuds,” Hussain told Cromitie during one meeting.47
“Every second advisor to the president is a yahud,” Hussain repeated.
“In the White House?”
“Yeah,” Hussain said.
“The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion yahudi,” Cromitie answered.
Hussain told Cromitie that if he was angry for the way the world was, he could change it. But he needed to change it through jihad. “I always think about going for a cause, you know? For a cause of Islam. Have you ever thought about that, brother?” Hussain asked.
“Have I ever thought about going for the cause?” Cromitie asked.
“Cause of Islam,” Hussain clarified.
In November 2008, Hussain invited Cromitie to attend the Muslim Alliance in North America conference in Philadelphia. The local imam from Masjid Al-Ikhlas would be there, as would one of Cromitie’s idols, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an African American convert to Islam whose mosque is in Brooklyn. Hussain offered to cover all of Cromitie’s expenses, which of course were covered by the FBI. By this time, Hussain had told Cromitie about his import business and said he could bring in weapons and missiles from China. Not to be outdone by Hussain’s peacocking, Cromitie portrayed himself in conversations with the informant as something of a badass, claiming to have firebombed a police precinct, to have a brother who stole $126 million in merchandise from Tiffany & Co., to have formed a small militia, and to have stolen guns from Walmart.48 These claims were all untrue. Whether the FBI knew at the time that Cromitie was nothing but talk is unclear, but the conference in Philadelphia would prove to be a turning point for Hussain and the Bureau.
It was late at night on Friday, November 28, 2008, and Hussain and Cromitie were driving to Philadelphia in the FBI informant’s Hummer. The vehicle had been wired for sound, and all of their conversations during the nearly four-hour trip were recorded. About halfway through the drive Cromitie went silent.
“What are you thinking, brother?” Hussain asked.
“I’m just thinking that I’m gonna try to put a plan together. What type of plan? I don’t know yet. I’m gonna put a good plan together,” Cromitie answered.
“May Allah be with you and Allah find you the way,” Hussain said.
The next day, Hussain and Cromitie attended the conference in Philadelphia, where they saw the imam from Newburgh and listened to an inflammatory speech Siraj Wahhaj gave during a dinner. In their private conversations, Hussain kept asking about a security group Cromitie claimed to have formed to protect Newburgh-area Muslims—Cromitie called the group his “sutra team”—and what type of actions they had done in the past.
“We couldn’t get hold of a bomb like we wanted to, but we was doing all type of stuff,” Cromitie said. “You probably heard. We was blowing police cars up. We was throwing gas bombs inside.” Cromitie was lying about all of it, of course. But he did know a few thugs-for-hire, Newburgh men who he said would be willing to join an attack for the right price. “They would do it for the money,” Cromitie told Hussain. “They’re not even thinking about the cause.”
Later that same day, Hussain asked Cromitie what he thought would be the best target for a terrorist attack. Cromitie’s response was a bridge. “But bridges are too hard to be hit, because of they’re, they’re made of steel,” Hussain told him.
“Of course they’re made of steel,” Cromitie said. “But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down.”
If Hussain and the FBI were going to bring Cromitie into a terrorist plot, they needed to guide him toward a more manageable idea than bombing a bridge. A few days before the Philadelphia conference, the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba had killed 364 people in a coordinated attack in Mumbai, India, that targeted hotels, a café, a railway station, and a Jewish community center. Special Agent Fuller instructed Hussain to bring up the Mumbai attacks, which he believed would help dissuade Cromitie from his ambition to bomb a bridge.
“Eight spots were hit at the same time,” Hussain told Cromitie, referring to the terrorist attack in India.
“Yeah, yeah, eight, I saw it,” Cromitie replied.
“You saw it. The railroad station. Hotels, the Jews—”
“Yeah,” Cromitie interrupted.
“The Jew center, the main Jew center,” Hussain continued.
“Yahudi,” Cromitie said.
“Yahudi center. Uh, the cafés where the Americans, and there’s this, uh—”
“That too,” Cromitie interjected. “The cafés and shit like that. Sometime the biggest people be in these places and you don’t know, but shit happens. You understand?”
After a few more minutes of talking, Hussain pressed Cromitie to move forward. “Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man? I’m asking you a question on it,” Hussain said.49
“My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly,” Hussain said.
“Who’s your people?” Cromitie asked.
“Jaish-e-Mohammed.”
That answer was supposed to make it clear that Hussain was a well-connected terrorist. But Cromitie had never heard of Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is among the world’s better-known Islamic terrorist organizations. “Who are they?” he asked. “What are, what are your people? What are they, Muslim?”
“What do you think?” Hussain asked.
“What are they, Muslim?” Cromitie repeated.
“What do you think we are?”
Cromitie had no clue. However, the fact that Cromitie had never heard of the terrorist organization the FBI was using for its cover was not enough to stop the Bureau from pushing forward with a sting built around a luckless man they inexplicably viewed as a would-be terrorist.
After they returned from Philadelphia, Hussain and Cromitie discussed their proposed attack, with Hussain suggesting they target nearby Stewart International Airport, which includes an Air National Guard base, as well as a few synagogues. But after deciding on the specifics of their plot, Hussain had to leave the area for nearly two months—he told Cromitie he had to go to New York City to meet with other members of Jaish-e-Mohammed—and he asked Cromitie to spend their time apart recruiting people and doing reconnaissance on the targets for the attack.
However, without the informant driving the action in Newburgh, the plot ran aground. While Hussain was gone, Cromitie spent his time working at Walmart, hanging around Newburgh, and watching a lot of television—mostly, in a wonderful irony, Hollywood action movies involving Islamic terrorists. When Hussain finally returned on February 23, 2009, Cromitie had accomplished nothing. “I been watching a lot of crazy pictures lately,” Cromitie told Hussain, as if to explain his inaction. “Well, terrorist movies. A whole bunch of them. And America makes these movies. That’s the shit that kill [sic] me. And then I look at all of these movies, and I say to myself, ‘Why is America trying to make the Arab brothers look like they the bad guys?’”
The sting was going nowhere, and Hussain needed to get it back on track. He told Cromitie that Jaish-e-Mohammed was very happy with him, and that his superiors had given him authorization to carry out the attack with Cromitie and any men he could recruit. Hussain said the attack would teach people a lesson—but Cromitie was just as clueless as before about what they were doing, for whom, and why.
“Who are we teaching a lesson to?” he asked.
“The people who are killing innocent Muslims,” Hussain answered.
With the FBI informant back in Newburgh to provoke the action, the plan became serious again. Hussain and Cromitie came up with code words—guns were mangoes, missiles noodles, phones eggs—and Hussain asked Cromitie to go with him to collect information about target sites. “Let’s speed up the process,” Hussain said, a reference to how Cromitie had accomplished so little while he was away.
With Hussain’s encouragement, Cromitie recruited three members of his so-called sutra team. They were all small-time thugs and converts to Islam. David Williams was a twenty-eight-year-old who went by the name Daoud. He had spent time in prison for drugs and weapons possession charges and had been released from parole supervision in May 2008. Onta Williams (no relation to David Williams) was a thirty-two-year-old high school dropout who went by the name Hamza and had done three months in jail on a drug charge. Laguerre Payen, a twenty-seven-year-old who went by the name Amin, had served one year in prison for an assault charge for shooting two sixteen-year-olds in the head and eye with a BB gun.
With three recruits now on board and targets selected, the FBI still wasn’t convinced the sting would work. If Cromitie backed out of the plot, the whole operation would fall apart. So Special Agent Fuller instructed Hussain to give Cromitie $1,800 and ask him to buy some guns. If the sting operation imploded, the FBI would at least have weapons charges to bring against Cromitie.
Even as a goon, though, Cromitie was hopeless. He couldn’t find anyone to sell him a gun, resorting at one point to throwing stones at a drug dealer’s second-story window in the hopes of waking him and asking if he had any firearms to sell. But the drug dealer wasn’t home, and in the end, Cromitie returned the money to Hussain. The target of a months-long FBI terrorism sting wasn’t even capable of obtaining a Saturday Night Special with $1,800 in his pocket.
With the sting now progressing in waves, a flurry of action pushed by Hussain followed by long periods of inaction, it was becoming clear that Cromitie wasn’t the die-hard jihadi the U.S. government would ultimately portray him as to the news media. Within weeks of Hussain’s return to Newburgh, for example, Cromitie traveled to North Carolina to pick up extra work stocking a new Walmart location. He then went several weeks without even talking to Hussain until calling him on April 5, 2009. By that time, the FBI informant had left Newburgh for New Jersey.
“I have to try to make some money, brother,” Cromitie told Hussain, explaining why he had gone to North Carolina.
“I told you I can make you $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother,” Hussain said. “What can I tell you?”
“Okay, come see me, brother. Come see me.”
How much Cromitie, in finally moving forward in the plot with Hussain, was acting out of ideological commitment or financial interest is questionable. Hussain would later admit at trial that he created the—in his word—“impression” that Cromitie would make a lot of money by participating in the bombing plot.50 When asked about the phone conversation in which he offered Cromitie $250,000, Hussain said the phrase “$250,000” was simply code for the plot—code, he admitted, that only he knew.51
This also wasn’t the only time Hussain used financial inducements when Cromitie was reluctant to become a terrorist. At various times during the sting operation, Hussain gave Cromitie money to pay his rent—money that had come from the FBI.52 He also at one point offered to buy him a barbershop.53 “What will it cost—$60,000, $70,000 to build it?” Hussain asked.54 Indeed, Cromitie and the three men he recruited all ultimately believed there would be a financial reward for participating in the terrorist plot, which had now evolved into a plan to plant bombs inside parked cars in front of synagogues in the Bronx and then return to Newburgh, where they’d fire Stinger missiles at planes. Hussain told Cromitie his organization could provide everything they’d need—the transportation, the bombs, the missiles.
On April 7, 2009, at two forty-five in the afternoon, Cromitie went to Hussain’s home on Shipp Street in Newburgh—which was an FBI safe house.55 A hidden camera recorded everything that happened in the living room, and FBI agents in a van around the corner watched the action live. It took this meeting for Hussain to make Cromitie comfortable with the prospect that their attack would kill and maim, but to do so, he had to fuel once again Cromitie’s hatred of the U.S. military and Jews.
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Cromitie told Hussain. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“If there is American soldiers, I don’t care,” Hussain said, egging on Cromitie.
“Hold up,” he answered. “If it’s American soldiers, I don’t even care.”
“If it’s kids, I care,” Hussain said. “If it’s women, I care.”
“I care. That’s what I’m worried about. And I’m going to tell you, I don’t care if it’s a whole synagogue of men.”
“Yep.”
“I would take ’em down, I don’t even care. ’Cause I know they are the ones.”
“We have the equipment to do it,” Hussain said.
“See, see, I’m not worried about nothing. Ya know? What I’m worried about is my safety,” Cromitie said.
“Oh, yeah, safety comes first.”
“I want to get in and I want to get out.”
“Trust me,” Hussain assured.56
Three days later, Hussain, Cromitie, and David Williams went to Walmart and purchased a digital camera, which they used to take photographs of Stewart International Airport and synagogues in Riverdale, a heavily Jewish area of the Bronx.
On April 23, 2009, Cromitie returned to the Shipp Street house, this time with David Williams. On the living room coffee table was a bomb—the type they would place in parked cars in front of the synagogues. Cromitie stared at the weapon. “What’s the distance?” he asked Hussain.57
“It’s, like, a hundred, hundred miles’ range,” Hussain answered. “So, it’s with a cell phone, so if you put it up there, you come out back here. You can sit down here, and it blows up.”
Cromitie laughed and fist-bumped David Williams.
The next day, Hussain, Cromitie, and David Williams drove to the airport to scout for an ideal area from which to fire the Stinger missiles. They purchased four cell phones for use during the attack, and all four men—Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—then met Hussain at a storage facility in Newburgh, where the FBI informant showed them the C-4 explosives to be used and demonstrated how to operate the Stinger missile system. They set a date for the attack: May 20, 2009.
By this time, it was clear that none of the men was doing the attack for ideological reasons; they were doing it for cash. How much money they believed they were doing it for remains a mystery; officially, the FBI authorized Hussain to offer $5,000 to each man. The night before the attack, the informant took the four men to a T.G.I. Friday’s for dinner—“a last supper,” as Hussain called it. Over dinner they purportedly discussed money. But the FBI did not record the meeting. Special Agent Fuller gave Hussain his instructions, as he always did before meetings with Cromitie and his group, but unlike for the dozens of earlier meetings, the agent didn’t give the informant a recording device. Whatever Hussain said over the meal, it was enough to ensure that Cromitie and his three associates carried forward with the plot.
On the evening of May 20, 2009, the four men piled into Hussain’s car and headed south toward New York City. Though Hussain had previously shown Cromitie how to activate the bombs—which were, in fact, inert—Cromitie couldn’t figure out how to activate them himself once they were on the road. Hussain, who was driving, had to pull over and activate the bombs from the side of the highway. Upon their arrival in the Bronx, the four men got out of the car while Hussain stayed behind the wheel. Cromitie wanted to deliver the bombs himself, and he asked David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen to serve as lookouts. Hussain was to remain in the car as the getaway driver.
As the informant promised, there were three cars parked in front of the Riverdale Temple and Riverdale Jewish Center, which are located less than a quarter of a mile from each other on Independence Avenue. Cromitie placed a bomb in the trunks of each of the cars as instructed and then ran to the getaway car. While he believed he was placing deadly and destructive bombs in cars parked there by other Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives, in reality he was putting props into the trunks of rental cars that had been parked there by FBI agents.
Cromitie opened the door to Hussain’s car and climbed into the passenger seat. Just then, a SWAT team consisting of local and federal law enforcement officers surrounded the car and shattered the windows. Glass rained in as Hussain lifted his hands to shield his face. The FBI informant then looked down; his hands were bleeding from the broken glass. But Hussain’s job was done. He would receive $96,000 for his work in the case.58
The FBI charged James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—whom the media would dub the Newburgh Four—with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to kill officers of the United States.
The Bureau held a news conference following the arrests.
“Did you believe they were a genuine threat?” a reporter asked Joseph Demarest, the head of the FBI’s New York office.
“Yes, based on what they intended to do and based on their actions,” Demarest said. “They planted the satchels, or bags, with what they believed to contain explosives, in front of two Jewish temples.”
“Did they have any experience in knowing if what they had was real?” the reporter followed.
“No, not that we’re aware of,” Demarest answered.59
The four men pleaded not guilty to the charges, and their defense lawyers attempted to show at trial that Shahed Hussain had baited the desperate and susceptible men with money and lies. But the jury was unsympathetic to the argument and found all four guilty following a one-month trial.
At James Cromitie’s sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon appeared to agree with many of the arguments the Newburgh Four’s lawyers had made. “The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” McMahon said. “It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true . . . . I suspect that real terrorists would not have bothered themselves with a person who was so utterly inept.” McMahon continued, “Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” The judge then sentenced each of the four men to twenty-five years in prison, the minimum sentence available to her under federal sentencing guidelines.
At the same hearing, Cromitie told Judge McMahon: “I am not a violent person. I’ve never been a terrorist, and I never will be. I got myself into this stupid mess. I know I said a lot of stupid stuff.”60
With the convictions of the Newburgh Four, Shahed Hussain was now an all-star FBI informant, having been at the center of two successful terrorism stings. FBI agents told me that even after the Newburgh trial, during which defense lawyers provided evidence showing that Hussain had lied or withheld information from criminal and bankruptcy courts, Hussain continued to be used as an informant and was considered among the Bureau’s top terrorism snitches. Hussain liked working for the FBI—he said so himself during court testimony—but what makes his work as an informant so troubling is that he, like other snitches, was motivated purely by self-interest.
In addition to payments during the course of an investigation, informants receive what the FBI terms “performance incentives” when sting operations result in convictions. The amounts of these payments are never disclosed, though one former agent told me that six-figure paydays are not unusual for high-profile cases. Performance incentives serve two purposes for the FBI. The first, and most obvious, is that they keep informants hungry; they know that if they can bring home a conviction with their testimony, they’ll be in line for a handsome payday. But the second, and more important, reason for withholding an informant’s full payment until after conviction has to do with the fear of coloring a jury’s opinion. A paid informant is always a problem for prosecutors, as defense lawyers will use the payments to suggest that the informant has motivation to lie on the witness stand because the government is paying him. The more he’s paid, the more motivation he has to deceive, the logic goes. For that reason, the fact that Hussain received $96,000 for his work during the Newburgh Four investigation presented a challenge for prosecutors, since defense lawyers during the trial made references to the payments in clear attempts to bias the jury against the FBI’s informant. What the jury never learned, however, was that Hussain would receive even more money if Cromitie and his three co-defendants were convicted. Even Hussain himself didn’t know exactly how much money he’d receive, as FBI agents never tell informants the amount of their performance incentive and never guarantee that they will receive a performance incentive at all, since not knowing this information safeguards informants from having to testify about it at trial, which would give defense lawyers even more fodder to use when trying to undermine the informant’s credibility. “They have an expectation that there’s a performance incentive waiting for them at the end of the trial,” an FBI agent told me, asking that his name not be used because he was not authorized to talk about the subject. “But all we tell them is, ‘Hey, we’ll take care of you at the end of it.’”
Because payments to informants come out only at trial, and the trial is over by the time the FBI pays performance incentives, the amount of incentive money Hussain received after the Newburgh Four trial has never been revealed and is exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. But it’s safe to assume that the payment was substantial, since Hussain continues to work for the FBI. In fact, the money paid to informants such as Hussain underpins a fundamental injustice present in all informant-led terrorism sting operations: that it’s against the financial interest of informants not to help make people into terrorists. That’s why FBI informants are so aggressive in pushing forward terrorist plots. Finding terrorists, even ones led by the nose into plots, pays substantial dividends.
In the months after the trial of the Newburgh Four, I made several attempts to meet with Shahed Hussain. However, he never responded to any of the messages I left or the letters I sent. In February 2011, I drove to the Crest Inn Suites and Cottages, the hotel he’d purchased with some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had stashed away in an account in Pakistan. The hotel is about forty-five minutes north of Albany. A storm had come through New York two days before I arrived, and the snowbanks along the roads were piled several feet high.
Hussain’s hotel was dumpy and in the middle of nowhere, the only nearby attraction the horse racing track in Saratoga Springs. The green and yellow sign had been freshly painted. A Mercedes Benz and a BMW were parked outside near the office. Every time I’d tried to call Hussain, his son, who told me his name was Haris, had blocked me. He acts as a kind of gatekeeper to his father. So I wasn’t surprised to see Haris behind the reception desk of the hotel. I told him I was looking for his father.
“He’s out of town,” Harris said.
“So he owns this place, right?” I asked.
“No, I own it.”
“You’re his son, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you own the hotel, and not your dad?”
“You work for him, but you own the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“So you own this hotel but you work for your dad—at this hotel?”
“Yes.”
It was the type of nonsensical information that always seems to surround Hussain. That’s why it’s difficult to parse truth from invention in the FBI informant’s life story, which becomes amusing when you think about it, because the Justice Department puts Hussain on the witness stand and asks jurors—who know so little about him—to believe what he says.
Of course, Hussain never called me after my visit to his hotel. But I knew he was still working for the FBI, in some Muslim community somewhere in the United States. I just didn’t know where. Then, little more than a year later, he resurfaced.