The Brothers (21 page)

Khairullozhon Matanov, Kair for short, said he knew about the case—he understood whom Amir was going to see—but that is not what they discussed on the way. Kair was an ethnic Uzbek from Kyrgyzstan: he left in 2010, when mobs were attacking Uzbeks and setting fire to Uzbek-owned businesses throughout Kyrgyzstan. He had family back home—he had been sending them money from his work as a cabdriver, but now he had his green card and wanted to set up something more permanent and lucrative, like perhaps some sort of an export-import business with Kyrgyzstan. He asked Amir which he thought would be better to ship to Central Asia: clothes or cars. Amir was in favor of cars. “The profit margin is the same,” he said, “but there is less busywork. But you have to take care to have a customer lined up for every vehicle you ship—then it will work.” This was the kind of conversation Amir would have liked to have with one of his own sons. He decided he wanted to know Kair.

That was on a Wednesday. On Friday, Amir needed a ride, and he called Kair. Or maybe he just wanted to talk to Kair and needing a ride was an excuse, because Amir kept calling. There was no answer.

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THE INDICTMENT
against Kair was filed on May 29, 2014—the Thursday between the Wednesday he drove Amir and others to the jail and the Friday when Kair himself was arrested. The timing may have been a coincidence—or Amir’s acquaintance with Kair may have been the indirect cause of Kair’s arrest. Like other immigrants who had known the Tsarnaevs, he had been tracked by the FBI for months, but unlike all the others, he failed to stay as far away as possible from anyone else affected by the case. He was charged on two counts—obstructing justice by destroying evidence, like Dias and Azamat, and “making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements,” like Robel.

Indictments are written by grand juries, groups of sixteen to twenty-three people who, unlike trial juries, are appointed in proceedings that are closed to the public and who are sworn to secrecy in perpetuity. Federal grand juries consider prosecutors’ requests for indictments, hear from witnesses—predominantly, though not exclusively, FBI agents—and decide whether there is probable cause to charge a person with a crime. Their decisions do not have to be unanimous, and far more often than not, they agree with the prosecution and the federal agents who make the case that charges should be brought. There is no standard of “reasonable doubt” in the work of a grand jury, because it does not determine guilt; the question the grand jury is answering is: “Do we suspect this person of having committed a crime?” The indictments, then, are usually accurate reflections not only of the story the FBI is telling about a crime or a person, but of what makes us suspicious. In Kair’s case, the narrative began after the eleven points of the indictment that rehearsed the story of the marathon bombings:

12. Khairullozhon Matanov is a citizen of Kyrgyzstan who entered the United States lawfully in 2010, has lived in Massachusetts since then and has worked, among other jobs, as a taxicab driver.

13. While in the United States, Matanov met Tamerlan Tsarnaev and became friends with him, and he also knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Matanov participated in a variety of activities with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, including discussing religious topics and hiking up a New Hampshire mountain in order to train like, and praise, the “mujahideen.”

14. In the hours and days following the bombings, Matanov contacted and attempted to contact Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by cellphone and saw Tamerlan in person at least twice.

15. About forty minutes after the bombings, at approximately 3:31 p.m. on Monday, April 15, 2013, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and invited him to dinner that night. Tamerlan accepted. That night, Matanov bought Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev dinner at a restaurant.

16. After Matanov returned from dinner with the Tsarnaevs following the bombings on Monday, April 15, Matanov spoke with Witness 1 (whose name is known to the Grand Jury). When Witness 1 told Matanov that Witness 1 hoped that the Boston Marathon bombers were not Muslim, Matanov initially responded that the bombings could have a just reason, such as being done in the name of Islam, that he would support the bombings if the reason were just or the attack had been done by the Taliban, and that the victims had gone to paradise.

17. In the days following the bombings, Matanov continued to express support for the bombings, although later that week he said that maybe the bombings were wrong. He expressed sympathy for the victims’ families, although he continued to explain away the significance of the victims’ deaths on the ground that everyone must eventually die.

18. On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, Matanov called Dzhokhar Tsarnaev at approximately 5:04 p.m., but did not connect. Within a minute or so, Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev and talked for almost one-and-a-half minutes. He then placed a call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev around 5:35 p.m. that did not connect. At around 6:53 p.m. Matanov called Tamerlan Tsarnaev again, and talked for about a minute. Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect on April 17, 2013, a few minutes later, around 6:57 p.m. At some point later that night, Matanov visited Tamerlan Tsarnaev at his residence in Cambridge, MA. Around 9:35 p.m. the same night, Matanov made another call to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that did not connect.

Paragraphs nineteen and twenty describe the release of the suspects’ photographs by the FBI. According to the indictment, Kair looked at the pictures shortly after they were released by going to the CNN website on his laptop. At 8:16 in the evening he called Jahar’s cell phone and did not get an answer. New, higher-resolution pictures were released at two in the morning, and Kair looked at them again shortly afterward. At 7:17 in the morning he called Jahar’s cell phone again and did not get an answer.

The next section of the indictment is called “Matanov’s Cover-Up.”

Early in the morning on Friday, April 19, Matanov, visibly upset, woke up Witness 1. When Witness 1 asked Matanov why he appeared upset, Matanov answered that pictures of the bombers had been released and he knew the bombers.

In other words, Kair had gone through the same process as Dias, Azamat, and several others: the knowing and not knowing, going back and staring at the grainy photos over and over, then knowing and not believing, and finally being unable to maintain denial once the bombers had been named—and going into a panic. So what did he cover up? “Matanov falsely told Witness 1 that he did not know whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev held any extremist views,” states the indictment.

It is not illegal to lie to one’s friends or roommate—and judging from the fact that Kair talked to Witness 1 when he returned from dinner and that he woke up Witness 1 early in the morning, Witness 1 was probably his roommate. By seven in the morning Kair was in his cab, driving a regular client, and telling him that the person they were talking about on the radio was someone he knew—and that he even recognized the address the reporter mentioned. The client, referred to in the indictment as Witness 2, asked whether Kair had visited the place on Norfolk Street, and “Matanov falsely claimed that it had been a while, when in fact he had been at Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s apartment less than 2 days previously.” This lie did not break any laws, either. The episode itself hardly qualifies to be included in the section of the indictment called “Matanov’s Cover-Up”: if he was covering up, he was not doing a very good job.

After dropping off his client, Kair went to see Witness 3, whom he had once introduced to Tamerlan.

Matanov then asked Witness 3 to take some cellphones which were in Matanov’s possession because, Matanov said, they were illegal and might be found if the FBI searched his apartment.

What he was covering up here was the possession of either contraband or stolen cell phones, much as Robel and the others had tried to cover up their marijuana use.

It was still Friday morning. Kair picked up Witness 2, his regular client, again and, it would appear, asked him for advice on the best way to report to the authorities his relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers. He was under no legal obligation to do this: even though the FBI was imploring anyone with information about the brothers to come forward, such cooperation with the authorities is voluntary and failure to heed such calls cannot be punished. Witness 2 tried dialing a police officer acquaintance on Kair’s behalf, and when he could not reach him, the two—the cabbie and his client—went to the nearest police station together. This happened to be in Braintree, a suburb on the opposite side of Boston from where the brothers had lived and staged their bungled escape.

Kair was interviewed by a Braintree police officer—and, according to the indictment, though he gave the officer some information about the brothers, including their phone numbers, he also told some lies. He said, for example, that he had not seen photographs of the brothers released by the FBI: he was apparently trying to justify not having gone to the police earlier, most likely because he did not realize that the law did not require him to.

Matanov also told the detective that he mostly knew the Tsarnaevs through a common place of worship and through playing soccer, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov was Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend and had seen him twice that week on occasions unconnected with soccer and worship.

There is no indication, however, that the detective asked Kair when or under what circumstances he had last seen Tamerlan. In fact, when Kair’s defense attorney got a transcript of this interview, he discovered that the detective had interrupted Kair’s story of his relationship with Tamerlan.

Matanov also told the detective that he knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a wife and daughter but claimed not to know whether they lived with Tamerlan, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov knew that Tamerlan Tsarnaev lived with his wife and daughter and that Matanov had even exchanged greetings with Tsarnaev’s wife and played with his daughter while he visited the Tsarnaevs’ residence less than two days previous.

In fact, as defense attorney Edward Hayden pointed out in court a few days after the indictment was filed, the transcript shows Kair saying that he was not sure that Tamerlan’s wife and daughter would still be at Norfolk Street now that Tamerlan was dead.

Matanov also told the detective that he had not “participate[d] with” Tamerlan Tsarnaev at a house of worship since 2011, which Matanov intended to be false, misleading, and to conceal the fact that Matanov had been at a house of worship with Tamerlan at least as recently as August 2012.

That is the last of the lies Kair ostensibly told the Braintree police officer. Then he went home and asked Witness 1 to take some of the illegal cell phones off his hands. The person refused. Then Kair deleted most of the video files he had on his laptop as well as its Internet cache. By doing so, claimed the indictment:

Matanov obstructed the FBI’s determination of his Internet activity during the night of April 18 and the day of April 19, 2013, and the extent to which he shared the suspected bomber’s philosophical justification for violence, among other topics of interest.

There is no allegation in the indictment that Kair was in any way involved with organizing the bombing or with trying to help the brothers evade law enforcement—or that he knew anything that might have altered, influenced, or sped up the investigation. Sharing violent beliefs is not a crime, and neither is trying to hide one’s beliefs. It is also possible that Kair was trying to cover up the fact that he, like most Russian speakers on the planet, watched pirated video.

The FBI did not contact Kair until Saturday afternoon. Over the course of several interviews he told the FBI everything he could recall, including the contents of his conversation with the brothers over dinner the evening of the bombing. Tamerlan had pointed out that no one had taken responsibility for the bombing and this probably meant that it was not al-Qaida, which always made its claim of responsibility within two hours of the act—a patently false assertion. The indictment accused Kair of making a series of contradictory statements in his conversations with the FBI: he had at first omitted the fact that he drove the brothers to the restaurant that night, though he admitted right away that dinner had been his treat. He also made muddled statements about when he finally and fully realized that the Tsarnaevs were the suspects, but the grand jury was certain that he knew when he first looked at the pictures on Thursday evening.

In sum, Kair’s crime appears to amount to having been confused and perhaps scared, and trying to conceal his own petty illegal activity—after voluntarily going to the police with information about the brothers.

•   •   •

IN APRIL 2013,
the FBI placed Kair under “overt surveillance”—like Ibragim Todashev, he knew he was constantly being followed and watched. He got a lawyer. In early May, Kair apparently decided to see if he could drive crazily enough to shake his FBI tail. The following day, his lawyer relayed the FBI’s request to drive more carefully; Kair complied. Just before the Fourth of July, the lawyer relayed the FBI’s request that Kair stay away from any celebrations (“The city was on edge,” Special Agent Timothy McElroy offered later in court by way of explanation); Kair complied. Just before Patriots’ Day 2014, the lawyer relayed the FBI’s request that Kair leave the city for the holiday; Kair complied. But once the anniversary of the bombing had passed, things appeared to get back to normal: Kair began making plans for his new export-import business, and he even let his relationship with his lawyer lapse. Then he gave Amir a ride to the federal prison. Two days later, he was in jail himself.

He was wearing an orange jumpsuit when he was led into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Boston for his detention hearing and arraignment on June 4, 2014. A bailiff removed Kair’s handcuffs once he had waddled over to the defense table; the shackles stayed on. His court-appointed defense lawyer, Edward Hayden, ran through the indictment, pointing out the inconsistencies, the absurdities, and most important, the absence of a description of anything that could be construed as a crime.