The Terror Factory (18 page)

“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?”

“Well, I work for him.”

“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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.