Using informants with criminal backgrounds has long been a controversial FBI practice. The most famous example involves Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, who served as an FBI informant for nearly twenty years in exchange for federal law enforcement’s not referring for prosecution his organization’s criminal activities, which included extortion, loan sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and the trafficking of guns and drugs. After losing his FBI protection in the mid-1990s and being indicted on federal racketeering charges, Bulger spent the next fifteen years as a fugitive from justice—twelve of them on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive List—before federal agents found him in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. Bulger, who was eighty-one years old at the time, had $800,000 in cash and a weapons arsenal in his apartment.1 He has become legendary in the Bureau—a kingpin-turned-informant who committed crimes far more serious than the ones he dropped the dime on.
Since 9/11, there have been many instances of federal informants committing crimes worse than the ones they were helping to investigate. In South Florida in 2003, Luis Martinez—a Mariel boatlift refugee and career criminal who became a federal informant assisting with investigations of home invasions in which firearms were taken—murdered retired Genovese crime family member Charlie Moretto in a mansion on Millionaire’s Row in Lighthouse Point, in Broward County.2 Nearly a decade later, in 2011, across the country in Seattle, a federal informant sexually abused an eighteen-year-old woman while holding her prisoner for several days in a cheap motel room.3 These are but two examples of the hundreds, if not thousands, of crimes, from fraud to murder, committed by FBI informants in the last ten years. Some have been reported and resulted in criminal charges, while others were simply made to go away by the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. There’s a saying in the Bureau that sums up the criminal tendencies of informants: “The only problem worse than having an informant is not having an informant.”
The use of criminals as informants is due in large part to a pervasive belief within the Bureau that only criminals can catch other criminals, an idea summed up neatly by another FBI saying: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.” If an agent can find a thug over whom he or she can hold criminal or immigration charges, it puts that agent in a position of control over someone who can navigate the depths of criminal hell for an investigation. This practice has only grown since 9/11, and in particular since George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential directive to increase the number of informants used by federal law enforcement, which put substantial pressure on agents to recruit and use informants. This has in turn brought more and more criminals, many of them violent offenders, under the contract employment of the FBI.
During a conversation in early 2011, I asked Dale Watson, who had been the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on September 11, 2001, about the Bureau’s use of criminals as informants. A slightly overweight man with short brown hair, green eyes, blushed cheeks, and a faint Southern accent, Watson told me that the Bureau wants informants who have committed unprosecuted crimes, so that those crimes can then be used as leverage to control them. “The best informants are the ones you jam up on something,” he said matter-of-factly, adding that it isn’t in the FBI’s best interests to focus on questions of whether it’s proper to use a particular informant in an investigation. “That’s up to the court,” Watson said. “We use whatever means we need to, under the law, to develop a prosecutable case, and the Justice Department puts it in front of a jury.” Watson’s logic is emblematic of an FBI culture that shuns introspection in favor of efficiency. If a policy or tactic is legal and obtains the results the government desires, FBI agents aren’t in the practice of debating whether it’s ethical, or even fair. And with overall federal conviction rates above 90 percent every year since 2001—in addition to a nearly perfect record in terrorism cases that go to trial—there’s little motivation for the FBI to question its investigative tactics.4
But that could change. On Capitol Hill, an effort is underway to reform undercover investigations and introduce congressional accountability for the actions of federal informants. In 2011, U.S. Representative Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts sponsored the Confidential Informant Accountability Act, which would require federal law enforcement agencies to report to Congress twice a year on all serious crimes, authorized or unauthorized, committed by informants. Until that or similar legislation passes, no formal accountability system exists for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies in their use of criminals as informants. In addition, no meaningful oversight occurs in monitoring the targets of FBI investigations, questioning whether those individuals should even be the focus of informant-led stings in the first place, as well as the propriety of going after people who lack the capacity—financial or mental—to commit serious crimes. Because of this lack of oversight and accountability, the Bureau can use criminals in sting operations against easily susceptible targets without facing any kind of adverse consequences.
Take, for example, a sting case that began just months after the World Trade Center fell and involved two FBI informants, one with a long trail of debts, the other with an extensive rap sheet. The sting began when FBI informant Mohamed Alanssi entered House of Knowledge, an Islamic bookstore in New York City, in early 2002. Alanssi, a Yemeni, was a well-spoken man who had worked at the U.S. Embassy in Sana in the mid-1970s coordinating travel for State Department staff. However, his tenure at the U.S. Embassy had been rocky, and he was fired twice for reasons that have never been disclosed. “Let’s just say that the embassy found him to be untrustworthy,” said Mohammed Almelahi, an embassy accountant.5 Alanssi moved briefly to Saudi Arabia, where he started a travel agency that failed, before returning to Yemen and defaulting on a $71,700 loan he’d taken out on his home. A year before 9/11, with his debts piling up in Yemen, Alanssi moved to New York City, where he opened a travel agency out of a small second-story office on Court Street in Brooklyn. Just as in Yemen, Alanssi racked up unpaid bills in Brooklyn.
But his fortunes changed two months after 9/11 when FBI agents began cracking down on hawaladars, brokers connected to an underground global banking network whose roots date back to the eighth-century Islamic world. In the hawala system, money can be transferred without having to be moved physically or electronically. Let’s say a man in Brooklyn needs to send money to a relative in Islamabad, Pakistan. He can give the money to a local hawaladar, who will take a small fee and then contact another hawaladar in Islamabad, instructing that hawaladar on the amount of money to be remitted and the password the recipient must provide for collection. The whole system, out of the reach of government regulators, is based on trust. The first hawaladar never sends money to the second; there is an implicit expectation that the money will be repaid later on, likely through a cash transaction in the opposite direction.
Immediately after 9/11, FBI agents suspected hawaladars in Brooklyn’s Yemeni community of helping to finance international terrorism, and during their investigation, agents happened across Alanssi. In the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks, FBI agents were desperate to recruit informants who could infiltrate Muslim communities. In spite of his debts and problematic employment history with the State Department, Alanssi quickly became one of the FBI’s early counterterrorism stars, and one of its best-paid informants. Alanssi was ultimately able to deliver several prize catches for the FBI, including Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who the U.S. government believed was raising money for Al Qaeda in Brooklyn’s Yemeni community. 6
In the 2002 sting, Alanssi pretended to be a customer and asked bookstore owner Abdulrahman Farhane if he could help him purchase weapons and other equipment for Islamic fighters in the Middle East. Farhane demurred and instead introduced Alanssi to a man named Tarik Shah, who taught martial arts at a nearby studio. A Sunni Muslim whose parents were members of the Nation of Islam, Shah was an accomplished jazz musician who toured in Japan with Betty Carter and played at Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential inauguration. Alanssi would spend the next two years with Shah, and while the FBI obtained recordings of Farhane and Shah discussing how they could transfer money overseas, the government didn’t have enough for an indictment. So the FBI turned to a second informant, Theodore Shelby, a former Black Panther who had scratched out a living stealing from drug dealers before going to prison for a series of tollbooth robberies.7 Shelby, who went by the name Saeed Torres when working as an informant, agreed to cooperate with the FBI in exchange for early release from prison.
Shelby’s relationship with Shah began when he asked for a bass lesson. This led to Shelby renting the bottom floor of a three-family house in the Bronx that Shah’s mother owned (Shah lived on the second floor). Living right below his target, Shelby was able to secretly record conversations that portrayed Shah as a man obsessed with his martial arts prowess as well as a desire to train Muslims in hand-to-hand combat.8 In one exchange, Shah pointed to the sharp pin his bass rested on. He could kill someone with that, he said. “Flip, pop, pop, right in the middle of your head,” Shah explained.9
On December 16, 2003, Shah told Shelby that he was interested in training Muslims for jihad. His technique, he said, was “deadly and dangerous.” Shelby in turn told Shah he had access to a warehouse in Long Island. Pleased, Shah said he’d need to hang some tires there. “I teach brothers how to use swords and machetes,” he said, explaining his need for rubber. The informant then told Shah that he knew an Al Qaeda recruiter, and FBI agents turned to a seasoned hand for the final part of the sting.
On March 3, 2004, Shah and Shelby took a train to meet with the so-called recruiter. Shah didn’t know that the operative—a squat, Arabic-speaking man with short-cropped black hair and a round face—was undercover FBI special agent Ali Soufan, a John O’Neill protégé. Shah told Soufan that he had a friend, a doctor named Rafiq Sabir, who lived in Palm Beach County, Florida, and had gone to the “mountains”—which FBI agents believed to mean terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Soufan, in turn, told Shah that many of Al Qaeda’s hand-to-hand combat trainers had been detained at Guantanamo Bay, and as a result, he and his friend were needed urgently. That’s when Shah pulled out prayer beads and demonstrated how he could strangle a man to death using them. “Since I was pretty young, this has always been one of my dreams,” Shah said of joining Al Qaeda.10
On April 1, 2004, Shah traveled with Soufan to meet with Sabir in Florida. At the meeting, Shah told Soufan that he wanted to learn about chemical weapons, explosives, and firearms, while Sabir talked about a recent trip he had taken to the Middle East, where he had worked at a Saudi military base in Riyadh. After their conversation, Soufan led both men in oaths to Al Qaeda—which would provide enough evidence to win convictions for the government. Days after the oath, the FBI arrested both men, Shah in New York and Sabir in Florida. Shah pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while Sabir was convicted at trial and received twenty-five years.
Shah is currently in federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia. His elderly mother, Marlene Jenkins, lives in Albany—less than a mile, by coincidence, from the convenience store that FBI superinformant Shahed Hussain owned and the Department of Motor Vehicles office where he ran the scams that first brought him to the Bureau’s attention. I visited Jenkins at her home in February 2011. She was seventy-five at the time, and she kept her small house tidy and spotless. All of the living room furniture was wrapped in firm plastic. Eager to talk about her son, she pulled out photos of Shah holding his bass or playing at jazz clubs. Her son wasn’t dangerous, she maintained. His only crime was running his big mouth. “No weapons, no bomb,” Jenkins said of the government’s case against her son.11 “It was just talk. They never did anything. People just talk all the time. But they don’t follow through.” Jenkins believes the two paid FBI informants entrapped her son.
Theodore Shelby has continued to work as an FBI informant in counterterrorism cases. But Mohamed Alanssi, who was paid more than $100,000 for his work as an informant, left the Bureau’s employment in spectacular fashion. On November 16, 2004, Alanssi, then fifty-two years old, faxed a letter to the Washington Post and the New York office of the FBI, saying that he was about to “burn my body at an unexpected place.”12 He complained that the FBI was unwilling to provide security for his family in Yemen, who were in danger, he claimed, following his being named as a witness—and revealed as an informant—in the trial of Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad. “Why you don’t care about my life and my family’s life?” Alanssi wrote in his letter, which was addressed to FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, the same agent who was in charge of Shahed Hussain in Newburgh.
At 2:05 p.m., dressed in a pressed suit and tie, Alanssi walked up to the White House’s northwest guardhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue and asked to have a note delivered to President George W. Bush. The guards turned him away. Alanssi, who was soaked in gasoline, then pulled out a lighter and ignited his clothing. Secret Service agents wrestled him to the ground and put out the flames with an extinguisher. Alanssi wound up with burns over 30 percent of his body.
Alanssi’s self-immolation made the front page of the Washington Post and received extensive coverage on cable news and in the world media. As a result of the publicity, prosecutors didn’t want to call him as a witness in the trial of al-Moayad, forcing defense lawyers to bring him to court instead, where he wore a flesh-colored glove on his right hand to cover up the burn wounds.13
The sour ending to the government’s relationship with Alanssi had no effect on the FBI’s continued use of terrorism informants with questionable backgrounds. Following Alanssi’s dramatic exit from its informant ranks, the Bureau began to bring in informants with even more checkered pasts. While Alanssi had left a trail of debts and unanswered questions about what he’d done to be fired twice from his job at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, this new crop of terrorism informants included fraud artists, drug dealers, thieves, and gunmen. Shahed Hussain, an accused murderer and con man, was among them.
At the beginning of 2006, the FBI became so desperate to infiltrate what agents believed was a terrorist cell in the suburbs of Philadelphia that they freed one Muslim from probation and released another from jail just to use as informants.
The story of that case began in New Jersey on January 31, 2006, when Mohamed Shnewer dropped off a homemade video to a Circuit City store in Mount Laurel in order to have it converted to a DVD. The FBI had never heard of Shnewer, but that afternoon, Brian Morgenstern, a clerk at Circuit City, called federal authorities and explained that a video he was converting contained “disturbing” images.14 In the video, recorded on January 3, 2006, ten men in their twenties, wearing camouflage and fatigues, fired rifles in a wooded area in Pennsylvania. As they fired, they shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” or “God is great!” In addition to Shnewer, the men in the video included Dritan, Shain, and Eljvir Duka—brothers and illegal immigrants—and Serdar Tatar. Shnewer was Eljvir’s brother-in-law.
The video prompted the FBI to start an investigation through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Bureau turned to two hardened criminals to infiltrate the group as informants. The primary informant, Mahmoud Omar, had entered the United States illegally and was on probation for bank fraud when the FBI approached him. The other informant, Besnik Bakalli, was in a Pennsylvania jail cell awaiting deportation to Albania, where he was wanted for a shooting.
In March 2006, Omar, who claimed to have served in the Egyptian military, befriended Shnewer, an overweight, socially awkward twenty-year-old with an interest in jihadi videos. At the same time, Bakalli began spending time with some of Shnewer’s associates, including Eljvir Duka. Four months later, on July 28, 2006, the FBI got its first break in the case when Serdar Tatar, whose family owned a pizza shop near the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey, asked Omar if he could fix a problem with his car. The informant took the vehicle to law enforcement officials, who found a fifty-round box of nine-millimeter ammunition in the car. Following this, Omar began to wear a wire, and on August 1, 2006, Shnewer was recorded telling the informant that he, Tatar, and the three Duka brothers were part of a group planning to attack the Fort Dix army base. He explained that they wanted to gather as many as seven men to kill at least one hundred soldiers using rocket-propelled grenades. They’d been training for the attack, Shnewer told the informant, and had a good reason for choosing Fort Dix as their target. “Why did I choose Fort Dix? Because I know that Serdar knows it like the palm of his hand,” Shnewer said—a reference to Tatar’s familiarity with the base from delivering pizzas there.15 Shnewer asked Omar, the informant, to lead the attack, since he said he had military experience in Egypt.
Four days later, on August 5, Shnewer and Omar discussed tactics. “Maybe it’s easy to hit them at night,” Shnewer wondered. On August 11, Shnewer and Omar drove to Fort Dix to scope out the base. Shnewer liked what he saw. “This is exactly what we are looking for,” he said. “You hit four, five, six Humvees and light the whole place up and retreat completely without any losses.” Shnewer also told the informant he had a Serbian sniper from Kosovo—a man named Agron Abdullahu—who would help with the attack. While Shnewer and Omar were planning the attack, Bakalli, the second informant, was getting closer to the other members of the group.
However, a few months later, on November 15, 2006, the entire sting almost unraveled when Tatar—the one who supposedly knew his way around Fort Dix—called the Philadelphia Police Department. He explained how he’d been approached by Omar, and was worried that he was being set up in a terrorist plot. But Tatar never followed up with the police, and in the end chose not to back out of the plot. Even as he feared Omar was an informant or law enforcement officer, Tatar told him, “I’m gonna do it. Whether or not you are FBI, I’m gonna do it. Know why? It doesn’t matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested . … I’m doing it in the name of Allah.” He then handed Omar a map of Fort Dix, which Omar promptly turned over to FBI agents.
On January 19, 2007, the Dukas told Besnik Bakalli that they had a nine-millimeter handgun, an assault rifle, and a semiautomatic assault weapon, all of which they claimed to have gotten from Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper. The group then made another trip to the Pennsylvania woods in February 2007 to fire semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. Later that month, Dritan Duka invited Omar to play paintball with them and asked if he knew how they could buy AK-47 assault rifles. On March 28, Omar provided a list of weapons and prices from his purported arms source. Shnewer said the pricing was “very good.” Dritan Duka suggested that the better armed they were, the lower their chances of being caught, saying: “All the AKs, the M16s, and all the handguns . . . . I just want to be safe, brother . . . . I got five kids, so I don’t wanna go down. People catch me, like, they think I’m a terrorist.”
But if the Fort Dix Five, as the media would later dub them, were terrorists, they were coerced ones—pushed along by criminals who had personal interests in their prosecution. In several conversations, members of the group made comments that suggested they never intended to become violent. For example, one of the Duka cousins told Omar: “We are good the way we are. We are not going to kill anyone.” A few days after that comment, when Omar tried to goad the group on by bringing up the story of an Ohio man who had been training with terrorists, Dritan Duka responded by saying that in the hysteria following 9/11, Muslims could be arrested just for talking, even if they didn’t mean what they said. He likened it to their situation—how they were just bullshitting about an attack on Fort Dix. Similarly, following the paintball outing in February 2007, Bakalli asked the Duka cousins what they thought jihad meant. It didn’t mean violence, they told him; it was a personal struggle against one’s self and a struggle to live a good life. Less than a month after that statement, the FBI arrested the five men, charging them with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. All five pleaded not guilty and went to trial.
In his opening remarks at the trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick told the jury: “Their inspiration was Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their intention was to attack the U.S.” The prosecution then played undercover recordings and the jihadi videos the Fort Dix Five had watched, trying to portray the New Jersey men as dangerous terrorists. Evan Kohlmann, the young terrorism expert with questionable credentials, served as a witness for the prosecution, telling the jury that the videos the defendants had watched were “some of the classics put out by [Al Qaeda].”16
The defense, in turn, attacked the credibility of the two paid informants—both of whom had money and freedom riding on a successful prosecution—and tried to minimize the videos by describing their viewing as nothing more than immature chest-thumping by the men. But the key to the whole case—and the key to other successful terrorism sting prosecutions since then—was the fact that the prosecution didn’t need to prove that the Fort Dix Five would have carried out their attack plans. The conspiracy—that the men so much as talked about it and planned for it—was all prosecutors needed to prove them guilty of conspiracy to murder U.S. officials. In his closing remarks, Fitzpatrick emphasized this to the jury: “We don’t even have to prove that they intended to kill [soldiers] in the United States . … As long as the conspiracy exists, and as long as within New Jersey at least one overt act occurs, it doesn’t matter if the object of the conspiracy was to kill a soldier in Delaware, or in Pennsylvania, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. The conspiracy is the charge. The conspiracy is the heart and soul.”17
The jury agreed, convicting the Fort Dix Five of conspiracy to commit murder, though it acquitted them of the charge of attempted murder. The three Duka cousins and Shnewer received life sentences, while Tatar received thirty-three years. Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper who was only peripherally connected to the plot, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide firearms, for selling guns to the Dukas. He received twenty months in prison. For a successful prosecution, the two informants, Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli, freed from probation and jail respectively to serve the government, were paid performance incentives whose amounts have never been disclosed.
By training and firing weapons in the woods of Pennsylvania, the Fort Dix Five demonstrated capacity for violence—even if the evidence made public at their trial suggested they were just a bunch of young guys full of bluster—thus making the FBI’s infiltration of the group by informants at least somewhat understandable. In many other terrorism stings, however, while the target hasn’t demonstrated the slightest inclination toward criminal behavior, the informant who leads the plot has a long and violent criminal history.
A good example of this occurred in Rockford, Illinois. Working at a video game store, Derrick Shareef was twenty-two years old, broke, and didn’t have a place to live when an FBI informant approached him in September 2006, offering the use of a car, a place to live, and free meals. It was the day before Ramadan, and Shareef, who’d been ostracized by his family since converting to Islam at the age of fifteen, saw the offer as an act of God. The informant, whose name has never been revealed, had been convicted of armed robbery in 1991 and possession of a stolen vehicle in 1997, as well as being a former member of the Four Corner Hustlers, a mostly black street gang known for its brutality on Chicago’s West Side.18
While they lived together, the informant and Shareef discussed what they believed were injustices in the Muslim community. Their conversations turned to conspiracy and violence, with the two deciding to plot an attack in the United States—a demonstration, they told each other, that would shake the American people. On November 26, 2006, Shareef told the informant he wanted to attack “some type of City Hall type stuff right now, federal courthouses.” The informant asked Shareef how he intended to pull off such an attack. “You go in there and you clock the first three niggers at the door—everything else is gonna have to be tactical,” Shareef said, as if he had experience in combat tactics, adding: “I just want to smoke a judge.”19
The informant told Shareef that he knew an arms dealer, and if Shareef was interested in purchasing weapons for an attack, he could arrange a meeting. The informant also recommended that they target a shopping mall. “We gotta look at it this way,” he told Shareef. “We want to disrupt Christmas.” This idea excited Shareef, and the informant said that they should purchase grenades for the attack. Shareef agreed. The informant then stressed that he was “down” for the attack. “I swear by Allah, man, I’m down for it too,” Shareef told the informant. “I’m down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man.”
Later, the informant told Shareef that he had ordered eleven “pineapples”—their code word for grenades—“at fifty bucks a pop.” Since Shareef had no idea how to use a grenade, the informant had to give him a tutorial, explaining how to detonate one and how the timing mechanism worked. They then prepared for the shopping mall attack, creating video statements on December 2, 2006. While Shareef was so eager for the attack that he kept assuring the informant of his commitment, he also made it clear that he couldn’t have hatched the plot without the informant’s help. “I’m ready, man,” he said. “I probably would have eventually ended up just stabbing the shit outta some Jews or something. Just stabbing them niggers with a steak knife.”
Though the informant had brought Shareef along in the plot, the case was still weak. While the FBI had the makings of a conspiracy charge, since Shareef and the informant had discussed an attack, Shareef still hadn’t participated in a overt act to further the conspiracy. He hadn’t done any surveillance, and nothing he had done suggested he was ready to take the plot beyond talk. To get things moving, the FBI instructed the informant to suggest to Shareef that he purchase some grenades. However, Shareef didn’t have any money. In fact, the only thing he had of value was a set of stereo speakers worth about one hundred dollars. The informant told Shareef that he could broker a trade with the arms dealer—the speakers in exchange for grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. “I think what he gonna do is just take the speakers and say, ‘Even,’” the informant said. While the claim was ridiculous—no arms dealer would accept used stereo speakers in exchange for black-market weapons—Shareef, evidencing his gullibility, never questioned it. The informant then put Shareef in touch with his arms dealer friend, who was an undercover FBI agent.
On December 4, 2006, the undercover agent and Shareef talked on the phone and agreed to meet at a store parking lot on Walton Road in Rockford, where the deal went just as the informant said it would. Shareef handed over the speakers, and the undercover FBI agent gave him a box containing four inert grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. FBI agents immediately arrested Shareef, who pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. At the age of twenty-three, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
Since Shareef never went to trial, the identity of the informant and his motives for serving the government weren’t revealed. But available court records suggest that the informant would have been a problematic one for the FBI had he needed to testify. In addition to the convictions for armed robbery and car theft, the informant owed $16,000 in child support—which was the exact amount the FBI paid him for his role in the terrorism sting—demonstrating his financial interest in seeing Shareef sent to prison. The conviction the criminal-turned-informant helped the FBI secure was Shareef’s first; as a matter of fact, aside from a traffic violation for driving without insurance, it was the first time he had ever been charged with any kind of crime.20
In spite of their criminal pasts, no evidence indicates that the informants in the cases of either the Fort Dix Five or Derrick Shareef committed any crimes while working for the FBI. However, it is not unusual for informants with criminal backgrounds to revert to their illegal ways while employed by the Bureau. That’s what happened in Decatur, Illinois, when an informant who had spent time in prison on drug charges met a man named Michael Finton.
Finton was a white man in his twenties who went by the name Talib Islam, which he adopted after converting to Islam while in prison for robbery. During his probation, Finton failed to notify his parole officer of an address change. The parole violation prompted a routine search of his home and car, and during the search, probation officers found Islamic writings and letters Finton had sent to John Walker Lindh, the American who went to prison for joining the Taliban after 9/11. Finton’s bank records showed an incoming wire transfer from a man in Saudi Arabia named Asala Hussein Abiba. The officers also discovered evidence that Finton had gone to Saudi Arabia for a month in April 2008.
The suspicious probation officers turned this information over to the FBI, whose agents brought in an informant to get closer to Finton. “To my knowledge, the motive of the CHS to assist in this investigation is solely hope for monetary payment,” FBI Special Agent Trevor S. Stalets wrote in an affidavit, using the acronym for “confidential human source,” the FBI’s term of art for informant.21 The confidential human source and Finton became fast friends, with Finton telling the informant he wanted to receive military training so that he could fight against Israel. He also told the informant about his trip to Saudi Arabia, which had been paid for by a sheikh he met on the Internet whose daughter he was now engaged to marry. On December 29, 2008, Finton explained to the informant that he wanted to “secure his place in paradise by becoming a mujahid.” The informant in turn told Finton he knew someone who could help, and Finton sent an introductory email to the informant’s contact. Finton didn’t know that the contact was an undercover FBI agent.
At the same time he was targeting Finton, the FBI informant was involved in criminal activity of his own—real crimes in this case, not imaginary plots. Sources told the FBI that the informant was dealing drugs while working for the government—information the Bureau could not confirm independently but which it viewed as credible enough to report it to the court in an affidavit. Yet the informant’s alleged drug slinging while on the government payroll wasn’t enough for the FBI to call off the terrorism sting against Finton.
On May 6, 2009, the undercover FBI agent met Finton in a hotel in Collinsville, Illinois, eighty miles south of Springfield. There, the agent told Finton he was an Al Qaeda operative recruiting terrorists in the United States. Finton expressed his desire “to receive military-type training.” Over the next few weeks, Finton and the undercover agent discussed possible targets before settling on the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, a gray, three-story limestone building that houses the U.S. courthouse and is named after a former congressman from Illinois.
Finton explored the building for reconnaissance. Deciding that a backpack bomb would not be suitable, he told his supposed terrorist friend that a car bomb would work best. The undercover FBI agent said Al Qaeda could provide a car bomb to be parked in front of the building. Finton then recorded a video. “Muslims would fight back to stop America at any cost,” he said, explaining that he was not bombing the building for financial gain but in the hopes that “the big bully Israel would not be there anymore.”22 At the same time he was moving forward in the plot, Finton also began to wonder if he was being set up—but he quickly reasoned away that concern, telling the informant that he didn’t think law enforcement authorities were that smart.
On September 23, 2009, the informant drove Finton from Decatur to Springfield, where Finton met with the undercover FBI agent and picked up a van with an inert bomb in the back. The undercover agent showed Finton how to detonate the supposed bomb once the vehicle was in position. Finton then drove the van to the Paul Findley Federal Building and parked it in front. He got out of the vehicle, walked to a safe distance, and dialed on his cell phone the number that he believed would detonate the bomb. Nothing happened, and FBI agents arrested him. Finton pleaded guilty to attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. The drug-dealing informant was never identified in court records.
The Finton sting was not the only instance in which an informant had problems with drugs and the FBI chose to ignore them. In the case of Rezwan Ferdaus, a twenty-six-year-old living in a suburb outside Boston, the informant had a problem with heroin to which the Bureau turned a blind eye. As part of an FBI sting, Ferdaus, a bright young man who had graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in physics, met two people—one an informant, the other an FBI agent—who he believed were Al Qaeda operatives. The disgruntled Ferdaus told the agent and the informant he wanted to launch an attack against the United States. However, the idea he came up with—destroying the gold dome of the U.S. Capitol Building by using a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades—seemed so out of touch with reality as to raise significant questions about his mental state.23
The informant in the case, a man known as Khalil, had difficulties of his own, including a heroin habit he hadn’t told the FBI about. Khalil inadvertently revealed his drug problem to the Bureau when he showed up on a secret recording of another, unrelated case, buying heroin. Despite catching him on tape, the FBI didn’t terminate Khalil from its informant ranks.
Khalil’s heroin problem carried over to the Ferdaus case, where he was overheard on an undercover recording saying he was sick and needed drugs. (He was also caught shoplifting while wearing an FBI wire, despite being paid $50,000 and being given the use of an apartment for his work as an informant.) As a result of that recording, Khalil’s drug habit came up as an issue in a November 2011 pretrial hearing for Ferdaus.
“What steps did you take to ensure he wasn’t using heroin?” Ferdaus’s public defender, Miriam Conrad, asked FBI Special Agent John Woudenberg.
“He was much scrutinized,” Woudenberg said. “He was under the microscope.”
“Did you give him a drug test?”
“No,” Woudenberg admitted.24
Ferdaus pleaded guilty to attempting to damage and destroy a federal building by means of an explosive, and attempting to provide material support to terrorists and a terrorist organization.25 He received seventeen years in prison.
The FBI’s search for would-be terrorists is so all-consuming that agents are willing to partner with the most heinous of criminals if they appear able to deliver targets. That’s what happened in Seattle, Washington, in the summer of 2011, when agents chose to put on the government payroll a convicted rapist and child molester.
The investigation began on June 3, 2011, when a man contacted the Seattle Police Department and told them that he had a friend named Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif who was interested in attacking Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington. The tipster told police that Abdul-Latif had already recruited an associate, a man named Walli Mujahidh. Seattle police referred the caller to the FBI, whose agents quickly enlisted him as an informant and launched a full investigation of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh.
Based on these initial actions, it was clear that the FBI believed it was dealing with two dangerous potential terrorists. But in reality, what it had were two financially troubled men with histories of mental problems. Abdul-Latif, whose birth name was Joseph Anthony Davis, had spent his teenage years huffing gasoline and once told a psychologist he heard voices and saw things that weren’t there. When he was twenty-three, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills intended to treat seizure disorders, later telling a psychologist that he “felt lonely and had no use to live.”26 His partner in the supposed terrorist plot, thirty-one-year-old Mujahidh, whose name was Frederick Domingue Jr. before his conversion to Islam, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which causes mood swings and abnormal thoughts.27 Dorothy Howard, who met Mujahidh through her daughter when they lived in Pomona, California, remembered him as sweet-natured but gullible, someone who was trying hard to get a handle on his mental problems but wasn’t always successful. “Sometimes he would call me and say, ‘Mrs. Howard, I really need my medications. Can you take me to the clinic?’” Howard recalled. “Sometimes they would keep him three or four days.”28
The FBI’s informant, whose name was not revealed, was the only source claiming that Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were terrorists on the make. And the informant came with an outrageous story of his own. In addition to being a convicted rapist and child molester, according to government records, he had stolen thousands of dollars from Abdul-Latif in the past and had tried, but failed, to steal Abdul-Latif’s wife as well.29 The state of Washington had also classified the informant as a high-risk sex offender, and while working for the FBI, he was caught sending sexual text messages in violation of his parole—something he attempted to hide from agents by trying to delete the messages.30 Despite what were obvious problems with the investigation from the start, the FBI gave the informant recording equipment and instructed him to move forward with the sting.
As Abdul-Latif and the informant discussed possible targets—after growing concerned that attacking a military base would be too difficult, given the armed guards and fortification—it became clear that the Seattle man had no capacity to carry out a terrorist attack. In fact, Abdul-Latif had little capacity for anything, since he had only $800 to his name, and his only asset was a 1995 Honda Passport with 162,000 miles.31 In addition, his supposed accomplice, Mujahidh, was still in Southern California. But his friend, the informant, said he could provide everything they would need for the attack, including M13 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and bulletproof vests.32 That Abdul-Latif didn’t have much money and didn’t know anyone who could provide him with weapons strongly suggested that the plot was nothing more than talk, and would have stayed that way had the FBI not gotten involved.
After scuttling the idea to attack Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Abdul-Latif and the informant settled on a plan to attack a Seattle processing station for incoming troops, where most of the people would be unarmed. “Imagine how many young Muslims, if we’re successful, will try to hit these kinds of centers. Imagine how fearful America will be, and they’ll know they can’t push Muslims around,” Abdul-Latif said. On June 14, 2011, Abdul-Latif and the informant purchased a bus ticket for Mujahidh to travel to Seattle from Los Angeles. Needing to select a password that would allow Mujahidh to pick up the ticket at the station, Abdul-Latif initially suggested “jihad.” He and the informant laughed about the password choice before Abdul-Latif decided on “OBL,” for Osama bin Laden.
A week later, Mujahidh arrived in Seattle, and the three men drove to a parking garage to inspect the weapons the informant had procured. Inside a duffel bag were three assault rifles. Mujahidh took hold of one of the guns, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Abdul-Latif inspected one of the other rifles. “This is an automatic?” he asked. The informant then showed him how to switch on the rifle’s setting for automatic firing. At that point, FBI agents rushed into the garage and arrested Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh. The two men were charged with conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and four firearms counts. The FBI paid the informant $90,000 for his work on the case.33
Michele Shaw was the public defender appointed to Mujahidh. When she first met him inside a jail in Seattle, she couldn’t believe he was the man the government had portrayed as a dangerous terrorist. “He is the most compliant client I have ever worked with in my twenty-two years of practicing law and so appreciative of our weekly visits,” Shaw said. From the start, Shaw knew she had a mental health case on her hands, not a terrorist case. Mujahidh was easily susceptible to the informant, she believed, because he had a history of relying on others to help him separate fantasy from reality. But the judge in the case didn’t agree. “Walli’s mental health issues in my opinion are huge and looming large, but the court stated this week on the record that my client’s mental health issues are a very tiny part of this case,” Shaw told me in October 2011. Unable to use mental health in an entrapment defense, Shaw reluctantly recommended that Mujahidh plead guilty. He agreed, and was sentenced to twenty-seven to thirty-two years in prison. For his part, Abdul-Latif pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Had it not been for a rapist and child molester fishing for a payday, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh would likely be today where they were in June 2011—two Americans you’d never hear about, trapped on the margins of a society to which they posed no threat.
Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh became terrorists because the FBI and one of its informants had incentives for making the pair into terrorists. The informant’s incentive was monetary, while the FBI agents who supervised the sting were under intense pressure from their higher-ups to build a terrorism case. At no point during the sting operation did anyone question whether someone like Abdul-Latif was more despondent loser than scary mass murderer. That is a problem inherent in today’s terrorism sting operations: the FBI and its informants are under pressure—albeit for different reasons—to see terrorists, even where none exist.
Since informants have vested interests in seeing their targets convicted—with criminal informants often having their own personal freedom on the line—it’s the FBI’s responsibility to ensure that these interests do not influence investigations. If the Bureau is following “the book” during an investigation, agents will give an informant tasking orders before each meeting between the informant and the targets. These orders will include what the informant should discuss and how he should behave during the meeting. Ideally, the meeting with the targets should be taped, giving the FBI an indisputable record of what was said. At regular intervals, FBI agents should also subject their informant to a polygraph test to make sure he isn’t lying or withholding information. If the informant fails the polygraph, or engages in criminal behavior not authorized by the FBI, agents are supposed to cut him from the ranks.
However, the FBI doesn’t always work by the book. We know this because the Bureau has documented many occasions when it doesn’t play by its own rules. Elie Assaad, the informant in the Florida stings involving Imran Mandhai and the Liberty City Seven, lied during a polygraph examination in Chicago yet continued to work as an FBI informant. In the Michael Finton case, the FBI had credible information that its informant was dealing drugs yet continued to use him until the final day of the sting operation. The informant in the Rezwan Ferdaus case was caught on an FBI video purchasing heroin and still the Bureau continued to pay him for his work. These informants were allowed to lead terrorism stings because the pressure to find would-be terrorists is so great that it’s created a precarious situation in which FBI agents identify loudmouths on the fringes of society and through, elaborate sting operations involving informants, many with criminal backgrounds, transform these powerless braggarts into dangerous terrorists engaged in horrifying plots to bomb buildings, public squares, and subway stations.