Escape (8 page)

"Well, in the interests of inner-office harmony, as well as avoiding sexual harassment complaints, please do remember to control your dirty mind and your cavalier attitude around Mrs. Milquetost."

Guma held up his hands in mock surrender. "Hey, no worries. Actually, I sort of like the old Dragon Lady—and no, not like that. She doesn't take shit from nobody, and I can respect that. So I'll see if I can't make a better impression in the future."

"Thanks, I appreciate it, Ray," Karp nodded. "And thanks for coming in early. I wanted to catch up on the bombing investigation before the bureau chiefs meeting. Some of this is 'need-to-know only' type stuff. We've got a leak in the office; so best to keep this close to the vest for now."

Guma fished a small notebook out of his inner suitcoat pocket and flipped it open. "Well, the feds still aren't saying a lot. As you know from the task force briefing on Saturday night, they've identified the perpetrator as Rondell James, black, age thirty, has a rap sheet going back to Juvenile Hall, spent some time at Attica for armed robbery, but then not much else on him for the past five years. In fact, the feds had nothing more at all after 2001, at least that they're willing to share."

Guma squinted at his notebook. "He caught a cab on 117th Street to the synagogue. Clay Fulton's guys talked to the cabbie before the feds shut him up, so we were able to get a little out of him. The cabbie said he didn't notice anything unusual about his customer, except that he was wearing a long, heavy coat and it was such a warm day."

"I guess now we'll have to start looking twice at anybody in long black coats," Karp muttered.

"Yeah, or maybe just put metal detectors and bomb dogs at the entrance of every public building. Anyway, the cabbie said that the guy was friendly enough when talking about day-to-day things. But when they passed a group of Hasidic Jews standing on a sidewalk, he started in on how Jews were the cause of all the world's problems."

"That's a new one," Karp noted dryly. "So unusual to blame Jews."

Guma smiled at the sarcasm. "Yes, according to James, Jews have taken over Congress and control the U.S. military." He flipped forward a few more pages. "I went and talked to the cabbie, Aman al-Barak, a Muslim immigrant from Yemen. He was a little ticked off that James paid his cab fare in food stamps, but otherwise he considers James to be a 'jihadi martyr.' Interesting because the feds don't have anything linking James to Muslims— at least nothing they're telling me about."

Guma seemed about to say something more but hesitated. Karp, who was used to listening for nuances in the way people said things, especially when answering questions, decided to ask about it. "You keep emphasizing that 'the feds' don't seem to have much, with the implication that perhaps you have more?"

Guma grinned mischievously. "Well, I hope this doesn't get me in trouble," he said. "And I suppose in the spirit of cooperation, I should have passed it on directly to our friends at the Department of Homeland Security, but since they're treating us like second cousins twice removed, I thought maybe I'd share it with you first."

"As I'm your boss, I don't see the problem," Karp said.

"Well, it seemed odd to me that this guy is a career criminal until 9/11 goes down," Guma replied. "Then all of the sudden, nothing ... until he decides to blow himself up in a synagogue. I start thinking, 'Maybe the feds are looking at the big picture and missed some of the small stuff.' So when everybody was otherwise occupied, I bribed their nebbish fingerprint guy into e-mailing me a copy of the print from the perp's right index finger, which was about all that was left."

"Bribed?" Karp asked, not sure he wanted to know.

"Yeah," Guma replied. "This guy is from Boston—I could tell by that ridiculous accent. So happens that the damn Red Sox are playing at Yankee Stadium next week, and I got tickets. He drove a hard bargain; it was both my tickets or nothing."

"That's rough," Karp said, hiding a smile.

"Yeah, you owe me big," Guma agreed. "And even then he was pretty nervous—said everything was supposed to be on lock down, top secret bullshit—but I convinced him that it was just for my files, and if I turned up anything I'd report it right away. Which is what I'm doing now ... only it's to you."

"So noted," Karp said.

"I ran the fed print through the guys at the NYPD lab, and all that stuff from James's pre-2001 life popped up," he said. "But this time, there was something else on the misdemeanors screen from a more recent case; in fact, just a couple of years ago. Even then it was just a name and a case number. So I spent a few hours down here yesterday morning until I found the file. Apparently, James was one of three bodyguards for a Muslim religious leader over in Harlem, and they beat the shit out of a guy who had some beef with their boss. Only James wasn't going by that name; he was calling himself Muhammad Jamal Khalifa."

"Tell me how you're certain it's the same guy?" Karp asked, intrigued. "Fingerprints don't lie, but they have been known to be misplaced, as in misfiled."

"The feds had a mugshot of him from Rikers, and I found the booking photo from the assault case," Guma replied. "It was the same guy—lots of pockmarks—different name. Easy to miss the misdemeanor, and it's apparently not on the national computer. The case file, however, indicated that he and the others were originally charged with felony assault, but we let him plead to a misdemeanor assault. The victim started the physical stuff, and I guess there was a concern that we might not win at trial."

"He do any time?"

Guma referred to his notepad. "Yeah, three months at Rikers and a year's probation.... It's hindsight, but I wish we'd stayed on him for the felony and sent him away longer."

Karp caught the edge in his colleague's voice. They both knew that plea deals were a necessary evil for prosecutors. There was no way the DAO had the manpower or the money to go to trial on every case, and sometimes the best they could do was get the guy off the street for a while and hope it would save a few more people from being victimized.

To avoid "turnstile justice," Karp had senior ADAs review the incoming caseload daily to ensure that serious cases were not plea-bargained away. He'd also instituted the "No Lesser Plea" files. While the defendant could plead to the top count of the indictment, no sweetheart agreements on sentencing would apply to those cases marked NLP; on those, the ADAs asked for max time, no bargaining.

But every once in a while, they'd have to plead a case for some bad guy who should have been looking at hard time in Attica—maybe because the case was weak—and they had to settle for probation or time-served. Then the asshole would go out and kill somebody; after which, the press and politicians would be all over the DAO for being "soft on crime" and making too many plea deals. Of course, when it came time to pay for more prisons and more prosecutors, the press and the politicians became fiscal conservatives.

It was a damning conundrum. "There's no crystal ball in this business," Karp said. "No way we could have singled him out from ten thousand other assault cases that year as a potential suicide bomber."

"I know," Guma said. "But when something like this happens, it really hits you and you wonder if we're doing any good. Anyway, he did three months at Rikers for misdemeanor assault, which is maybe why the feds' computer didn't pick it up. Turns out the religious leader runs that mosque in Harlem that gets in the news all the time."

"Imam Sharif Jabbar," Karp said, wrinkling his nose as if a bad odor had entered the room.

Everybody knew the rabble-rousing religious leader of the Al-Aqsa mosque. In September 2001, there'd been a near riot outside the mosque after a local television station had aired aerial footage of men dancing in its courtyard, apparently celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center. An angry crowd had gathered on the sidewalk and shouted epithets, and when shoving matches started between some of the mob and the mosque security people, the police came in to break it up.

At a press conference inside the mosque the next day, Jabbar contended that neither he nor his congregation condoned violence. "But unlike the United States government and Israel, through Allah's blessings and insight, we understand the root causes that drive desperate people to take rash actions." He demanded extra police protection, which the city council—worried about escalating tensions between groups threatening to march on the Harlem mosque and blacks sympathetic to Muslims—granted.

In the years followings the attacks, Jabbar had been a frequent and vehement critic of U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror. "That's just another way of saying 'War on People of Color,' and 'War on Muslims,"' he'd shouted into a microphone, addressing several thousand protesters at Marcus Garvey Park at the start of the Iraq War. "The U.S. government wants their oil, and the U.S. government wants to humiliate Muslims. The U.S. government forces them to defend themselves in the only way they can against a superior military, and then the U.S. government calls them terrorists so it can justify killing them ... men, women, AND, may Allah protect them, little children." When NYCU political science professor Jessica Campbell—then only a campus radical, not an accused mass murderer—published her provocative essay "What Goes Around, Comes Around," Jabbar had happily gone on the
Off the Hook Show with Barry Queen,
a syndicated television program, to defend her. "And I ain't just talking about her right to publish that essay," he'd proclaimed to a national audience. "I'm talking about her just telling the truth. It was a military strike in a declared war ... and what's more, the U.S. government knew about it, and Allah strike me down if this isn't the truth, let it happen ... maybe even helped."

The appearance had earned him threats deemed serious enough that the mosque again received extra police protection.

Quite the irony, Karp thought, that Jessica Campbell was charged with mass murder, and her defender, Imam Jabbar, had possibly just been connected by Guma to another mass murderer.
God does work in mysterious ways,
he thought.

"Anything else connecting Khalifa to the mosque?"

"Gee, tough audience," Guma replied. "I thought I'd already thrown a couple of strikes to the plate."

Karp shrugged. "I just didn't want to assume that your arm was tired."

"Well, you got it right, because when Khalifa got popped for the assault, he gave his address as 126th and Madison."

"Jabbar's mosque."

"Yep. And get this, turns out Khalifa had a wife and a four-year-old kid. According to the file, she and her dad, Khalifa's fatherin-law, showed up at his sentencing hearing as character witnesses. I did a little checking. Her name is Miriam Juma Khalifa, an immigrant here illegally with her family from Kenya. She applied for permanent resident status as Khalifa's wife, but it hasn't come through."

"Might be a little harder to get now," Karp noted.

"She may not have done anything wrong, except marry a sociopath."

"But maybe she'd know if her husband had any co-conspirators. By the way, where'd you learn about their kid?"

"The Internet. I went online and found the birth records for a male infant born to Jamal and Miriam Khalifa in Harlem Hospital four years ago."

"You can get that off the Internet?" asked Karp, feeling like a dinosaur. "Easy."

Karp tapped on a yellow legal pad with a no. 2 pencil. "So what's your guess? Was James, aka Khalifa, acting alone? Or is the Al-Aqsa mosque turning out suicide bombers?"

Closing his notebook, Guma looked at him, his bushy white eyebrows knitted into a single line. "Really, at this point, I can't say, and your guess is as good as mine. I think any way you look at it, with the sort of rhetoric coming out of some of these U.S. mosques, including this one, it's only a wonder that someone didn't do this sooner. But does that mean that somebody put Khalifa up to it—at least to where we could prove a conspiracy case? I don't know, these guys like Jabbar are good at walking just this side of criminal intent."

As Guma spoke, Karp jotted down notes on the legal pad, but he was thinking about all the times the two of them and Fulton had talked about when, not if, suicide bombers would start turning the country upside down. Now that it had happened, it was still just as much of a shock.

"Sure as hell would like to know if he had help putting that bomb together," Guma noted.

"Can't you get that off the Internet, too?" Karp asked. "I thought the Internet was omnipotent, as well as omnipresent."

"Pretty much," Guma agreed, oblivious to Karp's snipe at modernity's techno-Frankenstein. "Yes, if you know where to look you can get instructions on how to create anything from a vest bomb to a nuclear weapon. But in either case, there's something you can't get off the Internet—at least not yet—and that's the stuff that goes boom. The feds said he used military-grade plastic explosives, which are particularly difficult to get and can be traced. No word on that yet. But I don't think this guy was the sort to be surfing the Net on his own. Nor do I think he had the financial wherewithal or connections to make a bomb. My opinion is that he had help." Guma paused. "There is one more thing that I thought was kind of unusual."

"What's that?"

"Well, this guy, Khalifa, was basically indigent, and so were his codefendants. But the day of their arraignment on that assault case, they show up with an attorney from one of the priciest firms in town."

"Maybe the imam collected a little extra from the worshipers that week to help his guys," Karp said. "Or the attorney was doing a little pro bono work."

"You mean 'a lot' extra from the worshipers. This guy charges five hundred bucks an hour; plus he's white, in his late fifties, and according to campaign contribution lists, which are also available on the Internet, a regular contributor to the GOP. I don't think he's the sort to do pro bono work for a bunch of black Muslims. But he shows up in the morning, and an hour later, all three defendants agree to plead to a misdemeanor, three months max on Rikers Island, no state prison time."